Speaker 1: Today's episode is another my favorite Tip episode where I
Speaker 1: go back to interviews from the past and I dig
Speaker 1: out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the
Speaker 1: thing that I got out of the interview that really
Speaker 1: impacted or resonated with me. Today's extract is from my
Speaker 1: chat with Ashtosh Priyadashi. Ashatosh is the founder of Sansama
Speaker 1: and a graduate of hy Combinator back in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the very famous incubator at Silicon Valley. So Sinsama is
Speaker 1: a daily planner for elite professionals that helps you plan
Speaker 1: out a focused work day by pulling together your tasks
Speaker 1: from all of your tools. Ashatasha spent most of the
Speaker 1: last decade building and launching productivity hardware and software, and
Speaker 1: his personal goal is to build products that help us
Speaker 1: navigate our work and life mindfully and intentionally. And I
Speaker 1: think it's fair to say that Ashutosh is as much
Speaker 1: as a productivity nerd as I am.
Speaker 2: So in this extract of my chat with Ashutosh, we talk.
Speaker 1: About how he uses artificial time constraints to significantly boost productivity,
Speaker 1: which I found fascinating. So let's head on over to
Speaker 1: my chat with Ashutosh something else that I know that
Speaker 1: you apply in your working life and think about is
Speaker 1: Parkinson's Law. And for those that are not familiar with
Speaker 1: Parkinson's Law, it's basically saying that the task will stretch
Speaker 1: to as long as the time that you give it.
Speaker 1: So if you have a report to write and you've
Speaker 1: blocked out an hour in your diary to write it,
Speaker 1: it will.
Speaker 2: Take an hour. Same thing applies to meetings.
Speaker 1: And I want to know how do you think about
Speaker 1: Parkinson's Law in your own working life and how do
Speaker 1: you apply it.
Speaker 3: I think one of the most interesting applications I've found
Speaker 3: for Parkinson's Law is to basically pick almost insanely small
Speaker 3: time periods for certain things and try to force your
Speaker 3: problem and solution into that space. So one of the
Speaker 3: things that we did in the really early days of
Speaker 3: building Sinzama is that we started operating on Twoday sprints.
Speaker 3: So basically what we would do is we were a
Speaker 3: really small team at the time. There was just four
Speaker 3: of us, So on Monday we would say like, Hey,
Speaker 3: these are the Monday morning We're going to build. Each
Speaker 3: of us would say, hey, these are the things I'm
Speaker 3: going to build, and we would sort of demo it
Speaker 3: and ship it to like our production website by Tuesday evening,
Speaker 3: and then Wednesday morning we would repeat the same process
Speaker 3: and demo it to the team on Thursday afternoon and
Speaker 3: then ship it. And the really interesting thing was, basically
Speaker 3: we gave ourselves this kind of like two days. It was.
Speaker 3: It was really like a day and a half to
Speaker 3: make progress, and a lot of really interesting things happen.
Speaker 3: One we figured out ways to take what we thought
Speaker 3: were really hard problems and just break them down into
Speaker 3: things that could be done in two days. So a
Speaker 3: very practical example was we wanted to build integrations with
Speaker 3: other services, and usually the development time on something like
Speaker 3: that is just a lot longer, and so we were
Speaker 3: sort of forced to find really creative solutions to how
Speaker 3: can we make our users and customers get the value
Speaker 3: of having kind of an integrated experience in the app
Speaker 3: in a way that it's something we can build in
Speaker 3: two days. And so we kind of used Parkinson's law
Speaker 3: to force us to one think of new ways to
Speaker 3: solve the problem and not and basically get our engine
Speaker 3: of iteration moving really fast so that we could learn
Speaker 3: a lot faster. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like that a lot because typically people think about,
Speaker 1: you know, the classic like Google design sprint which is
Speaker 1: five days and then doing that in a day and
Speaker 1: a half ready to ship. I think that's that is
Speaker 1: a really cool application of Parkinson's law. When you were
Speaker 1: talking about that, I I was thinking, you know, in
Speaker 1: my own life, like just that challenge of going, okay,
Speaker 1: can I get this task that could take hours actually
Speaker 1: done a whole lot more quickly. And something I do
Speaker 1: every week is I'll generally be writing a column or
Speaker 1: an article or something like that for some media publication.
