Speaker 1: If you were to take your job on the road
Speaker 1: and live as a digital nomad, would you be able
Speaker 1: to keep it up without your life turning into a
Speaker 1: permanent holiday? Could you do it while also running a
Speaker 1: global company. Co founder and CEO at Levels, Sam Corcos
Speaker 1: has done just that. He's been working as a digital
Speaker 1: nomad for ten years. So I got connected with Sam
Speaker 1: via Darren Murph, who is head of Remote at GitLab
Speaker 1: and was one of my favorite guests on the show
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty. Sam's company Levels is responsible for creating
Speaker 1: a fascinating health tech wearable device that tracks your blood
Speaker 1: glucose levels in real time so that you can optimize
Speaker 1: your diet and exercise. Sam is a fellow productivity nerd
Speaker 1: and thinks very deeply about his personal productivity and health,
Speaker 1: and in today's show, he shares a ton of really
Speaker 1: practical tips from his email processing strategy and how he
Speaker 1: organizes his calendar as a hyper busy CEO, through to
Speaker 1: how he manages to read two books every week. Yes
Speaker 1: that's every single week, and we also chat about his
Speaker 1: quarterly Think Week ritual. I'm doctor Ramantha imbat I'm an
Speaker 1: organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium,
Speaker 1: and this is how I work a show that helps
Speaker 1: you do your best work. Let's start by hearing what
Speaker 1: Sam's nomadic lifestyle is like as a CEO and how
Speaker 1: he has managed to make that work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's something that I've been doing for quite a
Speaker 2: long time, not necessarily intentionally, just sort of out of necessity.
Speaker 2: I was a software developer and a contractor for a
Speaker 2: long time, which involved a lot of travel, and you know,
Speaker 2: at a certain point you just kind of get used
Speaker 2: to it not having a permanent location.
Speaker 3: And so what does that actually look like? How do
Speaker 3: you move around? What do you own? What do you pack?
Speaker 3: Where do you go?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm at my most aggressively minimalistic stage right now.
Speaker 2: I'm down to I think one pair of jeans and
Speaker 2: three T shirts. Pretty much everything I own fits in
Speaker 2: a backpack. Being a minimalist is definitely helps with the
Speaker 2: being more of a nomad. I try to optimize for
Speaker 2: staying with friends. I found that it's a really great
Speaker 2: way to build relationships with people that I don't know
Speaker 2: im I get a lot of time to spend with them.
Speaker 2: It's also been fun taking people up on what we're
Speaker 2: likely facetious offers. I have friends who say, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: anytime you want come on down, and I'll say, cool,
Speaker 2: how's a Tuesday. Then I'll just show up at their
Speaker 2: house and it's yeah. It's been a really great way
Speaker 2: of building relationships. I try to stay in touch with
Speaker 2: a lot of people, and I keep pretty rigorous notes.
Speaker 2: I think at this point, have I think something last
Speaker 2: I checked maybe three hundred people that I have on
Speaker 2: a list who have offered extra bedrooms or couches that
Speaker 2: I could stay on if I was visiting.
Speaker 1: So it's a cycle through it that is quite insane,
Speaker 1: and it certainly blows Dunbazz number.
Speaker 3: What it doesn't it one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: So what prompted you to have a minimalistic approach to
Speaker 1: your life?
Speaker 2: I would say part of it was just reducing cognitive load.
Speaker 2: I think that in general. I think in general we
Speaker 2: underestimate how much cognitive load we put on ourselves when
Speaker 2: we have stuff. There's a reason why when people do
Speaker 2: spring cleaning, it feels really good. You have fewer things,
Speaker 2: you have fewer attachments, fewer obligations. I found for myself
Speaker 2: that a lot of these things are just comfort having
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, and you can become comfortable with discomfort,
Speaker 2: and you can really use your time focused on the
Speaker 2: right things. Part of it, I think is the recognition
Speaker 2: that I'm dying, that we're all dying, just some of
Speaker 2: us more acutely than others. And the more time we
Speaker 2: spend on things that are not adding value is really
Speaker 2: detracting from our long term goals. And I found for
Speaker 2: me spending a lot of time following the news, thinking
Speaker 2: about what I dress like and what I'm wearing, accumulating
Speaker 2: more things, having more responsibilities that the fewer of those
Speaker 2: things that I had in my life, the more time
Speaker 2: I could spend towards the things that I really care about.
Speaker 3: That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: And how does applying minimalism to your life help you
Speaker 1: be more productive?
Speaker 2: I think the biggest one is in terms of I
Speaker 2: guess time management broadly. I think a lot about how
Speaker 2: I spend my time, and by not having things or obligations,
Speaker 2: it's very easy for me to make quick decisions and
Speaker 2: to make changes very quickly. The idea of me moving
Speaker 2: from one place to another is really I have a
Speaker 2: hard time relating to people who for them moving is
Speaker 2: a really big deal. I think it's in the top
Speaker 2: five most stressful activities that most humans experience, up there
Speaker 2: with the death of a family member. And for me,
Speaker 2: moving and traveling is really it's very low stress, maybe
Speaker 2: zero stress. Part of it's just because I don't have
Speaker 2: stuff to move. I don't have to worry about the logistics.
