Speaker 1: Hello, it's Amantha here. How I Work is on a
Speaker 1: little mini break, and so today I am bringing you
Speaker 1: one of my favorite How I Work episodes that I've
Speaker 1: recorded over the last year. If you're a knowledge worker,
Speaker 1: the quality of your thinking ultimately determines the quality of
Speaker 1: your work. So how do you improve the quality of
Speaker 1: your thinking? Well, that's a.
Speaker 2: Pretty big question now.
Speaker 1: One person trying to answer that question is Tim Urban,
Speaker 1: the author of the incredibly successful blog called Wait But Why.
Speaker 1: Tim writes about everything from careers to the state of
Speaker 1: American power, to Elon Musk's vision for the future, and
Speaker 1: of course he writes about thinking and how we can
Speaker 1: get better at it. Tim shares how to break big,
Speaker 1: difficult ideas into smaller, more manageable components, and outlines how
Speaker 1: he fights procrastination. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm
Speaker 1: an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium.
Speaker 1: And this is How I Work, a show about how
Speaker 1: to help you do your best work. One of Tim's
Speaker 1: most notable public appearances was his ted talk about procrastination,
Speaker 1: which has been viewed by over.
Speaker 2: Sixty three million people.
Speaker 1: And if you haven't seen it, if you're not one
Speaker 1: of those sixty three million people. You should check it
Speaker 1: out immediately because it's brilliant. I wanted to know whether
Speaker 1: Tim had developed new strategies for beating procrastination since he
Speaker 1: delivered that Ted talk several years ago.
Speaker 3: My life's work is trying to conquer my own procrastination.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I like that you said that are working
Speaker 3: because there's a lot of articles on how to beat
Speaker 3: the destination, a lot of advice. And what I find
Speaker 3: is that most procrastinators, like myself, read one of those articles,
Speaker 3: we get super inspired. We think I'm doing this, this
Speaker 3: is it, I'm doing that from now on. I'm all set,
Speaker 3: like I just figured on. And then maybe we do
Speaker 3: it for a day or two, or maybe we don't
Speaker 3: even do it at all, and then and then move
Speaker 3: back to where we were right. So what actually works?
Speaker 3: I think there's two categories of solution here. One is
Speaker 3: a picture that your habits are kind of a boat
Speaker 3: that you're in, and if you're a procrastinator, it means
Speaker 3: something about the boat's not working well, like there's a
Speaker 3: there's a leak, or there's something's broken.
Speaker 2: And so the two categories of solution for something like this, Are.
Speaker 3: You repair the boat in a permanent way, like you
Speaker 3: actually fix the thing and it's fixed, or you put
Speaker 3: temporary duct tape or something over the pole and it's
Speaker 3: not permanent. It's not actually fixed. The boat's still broken,
Speaker 3: but it's the leak isn't happening right now because you've
Speaker 3: you've taped it up for a while.
Speaker 2: And so what I've been trying for the obviously.
Speaker 3: Ideally you're the first category where you're actually changing your
Speaker 3: habits and you're growing as a human and you're you're
Speaker 3: not the way you used to be anymore. And so
Speaker 3: for that category, the it's I've been trying to a
Speaker 3: couple of things. I've been trying to remind myself that
Speaker 3: even a big you know, we have this idea in
Speaker 3: the US at least, that forty hours is a good
Speaker 3: work week.
Speaker 2: You know, eight hour day is a good work day.
Speaker 2: It's like half the half the day. You know, you
Speaker 2: have sixteen awaking hours put in eight good hours of
Speaker 2: working done a full day.
Speaker 3: If you actually go into most people's offices or most
Speaker 3: people's workplaces who say they were forty hours a week,
Speaker 3: and you look at what they're actually doing and how
Speaker 3: much of that is really on focusing, deep focus on
Speaker 3: real work.
Speaker 2: The number is usually a lot less than forty.
Speaker 3: And I would say I've found that I think as
Speaker 3: a writer, at least if I put in three deep
Speaker 3: focused hours, that's a huge that's a great day, like
Speaker 3: I if I but but but.
Speaker 2: It's the psychology is weird where in my head it's like.
Speaker 3: If I wake up at you know, eight thirty, and
Speaker 3: I think, if I just pull my lap up onto
Speaker 3: the bed and work till eleven thirty, I'm done. Something
Speaker 3: about that doesn't It's like the perfectionist to me is like, well, no,
Speaker 3: I have to work all day. And what I find
Speaker 3: is that I'll spend the whole day sitting around working,
Speaker 3: except I'm like in this kind of gray areas where
Speaker 3: I'm supposed to be working but I'm not, or that
Speaker 3: I am a little and then I stop and there's
Speaker 3: a lot of breaks, and so it's this kind of
Speaker 3: gray area not really playing, not really working, soone that
Speaker 3: I spend a ton of time. And I call it
Speaker 3: the dark playground where you're kind of in leisure time
Speaker 3: you're not supposed to be in leasure time. I will
Speaker 3: I will put in a huge amounts of hours each week,
Speaker 3: and then I'll find that in the end, if I
Speaker 3: really were honest about how many of those are real
Speaker 3: hous it adds up to about three hours a day
Speaker 3: at a really good week. So the point is what
Speaker 3: I'm trying to get better at is less of this
Speaker 3: permanent gray area between work and play and more like,
Speaker 3: I am going to get my three hours done, and
Speaker 3: the psychology of that to be like instead of you know,
Speaker 3: thinking I have this whole ahead. No no, no, if I
Speaker 3: just wait three hours, I'm free for the whole day,
Speaker 3: but really doing it doing those three hours, because it
Speaker 3: compiles that's fifteen hours a week, that's sixty real hours
Speaker 3: a month.
