Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Good morning, This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Speaker 2: Today's episode is going to be a longer one part
Speaker 2: of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
Speaker 2: they take their days from great to awesome and any
Speaker 2: advice they have for the rest of us. So today
Speaker 2: I am delighted to welcome Paul Leonardi to Before Breakfast.
Speaker 2: Paul is a professor at You See Santa Barbara and
Speaker 2: the author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple
Speaker 2: Tools for Reclaiming Your Life.
Speaker 1: So, Paul, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning Laura, nice to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, why didn't you tell our listeners a little
Speaker 1: bit about yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, as you mentioned, I'm a professor at you
Speaker 3: See Santa Barbara. I've been a professor for about twenty years,
Speaker 3: and during that time I've really spent my effort and
Speaker 3: energy trying to understand how people and people who are
Speaker 3: working in companies can use digital tools effectively to increase productivity, efficiency,
Speaker 3: well being, etc. And there's a dark side. As we
Speaker 3: both know that all of these tools do great things
Speaker 3: for us, they also wear us out, and so a
Speaker 3: big chunk of what I've been focusing on for the
Speaker 3: last few years is trying to understand how do we
Speaker 3: make sure that we're taking advantage of all the great
Speaker 3: things these tools do for us at work and in
Speaker 3: our personal lives and not get so worn out by them. All.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, that leads us to the title of your book,
Speaker 2: digital exhaustion. I'm sure you have been asked this a
Speaker 2: million times, but what exactly is digital exhaustion?
Speaker 3: Great question. I like to define it more by feeling
Speaker 3: rather than just a definition. So play along with me here.
Speaker 3: If you don't mind, have you felt as you sat
Speaker 3: in front of your screen that the screen's kind of
Speaker 3: like a tractor beam. It sucks you in that you're
Speaker 3: scrolling and you're clicking, You're kind of feeling lack of energy.
Speaker 3: You maybe look at your watch and you're like, what
Speaker 3: have I been doing for the last ten minutes? You
Speaker 3: know you need to send an email, you know you
Speaker 3: should be replying to somebody on Instagram, but you kind
Speaker 3: of don't want to, but you can't quite leave and
Speaker 3: get up. If you've had those sorts of feelings before,
Speaker 3: that's digital exhaustion in a nutshell, right, It's this kind
Speaker 3: of pervasive feeling that I should be doing more, but
Speaker 3: I can't quite pull away. But I'm not being productive
Speaker 3: and it's kind of getting overwhelming.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, that's an interesting way to look at it.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm trying to figure out what exactly is
Speaker 2: leading to this, because obviously some tools are incredibly helpful
Speaker 2: for our life. I'm hoping that the squadcast where we're
Speaker 2: recording is not glitchy. But there's no way we'd be
Speaker 2: doing this you in California and me and Philadelphia and like,
Speaker 2: you know, be able to see each other. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of tools. Sure, digital tools are incredibly amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but is it just the sheer volume of them that's
Speaker 2: that's the problem. Is it the time we're spending on them?
Speaker 2: What is leading to the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a combination of factors that I really outline
Speaker 3: in the book, And the myth that I wanted to
Speaker 3: spell right off the top is that that we're just
Speaker 3: using tools too much. I don't think that's really the problem.
Speaker 3: We have to use them to get by in today's world, right,
Speaker 3: whether that's at home, whether it's at work, at parenting
Speaker 3: with our families, The key is how do we use
Speaker 3: them in ways that don't lead to those feelings of
Speaker 3: exhaustion that we just describe. So there are three key
Speaker 3: drivers to digital exhaustion. The first is attention. We hear
Speaker 3: a lot today about how we need to focus, we
Speaker 3: need to do deep work. All that's great, I totally agree,
Speaker 3: but I think those conversations miss a slightly different point,
Speaker 3: which is that the way we pay attention exhausts us.
Speaker 3: So for most of us, we're constantly switching across different devices.