Speaker 2: I don't have to worry about coordinating things. Another thing
Speaker 2: is I've had a lot of conversations with people related
Speaker 2: to environmentalism, and I do think that it is interesting
Speaker 2: how much we tend to focus on the waste component
Speaker 2: of consumption and so much less about the input components.
Speaker 2: We think a lot about recycling and trash, and we
Speaker 2: don't think about the input. The person who owns several
Speaker 2: extra homes is contributing a lot more to damaging the
Speaker 2: climate than somebody who throws away a recyclable jar. So
Speaker 2: I think a lot about these things, and I think
Speaker 2: that if most people were to practice some form of minimalism,
Speaker 2: really just consuming fewer things, I think a lot of
Speaker 2: societal problems that we're experiencing would probably get a lot better.
Speaker 1: So, given the way you live, what does your work
Speaker 1: environment look like when you're say, staying with the friend's house,
Speaker 1: maybe sleeping on a couch.
Speaker 3: I don't know, what does your work environment?
Speaker 2: Then look, I have my laptop. I'm currently sitting cross
Speaker 2: legged on a bed. Part of this is related to
Speaker 2: maybe my own inability to multitask. I don't have multiple screens,
Speaker 2: which I know a lot of people really like having.
Speaker 2: I've tried it. I just find it incredibly distracting and disruptive.
Speaker 2: I have the one computer, I have the one screen,
Speaker 2: and I try to only focus on one task at
Speaker 2: a time. Sometimes I use things like I have noise
Speaker 2: canceling headphones, which blocks out external noise so that I
Speaker 2: can really stay focused on what I'm doing. I've created
Speaker 2: some other interesting tools, like I call them my focus goggles,
Speaker 2: which are basically safety glasses that you would have in
Speaker 2: in a science lab, and I've spray painted around them
Speaker 2: so that you can only see a very narrow strip
Speaker 2: in front of you.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're pretty nerdy, but they they are quite effective
Speaker 2: at blocking out peripheral vision. It's interesting because I'm incredibly
Speaker 2: lacking in discipline, which is often surprising. Who are people
Speaker 2: who know me who think that I'm incredibly disciplined. But
Speaker 2: it's more like I've created artificial structures around my own
Speaker 2: actions in order to force myself to be disciplined if
Speaker 2: I don't have a meeting. In fact, this morning is
Speaker 2: a perfect example in theory. I like to wake up
Speaker 2: at seven and start working, but my call this morning
Speaker 2: at eight o'clock got canceled, so when my alarm went off,
Speaker 2: I just went back to sleep. And I will often
Speaker 2: create things like I will make a meeting at eight
Speaker 2: am every day so that I have to wake up,
Speaker 2: because if I don't, then if I don't have that obligation,
Speaker 2: then I will be incredibly lazy. I have website blockers
Speaker 2: for things like Twitter, for a lot of other things
Speaker 2: that I find really distracting. I use a lot of
Speaker 2: tools to just increase friction so that I'm I know
Speaker 2: that future Sam will be more likely to do the
Speaker 2: right thing.
Speaker 1: What are some other tools that you're using to increase
Speaker 1: that friction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I use one. Website blockers are a big one.
Speaker 2: I think it depends a lot on what types of
Speaker 2: addictions one has. So for me, for a long time,
Speaker 2: it was social media. A couple things. One. My relationship
Speaker 2: with Twitter is much healthier Now. I discovered muted words,
Speaker 2: which is a thing where you can any tweet that
Speaker 2: has a particular phrase in it won't show up in
Speaker 2: your feed. So for me, I know that a lot
Speaker 2: of the I guess you could call it outrage porn
Speaker 2: that makes its way onto Twitter really distracts me and
Speaker 2: pulls my focus in the wrong direction. I have easily
Speaker 2: in the hundreds of muted words, think from violence to
Speaker 2: riots to anything that's like an angry term. I haven't
Speaker 2: effectively turned off. And I have a lot of blocked
Speaker 2: accounts as well, and as a result, my Twitter experience
Speaker 2: is quite positive. I also deleted Facebook and got rid
Speaker 2: of most social media. I've also been I've been news
Speaker 2: sober for about eight years.
Speaker 3: And what does news sober mean?
Speaker 2: That means I have not consumed news in any form,
Speaker 2: be it written, verbal, television. I haven't consumed any news
Speaker 2: since about twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: Wow. What prompted that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I had this recognition. I read a book Ryan Holidays,
Speaker 2: Trust Me I'm Lying, which really the subtitle was Confessions
Speaker 2: of a Media Manipulator, And I think he really did
Speaker 2: write the book as a confession.