Speaker 2: You can fly through projects.
Speaker 3: And then genuinely on the other side of it having playtime.
Speaker 2: So it's turning.
Speaker 3: Grades black and white where you're not just doing one
Speaker 3: side of the yin yang, but you're actually doing the
Speaker 3: other two. You're genuinely playing when you're not giving yourself
Speaker 3: guilt free off time where you're doing high quality stuff
Speaker 3: and you're having fun in guilt free funds. It recharges
Speaker 3: your battery for the hardcore work zone the next day.
Speaker 3: So it's either going to be a hardcore work zone
Speaker 3: or nothing at all. That's where I'm trying to get.
Speaker 3: That is much more effective than kind of sitting here
Speaker 3: all day.
Speaker 2: Not kind of working. So there's a bunch of things.
Speaker 2: I have a bunch of strategies like that.
Speaker 3: Now the second pile of strategies is the duct tape, right,
Speaker 3: And so what I'm trying to do is while I
Speaker 3: build that habit, for example, is I'm trying to duct
Speaker 3: tape the boat into that habit. I have a colleague, Alisha,
Speaker 3: and she is the wave wise manager of lots of things,
Speaker 3: but why employee, and she does like a million things.
Speaker 3: And one of the things that her job entails is
Speaker 3: dealing with my.
Speaker 2: Flaws and like procrastination.
Speaker 3: That's why my procrastination has very much become her problem.
Speaker 3: And so one of the things one of the things
Speaker 3: that we've been doing, which has been great, and again
Speaker 3: it's treating myself like a baby, but it sometimes that's
Speaker 3: reading to do, is we have as either in person
Speaker 3: or on slack video nine thirty to twelve thirty. You know,
Speaker 3: these three hours in the morning, the three hours I
Speaker 3: want to be deep focusing at minimum, we have her
Speaker 3: either sitting next to me, or she can see my screen,
Speaker 3: or I share my screen with her on Zoo and
Speaker 3: she's working on her own stuff. She's not just staring
Speaker 3: at my screen. But I me knowing that she might
Speaker 3: be looking at my screen. It's enough external pressure to
Speaker 3: be like, well, I'm not going to go dick around
Speaker 3: right now like someone's watching me, and then I find
Speaker 3: I get my work done because she knows exactly what's
Speaker 3: supposed to be in my screen and what's not.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to go start texting when she's looking
Speaker 2: at I scream. So I'm just going to work.
Speaker 3: And it's not like recrest centers often you don't have
Speaker 3: to drag them, you know, clawing and fighting to work.
Speaker 2: You just have to give them like.
Speaker 3: A little push when they're like I don't want to
Speaker 3: It's like, oh okay, fine, right, So that to me
Speaker 3: is enough of a push to get me to do
Speaker 3: those three hours. So again, that's duct taping the boat
Speaker 3: because I still if at Lash is not there, then
Speaker 3: I won't do it.
Speaker 2: Probably fixing the boat means I don't need her anymore.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to do this because that's what I do, right,
Speaker 3: So that's what I'm aiming for But in the meantime,
Speaker 3: I'm having someone who is going to make me feel
Speaker 3: ashamed to not be working when it's supposed to be working.
Speaker 2: And people do other kinds of duct tape.
Speaker 3: They'll have a friend, they owe a friend will, they'll
Speaker 3: pay a friend some money, and that money that that
Speaker 3: friend's going to donate that money to a cause.
Speaker 2: They hate if they don't get their stuff done right.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of ways you can kind of,
Speaker 3: you know, duck take the boat in the meantime, and
Speaker 3: that's that's mostly what I'm doing now. But I'm my
Speaker 3: goal in life is to not need the duct tape
Speaker 3: anymore working on it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about how do we fix the boat so
Speaker 1: you don't need the duck type. What are some of
Speaker 1: the strategies that you're working on there to get to
Speaker 1: that utopian work life.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, if you read on you know, books
Speaker 3: on habits, you know there's real it's some you know,
Speaker 3: this is not some mystery thing. Your brain is a
Speaker 3: machine that has automated program that's running at all times,
Speaker 3: and that's kind of like sometimes have to go, I
Speaker 3: will It'll be I'll woken up, come out out into
Speaker 3: the kitchen, and I'll say.