Speaker 3: We're at home and we're thinking about work. We're doing
Speaker 3: one project, but we're also switching to do things on
Speaker 3: another project simultaneously. And each of those switches and how
Speaker 3: we pay attention and where we pay attention is really exhausting.
Speaker 3: We switch tools roughly twelve hundred times a day. Think
Speaker 3: about that, like, how many of those switches happen, and
Speaker 3: even if you're doing something is seemingly banal, as switching
Speaker 3: between let's say Microsoft Teams and Zoom that are both
Speaker 3: video conferencing platforms, think about, Okay, I've got to figure
Speaker 3: out where the record button is or how I get
Speaker 3: my mic on on this new application, and all of
Speaker 3: those micro decisions are just cognitively exhausting. They wear us out.
Speaker 3: So how we focus our attention is one. The second
Speaker 3: is about inference. So we are exposed to so many
Speaker 3: data points all day long, and sometimes those are data
Speaker 3: points in a seal spreadsheet. Sometimes they're images that we
Speaker 3: see on Instagram or a video on TikTok, and it's
Speaker 3: easy to think that, well, we just are seeing the
Speaker 3: total here, we're seeing the world. We're seeing all of
Speaker 3: the bits and pieces of information, but we're not. We're
Speaker 3: always making inferences about, well, what do these data actually mean?
Speaker 3: Or why did that person post that? Or I wrote
Speaker 3: this thing in this email, what does that person think
Speaker 3: about what I just wrote? And so we're constantly making
Speaker 3: all these inferences about data and information sources, and there's
Speaker 3: just great research that shows that when you make those inferences,
Speaker 3: we get emotionally exhausted, We get mentally exhausted, and we're
Speaker 3: just doing that constantly. And then the final piece is
Speaker 3: just really around emotions. You know, I don't think we
Speaker 3: typically think of technology and emotion in the same sentence,
Speaker 3: but the way we use our tools and how we
Speaker 3: get involved in you know, sort of the flow of
Speaker 3: our work or you know, interactions that we have, maybe
Speaker 3: on text message with our family and friends, they lead
Speaker 3: to a whole range of emotions, some of them really great.
Speaker 3: We're excited, we're you know, we're feeling really happy. Others
Speaker 3: were feeling kind of depressed, or we're having anxiety, or
Speaker 3: maybe we're mad. And emotions are one of the biggest
Speaker 3: sources of our exhaustion, whether they're positive or negative. Emotions
Speaker 3: wear us out. And everything we do with technology today
Speaker 3: piques our emotions in all kinds of ways. So if
Speaker 3: you think about attention, inference, and emotion, those are the
Speaker 3: things that are wearing us out. It's not our tools,
Speaker 3: but it's how our tools create these different orientations to
Speaker 3: those three drivers.
Speaker 2: Well, and one of the things you suggest in the
Speaker 2: book is doing a bit of an audit on all
Speaker 2: the tools you are touching in the course of the day.
Speaker 2: What we're switching between twelve hundred times. I'm curious what
Speaker 2: are the sort of numbers people are posting when they
Speaker 2: do an audit. What kind of numbers are is that
Speaker 2: list going to be so our readers, our listeners don't
Speaker 2: feel bad.
Speaker 1: When they do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I've done this with a like probably at
Speaker 3: sixty seventy people at this point, and on average, I
Speaker 3: would say people report using between thirty five and forty
Speaker 3: different applications today. That's up from about a decade ago
Speaker 3: when I started doing this, and people were reporting somewhere
Speaker 3: between ten and fifteen applications. So that number has just
Speaker 3: dramatically increased in a few years. Another interesting fact about
Speaker 3: that difference between then and now is when I used
Speaker 3: to ask people, okay, well, tell me about the digital
Speaker 3: tools they're using, they would say, well, I use my laptop,
Speaker 3: and I use my phone, and i use my computer,
Speaker 3: so they are all devices. And today almost nobody mentions devices,
Speaker 3: but they say I'm on this app and that app
Speaker 3: and this app across all of these different devices. So
Speaker 3: it's not just that we're switching and paying attention and
Speaker 3: using so many different tools, but we're using them across
Speaker 3: different devices, and so they all have different interfaces and
Speaker 3: different ways of interacting with them. And thirty five to
Speaker 3: forty that seems like a lot. But if you just
Speaker 3: start to think about, okay, well, I use Safari on
Speaker 3: my phone, and then I go on LinkedIn, and then
Speaker 3: I'm using Microsoft Word, and then I look at Gmail
Speaker 3: and then they all add up real quick, real quick.
