Pod Insights Something You Should Know What Your Senses Can’t Perceive & What Happens When You Are Too Productive - SYSK Choice About this episode What if I told you that being left-handed or right-handed has a powerful influence on decisions you make? Listen as I begin this episode by explaining how this works. http://casasanto.com/papers/Casasanto&Chrysikou_2011.pdf
There are colors all around you that you can’t see. But birds can see them. Many birds see colors that are unimaginable to you. Dogs smell things everywhere that you can’t smell. Other animals have the ability to sense the magnetic fields of the earth – but you cannot. These are just a few of the interesting ways that other creatures perceive the world differently than humans. And it gets even more interesting than that. If you would like to hear how, listen to my conversation with Ed Yong, a Pulitzer prize winning science journalist, staff member at The Atlantic and author of the book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us (https://amzn.to/41vZ2Qa).
People sure talk about productivity a lot. By all accounts, we all need to get more done in less time – that is the key to efficiency and success. Yet have you noticed that when you don’t get everything done you think you should, you feel guilty – which never feels good. Maybe what we need is to stop worrying about being productive and enjoy living life instead. And by doing that, you may be even more productive than ever! Here to explain how is Madeleine Dore, author of the book I Didn’t Do That Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt (https://amzn.to/3ILawYE).
Food, drinks and candy at a movie theater are usually very expensive. In fact, I bet you have toyed with the idea of bringing your own snacks to save money. But is it right to do that? After all, they ask you not to. Listen as I discuss this interesting dileman. Source: David Callahan author of The Cheating Culture (https://amzn.to/3lYq1Ue)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:28 Mike Carruthers? Today on Something You Should Know, whether you're left-handed or right-handed has a strong influence on decisions you make. Then, how we humans perceive the world is different than the way a lot of other creatures do.
1:42 Speaker 01 We cannot see ultraviolet light, which the vast majority of animals with eyes can see. We see very many fewer colors than almost every bird can perceive.
1:55 Mike Carruthers? Also, something to consider if you've ever thought of smuggling your own snacks into a movie theater. And our obsession with productivity and not wasting time.
2:06 Speaker 02 We tend to worry about the time that we're wasting. And the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. So if we take away the worry about wasted time, maybe we can see the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time.
2:22 Mike Carruthers? All this today, on Something You Should Know.
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4:22 Mike Carruthers? Hello, welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. Thank you for joining me. I don't know if you knew this or not, but the upper right side of a menu, or a webpage, or even a newspaper, the upper right side is often considered prime real estate. It's the first place people look if they're right-handed. Left-handed people actually see the left side sooner. Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto says, "Our hands and eyes have everything to do with how we interact with the physical world, and our handedness can have a lot to do with the decisions we make."
5:02 Mike Carruthers? Dr. Casasanto asked participants in a study to decide between two products to buy, two job applicants to hire, or two alien creatures to trust. Right-handed participants regularly chose the one on the right side of the page, while lefties chose the one on the left side of the page. People tend to prefer things they see or experience on the same side as their dominant hand. That's apparently because they're easier to reach, perceive, and interact with. And you can use that phenomenon to your advantage by catering to someone's dominant side in professional or personal situations. And that is something you should know.
5:49 Mike Carruthers? As you travel through life on this planet, you see the world as it is, right? Well, not exactly. What you see is the world the way humans see the world. But other creatures on the very same planet see a very different world in very different ways. And so what makes this so interesting to me is that if animals see things so differently than we do, who's right? What is real? And does it even matter? Here to discuss this and give us some understanding of exactly how other creatures perceive their own reality is Ed Yong. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and staff member at The Atlantic, and he's
6:34 Mike Carruthers? author of a book called "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us." Hey, Ed, welcome to Something You Should Know.
6:44 Speaker 01 Hi Michael, thanks for having me.
6:46 Mike Carruthers? So when I look out the window, what I see isn't necessarily all that's there. It's just all that's there that I can perceive, which is a little hard to get your head around. So, so help me get my head around that.
