The Behavioural Economics Of How We Spend Our Time | Koen Smets | Modern Wisdom 127

Koen Smets is a behavioural economist and professor. We've been told "time is money" for all our lives, but how does time RELATE to money? We can't save time the same way we can save money, so what are the implications for how we should conduct our lives? Today Koen digs deep into the relationship between time, money, life satisfaction and much more. Extra Stuff: Check out Koen's Medium - https://medium.com/@koenfucius Follow Koen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/koenfucius Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The Estonian police a few months ago, I think, tried out on a particular piece of roads, an alternative way of penalising people who were speeding. In most countries, when you get caught speeding, you get a ticket and in some situations, the fine can be quite extensive depending on by how much you exceed the speed limit. But here in Finland, they came up with a different idea and so they stopped people speeding and they gave them a choice between paying, I think, for a sort of an average excessive speed, the fine would be something like 400 euros, so it's like a good 350 pounds, or they could wait for an hour. Just stay there for an hour and then they could be, they could go again.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Didn't have to pay anything, but they just had to wait by the roadside for an hour. About half of the people they stopped opted to wait, about half didn't. So you can imagine from that how much these people valued their time.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Koen Smets, who I've been fighting to pronounce that name, but I think I've managed to nail it. Welcome to the show.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Thanks very much, Chris. You did it proud. I think I've heard numerous strange mispronunciations of my name, all the way from Keen to Cohen to Cone and anything in between. So yeah, I think you passed with flying colours.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, we've got over the first hurdle. To the listeners at home, I'm starting to calm down a little bit now. You might not know Koen, but I was away in Bali and while I was away, it meant I couldn't record. And you do not know true fear until you have a twice a week podcast publishing schedule and no podcasts left to publish. And that is, that is where I've been over the last couple of weeks. But very fortunately for the people that are listening, I have this episode with yourself, which I'm sure is going to be fantastic. Behavioural economics and all sorts of decision making theory that we're going to go into, which I can't wait to do. Also coming up, Naval Ravikant's

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  Brother Kamal Ravikant talking about Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, his brand new book. And a bunch of other people that are really, really interesting over the next couple of weeks. But today, we're going to get to talk about some behavioural economics and some classical working strategies for organisations, human behaviour, decision making and motivation. That's right.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  That's the kind of stuff I do, yes.

• 2:37Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I love it. So what have you been thinking about recently? We've got the world is our oyster. The world of whatever you've been working on is our oyster.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Okay, well, one of the things, one of the themes I've been thinking of recently is, is time. As you, as you may know, economics is about scarce resources. It's about allocate, it's about allocating scarce resources. It's about weighing up costs and benefits. And this is in the, the economy as we know it is usually is to do with money or with some kind of equivalent of money, some resource that you need to manage. But of course, another very important scarce resource we all experience is time. We get, at every midnight, we get 24 hours for the next, the next day, so to speak. And once that's gone, it's gone. And of course, then there is another 24 hours.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  But we can, just like we can spend a pound or a euro or a dollar or any other currency only once. So we can only spend a minute or an hour or a second once. And if we spend it on one thing, we can't spend it on another. And so our, our general use of time follows similar patterns to the way we use money in the sense that we are, we are confronted with the fact that we don't have unlimited amounts of it. And so we need to be careful in how we use it up. And I think that, that is a fascinating topic for me because in many.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Particularly also behavioral economics experiments and economics experiments. You get people in a lab, you give them some tokens, you give them a little bit of money. Sometimes you see people go to developing countries, to India, for instance, where amounts in dollar go much further, so you can really intervene in people's lives on the scale of magnitude that is comparable to a month's wages, for instance, and still be affordable for research. But the problem is with whatever experiments you do with tokens or money is that it's usually in much smaller quantities and really impacts on us in real life.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  So my thinking is that if we looked more at how we could, we use time, where we all have the same amount of time, whether you're rich or whether you're poor, you get 24 hours a day. It's not because you're rich you get 36 hours a day. We all have exactly the same amount of time. And I think how we would respond to having to weigh up gaining or losing time might reveal things or clarify things that perhaps are unclear or ambiguous when you work with. You give people 10 pounds or 10 dollars and you make them bet on something or you make them pay for something. It doesn't work the same way, I think, and I think there is some mileage to be had

• 5:36Speaker 00

  out of using time in research on economics and on behavioral economics and on human behavior.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, time and money are intrinsically linked, aren't they?

• 5:49Speaker 00

  They are. As you know, the old adage goes that time is money. But is it really that equivalent? Is time really always money? And I think if you think about it, not every minute has got the same worth to you and to me or to anybody else. If you are in the middle of something that's really important, then your time will be much more valuable than if you're just lazing about on the city, watching The Simpsons.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And so I think.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  You see it as well in overtime, for instance. People demand to be paid more when they go over a certain limit in terms of working for an employer, for a boss. So the concept itself of being paid fifty percent more or double time for overtime, people are being paid more for working in the weekend, reflects immediately that a time doesn't have an intrinsic, stable, unique value. And I think that in itself is an interesting and important observation that affects the way we behave and we handle and we manage our time.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. There's a short blog post I remember reading quite a while ago that was talking about how as a child you'd happily give up your day for a dollar and as an old man you'd happily give up your fortune for a minute.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Yes, very true. And I think it's quite kind of extreme. As a child, of course, you have no idea of the finiteness of life. You're five years old, eight years old. Remember when school broke up at the end of the spring, early summer, you had, in Belgium, we had two full months of holiday of July and August. Well, the first of July is like you can't even see as far as the thirty first of August. So it was like an unlimited amount of holiday. Obviously, by the time mid-August came and then you need to go and buy out, I don't know, new books and pencils and everything else, well, school was starting again. So

• 7:54Speaker 00

  you get a sense of time, but yes, you have no idea of the finiteness, whereas if you're an old person, then yes, you're counting down and you know, well, maybe, I mean, my dad is ninety-two.