Speaker 2: Did I brush my teeth? And I literally don't know.
Speaker 2: I have to go and check out.
Speaker 3: The toothbrushes wet because brushing my teeth in the morning
Speaker 3: is so automated that my conscious brain doesn't even have
Speaker 3: any knowledge whether it happened, just unconsciously, I was thinking
Speaker 3: about something and I did it, and you know you
Speaker 3: usually answers, yes, oh yeah, I did, but I don't
Speaker 3: even remember because it was so it's so unconscious. Right,
Speaker 3: So that can be good, or that can work in
Speaker 3: our favor or against us. Right, if we have good habits,
Speaker 3: that's incredible. Like for example, like I.
Speaker 2: Never have to never procrastinate in brushing my teeth. I
Speaker 2: never miss a debt. It's not hard.
Speaker 3: I don't put any willpower into it because the automated
Speaker 3: program hasn't come. And so when we have good habits
Speaker 3: in general, our brain doesn't put it much resistance. We
Speaker 3: just do it. It's just not even a question mark.
Speaker 3: You know, of course we're going to do it, and
Speaker 3: just do it and it's over and you don't think
Speaker 3: about it. It's it's when you don't have the habit,
Speaker 3: you have to put in willpower. Now, especially when usually
Speaker 3: when you don't have the habit, it's because you have
Speaker 3: a bad habit. For a procrastinator, that habit would be
Speaker 3: you sit down in the computer to get to your work,
Speaker 3: and as soon as you look at the work and
Speaker 3: it's this is icky, without even thinking about it, your
Speaker 3: hand will just keyboard shortcut over to the chrome window
Speaker 3: or to your texts, and you'll start doing something else
Speaker 3: without even thinking about it, or you know, like so
Speaker 3: you'll just be in a habit of procrastinating at the
Speaker 3: beginning of your work block, which then might you know,
Speaker 3: when you start procrastinating, it becomes even harder.
Speaker 2: The longer you go, the harder it is. See it
Speaker 2: out of that and get get to work.
Speaker 3: So so I would say that, like, that's what you're
Speaker 3: trying to do, is you're trying to have as many
Speaker 3: of the automated programs in your head working in line
Speaker 3: with your long term.
Speaker 2: Goals as possible.
Speaker 3: So I think that what if you can get this
Speaker 3: is part of what I'm trying to do with Alicia,
Speaker 3: is just train my brain to like think, I wake
Speaker 3: up and procrastination and like isn't happening right now?
Speaker 2: Like fun is not it's not what's on the menu.
Speaker 2: It's not even an option.
Speaker 3: Like I'm just like, obviously I wake up and I'm like,
Speaker 3: it sucks.
Speaker 2: But I'm in work mode.
Speaker 3: And then suddenly I'm free in the afternoon and get
Speaker 3: my because right, because you know, before I got into
Speaker 3: this routine, it would be the opposite.
Speaker 2: I wake up and I love waking up. Ah, there's
Speaker 2: my phone and all the things to look at.
Speaker 3: On my phone, and then like the way to make
Speaker 3: coffee and then maybe take a walk, maybe I'll call
Speaker 3: a friend, Like it would it would seem like oh.
Speaker 2: So much, And it's like no, no, no, I want to.
Speaker 3: Train my brain to think this is that's later. None
Speaker 3: of that stuff happens now. This is this is serious time.
Speaker 3: So I think, yes, you want to And when you
Speaker 3: build those habits, you don't need the willpower anymore, right,
Speaker 3: and so it becomes a lot easier. So it seems like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is impossible to maintain these you know, this kind
Speaker 3: of good schedule at first. If you've done it for
Speaker 3: a month straight, you will find often that it's kind
Speaker 3: of just happening.
Speaker 2: Now. It's not as hard as it used to be.
Speaker 2: Now to go one notch a deeper.
Speaker 3: Here's like the to me, like the true like long
Speaker 3: term underlying strategy underlying all of this is you have
Speaker 3: to change your identity. I'm a procrastinator to a non procrastinator.
Speaker 3: You have to change your storyline. You have to convince
Speaker 3: yourself that you are someone who doesn't fuck around during
Speaker 3: your work block.
Speaker 2: I'm the kind of person who just does this.
Speaker 3: And I know that not because I think I am,
Speaker 3: because I know I am, because I just look at
Speaker 3: the last ten weeks, look at the last year. I've
Speaker 3: just just just what I did. Right now, I don't
Speaker 3: have to convince myself I'm someone who brushes my teeth
Speaker 3: every morning, because I actually am, and I have full confidence,
Speaker 3: self confidence that I'm going to do it again tomorrow,
Speaker 3: and I'm going to When it comes to will I
Speaker 3: procrastinate tomorrow?
Speaker 2: Will I will?
Speaker 1: I will?
