The Most Important Principles Of Productivity - Chris Bailey

Chris Bailey is a productivity consultant, researcher and best selling author. The world of productivity is messy. Overwhelming volumes of information and contradictory advice doesn't make the world any simpler. I brought Chris on to explain the most important, core principles that research-based studies and real-world practise says contributes to better productivity. Expect to learn why time, attention and energy are your fundamental resources, how to maximise your deliberateness, why starting the day with specified intentions can change the way you work, Chris' nerdy advice for making green tea, why there's a tension between creativity and productivity and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Learn how to skip college and get Praxis’ free book on the success mindset at https://discoverpraxis.com/modernwisdom/ (discount automatically applied) Get $150 on everything from The Cold Plunge at https://thecoldplunge.com/ (use code MW150) (international shipping enquiries - [email protected]) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Chris' website - https://alifeofproductivity.com/ Buy Hyperfocus - https://amzn.to/3IyxOxC Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #productivity #mindset #goals - 00:00 Intro 00:25 Cutting Out Caffeine 10:18 Wake-up Time 14:22 Engendering Deliberateness 21:46 Daily Habits for Productivity 34:56 Is Focusing Counter-productive? 44:26 Creating a Distraction List 50:16 Environment Design 54:16 Why We Procrastinate 1:03:16 Does Productivity Bring Happiness? 1:11:28 Where to Find Chris - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Bailey?

  When you start with the research and work backwards to a logical conclusion of how we should spend our time, I think focusing on things all day long is one of the most disastrous things we can do for our productivity.

• 0:14Chris Williamson?

  Chris Bailey, welcome to the show.

• 0:16Chris Bailey?

  Chris, yourself, how are you?

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  I'm good. Tell me about what you're drinking.

• 0:21Chris Bailey?

  I am drinking a lovely green tea. I have cut out coffee from my repertoire and I feel calm. I feel focused. It's the L-theanine, isn't it?

• 0:33Chris Williamson?

  I haven't had caffeine for 400 and something, 450 days or so now.

• 0:39Chris Bailey?

  How do you find it affects you?

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  So I wanted to see what would happen if I cut it out at the start of 2021.

• 0:46Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  And I didn't really notice any withdrawals, none of the headaches. A lot of people talk about you getting headaches and stuff.

• 0:51Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  I was, I would say a moderate user. So one coffee in the morning, maybe a Noco, which is about 120 migs or 150 migs during the middle of the day. And then that would be it. So what's that? Probably about 200 throughout the day-ish, something like that. So I'd say that's probably

• 1:07Chris Bailey?

  A decent amount.

• 1:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like a moderate amount. Stopped, no headaches, no withdrawals. Did notice that I had a craving for it, but my energy levels didn't really seem to change all that much. Now, over the last year and a half, I've been stealth caffeined a couple of times. You think that you're getting

• 1:28Chris Bailey?

  Decaf.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  Diet Coke on the gun in post-mix that doesn't have caffeine and it's come from a bottle that does have caffeine and you get whatever, 20mg of caffeine. So I've been, I've been stealth caffeine, but like purposeful caffeination hasn't happened. Sleep's better, energy levels are more consistent.

• 1:44Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  But performance in the gym is a little bit difficult to get to.

• 1:49Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  And the high that you get if you have a nice coffee, you know, halfway through the morning and you put some good tunes on for

• 1:57Chris Bailey?

  The buzz.

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that's something that I miss the most. So I think I'm going to take it to 500 days, do a little report about an experiment. Like this is, I quit caffeine for 500 days. This is what I found was good. This is what I thought was bad.

• 2:09Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  Here's some results or whatever. But you are a green tea fiend. I heard you talking about the fact that you shouldn't do it at 100 degrees Celsius as well.

• 2:18Chris Bailey?

  Oh. Yes, absolutely not. That is sacrilegious to green tea. People think they don't like green tea. People think green tea tastes burnt and sour because they order it at a restaurant. First of all, half the people who serve at a restaurant, they don't even know green tea has caffeine in it. Speaking of stealth, speaking of stealth caffeine, there's caffeine lurking in decaf coffee, too. You know, Starbucks decaf has like forty milligrams of caffeine. I think their espresso has a ton as well, but I love the calming effect of green tea. It has that L-theanine. And so even if you drink a coffee, I really recommend stacking that coffee with L-theanine, L-theanine pills, which are, you can buy them anywhere pretty much.

• 3:03Chris Bailey?

  And it dampens the adrenaline response to the caffeine consumption because caffeine increases, or coffee increases cortisol levels about two hundred percent and adrenaline levels about two hundred percent, but that L-theanine blunts the effects of that. And it's beautiful. So you get the presence that caffeine can cultivate with what you're doing. You can zero in on what you're doing in the moment, too, but you don't have that anxiety. You don't have that stress response. There's even a disorder called the caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, or caffeine-ism.