7:01 Speaker 01 So I'm, I'm sitting here experiencing the world around me, the sights, the sounds, the textures, the smells. And I think you're right, that it doesn't occur to most people that that experience is only partial. And yet it is. There is so much about the world that we are missing. There are, there are types of light, types of color that we can't sense. There are smells that we don't smell. There are sounds that are below or above our range of hearing. Other animals can tap into that. And so there, each creature is really only perceiving a thin sliver of the fullness of reality. And I find that really fascinating. It's,
7:43 Speaker 01 this, there's a word for this idea. The word is umwelt. It comes from the German for environment. But it doesn't mean the physical environment. It means the part of the world that each creature can tap into, that each creature can sense, can perceive. And that part is always limited. I find that idea, the umwelt concept, to be incredibly humbling. It means that for all our vaunted intelligence, humans really are still only perceiving a small fraction of all there is to perceive, and that our understanding of the world could be greatly expanded by taking into account the senses of other animals.
8:25 Mike Carruthers? I would imagine that the reason creatures see that little slice that is uniquely theirs of, of the bigger reality, is because that's what they need to see. That's what they need to perceive in, in order to survive.
8:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. Evolution tunes an animal's umwelt and animal's senses to its particular needs. We humans have very good eyes, we have decent hearing, but we don't, for example, sense electric fields of the kind that every living thing inevitably produces. There are fish that can sense those electric fields. They tend to live in very, very murky water where vision isn't very useful, but an electric sense is very useful. These fish produce their own, their own electric fields, like living batteries, and they sense the
9:19 Speaker 01 ways in which objects around them distort and deflect those fields. That allows them to navigate through these incredibly murky, often dark waters without the need for vision. Likewise, in a similar way, animals that tend to navigate over incredibly long distances, like songbirds or sea turtles, have the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field. It's almost as if they have living compasses inside their bodies. And that gives them a way of knowing the right heading, knowing where they are on the planet at any given time, without the need for senses that could be more easily occluded, again, like vision
10:03 Speaker 01 or smell.
10:06 Mike Carruthers? So one of the things that interests me about this is if there are other creatures that smell things we can't smell or see things that we can't see, how do we know that? Because if we can't see them, how do we know that they can see them?
10:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great question. So in a lot of cases, scientists do simple experiments where they expose an animal to a particular thing. Let's say a sound that is too high pitched for us to hear, or a smell that at concentrations below what we can detect. It's easy enough to do that, and then you can look at the animal's reactions. But then often, it's the reverse.
10:48 Speaker 01 The discovery of these incredible senses comes from watching animals behaving in unusual ways. And asking, how are they doing that? Bats, for example, can echolocate. That means they produce high pitched calls and they listen out for the rebounding echoes and they use those to navigate through the dark world around them. Um, echolocation was discovered when scientists watched bats flying through rooms that were so dark, they couldn't possibly be seeing anything. And yet they were swerving around obstacles, they were plucking insects out of the air. How were they doing that? Um, at the time when, uh, at a point when people managed to create ultrasonic detectors,
11:32 Speaker 01 detectors that could uh, recognize the very high pitched calls that bats were producing. People realized that they were actually creating and listening to these sounds well above the range of human hearing. So that's a great example of how the, these um, senses tend to be discovered. There's, it's a mix of um, curiosity, of careful observation, and of using technology to um, compensate for our own sensory shortfalls.
11:59 Mike Carruthers? When you look at our ability to perceive the world compared to, say, other, well, any other animal. I mean, do we, do we tend to do better than most? Are we, do we see or and perceive less than many? What, where, where are we on the scale?
12:17 Speaker 01 You can sort, you can draw some comparisons. So, so vision is a good example. For example, humans have incredibly sharp vision. Um, our eyes have better resolution than the eyes of almost any other animal, except for birds of prey like eagles. So we're very good at seeing things in, in great detail. A lot of the patterns that we can see on animal bodies um, don't, aren't actually visible to the animals themselves. A lot of the spots of butterflies or zebra stripes look like just, they just fade into gray to the eyes of a lion or another zebra. Um. But there there are always trade offs with the senses. So eyes can either have
12:57 Speaker 01 exceptional resolution or exceptional sensitivity, and they can never have both at the same time. So the we the trade off for our incredibly acute eyes is that they fail very easily when light gets dim. So our night vision is very poor compared to other mammals, but the sharpness of our eyes is excellent. Um. Our hearing is very good, but it's limited in its range. So things like bats and dolphins can produce high pitched sounds that we can't hear. Um. Even rats and mice, uh, which humans have studied for centuries, have been having animated ultrasonic conversations that we have been completely oblivious to for most of that time, throughout all of that time.