• 8:05Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is a testament to some good genetics that you've got there.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Well, I hope I inherited his. I didn't inherit his hair genes in the sense he's quite bald and most of my hair.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant. For the listeners at home, it's a fantastic head of hair.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good bargain. But yeah, he's ninety-two, he's still in good health. But of course, he knows that he's likely to live another twenty years or maybe another ten years or maybe five years. So you're really looking at time in a very different way. That said, it's interesting that we sort of go down this particular rabbit hole. He lives on his own, um, and uh he hasn't got much to do. Most of his friends and his uh his relatives, uh, except for his children, so but uh his his sort of siblings and peers and all that, they've all died. So there's very few people left of his generation. And so he's, he lost purpose a little bit.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  And so he's got lots of time and doesn't really quite know what to do with it. Um, he loves gardening and all that, but obviously it being winter, um, it's not a good time to uh spend too much time in the garden. So he struggles to fill his days with uh with something. So I think if you look at time as something that you would in uh you would allies in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to accept, he would be willing to pay for something to do, rather than having to be paid to do something, um, in a sense. But yes, I think these are all examples of how we we look at time with different different eyes, depending on how old we are, depending on what what day in the week it is, depending on what time of day it is, depending whether on holiday or not.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  All of that matters and makes us look at time differently. Same at work as well. At work, basically what we do, we we give our employer an amount of time and we get money in return. And somehow we we tend to view that time as sunk. We've we've sold it, so it's now our employer is in a sense. So we are less concerned with wasting our time. And we we're certainly less concerned with wasting other people's time. Um, I I did exercise once with a client of mine, um, where we had a workshop with about fifty people or so joining.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  And uh one of the things we had to look at was sort of budgets and how much money was being spent. And I made them do the exercise of what's this workshop costing? And I even revealed my fee so they could take that into account. Um, and then they looked, okay, well, the hire of the venue and the meal and this and that. What they didn't take into account at first was their own time. When you get fifty people earning what between, say, sixty thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand euros a year, when you get these, that amount of people together for two days, that's a huge amount of money or time equivalent of money that you devote into something. So, but we don't really think about it in those terms.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  We don't, we think the time, we work, so now it's work time. We don't really worry about what we do with that time, whether we are using it well, whether we're using other people's time well. And that's why you get so many complaints about meetings being a waste of time and wall-to-wall meetings and

• 11:29Speaker 00

  all day and looking back and say, well, I have no idea what I've done today, but it's not very much.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I suppose.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  So I think time, time, time really is a fascinating topic that is, I, I think, understudied and under, under researched.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  I've had a couple of conversations, the listeners may be familiar with Laura Vanderkam's episode, who's a time management expert. That was more from the productivity side, Nair Aal as well, also to do with task prioritization. You know, as a sympathy card that I'll throw out to some of the people that will be listening, many of whom will be knowledge workers. I sympathize wholeheartedly with the fact that your days are messy and you haven't got a clue what you did with them. And when you look back at your day and you think, how did I spend my time? You know, we even use, we even use that language linguistically, we're talking about it like it's money. How did I spend my time today?

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  This allocated number of units of temporal tokens. How did I decide to spend my time today? And, you know, I, I, I feel for you because it is, as you say, you've got, I went into a meeting, then I sat down, I had a coffee, I did a this, you know, and it, it just fritters away. But yeah, you, you bring up in a couple of your recent blog posts, talking about opportunity cost. And obviously how that relates to.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, I tell you what, why don't you, why don't you explain to the listeners what opportunity cost is to.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, opportunity cost is really is, is what you, what you do not do, what you cannot do when you do something else. So to give a simple example, take a taxi driver, you, you take a taxi somewhere and you ask the guy to wait for 20 minutes. And then because you're going to do something and then you come out again and you still want the taxi to be there waiting for you to take you back home or something. So he is not going to say, is not, is not going to do that for free. To the taxi driver, the 20 minutes he's standing there is 20 minutes, he could not be carrying somebody else, another paying customer. So he's going to have to charge you enough to compensate that. And that's the opportunity cost. So he, the cost to him is not sitting there because he could

• 13:42Speaker 00

  be looking at his Facebook account or reading a paper, or just look out the window or having a sleep. But that's neither here nor there. It could be working as well. And that's how we will measure the cost of sitting there for 20 minutes. So that is what opportunity cost is. And that applies to time as well as to, to money, of course. It also applies to money. If you spend money on a meal, then that money is, you cannot use that money for something else. So there is an opportunity cost expressed in what else you could buy with the money that you spend on, on going out for a meal.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  Let's try and dig down into the nuance of the difference between opportunity cost for money and for time, because I think this is really fascinating. You can't not spend time. Is that a fair statement to make?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  But you can not spend money.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. You can still, you can say, I'm not going to spend it. I keep it for something else. You can't do that with time, or not, not easily, at least in the same way. You can't bank time. Maybe if you, if you play television quizzes, then sometimes you can bank, you can bank money and time, but in practice, yes, a time, a second, the last second, the second I've just gone is gone. We cannot reuse this at all. Of course, you can say, I'm going to bring certain activities forward and do them now. And that is a good way of of managing time over a longer period of of time, as it were. When you say, well, for instance, what people do when they travel. Um, they they do something useful while while they're traveling or while they're waiting.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  And so they can make time that would otherwise be wasted, as in time spent without anything tangible, anything uh meaningful uh getting gotten in return. You can change that and you can say, well, I may be waiting for the plane, maybe thirty minutes delayed. But actually, I can start writing my report. And so you actually make good use of your time. Um, but it requires a degree of awareness and deliberation to do that. And we are not, we don't always do that. And also, we we are worse on the other, on the other hand, on the other hand as well, we we waste time as well. We we are not always consciously using our time in the best possible way.

• 15:56Chris Williamson?