• 3:44Chris Bailey?

  And so if you find yourself anxious after consuming some coffee, anxiety puts a damper on productivity, puts a damper on focus because it narrows our attentional capacity. It shrinks how much attention we have to give to whatever is in front of us in the moment. And if you find that, so it's kind of this balance, isn't it? That the increased narrow focus versus the increased anxiety, which can shrink how much attention we have to give to whatever's in front of us in the moment. So that's why I love green tea. I find it gives the presence, it gives the energy, but the L-theanine, and it gives the calm as well, that crushes that.

• 4:24Chris Bailey?

  A caffeine related stress response. So that's why I'm a big fan of it. I, you know, I drink a cup of coffee every once in a while for the buzz, like you were saying, but besides that,

• 4:36Chris Bailey?

  I'm good. I'm good with my green tea.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  Would you say if someone's going through a period of time where they're ambiently feeling anxious due to non-caffeinated related things, that avoiding coffee during that time might be a good idea specifically as well?

• 4:50Chris Bailey?

  Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. I'd never thought about that. If you're feeling a little bit anxious, if you've got some stuff coming up, perhaps consider pivoting your source of caffeine to something that isn't coffee.

• 5:00Chris Bailey?

  And, and mind your energy too. You know, if you, if you find that your energy is low at one or two in the afternoon, that might be because you have too much caffeine. It might be because you perceive more of the stimuli in your environment as a sort of stress response, which just heightens anxiety. It narrows focus and it provides us with less of a mental capacity to deal with whatever's in front of us in the moment. This is something that I, that I found personally. And, and you know, I, I used to give the advice that we should consume caffeine strategically when we actually benefit from the energy boost. I, I still do buy that advice because I, I think caffeine, when it's well deployed,

• 5:41Chris Bailey?

  can work wonders. It does depend on whether we're an introvert or an extrovert. If you're an extrovert, you can handle, you have the capacity to handle that extra stimulation. But if you're more on the introverted side of the spectrum, you're more stimulated by default from the environment surrounding you. And so if that's the case for you, you might not want to consume caffeine before a big presentation or a big meeting, right? These, these stressful events that can threaten to push us over the edge of anxiety to begin with. You don't need to, to drink a cup of. Fluid liquid stress in addition to that stimuli.

• 6:20Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's so interesting. So people that are introverted, their internal state already is sufficiently stimulating.

• 6:29Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 6:29Chris Williamson?

  That they don't necessarily need to add on top. And if they're doing something which is going to add external stimulation on top, don't further make that worse with coffee. Well, I did an episode with Dr. David Sinclair. He was one of the first people that came on the show that really blew up in terms of the episode. And I flew out to Harvard Medical School in Boston to go see him. And he needed to push back by half an hour. So I'd rocked up, I'd got my little badge that had my name on that looked cool. And I thought, oh, right. Well, I've got half an hour. So I'll go to Starbucks and I'll sit down. And usually in the UK, I would order, I think, a venti Americano black, right?

• 7:06Chris Bailey?

  Okay.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  The, the big one, black, nothing in it, except for sweetener. Didn't realize that the caffeine in the US versus the UK, I think, is a good chunk more. So I get back to Harvard Medical School to go into David's lab and I'm like, I'm levitating now across the floor. I'm just vibrating into his office.

• 7:28Chris Bailey?

  You're not sweating, you're percolating.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah. I was at the same resonance frequency as that only dogs could hear.

• 7:34Chris Bailey?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:34Chris Williamson?

  I, I was really, really struggling for the first 15, 20 minutes of that episode. I'm like, trying to sort of calm myself down. Nothing to do with the fact that I was talking to this interesting person. Everything to do with the fact that I'd just jacked myself with whatever 300 milligrams of caffeine.

• 7:52Chris Bailey?

  Yeah. Oh, it's remarkable. And this is, you know, I look at the science of productivity for a living. And this is, I think, something that a lot of people miss with productivity advice is it's personal productivity, right? And because of that, we're all wired differently. And so the advice that works for you might not work for me, might not work for whoever's listening to this right now. And so we really do have to take what works for us and leave the rest and adapt for not only the constraints of our life, but also who we are, our biology, our wiring. You know, there's all these articles like, oh, the early bird gets the worm. And, oh, we should wake up at 4:30 every morning in order to be whatever.

• 8:35Chris Bailey?

  You know, top of, I don't, I don't even know what people say. But when you look at the actual research, the actual research shows that there's no difference in somebody's socioeconomic standing based on what time they wake up at. It's what we do with the hours of our day and how deliberately we live and how deliberately we work that makes the biggest difference with regard to our productivity. And that kind of dovetails off of the introvert slash extrovert relationship with caffeine and that stimulation from the environment by default. We really have to take the, the advice that works for us and leave the rest. So question, you know, question everything that I say today, obviously, but I don't, do you think your interviews have gotten better?