13:40 Speaker 01 Um. Our sense of touch is very good. Um. Our fingertips are exquisitely sensitive, but there are other animals like sea otters that have uh hands that are just as sensitive, but are also very, very fast. They not only have um incredibly sensitive fingers, but they can use those fingers to detect uh food that's buried or hidden much more quickly than a human could. And then there are senses that we absolutely do not even have. Um. We cannot sense the earth's magnetic fields like a humble robin or even uh some kinds of insects can. We cannot see uh ultraviolet light, which actually the the vast majority of animals with eyes can see.
14:26 Speaker 01 We see uh very mu- very many fewer colors than almost every bird can perceive. So we are very good in some areas, very, very poor in a lot of areas. And that's kind of the norm for the animal kingdom. Um. You know, nothing can sense everything, because as we've said already, nothing needs to.
14:48 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about how different creatures on this planet see the world differently than we do. And my guest is Pulitzer Prize winning author Ed Yong. His book is called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us.
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18:27 Speaker 01 So, dogs live in a world that's dominated by smell. Smell is a primary sense for them. It's the way they explore, it's the way they socialize, they experience the world. And, and I think humans often forget this because certainly those of us who can see are so dominated by vision that we assume that other animals do the same. I have a dog. His name is Typo. He's a corgi. When we go on walks, I often see other dog owners yanking their dogs along. You know, to them, the walk is a means of exercise or travel from A to B, but... That's a bit of a shame, because if you actually let dogs do their own thing on a walk,
19:10 Speaker 01 which I try and do with mine, often what they want to do is they want to sniff. They will spend a long time sniffing a random piece of pavement or a random fence post that another dog has just peed upon. You know, all dog owners, I'm sure, are very familiar with this feeling when you're walking along quite happily and their dog grinds to a halt and just starts very intently exploring something around it. And that speaks to how important smell is to them. What, you know, when my dog sniffs a patch of pavement that another dog has peed on, it feels a lot to me like me checking a social media account, right? That dog starts sensing which other dogs have been around in the neighbourhood.
19:55 Speaker 01 It can tell stuff about those dogs' health, you know, maybe, but what they've been eating recently. It's a, it's a social update from a distance. And that's just one of many types of information that dogs are getting by sniffing the world around them. I think, you know, by depriving dogs of that, we're really severing them from a really important part of their life. It would be as if you and I went on a hike and every time I stopped to appreciate a beautiful viewpoint, you clapped your hands over my eyes and dragged me along. You know, I think that dogs, when they are allowed to smell and when they're allowed to have agency over what they choose to sniff,
20:41 Speaker 01 studies have shown that they tend to be happier. They tend to be less anxious, more optimistic. You know, and that's something that dog owners can give to them by thinking about the way they sense the world.
20:54 Mike Carruthers? And I've also heard that dogs' hearing is very good. It's certainly better, I guess, than human hearing in the sense that they can hear sounds, hear frequencies that we don't hear. But is a dog's hearing spectacularly good? Or is it just a little better than ours?
21:10 Speaker 01 Their hearing is very good. They're very good at localising sound, so telling which direction a sound is coming from. But, you know, human hearing is also pretty exceptional. We, we have very decent hearing. We have good localisation. We can hear over a wide range of frequencies. If you want to think about really incredible hearing, though, there are all kinds of examples around the animal kingdom. So most birds have much faster hearing than we do. So that is, they can resolve very, very fast-moving changes in pitch or volume that our ears can't pick up.