Speaker 3: I work in my work zone right the way I
Speaker 3: want to. It's less of a I don't feel ass
Speaker 3: confident in it now. I view it as like there's
Speaker 3: kind of this awareness in your head that's watching I
Speaker 3: call it a spectator, and it's watching everything that happens
Speaker 3: and a picture. That spectator is betting on whether you
Speaker 3: know I always think of the you know, the procrastinator's
Speaker 3: mind as a rational decision maker and an instant gratification monkey.
Speaker 2: And that's what I talked about in the Ted talk.
Speaker 3: And these two characters are battling for control of the
Speaker 3: wheel and the procrastinators everyone has that. But the procrastinator's
Speaker 3: problem is that the monkey's winning the wrong times. But
Speaker 3: I don't think you're either of those. I think that
Speaker 3: you truly are behind them. Your spectator is watching this,
Speaker 3: and if that spectator thinks the monkey's going to win,
Speaker 3: the monkey's probably going to win. That spectator believes no, no, no,
Speaker 3: Like I think that the rational, the grown up in
Speaker 3: the head is going to win out here, Probably the
Speaker 3: grown up will because that spectator's belief is like self confidence,
Speaker 3: and that feeds into what's going to happen. So this
Speaker 3: is why I think self fulfilling prophecies are very real,
Speaker 3: Like whatever the spectator believes is going to happen usually
Speaker 3: does because that's where your confidence lies.
Speaker 2: And the spectator isn't.
Speaker 3: Again, it's just rational, it's just looking at, well, what
Speaker 3: happened before, Like if I procrastinated money through Thursday, the
Speaker 3: spectator I wake up in the morning, and that spectators
Speaker 3: on Friday thinking.
Speaker 2: This is you know, deep down, no way, no way
Speaker 2: am I.
Speaker 3: Going to actually do what I'm supposed to do today?
Speaker 3: Right there, When you have that thought, you're probably going
Speaker 3: to mess it up. You're probably not going to do
Speaker 3: what you're supposed to do that day because you don't
Speaker 3: believe it yourself.
Speaker 2: So how do you change that?
Speaker 1: Right? How do?
Speaker 3: That's this vicious cycle. That's why procrastinators get stuck for years.
Speaker 3: The vicious cycle is because you believe you're going to fail,
Speaker 3: so you do, which enforces.
Speaker 2: The belief that you're going to fail, so you do again. Right,
Speaker 2: you have to. David has to beat Goliath somehow. Right
Speaker 2: you have to.
Speaker 3: That's why I'm using, for example, my colleague Alicia as
Speaker 3: in kind of an assistant in this. I'm trying to
Speaker 3: create ways to help David beat Goliath. A few times
Speaker 3: upset and then the spectators start to think, huh, well,
Speaker 3: maybe actually here, maybe I've changed, Maybe this is a
Speaker 3: different person now, Maybe I am not the procrastinator I
Speaker 3: used to be. That's the kind of thinking that can
Speaker 3: lead to genuine like I really don't do it anymore.
Speaker 2: I just stop doing it. One day.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of jumble thoughts because I'm like,
Speaker 3: I think about this all the time, obviously, but I
Speaker 3: think it's like things like, you know, you can talk
Speaker 3: about habits and stuff all day, but deep down, it's
Speaker 3: like you have to just do it enough you start
Speaker 3: to believe that I am someone who has changed, and
Speaker 3: then you actually will be someone who has changed.
Speaker 1: I'm intrigued that you go straight to habits as opposed
Speaker 1: to purpose when we talk about procrastination. I remember a
Speaker 1: while ago when I had Adam Grant on the show
Speaker 1: and he talked about how he will reward himself after
Speaker 1: doing a chunk of deep focused work with checking social media,
Speaker 1: and then I asked him, well, what brings you back
Speaker 1: to your work, Like how do you not get lost
Speaker 1: in that social media spiral? And he says, well, I
Speaker 1: want to work. I'm really clear on why I work,
Speaker 1: and I love it and I feel that way about
Speaker 1: my work too. But I procrastinate a lot, and I'm
Speaker 1: curious what role does loving what you do. I mean,
Speaker 1: you write and draw for a living that is most
Speaker 1: people in many people's dream job, and you get to
Speaker 1: do it, yet you're still procrastinating. So where does purpose
Speaker 1: and loving what you do fit in?
Speaker 2: My work has a ton of purpose to me, right,
Speaker 2: I feel like you do.
Speaker 3: I feel very lucky to get to do what I do,
Speaker 3: and I feel like it matters. And so I do
Speaker 3: feel that way, right, and like you that that's not enough,
Speaker 3: because here's the thing. The work I had, the work
Speaker 3: I do has a lot of long term meaning, right,
Speaker 3: it has macro meaning. Finishing a blog post and putting
Speaker 3: it out feels amazing. Right, It's this reward you get.
Speaker 2: But that's not so. The instant gratification.
Speaker 3: Monkey in your head can't think long term, can't see
Speaker 3: the big picture.