  I want to get you to elaborate on awareness and deliberation in a second. But I'm thinking as you're talking through that, I'm hoping that some of the people that are listening might be in a situation like that. They might be in this sort of little

• 16:13Chris Williamson?

  pending waiting room of hell in between one thing that they got to do and another thing they got to do. And this thing would have sucked. And maybe me and you, Chris and Kona, making this uh this afternoon or this little waiting thing a little bit easier, maybe we're in their ears right now. You've got the headphones in, listening away. Perhaps that's the way that they're doing it. So if that is the case, I hope that we are, I hope that we're making your your day a little bit better. Um, but yeah, let's let's talk about, um, uh, what was it that you said deliberation and?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yes, awareness.

• 16:43Chris Williamson?

  Awareness.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Awareness, awareness and deliberation, yes. I think it's, there, the parallels with money still go a a long way here as well. I think we often spend money a little impulsively. We don't really. I mean, we we are not what what economists used to call and some still do homo economicus, the sort of rational, you know, it's maximizing self-interested individual. Um, so in other words, if you spend a tenner on on, I don't know, some some gadget or or a sandwich or and and a drink or something, you're not considering what what else could I spend this tenner on? Can I just bring to mind everything else I could possibly spend

• 17:26Speaker 00

  this tenner on? And and then sort of rank them and say, well, the very best way I can spend this is this, not the sandwich and this drink, so I'm not going to buy this, I'll buy something cheaper. We don't do that. We we sometimes spend money totally impulsively, but we also have some um preset limits. We think, oh, well, for for a tenner, I'm not going to spend half an hour um cogitating about where else could I spend this even better than than here. Um, but we we don't always weigh up the opportunity cost of of spending money. Um, if you go on holiday, it means you can't buy a new car. Um, for instance, that's the kind of thing that some people are aware of and other people are

• 18:09Speaker 00

  not aware of. Um, and so the same applies to to time, in a sense. If you

• 18:16Speaker 00

  uh uh to give you an example, from when I was little, um, I was maybe twelve, thirteen years old, and uh this is the this was a time when self-service petrol stations started popping up. Before that, it was all full service, so you drove up and a guy in your uniform came along and sort of opened your filler flap and and filled up filled up your tank with petrol, and then you could start doing it yourself. And these petrol stations gave a discount. And of course, some gave a little discount, others gave a big discount. And I remember my dad, we we hadn't had a car for a long time. We we went, we drove like twenty minutes to get some discount of one franc a liter or something, not particularly. And I realized even then that there was no calculation being done.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  So there was no awareness of how much time, let alone the distance driven, but how much time are we spending to drive, I don't know, ten miles, fifteen miles to get petrol that is just a little bit cheaper. And I think we we often do not think about that, and we think about it even less when it's about time. We we don't really think about how much time something takes. We we think we need to go to a meeting. That meeting is like two and a half hours drive away, so we would just say, well, there's some traveling time, we, that's just part of the equation. We don't, especially because time is not even as tangible as money, there is salience, time is not salient in the same way. You just take it as a given that, okay, I'll have to to drive for two and a half hours and and get there.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  When we're stuck in traffic, we don't really calculate how much time we waste stuck in traffic. I mean, I I try to avoid driving as much as I can, but when I, when occasionally I have to take the car and I have to drive during rush hour, and I see these people, and I'm all sitting there and sort of bumper to bumper, and for me it's just once, and so I I say, well, yeah, I had no choice, I really had to do this, there's no other way. So I rationalize it, but I then think of these other people sitting left of me and right to me and in front of or behind me, and they experience this every day. Do they, have they ever worked out what this is costing them in time, how much time this

• 20:24Speaker 00

  is, this is wasted for them, multiplied by five days a week?

• 20:30Chris Williamson?

  The cumulative load.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  Thirty-five, thirty-five, thirty-five weeks a year. So we we we don't think about it, and that's that's what I meant by by awareness. And I think by being deliberate is once you're aware of the the time you spend, you're, you can sort of account for time more easily, then you can begin to be deliberate about what you do. For instance, you you mentioned where people might be listening to this podcast. I I don't particularly like driving, but I see driving as something, a a great opportunity to listen to podcasts. Sometimes I listen to the radio, but most of the time I accumulate lots of podcasts. And then when I need to drive, and I often drive from here to the continent, so these are long trips.

• 21:18Speaker 00

  That means I can listen back to back to several episodes of Freakonomics, or of your podcast, or of Econ Talk, or you name it. I mean, there's a whole raft of things I tend to listen to. And I think, to me, that is like good management in the way, in the same way that you use your, manage your money well. Good money management is good time management. Time management is not just about diary management. It's about being aware of where there is a sort of downtime, a time that is otherwise not very well spent. Because as you, as you mentioned earlier, we can't bottle up time. We, it just goes by.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And so we either use it or we lose it. And that awareness can achieve you better, to use it better.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  There is a concept in urban economics called mental accounting. I don't know whether you've heard of it, maybe some of your earlier Be Urban Economics guests may have mentioned it, but I'll, I'll quickly, I'll briefly explain it. Mental accounting is like having multiple virtual bank accounts. And you have one account for the rent, and one account for the bills, and one account for going out for a meal, and one account for food and clothing, or whatever. So you, you cut it up. It's basically, it's all the same money, because money is, as I say, is fungible. You, a dollar is a dollar. Whatever you spend it on, it's exactly the same dollar.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  But by dividing it up into virtual pots or accounts, you can manage it better. You can have a savings account, where you save up for Christmas, for, for the holiday. And basically, it's there, it's earmarked, there's a label on it. And it means that you're not really supposed to take money out of that for something else. And there's, there's an anecdote, I think it's, I forget, I forget who it was. One of them is Dustin Hoffman, Hoffman, and the other one is, I forget, two actors who used to live together in Hollywood, when they were young and in big unions. And one of them goes back home and wants to borrow some money because they've run