21:51 Speaker 01 So if you've ever listened to a songbird singing and wondered and had this strange feeling that there's probably more in that song than we can hear, then you'd be right. There are a lot of intricacies in the songs of songbirds that humans just can't pick out and that they absolutely can. You know, like one easy example of this, there is a bird called the whippoorwill that makes a song that sounds to a human like it's got three syllables. It actually has five in it. It's just that they happen too quickly for us to pick out. But when a mockingbird mimics the song of a whippoorwill, it gets all five syllables because its hearing is that much faster. And then there are creatures that have hearing
22:34 Speaker 01 that can hear sounds beyond what we can hear, either ultrasonic calls that are too high pitched for us to hear, or infrasonic calls that are too low pitched for us to hear. Ultrasonic calls are really good for sensing the environment. So bats and dolphins use those to navigate with echolocation to an extent in environments that we couldn't navigate in. Infrasonic calls travel over very large distances. So whales, the biggest whales, like blue whales, can use infrasound to communicate over distances of kilometers, miles. Some people argue that they might even be able to hear each other over the span of an entire ocean.
23:15 Mike Carruthers? When you understand how some of these other creatures perceive their reality, does it give us any real insight in what it's like to be them?
23:28 Speaker 01 You know, let's go back to bats. Bats are a very famous example of this because the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote this essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, where he argued that even if you imagined yourself using echolocation or flying through the air with leathery wings, you would never really be able to get into the head of a bat to really understand what its subjective experience of echolocation was like. And he's right. You know, echolocation is a strange sense because... Bats need to produce sound in order to hear the rebounding echoes. So by listening for the sounds that they produce,
24:09 Speaker 01 you can get a sense of what information they're trying to wrest from the world. When a bat is scanning open air, it's producing different kinds of sounds than when it is trying to hunt down a fast-moving insect. So by recording the bat's call, you can kind of get at its intent. You can almost read its mind. And yet, there is still that gulf that Nagel described, where you still don't really know what it is like to be a bat, to get inside the head of a bat, to imagine the conscious experience of a bat. So science and technology can certainly take us a long way. But there is this gulf that we will never be able to cross.
24:53 Speaker 01 And the only way to cross it really is by making what one scientist, Alexander Horowitz, described to me as informed imaginative leaps.
25:03 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, and that's what's so interesting. And that's the big mystery. Because even with my dog, I mean, when I walk my dog, sometimes she'll stop and roll around in the ground and rub her neck on a specific spot. And I have no idea why or what that does for her, what itch that scratches. But it clearly must be pleasurable, and I'll never know.
25:29 Speaker 01 Yes, I think that's right. You know, my dog and I can communicate. We absolutely can. You know, I can tell him things, and he doesn't speak English, but he obeys certain commands. He understands certain bits about my mood. I can do the same. I can take guesses about what he wants. I can tell when he's hungry, what he wants to play. And I, I having learned about the senses of animals, I can guess what he gets when he sniffs as we walk, what he might hear, what he might feel. But I don't entirely know. And here is an animal that I love very deeply and that I spend every day with.
26:11 Speaker 01 There's always going to be that gap, but even if we'll never fully know the answer, it is glorious and beautiful to try and imagine, to try and cross that gulf, even if we'll never be fully able to. Because trying to do that teaches us so much more about the creatures that we share our lives and our planet with, and it shows our world in a new light. When I watch Typos sniffing his way along the street, it changes my understanding of the blocks that I walk along. It changes my sense of how quickly the neighborhood changes, what kinds of information are seeded in the very ground that I don't have access to.
26:56 Speaker 01 It makes the world and it makes my dog feel that much more miraculous to me.
27:04 Mike Carruthers? Lastly, talk about bees, because they seem like they're really interesting creatures and we see them all the time and not sure what they do and why they do what they do. But so talk about them.