Speaker 2: So the rational decision.
Speaker 3: Maker is this is this prefrontal cortex part of our
Speaker 3: brain that can see the big picture and plan ahead.
Speaker 3: It's this amazing thing that separates humans from so many
Speaker 3: other animals. The instant gratification monkey is much more of
Speaker 3: an ancient part of your brain that is shared with
Speaker 3: a lot of animals that wants to that is not
Speaker 3: in the world it evolved into. It's like a software
Speaker 3: program that evolved to live in a world that we
Speaker 3: don't live in anymore. So this idea of writing, working
Speaker 3: on writing that sometime fourteen months from that is going
Speaker 3: to be published as a book. That part of my
Speaker 3: brain just like, doesn't it can't get excited about now
Speaker 3: a tweet. On the other hand, I tweet a ton
Speaker 3: because the tweet is instant gratification.
Speaker 2: So and when I tweet, I try to write meaningful
Speaker 2: stuff too. Their purpose exists there too.
Speaker 3: And it's much easier to do and not recrest state
Speaker 3: because you get immediate feedback and mediate rewards. The rational
Speaker 3: decision maker knows about how much purpose and meaning there is,
Speaker 3: but the instant gratification monkey isn't that meaning to me?
Speaker 3: Usually it comes. I don't like the doing the actual
Speaker 3: work very much. I love putting the work out there.
Speaker 3: I love when I hear that the work resonates with
Speaker 3: other people, right. I love when the work connects my
Speaker 3: brain to other brains. That doesn't happen while I'm working there.
Speaker 3: That's just me alone, And so then the reward's not
Speaker 3: there yet. The reward's all coming later. And so the
Speaker 3: purpose I can know it. You know rationally in my
Speaker 3: head that there's purpose, but I don't feel it in
Speaker 3: that primal part. And that's the reason that I will
Speaker 3: go on the internet and start dicking around as a
Speaker 3: five minute break and now it's four hours later.
Speaker 2: Because it becomes this the instant gratification.
Speaker 3: Monkey just wants to resist something that you have to
Speaker 3: actually work hard on that's not perfectible. You know, I
Speaker 3: once was wondering, I've spent so much time crushing these
Speaker 3: hard crossword puzzles, you know, New York Times Saturdays and Fridays,
Speaker 3: and I'm thinking, why don't I procrastinate on that?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Why is that somehow fun?
Speaker 3: It's hard, it's a challenge, right versus then working on
Speaker 3: this Microsoft word doc when I'm trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how to outline this next section?
Speaker 2: Isn't that also a puzzle? And I think the answer
Speaker 2: is that it's not perfectible.
Speaker 3: You know, there's some there's some kind of thing, primal
Speaker 3: thing that the crossroad puzzle taps into that the that
Speaker 3: you know, working on long term, more abstract stuff just
Speaker 3: doesn't that, you know, it doesn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We will be back with Tim soon where we talk
Speaker 1: about his process for visualizing ideas. And if you have
Speaker 1: read any of Tim's incredibly popular blog posts, you will
Speaker 1: know how amazingly talented Tim is at visualizing ideas to
Speaker 1: make them stick. If you're looking for more tips to
Speaker 1: improve the way that you work. I write a short
Speaker 1: fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered
Speaker 1: that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets
Speaker 1: that I'm loving three to interesting research findings. You can
Speaker 1: sign up for that at Howiwork dot code. That's how
Speaker 1: I Work dot co. I want to dig into the
Speaker 1: three hour workday which you described where you're sharing your
Speaker 1: screen with Elisha and I love the sound of that strategy.
Speaker 1: What are you doing with the other five hours? Like,
Speaker 1: are you making that more black and white? Because you
Speaker 1: were saying the problem is that it's gray and it's
Speaker 1: this dark playground. So what do you do with that
Speaker 1: other five hours of the workday.
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, there's just always a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff to do.
Speaker 3: When I say deep focus, I mean it's like to
Speaker 3: deep focus on the thing that's most important, right, and
Speaker 3: sometimes that's.
Speaker 2: Something that's not urgent. You know you've heard of the
Speaker 2: Eisenhower matrix.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, So it's arranging everything by how urgent it
Speaker 3: is and how important it is. You make a square, right,
Speaker 3: so important is the top, and then it gets less
Speaker 3: important as you go down and it gets more urgent
Speaker 3: as you go.
Speaker 2: To the left.
Speaker 3: The point is that a lot of times we spend
Speaker 3: a ton of our time gets sucked up doing the
Speaker 3: stuff that's urgent but not important. So that's emails, that's
Speaker 3: meetings often you know, sometimes there you know, it's it's errands,
Speaker 3: it's paying bills, it's taking care of your dogs or
Speaker 3: your kids. Again, it's not that this stuff isn't important,
Speaker 3: but it's stuff that has to happen urgently. And and
Speaker 3: the definition of important here is does it contribute to
Speaker 3: your long term goals, values or mission. And usually we
Speaker 3: spend a lot of this time doing this urgent stuff.