Speaker 2: Well, but one of the things you then say with
Speaker 2: that is, I mean, the truth sets us free when
Speaker 2: we know what all these are. One of the upsides
Speaker 2: of doing this is you can see how many are
Speaker 2: just for personal use, which I think gives people more
Speaker 2: of a sense of agency over it. Like I can't
Speaker 2: suddenly decide to stop using Zoom if that's how I
Speaker 2: communicate with my boss and I'm working remotely, right, we
Speaker 2: can't just write that off. But nobody's requiring you to
Speaker 2: be on Instagram, for instance, most of the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true. So my recommendation when you're doing what
Speaker 3: I call a tool audit is to say, first, just
Speaker 3: list out all of the different technologies that you use,
Speaker 3: and I think you'll be surprised often how many duplicating
Speaker 3: tools we have. You know that maybe you're kind of
Speaker 3: just for fun, you're talking to your family on FaceTime,
Speaker 3: but you're also talking to your family on Zoom, and
Speaker 3: you're like, well, those are sort of giving me the
Speaker 3: exact same functionality. Maybe I don't need to be using
Speaker 3: both of these. So just listing as powerful as you mentioned,
Speaker 3: but then dividing between what do we use in our
Speaker 3: personal lives and what do we use at work helps
Speaker 3: us to recognize, just as you point out that we
Speaker 3: can do a lot in our personal lives to reduce
Speaker 3: the number of tools that we use. Sometimes it's harder
Speaker 3: at work, although lots of great examples of people who
Speaker 3: found that they're using a bunch of different technologies at
Speaker 3: work and nobody really knows why, you know. So I
Speaker 3: talked to one woman who was saying, well, we we
Speaker 3: have Dropbox, and we have g Drive, and we have SharePoint,
Speaker 3: and we seem to save our files on my team
Speaker 3: and all of those and so I went and asked,
Speaker 3: why are we using all three of these? And nobody knew.
Speaker 3: So I just said to the team, the team was
Speaker 3: about eight people, what if we just picked Google Drive?
Speaker 3: And everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's fine, we'll just move
Speaker 3: everything over to Google Drive. So often we're just stuck
Speaker 3: in this tool creep right where we have more and
Speaker 3: more devices and applications and we don't know why. And
Speaker 3: so it's easier to take care of the ones at home,
Speaker 3: slightly harder in the workplace. But I think both are doable.
Speaker 2: Absolutely Well, We're going to take a quick ad break
Speaker 2: and then we'll be back with more about digital exhaustion. Well,
Speaker 2: I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the author
Speaker 2: of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion. We've been talking
Speaker 2: about doing a tool audit of every tool you touch
Speaker 2: on the course of the day and seeing which ones
Speaker 2: maybe duplicates, which ones are solely for personal use in
Speaker 2: er within your control, whether you think they add to
Speaker 2: your life or not. But even if we are going
Speaker 2: to use a tool, there are ways within the use
Speaker 2: of the tool to sort of tone down its exhaustion
Speaker 2: factor for us. I mean, one of the things you
Speaker 2: mentioned is simply delaying responses and how does that work
Speaker 2: to tone down the exhaustion.
Speaker 3: Sure, So this is I think a powerful rule that
Speaker 3: I talk about in the book. It's rule number four,
Speaker 3: and it's maybe the most controversial of the rules in
Speaker 3: the book. You know, we're soingrained in quick response times
Speaker 3: in at least the western industrialized world. You know, somebody
Speaker 3: sends us a message, a text, an email, what's that message?