Speaker 3: It's a great book, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And he was talking about how he does
Speaker 2: all of these tricks to manipulate the media to cover
Speaker 2: certain things, and very much saying like I'm sorry that
Speaker 2: I've been doing this. People need to know about it.
Speaker 2: It's getting it's bad, and it's getting worse. And this
Speaker 2: is before the term fake news even existed. He might
Speaker 2: he practically coined it in that book. He at the
Speaker 2: very least defines it very robustly. And as an experiment,
Speaker 2: I decided that for a month I would stop, I
Speaker 2: would stop following the news, which was taking up a
Speaker 2: lot of my time, and I would try using that
Speaker 2: time just a one for one trade off to just
Speaker 2: read books. And in that month, I think I read
Speaker 2: eight books that month, which is probably more books than
Speaker 2: I'd read in.
Speaker 4: The previous five years.
Speaker 2: And the there were so many other impacts that were
Speaker 2: very interesting. One was that it was amazing how little
Speaker 2: I actually missed in terms of things that mattered. It
Speaker 2: was this recognition that so much of the news is ephemeral,
Speaker 2: and the incentives of the news industry are not in
Speaker 2: the best interest of the people that are following the news,
Speaker 2: and that the news is generally very low quality information
Speaker 2: and books have very high quality information. I would also
Speaker 2: say that one of the other things that was really
Speaker 2: surprising was how I physically felt different, which is kind
Speaker 2: of a hard thing to explain.
Speaker 4: That my.
Speaker 2: Anxiety levels were down pretty dramatically in facts, almost to
Speaker 2: the point where it was non existent. I used to
Speaker 2: feel stress, and I used to feel anxious all the
Speaker 2: time about world events, and it was weird in retrospect
Speaker 2: looking at it and realizing that I was I was
Speaker 2: feeling stress about a lot of things that I have
Speaker 2: no control over, many of which aren't even real, and
Speaker 2: it was a weird recognition. And so I basically haven't
Speaker 2: looked back, and I've managed to read two books a
Speaker 2: week since giving up the news, just by doing like
Speaker 2: a one to one trade of time of news to books.
Speaker 1: Wow. Now I loved Superhuman, and before encountering you, I thought,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm the biggest Superhuman fan in the world, but
Speaker 1: I believe that you might be that person. So I
Speaker 1: want to know how are you using Superhuman in ways
Speaker 1: that make email?
Speaker 3: And for those that.
Speaker 1: Don't know, Superhuman is an email client more efficient in
Speaker 1: terms of processing email.
Speaker 2: The biggest one is use of hot keys. I process
Speaker 2: a lot of email. It's probably my core competency. On
Speaker 2: the order if I don't process at least three or
Speaker 2: four hours of email every day, I fall behind. And
Speaker 2: I would say batching is probably the biggest one. And
Speaker 2: this is not within the scope of Superhuman. This is
Speaker 2: just in terms of time management, really making time for
Speaker 2: email and making it a first class citizen. This isn't
Speaker 2: the case for everybody. This happens to be the case
Speaker 2: at my job. It was talking with one of our
Speaker 2: engineers who he said in something like he processes something
Speaker 2: on the order of ten emails per week. It's just
Speaker 2: not his job. He doesn't do email. He writes code,
Speaker 2: and in my job, pretty much all of what I
Speaker 2: do is email. So Superhuman is a really great tool
Speaker 2: because it's very performant. It allows for scheduling. The nice
Speaker 2: thing about email relative to other mechanisms like text messaging,
Speaker 2: for example, is that email can be trianged. You can
Speaker 2: decide if something needs to be responded to now or
Speaker 2: it can be responded to later. Some of the other
Speaker 2: tools that superhuman laws you do are I think they
Speaker 2: use the term snooze, but really scheduling is the term
Speaker 2: where you can read an email and say all right,
Speaker 2: I need to revisit this in two weeks, and you
Speaker 2: can schedule it to resurface in a couple of weeks.
Speaker 2: So getting to inbox zero is really the critical component.
Speaker 2: Superhuman really enables that and makes it a lot easier.
Speaker 1: And I know that you're a big fan of snippets
Speaker 1: in the Human. Can you talk about what a snippet
Speaker 1: is and how you use it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, anybody who's worked in customer support knows a lot
Speaker 2: about snippets. A snippet is a common phrase or language
Speaker 2: that you use in many, many communications. I think right now,
Speaker 2: within levels, I think something like seventy percent of our
Speaker 2: communications we already have an answer written for it, which
Speaker 2: is pretty high. And I know that for a lot
Speaker 2: of the emails that I process, I would guess maybe
Speaker 2: half of the emails have are largely written as a
Speaker 2: snippet because a lot of the communication that you do
Speaker 2: are generally consistent. Like I have a snippet for grabbing
Speaker 2: a time on my calendar USUS calendly to schedule something,
Speaker 2: and that works super well. I schedule a lot of things,
Speaker 2: so it's useful to have a snippet instead of typing
Speaker 2: it out every time oftentimes you can compose emails from
Speaker 2: multiple snippets. I have some snippets that are basically a
Speaker 2: list of investor asks. I ask a lot of things
Speaker 2: from our investors. I think that snippet is maybe twenty
Speaker 2: items long, and I keep it up to date, and
Speaker 2: as I go through the process of asking for things
Speaker 2: from our investors, I'll paste the whole snippet and then
Speaker 2: I'll cut out all the ones that we don't need.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to talk about your calendar, and I
Speaker 1: know you think about delineating between macer versus manager time
Speaker 1: to take from Paul Graham's famous essay on that, but
Speaker 1: to start with, I guess, can you talk about the
Speaker 1: difference between maker versus manager time and then how you
Speaker 1: schedule that into your diary?