Speaker 2: That tends to be a weekly task that is on
Speaker 2: my list to do.
Speaker 1: And I know myself, I know that I could easily
Speaker 1: spend hours doing that, but typically when I'm time boxing
Speaker 1: my diary and essentially setting a meeting with myself to
Speaker 1: write the article, I'll generally keep it to one hour,
Speaker 1: sometimes ninety minutes.
Speaker 2: And I'm almost like surprised that.
Speaker 1: Oh, hang on, no, I can do that, And it
Speaker 1: just forces me to be very focused and work very
Speaker 1: hard and get it done.
Speaker 2: So I can absolutely relate to that.
Speaker 3: I think that's like one of the most important things
Speaker 3: you can kind of keep in mind when you're also
Speaker 3: sort of planning out your day is when you say like, hey,
Speaker 3: I think I can do all this stuff in like
Speaker 3: seven hours, you kind of start off the day then
Speaker 3: feeling like, hey, if I stay focused, I can get
Speaker 3: this all done, which is it kind of gets the
Speaker 3: like the flywheel of motivation inside of you going. And
Speaker 3: so for like the same thing, even on like a
Speaker 3: small scale, when you're like, hey, I'm gonna get this
Speaker 3: done in an hour, you actually get it done in
Speaker 3: an hour. And if you didn't have that sort of
Speaker 3: almost artificial time constraint that you had created for yourself,
Speaker 3: you just you kind of move through the task with
Speaker 3: a bit more passivity than you would have otherwise, and
Speaker 3: it's like you're making that commitment to yourself and you're
Speaker 3: almost kind of challenging yourself like hey, can I do this?
Speaker 3: And I think a lot of sort of really kind
Speaker 3: of effective and productive behavior comes from setting basically like
Speaker 3: a goal or something to kind of strive for when
Speaker 3: you're working towards something like that.
Speaker 1: And now I imagine that there are probably listeners going, yeah, look,
Speaker 1: that's all well and good, but what about the myriad
Speaker 1: of distractions, particularly digital distractions that are out there and
Speaker 1: pulling our focus away?
Speaker 2: From the task. What strategies have you found.
Speaker 1: Most effective to help keep those digital distractions in check
Speaker 1: and not get lured in by them.
Speaker 3: This might sound crazy, but I've just learned to embrace
Speaker 3: them and live with them and use them and kind
Speaker 3: of be okay with them. And instead of focusing my
Speaker 3: energy on what I don't want to do, ie, don't
Speaker 3: check Twitter, don't check Facebook, don't check YouTube, don't check slack,
Speaker 3: et cetera. I try to just put all of my
Speaker 3: energy and kind of focus on what do I want
Speaker 3: to do and be very sort of intentional and focused
Speaker 3: about that. And what I find happens is when I
Speaker 3: say something like, Hey, here's what I want to get
Speaker 3: done today, and then I also tell, you know, my colleagues,
Speaker 3: Hey guys, this is what I'm planning to get done today,
Speaker 3: I sort of just naturally kind of focus my time,
Speaker 3: energy and attention on my work and the things that
Speaker 3: I actually want to do, and I just spend less
Speaker 3: time on whether it's Twitter or whatever other kind of
Speaker 3: digital distraction because I have this like I'm sort of
Speaker 3: motivated to do what I said I was going to do,
Speaker 3: if that makes sense, And so it's not like I
Speaker 3: don't check those things at all. Now I do, but
Speaker 3: I'm able to just kind of push it aside and
Speaker 3: get back to what I want to do because I
Speaker 3: have that kind of goal and that commitment both to
Speaker 3: myself and to the people I work with.
Speaker 2: That is it for today's show. If you want to
Speaker 2: listen to the.
Speaker 1: Full episode, I link to that in the show notes,
Speaker 1: so you might want to check that out.
Speaker 2: And if you.
Speaker 1: Are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply
Speaker 1: grateful if you just take five seconds out of your
Speaker 1: date to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might
Speaker 1: be a star rating or a few words, and by
Speaker 1: doing so, it helps other people find the show and
Speaker 1: it also brings a huge smile to my face. So
Speaker 1: thank you to the hundreds of people that have left reviews.
Speaker 1: It is so deeply appreciated.
Speaker 2: So that is it for today's show, and I will
Speaker 2: see you next time.