• 23:35Speaker 00

  out of money for food or something. And they actually literally have jars on the kitchen counter. And there is money for something else in another jar, but they are unwilling to take the money from that jar to pay for whatever they need to pay. So that is mental accounting. And we can do the same thing with our own time. We can dedicate time to a certain activity and not use it for something else. All too often, we begin a task and we just carry on. And we keep on going. It's like throwing good money after bad because

• 24:15Speaker 00

  it may not be the best use of our time at a particular moment. And so if we're deliberate about how we're going to be using our time and say, right, I'm going to be working on this for this amount of time, and then I'm going to be doing something else that is also important at that moment in time. It's that kind of deliberateness that I was alluding to earlier on.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  I understand. The listeners will be familiar with Parkinson's Law as well, which is work expands to fill the time given for it. It's one of the reasons that time boxing your tasks throughout the day is an important way because everyone will be familiar from when they were at school of, well, if you're like me, you might be familiar of leaving your assignment until the last minute and handing it in. You've actually got some students of yours submitting assignments ready for midnight tonight. So I guess you'll be suffering with the 11:59 PM submission deadlines and all that sort of stuff.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  There are only a few that have asked for an extension.

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, well, I mean, they're just leaving it until 11:58, aren't they? And then they can ask for one. But yeah, I totally understand. One of the examples that you used in one of your blog posts, I thought was hilarious and fascinating. Can we talk about the Estonian police speeding fines, please?

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Yes, that's a fantastic idea, I think. The Estonian police in a bit early, a few months ago, I think, tried out on a particular piece of roads, an alternative way of penalizing people who were speeding. Um. In most countries, um, when you get caught speeding, you get a ticket. And in some situations, the fine can be quite extensive, depending on how by how much you exceed the speed limit. But here in Finland, they came they came up with a different idea. Um. And so they stopped people speeding and they gave them a choice between paying, I think, for for a sort of an average um uh uh excessive speed, the fine would be something like four hundred euros.

• 26:20Speaker 00

  So it's like a good three hundred and fifty pounds.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Um. Or they could wait for an hour. Just stay there for an hour and then they could be they could go again, didn't have to pay anything. Um. But they just had to wait by the roadside for an hour. Um. About half of the the people they stopped opted to wait, about half didn't. So you can imagine uh from that how much these people valued their time. Um. Because effectively, they paid four hundred euros for an hour. I don't think even, I think there are very few people who get paid that amount of money. So stopping by and saving four hundred pounds for some people, that was uh that was not enough, so to speak. So they they they went off, but the others uh did stay.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Now, I I sort of muse on that a little bit because I think if you look at some of some common behavioral economics principles. One of them uh which comes from an acronym uh that was put forward by the people of the behavioral insights team here in the UK. The the former Nudge units and they have some a simple, very clear framework for behavioral interventions uh going by the name of EAST acronym stands for easy, um attractive, social and uh timely. So any intervention should score highly on those four things, so it should make life easier. It should be um appealing, so people would want to do it, it should be social, other people do it, it should be timely.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  An intervention that is done at the moment that it it matters has more effect than intervention that is happening at some unrelated time. And when you think about it, when you get fined, well, even worse, so you drive along, you get flashed. You get you see the flash in your rearview and say, shit, um, I've been caught, okay. So you forget about it for you you drive a little slowly for a for a little while and then you forget about it. And then a fortnight later, the um. The you get the notes that you you got caught and you got a little sort of payment slip. You need to pay one hundred pounds or something. It's a bloody hundred pounds. But the connection between the behaviour that incurred the fine and the fine itself is really very, very loose at that point. It's such a long time ago that you will you don't make the connection.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  So in this particular case with the Finnish police, the connection is immediate. These people, most of the time, will have been speeding because they were late. They they left late. This is another another aspect of poor time management. It's leaving things too late. So they tried to make up for lost time by speeding and get to the destination on time. And then they get stopped and have to wait for an hour. So all the benefits they would have had is gone. So they made the effort to try and get there in time by breaking the speed limit. And yet they didn't get there on time. So this is a kind of reinforcing mechanism applied at the right time. That might, I don't know, there was they didn't really properly research it.

• 29:16Speaker 00

  But I think this is one of the things that I would I would like to see researched more. To see whether the effectiveness in terms of recurring speeding of this kind of penalty would be superior to the conventional penalty of just basically fining people.

• 29:38Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think about when when people buy things on a credit card as well. Or when people use contactless. There was a there was a study, I think Rory Sutherland cites it. People walking out of a supermarket and they're being asked, how much do you think your receipt is worth? And the people that paid cash were within, you know, ten percent, fifteen percent. People that paid chip and pin were sort of within thirty. And people that paid contactless, like, they might as well have just guessed. They might as well have guessed what the person next to them's receipt was. And it's that detachment, isn't it? It's not only the timely detachment, but also the detachment from something that's sufficiently visceral

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  in our sensations to actually make us feel like we were we were experiencing what is happening.

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely, and I think because at the point people are being caught speeding, time is very important to them, otherwise they probably wouldn't be speeding. So at that time, being delayed even further is extra painful and is therefore more likely to have an effect than something that happens two weeks later when they're forgotten, perhaps even where they were when they they got caught. So so yeah, I think I think that's a it's an interesting experiment that I think merits further investigation, so to speak.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  I agree. You also had a look at the relative judgments for people who were offering to do charity work about whether or not they were going to spend money to contribute to a particular cause or whether they were going to spend their time. And this gets on to a point as well that I'd love to move on to, which is talking about outsourcing tasks to other people based on your own value for your time. So let's let's get into that. Can you tell us about that study?

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes, yes, that's that's interesting study. I forget who it was done by. It's somebody at University of Cardiff. And they looked at what how people value people donating to charity, depending on whether they volunteer or whether they donate money. And they normalized it so that the the value of the donation was similar to the value of a week's work, so to speak. So it was entirely equivalent. And what they found is that in the eyes in the eyes of others, the donation of time is seen as much more valuable.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  That's seventy percent, wasn't it?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yeah. So that's that's interesting in itself. So whereas the if you if you take the old time is money equivalence, that is clearly not true, because people feel that people who volunteer and donate their time are more praiseworthy than than people who simply dip in their pocket and give some money.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is?