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  When?

• 9:19Chris Bailey?

  Cut out caffeine?

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  Uh, that's a good question. It's difficult for me to say because the skill curve in terms of skill acquisition is so steep.

• 9:29Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Chris Williamson?

  That I, and I don't intend on going back to being as bad as I was 18 months ago to then redo it again. It's like, I used, I used a lot of peptides. I ruptured my Achilles about two years ago, about 18 months ago, actually ruptured my Achilles and I used a bunch of different peptides, BPC 157, TB 500, a bunch of different things to try and assist with my recovery. And what people want to know is, well, what sort of impact did it have? And you go, well, I recovered quite quickly. But again, I don't plan on rupturing the other Achilles to not use peptides to be able to give you a test that I can identify what the, what the effect was.

• 10:05Chris Bailey?

  Even though some say symmetry is the definition of beauty?

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So yeah, maybe I should do to get a nice.

• 10:10Chris Bailey?

  Maybe you should.

• 10:10Chris Williamson?

  Thick fat Achilles on both sides, a lovely scar on both, both of the back of my ankles. Yeah, I am, the one size fits all thing, I think is interesting and useful. I'm surprised about the wake time has no correlation with socioeconomic status. The main reason being that people who wake up close to the time that most other people wake up, I would have presumed would have afforded them more opportunities socially. You're going to align with the timelines and the schedules of other people. That basically would have increased ambient serendipity as far as I could see. You know what I mean? You're just doing more things at the same time.

• 10:50Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Chris Williamson?

  But that's not the case.

• 10:53Chris Bailey?

  It is about deliberateness, you know, and, and that deliberateness should be informed by. The constraints of our environment. So if you do have meetings at 8:00 a.m. and you wake up at 9:00 a.m. that's not going to be that helpful. Obviously, with regard to your schedule, with regard to your routines. But I think, you know, if there's one central theme with personal productivity advice is that it's not about doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. It really is about that deliberateness and that intentionality. I think if there's anything that lies at the core of productivity, you know, and I think

• 11:35Chris Bailey?

  this is also something that many people get wrong with regard to this space. You know, first of all, there is no five, this 10-step trademarked, all rights reserved solution for becoming more productive that some consultant is going to try to sell you on. You know, you do have to take what works for you and leave the rest. But the things that I have seen work in myself, I like to do a lot of experimentation with myself, using kind of myself as a guinea pig. Because if I don't try the advice I'm giving, what's the point of giving the advice? Because, you know, very early on in writing about this stuff, I would recall writing about things that sounded like the right thing to say.

• 12:19Chris Bailey?

  But then I tried it out and I realized that often the truth was the opposite, like the wake-up time, and especially when you look at research after that point. And so you're exactly right. You know, we do have to account for the constraints of our day. And there are those common constraints. If you're asleep when everybody else is working, you probably won't benefit from the coordination that some projects need. You know, there's the collaborative work that we do, there's the individualistic work that we do. Finding out where we are in that spectrum can inform a lot of the best productivity strategies that work best for us. And, you know, speaking of distraction, distraction is a necessary byproduct of doing work that's collaborative.

• 13:03Chris Bailey?

  We need it in order to do work that's collaborative because it involves interfacing with other people, and that's always messy. But it's that deliberateness and that intentionality. I think that is what we should be. For lack of a better frame that I can think of extemporaneously, that's what we should be optimizing. Not only our work, but our lives around. You know, if you have a deliberate life, you're going to act and live in accordance with what you value. That'll create meaning, of course, because meaning is when we manifest our most deep values through how we act and how we work and how we live and how we speak with other people.

• 13:44Chris Bailey?

  But it's that deliberateness that lies at the core of productivity advice that I honestly have fallen in love with over the years. Because if we can do the things that we set out to do,

• 13:57Chris Bailey?

  what more do we need?

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  That's your definition of productivity, right? Accomplishing what we intend to do.

• 14:04Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so give me, you've written two books, both on productivity, you may have written more. The Productivity Project and Hyper Focus. And you've spent a lot of time doing personal experiments, plus research, plus sciencey stuff around all of this. If deliberateness and intentionality are two of the key principles

• 14:30Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  that underlie the core of the productivity approach that you've found, what are the frameworks or the supporting structures that help people to bring as much deliberateness and intentionality to their productivity as they can?

• 14:44Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, that's, that's an awesome question. It's, it's interesting because I, you know, I don't start with some system and work backwards to, to the advice. My, my approach is usually to start with the, the science that I can find on this stuff.

• 14:58Chris Williamson?

  Is that much science of productivity?

• 15:00Chris Bailey?