27:18 Speaker 01 Let me tell you the really cool thing about bees. So bees pollinate flowers, as we know. If you took all the colors of all the flowers in the world and you did an analysis and asked, what kind of eye would be best at seeing these kinds of colors? What kinds of, what kind of color vision would be best at discriminating all the flowers on the world? What you get is something very much like a bee eye. It is an eye that has three kinds of color sensing cells, much like humans do, but that unlike us are most sensitive to green, blue and ultraviolet. You would therefore think that maybe bees have eyes that are really well adapted
28:03 Speaker 01 to seeing flowers, but that's actually completely wrong. Because bees, or insects that gave rise to bees, came first and then flowers evolved. So what actually happened was that flowers evolved colours that ideally tickle the eyes of bees and other insects. And that's incredible to me because we often think of the senses as these passive receptacles for information, right? Like, I'm sitting here, light is entering my eyes, sound is entering my ears, I'm not doing anything, they feel like they receive. But in doing that, the senses also shape the world around us in profound ways.
28:47 Speaker 01 The way, the eyes of bees and other insects determined the kinds of colours that flowers eventually evolved. So beauty, as we know it, is not just in the eye of the beholder, it arises because of that eye.
29:05 Mike Carruthers? Well, I love this conversation because it makes you think about something that, that you never think about. The way other creatures, the way other animals perceive their world, which is also our world, but perceive it in such a different way than we do. I've been talking with Ed Yong, he is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist, a staff member at The Atlantic, and author of a book called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Ed, this was, this was a lot of fun.
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30:40 Mike Carruthers? It seems so many of us are caught up in this endless quest, endless desire to be productive, to get more done, to search for the perfect system or routine that will help us get everything accomplished on our to-do list. And then we feel guilty if we don't get everything on that list accomplished. It's a productivity grind, and it can really wear you down. There's got to be a better way. And here to help you find that better way is Madeline Dorr. She is a writer and podcaster. Her podcast is called Routines and Ruts. And she has a book out called, I Didn't Do That Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. Hey, Madeline, welcome.
31:23 Speaker 02 Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.
31:25 Mike Carruthers? So what is that thing? What is that quest? What is that big desire that we all have to want to get more done? Get everything accomplished? And then when we do, we want to get more done?
31:36 Speaker 02 It is a curious thing, isn't it, Mike? That we are told to optimize our lives so that we have more time, and then we just fill that with more optimizing of our lives. It's an endless game, it seems. And I think that it is a call for pause or a call for thought, because isn't it that we should be optimizing our time so that we have more times for the things that are meaningful or important to us? And productivity, it can be fantastic. We all need to get things done, but it's the never enough, never quite reaching an endpoint that can have us on this hamster wheel in our days.
32:16 Speaker 02 And it can contribute to things like burnout and overwhelm and stress and perhaps take us out of our lives.
32:24 Mike Carruthers? And doesn't it seem that no matter how productive you get, how many things you get done? You, at the end of the day, end up focusing on the thing you didn't get done. And then that makes you feel guilty.
32:39 Speaker 02 Hmm, it does. You can really spiral in these feelings of productivity guilt. And you can write off the whole day and deem it a failure because of that one thing that you didn't get done, or perhaps several things that you didn't get done. And so I think that where that really can stem from is this idea that in our society, we've tied productivity to our sense of self-worth. And when we do that, what we do is never enough. We never quite reach that feeling of being complete. Our to-do list is never complete. And so I think we're set up to fail a little bit here because we're told that productivity is a measure of our worth, but it's never quite enough. And so we never quite get there.
33:22 Speaker 02 And we pile on these feelings of guilt and shame at the end of the day. And so I think it's really about untethering that idea that productivity is the sole measure of our worth. And we can find some, some other things in our days to count amongst the doing. And so it's always curious to me that you can get to that end of the day and have that, that guilt feeling and, and focus solely on the thing that you didn't do. And overlook all of the treasures and all of the perhaps moments of connection that you had, or the moments of kindness, or what you learnt, even the mistakes you make.
33:55 Mike Carruthers? Well, I find it interesting that it seems like there's two kinds of time. There's either the time that you're being productive or you're wasting time. I mean, and there aren't a lot of other categories. It seems like just because you're not being productive doesn't mean necessarily that you're wasting time.
34:14 Speaker 02 Yes, I, I agree. I think that there's many, many categories in between. And even what we deem wasted time, I think is worth getting curious about. Because we can, we're quick to call ourselves lazy, or we're quick to say that we're wasting time. We're quick to say that we're procrastinating. But when we inspect that, we can actually see that sometimes it's those moments that are incredibly valuable. Are we procrastinating? Or are we actually thinking about the problem in a deeper way? Are we letting ideas sort of roll around in our minds before we take that action? And I think it's an interesting thing because we we tend to worry about the time that we're wasting.