• 32:32Speaker 00

  The interesting, well, I.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  I can theorize, and my theory is that we all experience time in a much more similar way than we experience money. Our experience to money is very much dependent on our point of reference, and therefore how wealthy we are. So to an economist, a dollar is a dollar, but to somebody who's a millionaire, a dollar will be worth less than to a homeless person who has no money at all. But time is much more equal for multiple people. And so we are, it's easier for us to put ourselves in a position of somebody who gives up a

• 33:20Speaker 00

  whole week of their time, of their personal time, to do something for somebody else, than for somebody to give up, I know, a thousand dollars.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of that as well is effortful signaling about the fact that I know, I can tell you people who have donated chunks of money to charity, but I don't know many people that have donated a week.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Well, that is because we only have fifty-two weeks in a year. We have, basically, there is no limited amount of money we can have. Now, of course, we will not give away half our wealth. Very few people do that. I mean, let's

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Unless you're Bill Gates.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Leave Warren Buffett and Bill Gates out of the equation. But generally, the amount of money we give is relatively modest compared to our total wealth. Even though it may, in absolute figures, be quite substantial, it's rarely something that will make a difference to our lifestyle. Very few people donate amounts that make a difference to how they will live their life after they've made the donation. But we all have limited time, so we can, we find it much easier to imagine what it's like to give up our week. We have limited amount of holidays, so there's a four or five weeks of holiday a year. So that's twenty or twenty-five percent of your holiday time you're giving up.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  To do something for somebody else, bloody hell, that's that's quite significant. Now, there is definitely um the likelihood that some of that is signalling. Um with donations of money, we can we can donate um anonymously and some people do. Um not many, the the proportion of anonymous donations is very, very small. Um so people really want others to be able to see that they they gave a certain amount of money because it gives them a warm feeling, but it also gives them a bit of status in the eyes of others. But you can't donate time anonymously, so there uh that is it's pretty obvious that you're donating the time. And so this is something where you can, even if you're a modest humble kind of person,

• 35:29Speaker 00

  you can still say and say, look, see what I what I did here, I sort of I went over there for a whole week.

• 35:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And just going back to the study, what's interesting is that even if the the participants to the study were told that if they had given money to this um charity, the charity could have bought much more time with that money from local people than the one week that they were giving up and the and the equivalent amount of money they gave up or the or all of the time, and still third party, the other people viewed the donation of time as more praiseworthy than the donation of money. So the utility of giving time may be less, but the status it gets you is still warm.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  And so so time, and and I think there there are some interesting implications to that, both um in our private lives and at work, I think. I think we should be more aware and make other people aware of the value of our time at work. So when we when people come and and ask for our time,

• 36:37Speaker 00

  or when when we go and ask somebody else for some of their time, we should be more appreciative appreciative of that time and understand.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  That this is a precious scarce resource they are making available to us. And so likewise, in the other way around. And it's the same thing at home. We at home, we sometimes treat the time of other people as if it's as if it has no value. Will you just go and do this? Uh, can you just go to the post office or this or that? And okay, what's the opportunity cost for the person concerned? Um, is that the best they could be doing with the time? I mean, it's twenty minutes walk either way to the post office. And I could do could be doing something else. So why are you asking me this? Because you forgot yesterday to go to the post office. So it's very easy for you to forget if you can then ask me today to go to the post office.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  So I think, again, more awareness of the value of time can lead to not not not only a better use of time, but also better relationships. Because if I can waste your time, if for whatever reason I have some power over you. Um, and I can I can instruct you to go to the post office for me because I forgot to post the letter or to send this package off yesterday, then

• 37:59Speaker 00

  be resentment. You will think, well, bloody hell, I could be doing it. It could be doing something interesting, something nice, something useful for me. But now I need to go to the post office and waste twenty five minutes, half an hour or so to to make up for some um, something you forgot to do yesterday.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  Um, isn't the isn't it interesting that with that you we've identified that as being something that people might be quite cognizant of at home? But if you were at work in a job and your boss said, hey, I forgot to take, I forgot to do this to take this to the post office, do you fancy going? You might actually think, oh, fuck, get in. I got forty minutes off work. I get to go and have a I get to go and have a walk. Despite the fact that your time at work could also be spent doing something.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  True, but as I said in beginning, one of the, one of the things that we tend to do when we're at work is we, we treat it as sunk time in a sense. We've sold our time to our boss already. So if our boss wants to use that time, because it's, it's his or her time now. So if they think that time is best spent by me, by sending me to the post office, who cares? I'm, I'm happy either way.

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  I suppose this is exactly where it's literally the tip of the spear of where the inefficiencies in wasting time come from within a business, don't they? That people are like, it's eight o'clock, I'm here, it's five o'clock, I'm gone. Whatever we do during that time and it takes a very, it either takes a very particular type of mindset or a special sort of remuneration package for people to start to bring that in. Cause you are right, some people hate meetings. They don't want to spend their time. Naval Ravikant famously, he, he doesn't do meetings. I don't do meetings. And you're like, well, you know, there's a lot of businesses and he's on the board of all of these like angel investment companies and stuff. How do you not do meetings?

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  And that's because that is how much he values not only his time, but the time of everyone that's around him. Or there's other companies that I know that their meeting rooms are deskless and seatless. So they are simply a room in which everybody can stand. And it just, it totally reduces down, it increases the effortful friction of someone wanting to call a meeting. It's like, okay, cool. You can call the meeting, but everyone's, everyone got to stand and everyone's got to hold their laptop like a, like a waiter in front of them while, while they're here.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  True.