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, It's something that I've I guess I would
Speaker 2: say I've learned the hard way. This is actually my
Speaker 2: first non technical role. Historically, I've been in software development,
Speaker 2: usually the person writing code or an engineering leadership. The
Speaker 2: first time I really took a leadership role in engineering
Speaker 2: and was doing a lot less programming. The challenge that
Speaker 2: I ran into is and it I found it very
Speaker 2: hard to communicate this to people inside the company who
Speaker 2: were not software developers, are not technical. Was how if
Speaker 2: I have a thirty minute meeting at eleven am and
Speaker 2: at three pm, I can't get any work done the
Speaker 2: whole day, And they'll say, well, it's only one hour.
Speaker 2: You still have the whole arrest of the day to work,
Speaker 2: And it's just like, it really doesn't work that way
Speaker 2: when you're trying to get into a flow state. I
Speaker 2: can't work up the emotional energy to even start working
Speaker 2: on this project if I know that there's a high
Speaker 2: likelihood I'll be interrupted in the middle of it. And
Speaker 2: so the difference between manager and maker time is Manager
Speaker 2: time is it's constant context switching and it's really not
Speaker 2: a flow state. It's jumping in between tasks. And maker
Speaker 2: time is you're deeply focused on one thing. And your
Speaker 2: writing code is a perfect example of maker time. Anytime
Speaker 2: you've been in a flow state where you just lose
Speaker 2: track of time. There have been times when I've been
Speaker 2: focused on coding and ten twelve hours go by and
Speaker 2: I haven't even looked up at the clock. They're both
Speaker 2: useful and important. And the thing that I discovered about
Speaker 2: myself is that, especially when you're in engineering leadership where
Speaker 2: you really have to do both roles. You're still coding,
Speaker 2: but you also.
Speaker 4: Have to manage.
Speaker 2: I found that intra day context switching was the problem,
Speaker 2: not inter day, and by that I mean jumping from
Speaker 2: coding to meetings to coding within the same day was
Speaker 2: what was causing me most of the emotional turmoil. Whereas
Speaker 2: if I just said meetings are on Mondays and Tuesdays
Speaker 2: are only programming, I'll take no meetings. Wednesdays, I'll do
Speaker 2: meetings again and no coding. If I just accepted certain
Speaker 2: boundaries around it, where I would have maker days and
Speaker 2: manager days, it ended up working pretty well.
Speaker 3: So what do you currently do at the moment? What
Speaker 3: does a typical week look like for you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny you say that, because I'm actually in
Speaker 2: the midst of writing a content piece on how I
Speaker 2: spent the first two years at Levels. I pretty religiously
Speaker 2: keep track of my time. Every fifteen minute increment of
Speaker 2: how I spent my time is in my calendar, so
Speaker 2: I can retroactively really quantify how I spent my time.
Speaker 2: And what's funny is that, I'd say one of the
Speaker 2: biggest things is, especially as a CEO, you end up
Speaker 2: wearing a lot of different hats. There were three very
Speaker 2: distinct periods in the company's history where I was basically
Speaker 2: just a programmer and I was an individual contributor writing
Speaker 2: code because that's what needed to happen. There were other
Speaker 2: times I spent the entire month of May last year
Speaker 2: on sales and marketing, and I just called hundreds of
Speaker 2: people to try to convert them and to learn from
Speaker 2: them and do user research. Really for the growth team.
Speaker 2: Right now, my job is mostly email. I spend a
Speaker 2: tremendous amount of my time on email, and I think
Speaker 2: of my role as if the company is a steam engine.
Speaker 2: My job is really just to be the low I
Speaker 2: don't really have a lot of specific deliverables. My job
Speaker 2: is to make sure that all of the component parts
Speaker 2: are functioning effectively and are well resourced. On a typical week,
Speaker 2: I would say that certainly for the last month or so,
Speaker 2: I'm doing a lot of engineering interviews. We're adding a
Speaker 2: lot of people to our engineering team this year. I
Speaker 2: think since February I've averaged between thirty and forty interviews
Speaker 2: per week. Wow, yep. One of the nice things is
Speaker 2: that because our team is so capable. I'm able to
Speaker 2: really singularly focus on one problem and really execute on
Speaker 2: it effectively. One of the challenges that a lot of
Speaker 2: startups that I advise run into is the CEOs in particular,
Speaker 2: are pulled in many directions and they have a lot
Speaker 2: of deliverables they have to do on many different parts
Speaker 2: of the company. I'm fortunate in that my role is
Speaker 2: since probably January has been largely redundant within the company.