34:55 Speaker 02 And if anything, I think the the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. So if we take away the worry about wasted time and we get curious about those moments, maybe we can see that the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time. Or we can see that it's thinking time, or we can see that it's it's a all important moment of rest and downtime.
35:20 Mike Carruthers? Well, I lo- I love what you said, that there is no bigger waste of time than spending time worrying about wasting time.
35:29 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly. And something that's been really helpful for me is actually returning to one of my favorite books by Arnold Bennett. It's called How to Live on Twenty Four Hours a Day, and it was written in nineteen oh eight. And so it's always a gem to kind of return to these texts and see that we've been grappling with these quandaries for for many decades and centuries even. And what Arnold Bennett points out is that we cannot waste time in advance. So I think sometimes when we're caught in that productivity guilt feeling, or we're worrying about wasting time, we we lament the morning that we might have wasted, for instance. And we carry that worry into the afternoon when actually we can't waste time in advance.
36:14 Speaker 02 So instead, we can have this opportunity to turn over a new leaf. And what that means is that we can see that this moment in front of us is so far unspoiled. Instead of falling further down that spiral that we can fall into, we can turn it over and begin afresh.
36:33 Mike Carruthers? One of the things I think people find frustrating is when you schedule your time, you schedule things to do and how long it's going to take and however you schedule it. What you can't schedule is what you don't know. You don't know what's going to happen, what's going to come up, what emergency, what thing is going to need your attention that isn't on your list. And that causes frustration in a lot of people is like, oh, now I've got to waste time doing this other thing that wasn't in the plan.
37:02 Speaker 02 It's inevitable, it's life. And so perhaps if we can build in some buffer room in our days and in our plans for those inevitable surprises, distractions and interruptions, perhaps that would be what can lessen that productivity guilt that we experience. Because we can see, oh, okay, so I didn't get that, the thing done that I thought that I needed to do today because of this emergency and interruption. And that's life. And so I'm not solely to blame here. I think there's a fine line in terms of, obviously there's these things that we want to accomplish in our lives to, to have a sense of meaning or satisfaction.
37:42 Speaker 02 And in many senses, we, we do need to find that motivation within ourselves. But I also think that we need to acknowledge when perhaps there's things outside of our control that, you know, knock over our plans for the day.
37:57 Mike Carruthers? Still, there are people I know that I'm very envious of because they seem to get so much more done in a week or a day or what, you know, I'll see them on Facebook or something and hey, they're over here doing this. And then they did this other thing and I'm thinking, how do they get it all done? And, and is it me and maybe they don't? Or are there just some people who seem to get a lot more done than others?
38:24 Speaker 02 Well, I, I do have a suspicion that perhaps people aren't able, people aren't getting as much done as they might portray they are on social media. I think that it's so easy to curate our lives. And even when we look on social media, we know that it's curated. We know that we're looking at a highlight reel intellectually. But it can be difficult to untangle that feeling of comparison where we, we fall short. So I think that there's, there's two things at play here. And the first is that there is a level of curation happening. And that can mean that we spiral in comparison and we see our real life and our incomplete to-do list.
39:06 Speaker 02 But really it, it might be that other people also have things that are incomplete. It's inevitable as well, where no one is perfect. But the other side of this is that Perhaps there are some people that have a greater capacity for productivity and perhaps they do get more done, perhaps they have higher energy or more attention or more resources. Maybe they've got more assistance in getting things done. Maybe they've got a home gym and they're able to kind of get their thirty minute run in early in the morning because they don't have to sort of commute to a gym or something like that. There's all these different tweaks in our lives and I think that when we're comparing,
39:47 Speaker 02 we have to remember that we're comparing apples and oranges because we're all individuals with variances. And I think that that can be really comforting to remember that we live in our day and nobody else's.