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  So, I mean, it is, it is so interesting, especially for me as someone who's never worked in a typical salaried job. That's never been my industry. I've always worked for myself. But I know that that's non-typical and, you know, I, I really do hope that some of the people that are listening can start to, if you are in a, a more typical sort of salaried job, you can start to assess your time while you are at work and think, well, hang on. Where, where, where can I make my experience either more productive or more enjoyable for, for me or whatever it might be?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  Well, yes, yeah, absolutely. And I think your your parallel is quite quite interesting. I think if you're self-employed, then you are you are really the owner of both your money and your time. And you will treat them with more respect, I think, than the time that you spend at work. Because you've already sold it. It's not yours anymore. I think the comparison is with, imagine that you're you're going on a business trip and you get some cash from work. You get, I don't know, a hundred and fifty pounds to spend on on a hotel and a meal or whatever. Will you be worried about how much you spend? Probably not. You you can't keep anything, so you can't keep the balance. You have to give back, you have to have receipts for a certain amount and a balance you need to give back.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  But you can spend up to a hundred and fifty pounds. So you're not going to be too concerned about how you spend that money. Well, I think it's very much the same with the time you spend at work. It's you've given it to your employer. So if if the if for whatever reason, you need to go and sit in meetings, five hours in a day, that's what you're going to be doing. Um, now, of course, it's not true for everybody, not to one hundred percent of of the time. But too much of the time, we we really treat that time as if it's it has no no particular value to us. We just do whatever, whatever comes along and we we don't. And we're not deliberate enough with it.

• 42:29Chris Williamson?

  I understand. I think that's such a brilliant example. The people that, you know, do have a company card that are are listening will know that it's if you got a hundred and fifty pounds to spend, it's a hundred and forty nine pounds fifty pence that goes on the steak. And you've bought a milkshake that you don't even want to have and this, that and the other. Um, I think you're right, there's there's something probably a little bit more.

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  Worrying or a little bit more sort of malicious going on, it feels to me a lot when I speak to people, some people who have these sorts of roles, there's almost an adversarial relationship between the employer and the employee, or the employee and the employer, that it's like they will drag their feet slash spend the money slash do whatever they can as much as possible. Sometimes, especially in a job perhaps that you might be not too enamored by. And, you know, I don't really know either from an employer or an employee's standpoint, if there's not a passion to sort of make the most of every minute, as Ben Bergeron would say.

• 43:33Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what the solution would be for that. I don't know if there is one.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think it's, it's, it's not normally malice, I think, it's just no appreciation for something that has no value. I mean, even in, in social policy, there is, there,

• 43:53Speaker 00

  a case can be made for making people pay for much of the services they get, because once you pay for something, you, you attribute value to it and you start caring for it more. So I'm not even remotely suggesting that at work we should pay our, our colleagues for their time. Although as a principle, it's probably not bad. And I think there have been experiments even at Google, where there were sort of, there was a virtual Google dollar being used that you could use to, to buy colleagues' time. But I think another concept that I, I use in my work as well is the, is the economics concept of externalities,

• 44:32Speaker 00

  where this is where a transaction between two parties involves a third party, or actually doesn't involve them, but the third party bears the consequences of it.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  So, I mean, a good example of externalities in, in, in society is pollution. So you, um, take plastic pollution, for instance. The plastic that is now filling up our rivers and oceans. So you go down to Tesco's or Sainsbury's and you get some plastic bags, because you can't be bothered to take your own bags. You get a handful of free bags, you get home, you, uh, you unload them and then you just throw them away. And they blow out of your waste bin on the outside and they blow into the local river and they find their way to the sea. So the seas are being polluted, whereas the transaction was just between you and Sainsbury's. You got some, some free bags and so somebody else is suffering the consequences.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Likewise, polluting industries that pollute the air or the water and so on. The same can happen within organizations where, I mean, to give you an example, um, where finance tells procurement, you need to squeeze down our suppliers. We want to pay less because we have price erosion, we need to compensate for that. So we're going to pay less for our raw materials next year than this year. So they're going to negotiate and they get a better price. What they don't at that moment realize is that the supplier is saying, right, okay, if we are getting less money for our product, we're not going to give as much support anymore. So if, if there is a problem with our, our supplies daring us up, we're not going to be on their doorstep within half an hour.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  We might give them some telephone support, but obviously it's not part of the, it's not part of the official written contract. It was part of the unwritten total agreement. And so the people somewhere else in the organization who need the help of the supplier will suddenly find that they don't get the help anymore. So that's an externality. The finance and procurement were happy because finance said you must shave five percent of the bill of materials and procurement shaved off six percent. They said, look at us, we did really well. And then somebody else is suffering the consequences.

• 46:45Chris Williamson?

  Operations and logistics are fucked, yeah.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Yes, those kind of things, precisely. So, but I think there is so many situations at work where what we do on our own or what we do with another colleague affects third parties and we don't know in what way. And it may well, it may well waste their time. But if we don't know. We'll happily waste the time because we don't pay for it. We it's not even visible. So that's why I I again, I keep on hammering on this notion of awareness. We we need to be aware of the consequences of what we do on other people, including of their time. And it may not, it may, I mean, we could do it this way or that way. It doesn't make much difference to us.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  But if we did it this way, it's going to waste somebody's time, maybe half an hour, half a day. If we do it that way, it won't waste any time at all. But if we don't know, we can't do the right thing. And this is because within an organisation, you don't have a market mechanism to show the expense of something that is a is a specific burden to a to a colleague, if you see what I mean.

• 47:56Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. So I've got I've got a question that I want to finish on. But before I get on to that, is there anything else? Do you want to bookend the discussion on time? Or are you are you happy with everything we've covered so far?