Speaker 3: It doesn't actually contribute to.
Speaker 2: Our long term goals, values and mission. Now, ideally, of.
Speaker 3: Course, the important stuff would also be urgent, right, so
Speaker 3: then you're forced.
Speaker 2: To do the importance. But for most of us, the really.
Speaker 3: Important long term work we need we want to work on,
Speaker 3: you know, and you know, whether it's improving as a
Speaker 3: person or getting better at you know, building a new skill,
Speaker 3: or working on a book that you've always wanted to write,
Speaker 3: or trying to get good at the guitar because you.
Speaker 2: Want to put out an album.
Speaker 3: And that really we deeply would affect our happiness if
Speaker 3: we could just do it. Those things usually don't have
Speaker 3: deadlines on, right. Those things often are very important, but
Speaker 3: they're not urgent. You know.
Speaker 2: That can also extend outside.
Speaker 3: Work, seeing your family enough, you know, you know, spending
Speaker 3: quality time with your your your family, or going to
Speaker 3: the gym, whatever that's that's this this this this important
Speaker 3: but not urgent file of stuff.
Speaker 2: And that's kind of the thing I think a lot
Speaker 2: of us need to be spending that.
Speaker 3: Three hours, you know, just like stuff where it's like
Speaker 3: this is a sacred space for whatever.
Speaker 2: The most important project.
Speaker 3: Is the stuff that's really icky to stuff that's really
Speaker 3: hard to do, the stuff that like matters that in
Speaker 3: thirty years I'll look back and like this will be
Speaker 3: part of something that mattered and I'll still know that then.
Speaker 3: Right now, if you can do that for three hours,
Speaker 3: five days a week, that's huge, right, that's a ton
Speaker 3: of time. Sixty hours a month. I mean, you will
Speaker 3: make incredible progress. You're a whole book just with those
Speaker 3: three hours, five days a week in one year, right,
Speaker 3: even less for some people.
Speaker 2: Outside of that.
Speaker 3: Is all the other stuff, right, there's so there's a
Speaker 3: huge everyone if you just live in the civilization today.
Speaker 3: We have a huge amount of the emails, there's texts,
Speaker 3: there's there's bills and errands and things that need to
Speaker 3: get done. There's just to do list, right, and a
Speaker 3: lot of stuff at work. You know, sometimes it's just you're.
Speaker 2: Trying to you want to reorganize your all your folders.
Speaker 3: You want to like, you know, you know, meet with
Speaker 3: the developer who's going over your new website.
Speaker 2: You know, you want to have a meeting. All that stuff.
Speaker 2: It's it matters, and it's work you have to do.
Speaker 3: But but but the three hours is reserved for something
Speaker 3: that if you could just make progress on it, your
Speaker 3: whole life would be totally changed. And if you don't
Speaker 3: make progress on it, like you'll really build up long
Speaker 3: term regrets. It's this really important project. So now I'm
Speaker 3: saying this as if like every day I do my
Speaker 3: three hours of like you know, work for me. That
Speaker 3: for me, the really important thing right now is finishing
Speaker 3: this book I've been working on and getting you know,
Speaker 3: writing right, writing and putting out making content, creating you know,
Speaker 3: the content that I want to put it.
Speaker 2: That's the most important stuff.
Speaker 3: This is a plan, This is a work in progress, right,
Speaker 3: I often hear some mistakes on me.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I will we'll do it for a while.
Speaker 3: And then I'll have a couple of early meetings so
Speaker 3: that we won't do it for a couple of days,
Speaker 3: and then I find like a week later, oh and
Speaker 3: then leash. She's like, you want to get back on
Speaker 3: the nine thirty three, and I'm like, yes, but it's
Speaker 3: easy to kind of just let it slip. Secondly, it's
Speaker 3: easy too if I have made a good a lot
Speaker 3: of progress to power through and keep working, which is
Speaker 3: not isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I find that
Speaker 3: it's very hard to have a streak of good days
Speaker 3: if I have one like great, great day, you know,
Speaker 3: as weird as that sounds. If I like power through
Speaker 3: and I work like six hours, it's really hard to
Speaker 3: come back the next day and just do those three.
Speaker 3: So I'm trying to stop after three, but I often
Speaker 3: find myself not stopping. But yeah, I think I think
Speaker 3: the way to think about it.
Speaker 2: Is what this is for me.
Speaker 3: At least three hours, five days a week is sacred
Speaker 3: time that no one else And this means when I
Speaker 3: say deep focus, I mean you're not on your phone,
Speaker 3: maybe you take.
Speaker 2: A five minute break.
Speaker 3: You know, each hour something that's planned, but like you're
Speaker 3: not cooking food, you're not taking phone calls, you're not
Speaker 3: checking your email or anything like you are.
Speaker 2: Like it's like, think of it as a final exam.