Speaker 3: And we feel like, well, we just have to respond
Speaker 3: right away. So there's a very strong cultural pressure towards
Speaker 3: that response. What's interesting, though, is there's been a lot
Speaker 3: of research about people and response times, and what the
Speaker 3: research shows is, first, people overestimate how urgent they think
Speaker 3: someone else's requests are, so we often think that we
Speaker 3: have to respond away because this person needs this thing
Speaker 3: right now. And if you go and survey the people
Speaker 3: that sent the request, they often say, well, I didn't
Speaker 3: really need this as quickly as they thought that I did,
Speaker 3: so thinking about this email urgency bias, I think is
Speaker 3: an important thing to remember. Second, the data also show
Speaker 3: that people in train to our response patterns. So if
Speaker 3: I'm someone who responds really quickly, then you're going to
Speaker 3: respond quickly because I responded quickly, and if I respond
Speaker 3: more slowly, you tend to respond more slowly because I
Speaker 3: responded more slowly. So we get into this choreograph dance
Speaker 3: pretty easily with the people that were exchanging messages to
Speaker 3: So if you want to slow down the rate at
Speaker 3: which you have to receive messages and respond to them,
Speaker 3: like just don't send messages quite so quickly, or respond
Speaker 3: to people's messages a little more slowly. I'm not suggesting
Speaker 3: that we shirk our responsibility if there's a really important
Speaker 3: and urgent thing, but many of the things that people
Speaker 3: ask us aren't super and many of the things people
Speaker 3: ask us resolve themselves if we don't respond right away.
Speaker 3: I mean that you can probably think of many times
Speaker 3: in your life where someone's asked you for some help
Speaker 3: or asked you for this piece of information and you
Speaker 3: don't respond for whatever reason, and then they email you
Speaker 3: back or text you and say, actually, I don't need
Speaker 3: that anymore. I moved on or I figured it out.
Speaker 3: So delaying strategically sometimes can help us to reduce response time.
Speaker 3: And the very last thing I'll say about this, because
Speaker 3: I know we should move on, but is that a
Speaker 3: lot of research shows that if we send longer messages
Speaker 3: that are more thoughtful, people respond to them less frequently.
Speaker 3: And that's important because what it means is that if
Speaker 3: I just take a little more time crafting something that's
Speaker 3: more thorough, then people will store that in their inbox,
Speaker 3: they'll reflect on it. It'll help to answer their questions
Speaker 3: maybe that they don't have right now, but they'll realize
Speaker 3: that they have in five hours or in a week.
Speaker 3: And that means that they're not constantly sending me these
Speaker 3: small follow ups that get me out of the rhythm
Speaker 3: of my work and really tax my attention for having
Speaker 3: to respond when I'm trying to do something else. So
Speaker 3: I think delayed response, slowing down a little bit is
Speaker 3: a huge tool that we can have in order to
Speaker 3: reduce our exhaustion.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and you say you train people in what
Speaker 2: you're like if I know that the emails I get
Speaker 2: from Paul are thoughtful and explain everything, and you know
Speaker 2: I'm not going to have a million follow up questions,
Speaker 2: and I start to, Oh, the emails from Paul are
Speaker 2: actually serious, I should.
Speaker 1: Start paying attention to them and reflecting.
Speaker 2: Upon them as they do what I think the things
Speaker 2: I found sort of darkly humorous tell you like many
Speaker 2: of us wind up using apps and group texts and
Speaker 2: such in our personal lives, sometimes in the hope of
Speaker 2: saving time, right, like the idea of Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: carpool with three other families to soccer, and because of that,
Speaker 2: I am only going to have to go to soccer
Speaker 2: twenty five percent of the time because we're all taking
Speaker 2: each other's kids. And yet the mental management of that,
Speaker 2: the mental load that winds up coming out of managing
Speaker 2: the carpool group chat can sometimes be as much as
Speaker 2: the time that you would have spent driving those children
Speaker 2: to soccer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, darkly humorous is probably a good way to describe it.