Speaker 2: I could take a week off and probably nobody would notice,
Speaker 2: which is very much the goal.
Speaker 1: Now, I want to know what you learned from tracking
Speaker 1: your time in fifteen minute increments for two years.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Man, there were a lot of things. I think the
Speaker 2: biggest one was how wrong I was about how I
Speaker 2: actually spent my time. I made some predictions in advance
Speaker 2: of writing this piece on how much of my time
Speaker 2: went to different types of activities.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 2: A couple things that I thought I was spending a
Speaker 2: lot of time on. One is strategy and thinking about
Speaker 2: company strategy, and we have a tremendous amount of documentation,
Speaker 2: I would say, way more than the average company of
Speaker 2: our size, and I would have guessed that I probably
Speaker 2: probably spent twenty percent of my time on strategy, and
Speaker 2: when I analyzed the data, I actually spent about four
Speaker 2: percent of my time on strategy. And similarly, I thought
Speaker 2: I probably spent twenty percent of my time on recruiting
Speaker 2: because it felt like I was talking to a lot
Speaker 2: of people looking for next hires, and I only spent
Speaker 2: about two percent of my time on recruiting, which was
Speaker 2: even more surprising, and it made me realize that there
Speaker 2: are certain types of activities that have a disproportionate emotional
Speaker 2: cost than actual time cost. The example around strategy is
Speaker 2: that it can be hard to work up the emotional
Speaker 2: energy to sit down and write a five page document,
Speaker 2: but that might actually only take you about an hour,
Speaker 2: and yet it feels a lot less time time to
Speaker 2: have ten one hour conversations with different people on your team.
Speaker 2: That doesn't actually even do a very good job of
Speaker 2: aligning people, because there's this game of telephone where you
Speaker 2: feel like you told them what you thought you told them,
Speaker 2: but they interpreted it very differently, and so it might
Speaker 2: be it might feel like it's less work, but it
Speaker 2: might actually be ten times the amount of hours with
Speaker 2: a a suboptimal result. So that was one of the
Speaker 2: big lessons was that there are certain activities that I
Speaker 2: seem to recognize their value, but I shy away from
Speaker 2: them in terms of actual time spent.
Speaker 1: That's so fascinating, just the difference between what you were
Speaker 1: expecting and what was the output, and having actually been
Speaker 1: sent a lot of your strategy documents in advance for
Speaker 1: preparing for this interview, I can certainly test to feels
Speaker 1: like you're doing a lot of work.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 3: Hey there, it's nearly time for a little break. But
Speaker 3: can I ask a favor of you?
Speaker 5: If you're enjoying how I work, I would love it
Speaker 5: if you could leave a review or a star rating
Speaker 5: and a massive shout out to the hundreds of people
Speaker 5: that have done this. I'm truly grateful for you taking
Speaker 5: a little bit of time out of your day to
Speaker 5: do that. Okay, Sam will be back after this break
Speaker 5: to talk about his favorite apps for boosting productivity.
Speaker 1: And what exactly this quarterly think week looks like. Now
Speaker 1: I want to know about what are some of your
Speaker 1: other favorite apps for productivity outside of Superhuman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean Google Calendar.
Speaker 2: I think that the one of the biggest things, one
Speaker 2: of the biggest unlocks for me was using my calendar
Speaker 2: as my primary mechanism for time management and in terms
Speaker 2: of tasking as well. I used to keep a to
Speaker 2: do list, which I think is sort of the default
Speaker 2: that everyone has to do list. The challenge that I
Speaker 2: kept running into is, especially with digital to do lists,
Speaker 2: to do lists can become infinitely long, and they feel
Speaker 2: infinitely long. I remember a couple of years ago my
Speaker 2: to do list was so long it was several lifetimes
Speaker 2: amount of work that would be required to actually get
Speaker 2: to the bottom of this list, and so I started
Speaker 2: using my calendar to proactively block off time. So when
Speaker 2: I would have a task like maybe it's right the
Speaker 2: content piece on how I spent the first two years
Speaker 2: of my time at levels, I will proactively look at
Speaker 2: my calendar and I'll block off I would expect it
Speaker 2: will probably take me six hours to write it, so
Speaker 2: I'll block off six hours to write that piece. Similarly,
Speaker 2: if there's something about running errands or writing a strategy
Speaker 2: document on how we think about podcasts, I'll block off
Speaker 2: time on my calendar instead of adding it to my
Speaker 2: to do list. I found that this was a It
Speaker 2: was probably the most powerful mechanism for just personal anxiety
Speaker 2: reduction because your to do list can become really optimistic
Speaker 2: on the things that you can get done because you
Speaker 2: can attach an amount of time to each individual item,
Speaker 2: like all right, well, this task takes three hours, this
Speaker 2: takes four hours, this takes two days, this takes four days.