• 48:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think maybe one final thing, and I wrote about it recently, is deadlines. The the use of deadlines and particularly self-imposed deadlines. And we we sometimes set deadlines where, yeah, I mean, we must get this done by then. And it it can be a very good mechanism for making the limited amount of time we have salient and we have a countdown clock mentally, or we can have a real countdown clock. And so we, okay, this much time left and we can plan and we know that we, as we get closer, we really need to get it done. Whether it's at work or whether it's at home, we can do this. But we should be careful not to be too dogmatic about using deadlines like this because there's always a trade off to be made.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  And so sometimes time not spent, but because a deadline is basically saying no further time spent beyond this moment in time. And if you if you don't go beyond that, then presumably there is some kind of value of finishing whatever you have um by then. I mean, you you you gave the example of my students and their final assignment for this this course. So they need to submit it by midnight tonight. It's midnight Central Time, so they've got another another eleven hours, so they've got a little while to go. But so some of them have asked for an extension and they they got it because they they were in time. And if they ask for one now, then they won't get it, they will get penalized.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Um but so they need to think about, should I submit my assignment on time and meet the deadline? Or should I submit it late, get a penalty, but have a better assignment?

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  Um hum.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  And I think that's the kind of trade off that we don't always make. We can become obsessed by a deadline and not really work out what the true cost would be of exceeding a deadline.

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  Or meeting the deadline as well, I suppose.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Well, but both, both indeed.

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  You can you can set set a self imposed deadline which forces you to make a suboptimal decision. One that potentially, given only a small increase of the deadline, would have increased the quality of the decision by a significant margin.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. And I think, I mean, to give you another sort of practical example, um you need to catch your train. Um and it's really quite important you you get that train, but how important is it? Are you are you going to be leaving the house without checking that you've actually closed the windows and the doors? Because, yeah, I really need to get the train. Or are you going to say, well, I'd rather check the house and I'll take the next train? Okay, there's going to be some costs involved with that, but at least I know my house will be secure and the iron will be unplugged and I'll have a sort of switch off the the gas stove and everything, so my house is not burning down. So when you when you put it so extreme, then clearly nobody is going to say, I'm going to rush out of the house, leave windows and doors open and the iron um on the ironing board.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Um because I need to catch my train, nobody's going to do that. But if it's not that extreme, we don't always think about it, about what it is we would gain by catching the train and meeting our deadline.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Or what we would lose by not meeting that deadline, or what we would gain in terms of the benefit of our house being secure or the equivalent. So I think deadlines can be can be useful, but we should be careful not to treat them as something that then begins to dictate us. I think we need to be willing to look at compromising either way and what the cost and the benefit of of going either side would be.

• 51:49Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that I love thinking about where the rubber meets the road with these sorts of discussions. Exactly what would you would you be prepared to have one window half open? Would you be prepared to have one window?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  Fully open, but it's an upstairs window. Or would you be da da da da? Like, so we do, we always do this and it's ruined. We used to have a big section on the propane fitness podcast, which I was a guest on before I started this one. And we used to have a big section called would you rather? And it was would you rather submitted by listeners? And there would always be something which had a value that was negotiable. And we would find a value that someone would accept. And then the ruin, it completely ruined the segment and we got rid of it. Because we just kept playing the same game, which was we would pick the value someone would accept, and then take it down by a unit, and then take it down by a unit, and then take it down by. It was also you do it for 50 grand. Okay. So would you do it for 49999? Would you do it for 49? And you just go, oh, well, like

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  you just, I don't know, I don't know exactly where, but where the rubber meets the road with those sorts of discussions, I think is, is really, really interesting. And you spoke about, I tell you what, before I asked the question, I've been really excited to ask you. You mentioned that one of the ways that people can insulate slash protect themselves from this is through planning. Can you just, can you just explain how you think planning sort of ties into the deadline and sacrifice sort of?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Well, I think, yeah, yes, yes, I can. I think I treat planning somewhat.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  Fuzzily, I'd say, I'm not the person who's got, I mean, sometimes when I've worked with people, I see they open their Outlook diary and it's got all these nice colored boxes. I don't have that many boxes, but I do it, I do it mentally in a sense. So I think about what I need to do, I think about when I'm roughly going to be doing it. To me, it's about this awareness and being deliberate about the time.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  So for me, that is planning. And I, I think what's important also is what is my purpose?

• 53:56Speaker 00

  If I'm, if I'm going to finish my blog post for Friday, then that's what going to be my main focus. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to be doing this until midnight and until I drop. No, this is where the mental accounting comes in. I'm aware that I need to take a break. I'm going to have a cup of tea, I'm gonna maybe watch something on television, and then I'll carry on working on it. So it's, it, it, it really is, I think there's probably a parallel with mindfulness as well. There's a lot of time mindfulness that is involved here. Being conscious of time, being conscious of the fact that it's valuable and that you need to use it well, but also that you, I mean, interestingly, I just tweeted a story earlier today about the value of doing nothing.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  So I actually, I sometimes literally do nothing.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  And I, I think it's very valuable, doing nothing. So there is, I, I don't look at my phone, don't look at anything, don't even think about anything, just basically float. Can be very useful. And so making time for that is a case of being aware of the need and being deliberate about creating that time. It's not necessarily I'm going to be doing nothing between eleven forty-four and twelve oh five tomorrow lunchtime. But it's about being, basically, being in control of, of your time. To me, that is what, what planning is. If if you need your diary to do that, then fine, but you don't necessarily need a diary.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  It's the sense of being in control of what you do when.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the tool doesn't really matter, but the deliberateness does. It's I can't remember, I read the quote earlier on today, so I'm kicking myself for not being able to remember it. But many of the problems of man are due to the fact that he can't sit alone with himself in a room for half an hour.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 55:49Chris Williamson?

  Um, and you know, it sounds like you are also, interestingly, if my meditation coach Brian is listening, he will know that my particular pathway of meditation at the moment is do nothing meditation by Shinzen Young. And that specifically for anybody that's interested is what he calls completely taking the hands off the wheel. And it is the practice of no practice. So my meditation on the morning doesn't even have me clearing my mind of thoughts. If thoughts arise, they're allowed to, there's no fixation or suppression. But the only thing that I do is drop an intention to control.

• 56:28Chris Williamson?