40:03 Mike Carruthers? Still, you must have found in your quest for, you know, the perfect productive day, there are some things, I don't know whether they're strategies or hacks or techniques or whatever, that that will help you get more done or will help you at least get to the things that you say are important and that some people do seem to do that better than others.
40:26 Speaker 02 Potentially, people do, but I think that there's so many suggestions out there in terms of how to get more done and there's some really helpful tips, there's some great systems that work for people. I found that when I was in pursuit of being perfectly productive, I found that the hacks and the time management techniques became something that was something that I tripped over or became even further entangled by because here was this promise, this solution, this hack will help you get more done, this hack will make you more successful and happier. And when I tried that and it still didn't work or I wasn't able to stick to it, I fell
41:10 Speaker 02 further into the productivity spiral because then I sensed that, oh, well now not only am I feeling I'm falling behind, but I'm also failing at this simple hack that's meant to be able to sort of offer this cure and solution. And so I found that, again, this can contribute to the spiral. And so instead of looking for this one size fits all solution.
41:36 Speaker 02 It's about finding what works for you. And it was a very freeing thing, I found, because those hacks can work for some people. And if it's working for you, that's fantastic. But the issue comes when it doesn't work for you and you feel further entangled. Perhaps that's a sign that you're looking in the wrong direction for the solution. And it really has to come back to finding what works for you.
41:57 Mike Carruthers? Talk about distraction, because people, I think, are easily distracted because there are so many. And you can say, well, I was just being creative when I was looking at Facebook for 25 minutes. But no, maybe. But mostly you were just wasting time looking at Facebook, and maybe that's fine. But it does seem that we are easily distracted. And then we feel bad about it later because we wasted that time, you know, looking at Facebook or whatever. But distractions are there, and some people give into them and other people don't.
42:33 Speaker 02 Yes, I think the key to getting curious is definitely, it requires a sense of being honest with ourselves. And so if you are spending that 20 minutes scrolling social media mindlessly, I think that it is about asking yourself whether that is a waste of time or whether, maybe it is. Sometimes we need those moments of mindlessness, and they have their place. And again, acknowledging that we have been set up to fail here and that these platforms and these devices do have a very addictive quality to them. And so they're designed to distract us. But when it comes to tackling those distractions in our days, again, it's acknowledging that there's an inevitability to them.
43:15 Speaker 02 An antidote can actually be to apply attention to things. And so rather than trying to eliminate distractions, I think that we would be chasing our tail all day if we're trying to do that, we can focus our attention instead. And one suggestion could potentially be to set an attention hour. And so that's where you have this moment to really assess what you've been paying attention to. So if you pay attention to what you're paying attention to, you'll actually really be able to see this inventory of your life. And you'll be able to see whether you're spending your time the way that you wish to. And perhaps instead of...
43:57 Speaker 02 Saying, okay, well, I'm going to eliminate that distraction of social media. You can say, I'm going to pay my attention to cooking this beautiful meal for somebody or for the, on this creative project that I really want to pursue.
44:10 Mike Carruthers? So let's talk about the difference between being productive and being busy. Cause I think there's a big distinction between the two, but I, cause I know a lot of people who are really busy, but they don't necessarily get a lot done. They're just busy being busy.
44:23 Speaker 02 Yes, um, there can be a real, uh, cult of busyness and, and busyness can be worn as this badge of honor. We ask people how they are and they, they often say busy. And I think that there's lots of different categories as well of busyness. Sometimes busyness is circumstantial. Sometimes busyness is something that we have put in place because we find that we need the momentum at this point in our life, or it could be even our natural frequency. Some people are, um, they thrive off being busy. It's, it's that sort of adage of ask a busy person to do something. Um, and so, but then there's another category of busy where it is this badge of honor and
45:06 Speaker 02 they're busy to prove their sense of worth or to prove that they're in demand or that their lives are, uh, are full. And I think that that can be, if it's your natural frequency and if it works for you, then that's great. I think that you'd find that those types of busy people aren't complaining about being busy. It's those that are complaining about being busy and it's by their own design that perhaps is worth inspecting. And it, it differs from being productive in terms of those moments of, of true productivity, uh, when we're engaged and when we're perhaps in flow and we have that, that element of that creative lens applied to it.