Speaker 2: But unless you map it onto the chronology of your
Speaker 2: actual time, you don't really know how long it takes
Speaker 2: and you end up dropping a lot of balls.
Speaker 1: What are some other apps that you're loving for productivity?
Speaker 4: Let's see.
Speaker 2: I use text Expander, which is basically snippets outside of Superhuman,
Speaker 2: it's much more extensible. I haven't used a lot of
Speaker 2: the extensible functionality. I think a text expander you can
Speaker 2: tie in and integrate APIs to run different commands and
Speaker 2: actually interact with much more robust set of tools. I
Speaker 2: use it for a lot of common things that I
Speaker 2: end up typing, either in terminal or in in the console,
Speaker 2: or in text messages. I use text expandar for a
Speaker 2: lot of my text message communications. I would say the
Speaker 2: biggest thing is just to keep things asynchronous as possible.
Speaker 2: I would say a lot of my productivity tools would
Speaker 2: be anti tools. I would say to the greatest extent
Speaker 2: that it's possible. Your phone should be on do not
Speaker 2: disturb mode by default as minus turn off notifications. Don't
Speaker 2: use slack, or if you do, use it with a
Speaker 2: very specific set of slas for example, we use slack
Speaker 2: at levels, but explicitly Slack is not the primary mechanism
Speaker 2: for communications. Slack is really just for updates, and there's
Speaker 2: no expectation that anyone will respond to a message and
Speaker 2: slack within twenty four hours, and that it prevents this
Speaker 2: fire hose effective information because information on slack is it's
Speaker 2: Slack is a synchronous tool that pretends like it's an
Speaker 2: asynchronous tool because you have the same expectation that people
Speaker 2: will respond immediately, but it's written and things just get
Speaker 2: lost if you're not paying attention in real time. So
Speaker 2: I think that focusing on things that are asynchronous by
Speaker 2: default is really the most impactful way of being productive.
Speaker 2: Is to really emphasize deep focused work and to eliminate
Speaker 2: distractions to the greatest extent as possible.
Speaker 1: Now, I know that Calendly is one of your favorite apps.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me for listeners that haven't come across
Speaker 1: Calendly what it is and how you use it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I use Calendly pretty religiously scheduling time is I
Speaker 2: guess this is actually Calendly is useful for me because
Speaker 2: I keep such a rigorous calendar. Calendly syncs with something
Speaker 2: like Google Calendar, and it allows people to find open
Speaker 2: spots on your calendar that you designate, and it allows
Speaker 2: them to schedule basically self serve. The typical way that
Speaker 2: scheduling works is you email somebody, they say, cool, I'm
Speaker 2: available at these times. You look at your calendar, you
Speaker 2: check all those times. You say, oh, well, I'm not
Speaker 2: available those times, but I am available these times. They say,
Speaker 2: oh well, I'm not available those times, how about these times?
Speaker 2: And it takes multiple days oftentimes to schedule something. Calendly
Speaker 2: just pulls in the data from my calendar and just
Speaker 2: let somebody pick a time that is open. I probably
Speaker 2: send five plus calendar links every day for people's scheduling
Speaker 2: things on my calendar. I also let it go three
Speaker 2: months out and so yeah, it's a really great tool
Speaker 2: to cut through the complexity of scheduling.
Speaker 1: Now I've heard that you have a think week every quarter.
Speaker 3: What does that look like.
Speaker 2: It's something that I highly recommend to anyone in a
Speaker 2: strategic role. Every quarter, I take a week I would
Speaker 2: say off grid, but not necessarily without access to internet
Speaker 2: or whatnot. I actually really like having access to internet
Speaker 2: for me. I will often spend a lot of that
Speaker 2: time reading and reflecting and writing. I do a lot
Speaker 2: of writing. I'll often come out of one of these
Speaker 2: think weeks with fifty to one hundred pages of writing
Speaker 2: on company strategy or personal reflections or writing of content pieces.
Speaker 2: I find writing to be a really, a really satisfying activity,
Speaker 2: and so it is usually during these think weeks that
Speaker 2: I come up with some of my best ideas because
Speaker 2: it's I don't take any meetings, I don't take any calls.
Speaker 2: I really just focus as much as I can on
Speaker 2: the big picture. So a lot of my best ideas
Speaker 2: have come from taking time away from the day to day,
Speaker 2: when you can think more holistically about your company and
Speaker 2: what the goals are, and what the trajectory is, and
Speaker 2: what the hiring plan is. I find that if I'm
Speaker 2: in the day to day, it's really easy to miss
Speaker 2: the forest for the trees. So yeah, I usually take
Speaker 2: I usually do it somewhere that's slightly remote, be it
Speaker 2: Joshua tree or Yosemite, but so relatively accessible.