Speaker 3: You know, this particular chapter in the book that's sort
Speaker 3: of about parenting in the digital age is really poignant
Speaker 3: for me personally because I've got three, well two teenage
Speaker 3: daughters and one almost teenage, and I'm just like a
Speaker 3: chauffeur service, right, I'm just driving them around constantly, and
Speaker 3: so it was really sort of horrifying but also gratifying
Speaker 3: to talk to so many parents to hear about what
Speaker 3: are your struggles and what are the ways that you
Speaker 3: deal with them. And the concept that I would urge
Speaker 3: us to think about is what I call shadow hours.
Speaker 3: So we think about a typical task like driving someone
Speaker 3: or carpooling, like how much time does that take? And
Speaker 3: the mental calculation that most of us make is, Okay,
Speaker 3: well how much time is this going to save me?
Speaker 3: But what we don't think of are those shadow hours,
Speaker 3: or the amount of time that happens in coordination to
Speaker 3: make that carpool happen. And it's funny. So just I'm
Speaker 3: just going to pull out my texts here while we're talking,
Speaker 3: because just last night, my wife's friend sent her a
Speaker 3: text and I'm going to see if I can read
Speaker 3: it here, and it says, got eighty three texts today
Speaker 3: about the carpool situation. I'm over it with a big
Speaker 3: face with crime. Now, think about that all the time
Speaker 3: that you're trying to spend to coordinate because someone you know, okay,
Speaker 3: well my other kids siys, so I can't do the
Speaker 3: carpool today, or it turns out, you know, this person
Speaker 3: has to go here rather than there. We're spending so
Speaker 3: much time trying to do these coordination activities that really
Speaker 3: take our time, attention, and peque our emotions that in
Speaker 3: many cases, if we step back a bit, we might think,
Speaker 3: maybe I just drive the person instead, maybe just drive
Speaker 3: my kid and I don't have to do all this
Speaker 3: coordination and spend all these shadow hours. And the other
Speaker 3: thing that I find talking to a lot of parents
Speaker 3: is they say, these are really crappy connections with people,
Speaker 3: you know, like, I'm not actually building relationships by saying Okay,
Speaker 3: I'll pick up, no you pick up, No, I'll be there, No,
Speaker 3: you be there. What people say that they do that
Speaker 3: really helps is that they'll say, well, rather than let's
Speaker 3: try to coordinate this on text when we both go
Speaker 3: and we're here at this event, let's talk about it.
Speaker 3: And then you actually see somebody, you laugh a little
Speaker 3: bit with them, you joke about the ridiculous situation that
Speaker 3: we're in driving our kids to and fro, and you
Speaker 3: feel like you're actually making a connection with someone and
Speaker 3: you're able to resolve a lot of those ambiguities that
Speaker 3: would have taken thirty texts in fifteen seconds worth of talking.
Speaker 3: So I think that the watchword here is think about
Speaker 3: your shadow hours and think about how you can connect
Speaker 3: so much that you actually lose real connection with people.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, we're going to take one more quick ad break
Speaker 1: and then we will be back with more on digital exhaustion.
Speaker 1: So I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the
Speaker 1: author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple Tools
Speaker 1: for Reclaiming Your Life. So, I mean that's not to.
Speaker 2: Say we should never try to carpool or to you know,
Speaker 2: outsource anything. I mean I'm reminded of the fact that
Speaker 2: like managing in general, like when you manage, when you outsource,
Speaker 2: you're still a resource.
Speaker 1: Problem.
Speaker 2: Is we have to, you know, try to minimize how
Speaker 2: many shadow hours we are devoting to different things, but I'm.
Speaker 1: Curious about your scandle. Here, let's talk about your scandule.
Speaker 2: Okay, do you have any routines, particularly around how you
Speaker 2: deal with digital stuff or inputs that you feel make
Speaker 2: you more productive.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I've developed a number of different tricks over
Speaker 3: the years, mostly inspired by doing the research for this book.
Speaker 3: So one of the biggest ones is about my pattern
Speaker 3: of response to incoming queer and that for me often
Speaker 3: happens on email, but it also happens on LinkedIn, it
Speaker 3: happens on text message, it happens through some group chat
Speaker 3: devices that we use in my work and in my consulting.