Speaker 3: You know, you know the zone you're in when you're
Speaker 3: you go and do a final exam right in college
Speaker 3: or whatever, and you're there and you're like, you know,
Speaker 3: it's like hardcore, and then you finish, you're like, ah, done,
Speaker 3: times up right, that's the goal.
Speaker 2: That's where you want to get where you're in.
Speaker 3: Like final example of the three hours, which means you
Speaker 3: all your your also schedule, your.
Speaker 2: Calendar takes this into account.
Speaker 3: Like that is you might as well be you're just
Speaker 3: off the map for those hours and you plan everything
Speaker 3: around that. And then when that's done, you could say okay,
Speaker 3: and now you can say the rest of the day,
Speaker 3: you know you can work on the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Maybe you fail at that and you just procrastinate. It
Speaker 2: doesn't matter. The days already a success you already want.
Speaker 3: And likewise, the week, even if the week you didn't
Speaker 3: get all the other little things done, you got behind
Speaker 3: your to do list for what really matters the week
Speaker 3: is a success.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about visualizing ideas. I feel like
Speaker 1: it's something that you're incredibly well known for, and I
Speaker 1: feel like some of the ways that you've visualized ideas
Speaker 1: and your blog posts, it just I feel like they're
Speaker 1: images that are etched in my head. Like I think
Speaker 1: about the tail end blog post that you wrote quite
Speaker 1: some time ago, and I feel like I will, you know,
Speaker 1: semi regularly think about the way you illustrated the course
Speaker 1: of a life and how much time we have. What's
Speaker 1: your approach to firstly deciding what concepts you're you're writing
Speaker 1: about deserve worthy of an illustration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's that's always a question mark is when to
Speaker 3: use writing versus visuals to get a point across. There's
Speaker 3: there's certain times for both, Right, there's obviously writing needs
Speaker 3: to take the meat of the stuff for me at least,
Speaker 3: and there's something that writing can do that visuals can't, right,
Speaker 3: Like writing.
Speaker 2: You can.
Speaker 3: There's just you know, language has has a lot of
Speaker 3: ability to get certain things across that that.
Speaker 2: That you can't do in a visual.
Speaker 3: But if there's certain times when like nothing is like
Speaker 3: a good visual like so for example, with this how
Speaker 3: much time you have in your life. I could describe it,
Speaker 3: that can say, here the number of weeks you have.
Speaker 3: Here are the number of months you have. But big
Speaker 3: numbers were not very you know, in writing, big numbers
Speaker 3: don't really have as much impact if you can, you know,
Speaker 3: so like I can say you have forty five.
Speaker 2: Hundred weeks in the life.
Speaker 3: Okay, that kind of sounds like an endless number and
Speaker 3: not endless, But that's like forty five hundred okay whatever,
Speaker 3: you know, it doesn't sound that different than if I
Speaker 3: said forty five thousand.
Speaker 2: It's just kind of like some big number, right.
Speaker 3: But if I suddenly illustrate it and boom, you're looking
Speaker 3: at them all, there they are.
Speaker 2: That's it. And especially I'll test it out sometimes.
Speaker 3: I I would do something like that and look and say,
Speaker 3: that looks like that looks like what the number sounds like.
Speaker 3: So what's the point of putting the visual in there.
Speaker 3: The wording is going to get the same is going
Speaker 3: to have the same effect. But when I've made that
Speaker 3: particular one, I looked at it and I said, wow,
Speaker 3: that is so much smaller than the number sounds. So
Speaker 3: that's a perfect time to do it right. So I
Speaker 3: think sometimes there can be something that's funny, a like
Speaker 3: a comic can can be funnier than wording a lot
Speaker 3: of the time.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it can be more sticky and more memorable.
Speaker 3: So like I can talk about the instant gratification monkey
Speaker 3: and the panic monster and the rational decision maker all
Speaker 3: I want, right, But if it's just these long words,
Speaker 3: these terms versus a visual boom, it can stick. So
Speaker 3: a visual can help it be, can help something come
Speaker 3: through that that it's not going through, and writing it
Speaker 3: can help make things clearer, and it can help it
Speaker 3: be more memorable. So for me, I'm always there's no
Speaker 3: formula as I'm writing. I'm always thinking about you know,
Speaker 3: I don't want to do a visual just for the
Speaker 3: sake of doing it. Would would a visual help here?
Speaker 3: What a visual will help a lot here? Would it
Speaker 3: make things better? Can this whole paragraph, this whole section
Speaker 3: just be is one good visual.
Speaker 2: Can be better? I've also made mistakes before.
Speaker 3: I've done a visual that is kind of convoluted or
Speaker 3: doesn't accomplish that much, And I often and I will
Speaker 3: later come back and just look at it and think
Speaker 3: like this didn't pop, Like actually I would have just
Speaker 3: described this concept. I tried to get too cute here
Speaker 3: with like a visual that has like four dimensions and
Speaker 3: like has all this stuff, and I'm looking and I'm like,
Speaker 3: this just didn't work. And so it's I'm always trying
Speaker 3: to get better at and like, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how does one get better at visualizing things?