Speaker 1: And like, how do you structure the wake? Are the
Speaker 1: questions or tasks or things that you bring in to
Speaker 1: guide you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: One of the consequences of keeping such a rigorous calendar
Speaker 2: is I actually I have my next think week planned,
Speaker 2: and I already have all of the days blocked off
Speaker 2: for the things that I'll be working on those weeks.
Speaker 2: As ideas come up and I realize that I am
Speaker 2: not going to have time to rethink the primary business
Speaker 2: model of the company, I'll jump ahead to my next
Speaker 2: think week in my calendar and block off a whole
Speaker 2: day to just think about business model. Or if it's
Speaker 2: for something completely unrelated, something like a personal thing that
Speaker 2: I want to reflect on, I can block off a
Speaker 2: wholiday for that. So I would say that it's they're
Speaker 2: usually mostly structured in advance of even getting there.
Speaker 1: Now, on the topic of health, what are some of
Speaker 1: your habits or retains or things that you do that
Speaker 1: help you stay healthy?
Speaker 2: A lot of it comes to do with it has
Speaker 2: to do with diet, which is not surprising. I try
Speaker 2: to avoid sugar, That's really the big one. I try
Speaker 2: to avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates, but sugar is really
Speaker 2: the big one. I go on a lot of walks
Speaker 2: pre COVID. I think I averaged something like ten miles
Speaker 2: per day of walking. I would take a lot of
Speaker 2: my calls on walks. Most people would do zooms and
Speaker 2: I would mostly do walks. I found that that's just
Speaker 2: a really good way of getting steps and staying active.
Speaker 2: I also really focus a lot on sleep. I try
Speaker 2: to get a minimum of eight hours of sleep a night,
Speaker 2: which is surprising to some people, but I think sleep
Speaker 2: is incredibly important, especially when you're doing strategy work or
Speaker 2: deep focused work. Being well rested it makes such a
Speaker 2: huge impact on my ability to perform.
Speaker 1: And I've heard that you're having less coffee these days
Speaker 1: and more tea.
Speaker 3: Is that correct?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm trying to cut back.
Speaker 2: I go through these cycles where I start with one
Speaker 2: cup of coffee and that becomes.
Speaker 4: Three, which becomes five.
Speaker 2: When you start getting to the point where you're measuring
Speaker 2: caffeine consumption and grams and not milligrams, that's when you
Speaker 2: know that it's time to cut back. So yeah, I've
Speaker 2: I still have the habitual crutch of a warm liquid,
Speaker 2: so I've been trying to switch to ginger tea and
Speaker 2: other types of green tea that have less caffeine. But
Speaker 2: I go through these cycles and it's funny. I remember
Speaker 2: the last time I completely went off of caffeine for
Speaker 2: probably a month, and then I had my first cup
Speaker 2: of coffee from a Starbucks and I remembered that caffeine
Speaker 2: is definitely a drug. It is a very different feeling
Speaker 2: when you have caffeine having not had it for a month,
Speaker 2: and it's like, WHOA, this is a potent substance. But
Speaker 2: when you're addicted to it and you just have it
Speaker 2: every day, it's a sort of more of a habit.
Speaker 3: That's so true.
Speaker 1: Now I want to talk about levels, and I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: by the Levels patch. And I will preface this by
Speaker 1: saying I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes
Speaker 1: to health. So something I did a few years ago
Speaker 1: when I discovered a company called day two, And I'm
Speaker 1: sure you're very familiar with them, but for those that
Speaker 1: are not, Day two is essentially a company that draws
Speaker 1: on a lot of research that suggests that individuals have
Speaker 1: very different responses to the same kind of food.
Speaker 3: So if you take.
Speaker 1: Something like white bread versus sourdough bread. Most people would
Speaker 1: assume that your blood glucose levels would spike after the
Speaker 1: white bread and not after the sourdough bread. But in
Speaker 1: fact it depends completely on the individual and I found
Speaker 1: that fascinating. And so day two then take your blood
Speaker 1: test data and they get a pooh sample and from
Speaker 1: there they're able to predict using I imagine, what are
Speaker 1: quite sophisticated algorithms, what every individual's person response will be
Speaker 1: to certain types of food. But couldn't get it in Australia.
Speaker 1: So I spent two weeks. I got a little finger
Speaker 1: pricking diabetes KIP from the chemist and I pricked my
Speaker 1: fingers or a finger, although I probably went through all
Speaker 1: ten of them by the end of the two weeks
Speaker 1: every half an hour to measure what my blood glucose
Speaker 1: response was to different types of food, so that I
Speaker 1: could eliminate that spike and have better energy. But what
Speaker 1: you are working on does that in a much easier way.