Speaker 3: And I used to be what I call a very
Speaker 3: hardcore batcher, meaning that I would pick certain times a
Speaker 3: day and I would say, Okay, this is my response period.
Speaker 3: I'm going to give you a window right an hour
Speaker 3: in the morning, and I'm going to give an hour
Speaker 3: at lunch and an hour in the afternoon, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to respond only during those times. In fact, when
Speaker 3: I was really at my peak of doing this, I
Speaker 3: think I really did it like once a day, and
Speaker 3: I was really efficient with all the rest of my
Speaker 3: work because I wasn't getting interrupted constantly by incoming messages
Speaker 3: that took my head out of the space that I
Speaker 3: was in and put in somewhere else, and my exhaustion
Speaker 3: felt relatively low. However, what I noticed over time, and
Speaker 3: after interviewing a lot of people who do batching versus
Speaker 3: what I can streaming, which is kind of just taking
Speaker 3: things as they come in and then responding to them
Speaker 3: right away, is that I was actually letting a lot
Speaker 3: of people down. You know, that I wasn't careful about
Speaker 3: triaging my messages right and triaging the things that I
Speaker 3: needed to accomplish, and so I put everything into the bucket.
Speaker 3: I'll respond to this at the end of the day
Speaker 3: when some things actually needed much more quick responses, and
Speaker 3: so I was making it difficult for other people to
Speaker 3: complete their work or to do the things they needed
Speaker 3: to do. So over time, I've moved toward having a
Speaker 3: system where I do dedicate chunks of time morning, right
Speaker 3: before lunch and then about an hour before it in
Speaker 3: my day to real in depth responses. But I'm also
Speaker 3: just looking throughout the day to make sure that things
Speaker 3: aren't coming in that will require a really quick response
Speaker 3: that doesn't take a lot of my headspace so it's
Speaker 3: a combination of figuring out about that batching and streaming
Speaker 3: and what the ideal balance is on those two activities
Speaker 3: for you that I think are really.
Speaker 2: Important well, because it really is a balance, right, I
Speaker 2: mean there are because there are people who are streaming
Speaker 2: all day and I can tell you having studied their schedules,
Speaker 2: they get nothing done. I mean, you know, everyone's excited
Speaker 2: that you hear back from John immediately, but if John
Speaker 2: has never gotten around to finishing his part of the
Speaker 2: project of initially, it gets a little tedious set you
Speaker 2: know that he was responsive but not effective.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I guess maybe people just need to.
Speaker 2: Try different things and see, like where you get the
Speaker 2: balance of people being unhappy with you versus where you
Speaker 2: get the balance of being unhappy with yourself because you're
Speaker 2: not getting stuffed.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know.
Speaker 3: I would say that most of the inbound things that
Speaker 3: we get right this is after talking to twelve thousand
Speaker 3: people over the twenty years of studying this. Most of
Speaker 3: the inbound things that we get are not urgent, you know,
Speaker 3: and most of them require some amount of thought from us,
Speaker 3: other than the ones that we quickly delete. Right, So,
Speaker 3: like hat your inbox, you can probably quickly delete, but
Speaker 3: things require some focus. So I do think it's worth
Speaker 3: figuring out how do I dedicate times in the day
Speaker 3: where I can really just focus on dealing with these
Speaker 3: issues and not in a time when I'm trying to
Speaker 3: write this report or put together this presentation or debrief
Speaker 3: with this client. But we also have to recognize that
Speaker 3: there are going to be the periodic things that come
Speaker 3: in that require quick response, and usually the responses that
Speaker 3: we need are not pulling us mentally out of a
Speaker 3: space to get us to be able to respond, and
Speaker 3: so we can deal with those quickly without really breaking
Speaker 3: our concentration. So my recommendation is that you think about, Okay,
Speaker 3: how do I batch most of these things into different
Speaker 3: times of the day, but just make sure that I'm
Speaker 3: only responding to those things that are really urgent that
Speaker 3: I need to as they come in. And finding that
Speaker 3: balance for you is going to be slightly different.