Speaker 2: Well, honestly, like the I have am again, I'm lucky.
Speaker 3: The way my work works is that I try something,
Speaker 3: then I publish it, and then if it's not good,
Speaker 3: three hundred people are going to tell me how bad
Speaker 3: it is, and likewise, and likewise if something's if something's good, likewise,
Speaker 3: I can tell which drawings really clicked because I see
Speaker 3: them on Twitter. You know, people repost them, people want them,
Speaker 3: you know, people talk about them years later.
Speaker 2: That's the best way I know.
Speaker 3: If if if a year later, you know, or multiple
Speaker 3: years later, I'm still seeing people talk about the visual,
Speaker 3: I know that it worked right, it was it did
Speaker 3: what I wanted to do.
Speaker 2: And then other visuals there's visuals like.
Speaker 3: There's so that the tail end was like kind of
Speaker 3: the second version of a post I did.
Speaker 2: The first one was called Life.
Speaker 3: And Weeks, which was just the week's thing before I
Speaker 3: started talking about time with people and I did this
Speaker 3: you know, fifty two week by ninety year grid right,
Speaker 3: and that I know has clicked because people have bought
Speaker 3: posters that I've made with it, people have bought t
Speaker 3: shirts and if people talking about it. Meanwhile, late in
Speaker 3: that same post, there's this other visual where I have
Speaker 3: this like really convoluted VENN diagram, and I have never
Speaker 3: once heard anyone mention it again or talk about it
Speaker 3: or praise it or tweet it.
Speaker 2: I've never I looked at it.
Speaker 3: I barely remembered it was that there you go, so
Speaker 3: right there, I'm getting feedback. I'm learning what's good and
Speaker 3: what's working what's not in real time by feedback.
Speaker 2: So that's huge.
Speaker 3: Now, some people obviously don't have that particular thing. Maybe
Speaker 3: they write, but they don't have comments on their blog
Speaker 3: or whatever. You know, there's a lot of reasons that
Speaker 3: you wouldn't be able to get feedback, and I think
Speaker 3: it's just experience.
Speaker 2: I think like it's doing a lot of visuals.
Speaker 3: Each one you often have an idea of what it
Speaker 3: should be, and then as you do it, it evolves
Speaker 3: into something different and you just learn so much about
Speaker 3: your own skills by doing that, you just you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes you stumble upon as you're making a visual, upon
Speaker 3: like a new idea that you could use with the
Speaker 3: visual and then you can repeat that in the future.
Speaker 3: But you never would have learned that just by like
Speaker 3: you know, so I think just a lot of repetition,
Speaker 3: and ideally repetition with feedback, yeah, helps them.
Speaker 2: The same thing goes for writing, of course.
Speaker 3: I mean, the best way to be good at writing
Speaker 3: is to write a lot, especially if you can write
Speaker 3: a lot and get feedback as you go.
Speaker 2: I mean, but.
Speaker 3: Even just writing a lot in a journal alone, like
Speaker 3: it's it's just it'll it'll improve like anything shooting a
Speaker 3: basketball a million times, like you'll get better at shooting
Speaker 3: the basketball.
Speaker 1: Tim I wish, I wish I had like all day
Speaker 1: with you because it's it's just been so absolutely inspiring
Speaker 1: connecting with you after having followed your blog for so
Speaker 1: many years. So thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 1: For listeners that want to consume more, Tim Urban and
Speaker 1: wait for why, what is the best way for people
Speaker 1: to do that?
Speaker 3: Just my blog WPY dot com and the email list
Speaker 3: is where you like can go to know that a
Speaker 3: new post is up, because otherwise I post very sporadically
Speaker 3: and it's really annoying to just check the site for
Speaker 3: a new post. So go to the site and you
Speaker 3: can sign up for the email list there. And then also,
Speaker 3: I wait, but why on Twitter? I tweet a lot
Speaker 3: because that's what I do when I'm procrastinating.
Speaker 2: Amazing. Thank you so much, Tim, But.
Speaker 1: Thank you for spending this last hour with me.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you so much, Arieta.
Speaker 1: One of the highlights of this chat with Tim for
Speaker 1: me was his accountability strategy with his assistant, Alisha. So
Speaker 1: I recently hired a new assistant who has just started
Speaker 1: working with me, and I'm very keen to.
Speaker 2: Give this strategy a go.
Speaker 1: I know that I personally find it so helpful to
Speaker 1: know that I'm accountable to someone other than myself when
Speaker 1: I am trying to plow through hard, deep work. How
Speaker 1: I Work is produced by Inventingum with production support from
Speaker 1: Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Riordan,
Speaker 1: and thank you to Matt Nimba, who does the audio
Speaker 1: mix for every episode and makes everything sound so much
Speaker 1: better than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 2: See you next time.