  So it's like either the thought about putting my hands back on the wheel gets, that's the only thing I'm allowed to think about thinking about. And that's it, which is doing that, like learning to let go of controlling thoughts, even in a meditative practice. Is because meditation in itself, in some forms, especially some of the ones that I've been doing, is still about, we're bringing the focus back to the breath, we're bringing the focus back to the somatic sensations in the body or the self-talk or the my, the mental imagery or whatever it might be. And um, yeah, the the power of literally doing nothing is is an interesting one. I think it was really, really good to go through that.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  But I have a final question for you, which I asked Richard Shotten. I'm going to ask you the same thing as well. So you're stranded on a desert island, stranded on a desert island on your own. And you're only allowed to have three mental models with you. And take three mental models onto the island with you. So they can be either the most novel or the most interesting. There can be a biased heuristic, whatever it is that you you want, but you got to choose three. And you're going to take them with you. Which three are you going to choose?

• 57:43Speaker 00

  I'm going to be on my own there.

• 57:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'll tell you what, you can you can imagine that there might be other people there as well because that will probably broaden the broaden it. But you've got to choose three. You've got to choose a favorite three.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  I'm not quite sure what you mean by by mental model.

• 58:08Chris Williamson?

  So any any any any bias, any heuristic. So you could have sunk cost fallacy, opportunity cost. You could have the pratfall effect. You could have anchoring. You could have

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  self-serving bias.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think one thing I would definitely take with me is cost benefit analysis.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  That's the it's it's the way you make deliberate decisions. And so it's considering what the the costs and the benefits are of the the multiple options that are in front of you. I think that would serve me well, even if I'm totally on my own on a on a desert island.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  Um, I think what I would also take is optimism bias. Um, because I think life can get a bit depressing if you're not optimistic. Um, optimism might be, well, God knows, maybe a ship might appear on the horizon and take me away from this island. Or I might discover important things that help me make my life more comfortable on on the island. Uh, what would be the third one that would serve me well?

• 59:23Speaker 00

  Well, maybe I don't know whether you treat as a as a mental model, but I would take mindfulness.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  I I find even when I'm driving occasionally, and it's it's it's probably the right side of doing nothing. But just sort of taking in the sight, taking in the landscape, taking in the way the trees look. Uh, maybe there's a bit of frost on the trees and and being really conscious of that. I think that's also something that would serve me well on a on a desert island. That is the ability to.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Experience my environment to the full, being mindful in that way, even if I have nothing else, if I have not any, any of my accoutrements that make my life interesting and pleasant these days, if I could be mindful in whatever the nature would be on my desert island, I think that would certainly well.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  I think it would stop you from getting bored as well, the resolution that you're looking at some, you know, if you're on this small desert island, you're seeing the same trees every day, you need to be able to look at them with optimism, you need to be able to be able to see them freshly. There's a couple of, a couple of mental models that come to mind, so George McGill, who I did a mental models podcast with, there's Hanlon's razor and Occam's razor, and he made McGill's razor, and McGill's razor was when offered two choices, choose the one which suggests, which offers the most luck or adventure. And that actually, interestingly, the luck or adventure side might be how you ended up

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  on the desert island. You might have thought, I'm going to take, I mean, this, this sounds like a great adventure, and now you're shipwrecked, and now you're stranded on a desert island.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, the question is, will it take you off the island again?

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yeah, exactly. Lucky. Create, get Wilson the volleyball on there, strap some bamboo shoots to a raft. Koen, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. If the listeners want to find out more, if they want to see some of your work, where should they head?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Well, I should, I should probably head to my Medium site. I mean, I published both on WordPress, there my address is koenfucius, I'll, I'll spell that, it's K O E N, as in my first name, fucius, as in my illustrious ancestor, confucius.net, or on Medium, I'm medium slash at koenfucius on Medium. You can always follow me on Twitter as well. I'm a prolific Twitterer, tweets not, not least my own stories, but also other interesting stuff to do with human behaviour that I discover on the net, left, right and centre.

• 1:02:11Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. Massive, massive appreciation for you for coming on and you're publishing, you're publishing weekly at the moment on your

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Every week, yeah.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  That's a, that's a serious schedule.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  A piece every week. Yes, that's right. And I try to stick to it. To the point, I actually, I publish in, in English and Dutch as well. So it's published on a Dutch, Belgian, Belgian, Dutch language news website. So I translate it usually in the early hours of Friday morning.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know, I know that, I know that feeling of completing my show notes a couple of hours. There's been a few, a few interesting times because of the publishing, the time that these episodes go live is 6am in the UK. And there's been a couple of times where I've been away in Bali, which is 13 hours ahead, or I've been in Boston, which is eight hours, like six hours behind. And I'm thinking like, shit, like I've got half an hour to get this episode up because it's actually, it's only 1am here, but it's 6am at home and blah, blah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Well, same for me, even though it's a self-imposed deadline, because nobody tells me to, to publish by 10 o'clock on a Friday morning.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  But it, it helps. I, I'm totally convinced if I didn't set myself that deadline, I would long have given up posting, a post every week. And that discipline, I think, it's a very good discipline to think as well. I mean, writing is the best way to learn to think better.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. And I think as well that what we've both got is a level of accountability. You know, there will be people that are waiting for your blog post. And if the blog post doesn't go up, maybe no one will actually say something, but you know, they'll probably think it. They'll be like, hang on a second, where's Coon's article from today? And that, that social, social fear, that social pressure, it's, it's enough of a motivation to keep us both going each week, I suppose.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  It is, even if it's totally imagined and is actually, nobody's reading my pieces. It still, it still works. Yeah.

• 1:04:05Chris Williamson?

  Coon, thank you so much for your time. Everything that we've spoken about today will be linked in the show notes below, including the Medium page for yourself and your Twitter. You know what to do. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to comment below. Like, share and subscribe. I would really appreciate it. But for now, Coon, thank you so much.

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  Chris, thanks very much. It's been very, very enjoyable. Thank you.

• 1:04:32Chris Williamson?

  Get away, get off this.