Speaker 2: For everybody, absolutely so, Paul, one of the questions I
Speaker 2: always ask everybody on this show is what is something
Speaker 2: you have done recently to take a day from great
Speaker 2: tip to awesome?
Speaker 3: That question, and for me, it actually relates to one
Speaker 3: of the concepts in the book, which when I talk
Speaker 3: about flow, and you're probably familiar with that concept most
Speaker 3: of your listeners are. You know, where you're really engrossed
Speaker 3: in an activity and you're just there because the more
Speaker 3: you're there, the less you want to be elsewhere. And
Speaker 3: there's all kinds of positive energy that comes from being
Speaker 3: in a state of flow in a fun activity and
Speaker 3: a work activity doesn't really matter. But one of the
Speaker 3: things that I tried to do recently was just to
Speaker 3: really be where I am. And I know that sounds
Speaker 3: kind of funny, but you know the other day, I
Speaker 3: was driving my daughter somewhere and I was thinking, so
Speaker 3: I started the drive, thinking, oh, like, I have the
Speaker 3: driver here right But then when I thought about this
Speaker 3: rule number eight in the book, I was thinking, Okay,
Speaker 3: what if I'm just really here right now, drive because
Speaker 3: I've made this choice, so I just will be right
Speaker 3: in the car with my daughter. And that really changed
Speaker 3: my day dramatically because I really listened to her talk
Speaker 3: about her day and we were driving along and she
Speaker 3: pointed out this beautiful bird that was flying along and
Speaker 3: I was like, oh my gosh, that is a really
Speaker 3: beautiful bird. And the drive went by like that, right,
Speaker 3: and like three felt like three seconds because I was
Speaker 3: in the drive. I wasn't thinking about what email is
Speaker 3: going to respond to in my head or think about
Speaker 3: the numbers I needed to crunch in my Excel spreadsheet later,
Speaker 3: and that took my data great in a way that
Speaker 3: almost nothing else has in a while.
Speaker 1: Would that all our driving children around could be that amazing?
Speaker 3: No kidding.
Speaker 1: There was no traffic and there was the birds were.
Speaker 3: Singing, birds were singing, and the clouds parted. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: It was amazing. My teenager wasn't mad at me. It
Speaker 1: was great. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Paul, What are
Speaker 1: you looking forward to right now?
Speaker 3: Let's see. I this sound a little geeky, but I'm
Speaker 3: really looking forward to AI. Like there's so much talk
Speaker 3: about it that kind of is exhausting, you know. But
Speaker 3: I've been doing work with a lot of different companies
Speaker 3: that are building AI tools and starting to implement them,
Speaker 3: and I really am excited about the possibility of how
Speaker 3: these different technologies are going to really change the way
Speaker 3: we work and the way that we enjoy our leisure time.
Speaker 3: There are certainly some things to be scared about, but
Speaker 3: I'm actually quite optimistic that if we make some smart choices,
Speaker 3: we're gonna, I think, have a better world. And maybe
Speaker 3: that sounds a little pollyannish, but I don't know. I'm
Speaker 3: kind of excited about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean technology can be great.
Speaker 2: You know, cares are amazing that we get to use them,
Speaker 2: even if they are occasionally exhausting.
Speaker 1: So, Paul, where can people find you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So you can find me at LinkedIn. That's a
Speaker 3: great place to interact. I'm on x p Leonardi one
Speaker 3: is to handle there, and then my website, Paul Leonardi
Speaker 3: dot com is a great place to get updated on
Speaker 3: some latest writings and places like Wall Street Journal, Harvard
Speaker 3: Business Review, and other books I've written. But check out
Speaker 3: Digital Exhaustion.
Speaker 2: Please please do book well. Paul, thank you so much
Speaker 2: for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If
Speaker 2: you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
Speaker 2: can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
Speaker 2: here's to making the most.
Speaker 1: Of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If
Speaker 1: you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach.
Speaker 2: Me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1: Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
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