45:47 Speaker 02 But when we're just busy for, for busy's sake, we're crowding our schedules without really thinking about whether these things that we're doing are what we wish to be doing in the limited time that we have.
45:59 Mike Carruthers? What is the myth of balance?
46:01 Speaker 02 Balance is often portrayed as the cure-all. It's a balance, people say, or you just need to find a work-life balance. But when you think about balance, if you think of it as a scale, it's constantly balancing. There's no such thing as a perfect balance, because if there were, our lives in many ways would be stagnant. They'd be unmoving, and we're constantly balancing. And I think that in many ways, I like to think of it as a wobble that we have in daily life. We wobble towards different priorities. Again, we might wobble towards different emergencies or interruptions that might occur in our day.
46:43 Speaker 02 And sometimes there's moments in our lives where different things take the priority. And so instead of finding this perfect balance where we're unmoving, if we embrace the fact that we're constantly in flux and we do wobble within our days, again, maybe we could find some more kindness towards those wobbles rather than judging them. And we could see that it's just part of the living. And so we can sort of take this idea of balance off its pedestal, because we will never really arrive. And if we did, maybe we'd find it's kind of dull anyway.
47:18 Mike Carruthers? Well, so much of what you've been talking about is how we feel about our productivity, not so much the productivity itself, but on those, you know, those days where you really, you nail it, you just get everything done and everything goes well, and that feels great. So you kind of want more of those days. But I don't know that those days are anything other than just, you know, freak accidents, that maybe that's not the goal, but those days sure do feel good.
47:48 Speaker 02 Yes, it can feel electric, can't it, those days, Mike? Where you do somehow manage to check it all off, or the day unfolded in the order that you thought it would. And you feel like you're firing on all cylinders. It's a wonderful feeling, and I think that's perhaps why we chase productivity, because it does feel good on the days that we do the thing. But I think- That it feels so good because in many ways it's it's it's a it's a small miracle of those days that that they feel more alivening because it doesn't happen every day. And so when they do happen, I think there's a there should be a wonderful appreciation for them. But it's acknowledging that not every day is the same. And in many ways, we we don't necessarily want
48:31 Speaker 02 the that would become a groundhog day if if what was once electric, if if it happened day after day after day, it would lose its shimmer. And so I think we we do want the variance and and perhaps it's about finding what works for you to set up the day in a way that that might put you in a position to have one of those days, but acknowledge that we also have days that that are littered with distractions and and sometimes the day is just not our day. But that doesn't mean that we are a failure and we need to to spoil it completely. We can still find the small good things within days like that as well.
49:09 Mike Carruthers? Well, it's good to hear, I think, for a lot of us, a lot of people, that that uneasy guilt feeling of not getting enough done, or or that feeling that I'm wasting time if I'm not like on task all the time, that we all feel that at some time, and maybe we maybe we just need to be a little kinder to ourselves. I've been talking with Madeline Dorr. She is a writer and podcaster. Her podcast is called Routines and Ruts. And you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. And her book is called I Didn't Do That Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for being here, Madeline.
49:48 Speaker 02 Thanks, Mike. It's been a delight to speak with you.
49:54 Mike Carruthers? As I'm sure you know, movie theaters don't want you to bring in your own snacks. Many theaters forbid it. They all frown upon it.
50:04 Mike Carruthers? You probably could get away with it, but according to David Callahan, who's the author of a book called "The Cheating Culture," doing so is really wrong. As a guest, you should obey the rules of the establishment, just like you would at any other business that serves food. Movie theaters make about 40% of their revenue from the sale of food and drinks. There's no doubt that the markups are sky-high, but keep in mind that theaters have to share ticket sale revenue with film distributors and studios. In the old days, snacks and drinks were not allowed in most carpeted plush theaters. Then, once TV came along, the theater industry had to pull out all the stops and allow people to have snacks.
50:49 Mike Carruthers? But you really should buy the ones they offer, and that is something you should know. Your rating and review would really help us if you could find the time to just take a moment, write a few words about this podcast, and post it wherever you listen. I'm Micah Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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