Speaker 1: So can you talk about what this patch is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. So we use a lot of the we
Speaker 2: use off the shelf continuous glucose monitors. They're manufactured by
Speaker 2: Abbot and Dex. Colm They've been on the market for
Speaker 2: quite some time for diabetes management, and what they do
Speaker 2: is they give you a real time stream of your
Speaker 2: glucose data. It's a patch that sits on arm, so
Speaker 2: it makes it such that you don't need to do
Speaker 2: the finger pricks and you get a much more comprehensive
Speaker 2: data set, so you can actually one of the challenges
Speaker 2: of using a finger prick is that you can often
Speaker 2: miss the entire peak of the spike, and so you
Speaker 2: don't capture all of the data and you might miss
Speaker 2: the actual response. So we use that to show you
Speaker 2: how different dietary choices, be it potatoes or aspher or
Speaker 2: I guess, how these different choices that you're making are
Speaker 2: affecting both your long term health but also really how
Speaker 2: you feel. My big learning for my own personal life
Speaker 2: was how closely tied my energy levels were to my
Speaker 2: glucose wings and how a lot of the things that
Speaker 2: I was doing that I assumed were really healthy, specifically
Speaker 2: steel cutops and oatmeal for basically my entire life. I've
Speaker 2: been told that oatmeal is the healthiest breakfast. And I
Speaker 2: think it was the first or second day I was
Speaker 2: wearing a glucose monitor I had this just a twelve
Speaker 2: o'clock crash, and I checked my levels and my blood
Speaker 2: sugar had spiked into ranges that healthy people are not
Speaker 2: supposed to be able to see, and I had crashed
Speaker 2: into deep hypoglycemia, and looking up the symptoms of hypoglycemia,
Speaker 2: I was having shaky hands, feeling tired, and unable to focus,
Speaker 2: and it was just this recognition that all of these
Speaker 2: things are just hypoglycemia. And it was called a post
Speaker 2: perennial crash when your blood sugar goes up really high
Speaker 2: and then your body produces a bunch of insulin to
Speaker 2: counteract that, and it often overcorrects, even up with low glucose,
Speaker 2: and that's when you start feeling really weird. So that's
Speaker 2: the core of the product is using really a lot
Speaker 2: of different data points, starting with glucose, to try to
Speaker 2: model the way that your body responds to different choices
Speaker 2: so you can live out a healthier life.
Speaker 1: Are there any other gadgets or health devices that you
Speaker 1: use to track data or live a healthier life.
Speaker 2: I've used the Aura ring for sleep tracking. I don't
Speaker 2: use it currently, but I've used it before and that
Speaker 2: was a really helpful tool. It gives you, I would
Speaker 2: say the biggest learning that I had from Aura. It's
Speaker 2: interesting how you can read something on the internet and
Speaker 2: it's very different to experience it in data. I've read
Speaker 2: that having alcohol before bed is bad for sleep quality.
Speaker 2: It's a very different thing to see it reflected in
Speaker 2: the data, having like two glasses of wine, and then
Speaker 2: you look at your data and the ring knows based
Speaker 2: on your heart rate, based on the number of times
Speaker 2: you tossed and turned, just how bad it actually is.
Speaker 2: So I've reduced my alcohol consumption, which already wasn't very high,
Speaker 2: but to pretty close to zero. I will I'll probably
Speaker 2: have a couple units of alcohol a month at this point.
Speaker 2: It's just it's not worth it for me.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I know that levels is not available in Australia at
Speaker 1: the moment.
Speaker 2: What's the timings on that, Yeah, hopefully as soon as
Speaker 2: humanly possible. We're still in beta. We probably will be
Speaker 2: until I'm hoping sometime in Q three of twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: We actually brought on Josh mor who was the general
Speaker 2: manager of Uber New York, to help lead international expansion,
Speaker 2: and I think Canada, UK Australia are the first countries
Speaker 2: we're looking at to expand to, so I would say
Speaker 2: optimistically sometime the end of this year, probably sometime next year.
Speaker 1: And for guests that are keen to connect with you
Speaker 1: and Levels in some way, what is the best way
Speaker 1: for people to do that right now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: So our I would say the best place to get
Speaker 2: information on metabolic health is the Levels blog is levelshealth
Speaker 2: dot com slash blog. I'm on Twitter at Sam Corcos.
Speaker 2: We can also follow us on social media at Levels
Speaker 2: on Instagram and on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Amazing, Sam, It's been absolutely fascinating chatting with you and
Speaker 1: just how deeply you think about all things productivity and
Speaker 1: managing your time. So thank you so much for giving
Speaker 1: me some of your time in your calendar.
Speaker 3: I've just loved our chat absolutely. That is it. For
Speaker 3: today's show.
Speaker 1: Next week on How I Work, I'm very excited to
Speaker 1: have Gary Meagan, ex Master Chef judge. We talk about
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, including his top tips for the kitchen,
Speaker 1: through to bouncing back from challenging times, which Gary has
Speaker 1: had a bit of experience with. If you're keen to
Speaker 1: hear that interview, hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening
Speaker 1: to this show from How I Work is produced by
Speaker 1: Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. The produce
Speaker 1: so for this episode was Jenna Koda, and thank you
Speaker 1: to Martin Imba who did the audio mix and makes
Speaker 1: everything sound awesome. See you next time.