  Well, that's the awkward part is you, you hear people talking about, oh, there's thousands of studies that show that this type of music supports productivity. But first of all, the way they measure productivity is usually more conducive to work that we did in a factory than doing work with our minds. And that's a big challenge to overcome in the research. Because, just because you produce something more with your time, doesn't mean that you actually make a difference with your time. Just because you answer more emails, just because you work longer, just because, and, and, you know, to Have a proper experiment, something needs to be easily measured and knowledge work is very difficult to measure.

• 15:44Chris Bailey?

  You can write a 200 word speech, a 300 word speech, the Gettysburg Address was around that length, that changes the course of history. Or you can write a 300 like crappy blog post about a sandwich that you ate, or a green cup of green tea that you drank. Maybe that's a bit better than the same. Actually, it depends what's in the sandwich, in my opinion. But measuring productivity is, is a really awkward thing that nobody really does right. Because how do you, how do you measure knowledge work when the work that we produce with our, our time, our attention, our energy differs and it's difficult to measure the impact of that. But what I like to do, that's why, that's the benefit of the personal experimentation.

• 16:29Chris Bailey?

  You know, it's an N of one. I don't have these, these teams that, that I coordinate, maybe I should, but it's, I see everything through my own lens and, and then I use the experiments as a launching off point to examine the research surrounding a topic. And my, my whole philosophy is there's a lot of productivity advice out there. In my opinion, there might even be too much productivity advice out there. And I try to be the, the person that separates out all the stuff that works from the stuff that does not work. And it's messy because it's knowledge work. And just because I write 1,000 words one day and 2,000 words the next, those 2,000 words

• 17:11Chris Bailey?

  could be garbage compared to the 1,000 words that came the day before. And so it's definitely not an, an exact science and the research surrounding productivity advice is not always good. But the best advice that I have found falls into three different categories. And this is kind of the, the curious thing and I haven't, you know, I started with this, I guess, you know, I've been bashing frameworks and, and I guess this is kind of a, a natural framework that, that appears in, in the research is that most of the advice, not all of it, but most of the advice that allows us to actually move our work and our life forward, it falls into one of three categories. The, the first category is time.

• 17:56Chris Bailey?

  Of course, we've always had to manage our time around the schedules of other people. That goes back to the factory type work where it was the environment where there is a direct connection between how long we worked for and how much we accomplished with our time. If we made one widget an hour and we worked four hours, we made four widgets, baby. And if we worked eight, we made eight. You know, there's a direct relationship. So time is the first ingredient of productivity. We've always had to manage our time around other people. And it's like you said, if we work in a collaborative environment, we need to account for that constraints in our deliberateness. The second component I see in productivity is attention. Right?

• 18:39Chris Bailey?

  It doesn't matter how well you can schedule things if you can't then focus on what you have scheduled. If you're distracted, if you're constantly interrupted, if you don't have as much mental capacity as you deserve in the moment that you give yourself through your habits, through your routines, through your rituals to accomplish things to the best of your ability. And it's not just about accomplishment, obviously, right? That goes back to that idea of intentionality, right? What do you want to get out of your time? And you know, that definition of productivity, it works regardless of the context. You know, if you intend to write 2,000 words and maybe, Chris, like record like three

• 19:24Chris Bailey?

  podcasts, or I don't know what the makeup of your day looks like, and maybe do a couple of interviews yourself, maybe. And then you do, and you do a bang up job of everything, I would say you're perfectly productive. And the exact same thing is true if your intention is to put your feet up on the beach with a two pina coladas, one for each hand, obviously, and just listen to an audiobook and soak in the sun. Right? Productivity begins and ends with intentionality. And I think that's how we should be measuring our productivity in the first place. And that's why it gets messy. That's why it gets messy with the research. But time, attention, those are the first two components of productivity. And I believe the third is energy.

• 20:08Chris Bailey?

  Right? Energy is kind of the the the fuel that we have to burn over the course of the day that fuels our willpower, that fuels our stamina, that fuels our capacity to get things done. So if you burn out at one or two in the afternoon because you over caffeinated all week, you're probably not going to accomplish much of your intentions with that day because you're not going to have the capacity with which to do so. If you have like, I don't know, if you go like some Indian buffet over lunch, as I did the other day, and have a couple of delicious Tiger beers and like way too many plates of butter chicken and

• 20:48Chris Bailey?

  white rice, which I do not regret. I mean, let me just say, I do not regret it. But I did not accomplish much that that afternoon. So, energy, I think, is the third component that not it's not part of my, I guess it's part of the framework that I like to share. But that's a common idea that that repeats through the research, that these three ideas and where they overlap, you know, if we can manage our time well, our attention well, our energy well, right? We have to develop habits and that takes time. But if we can get to a place where we optimize all three, then we are far more likely to accomplish the things that we set out to do.

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  Time, attention, and energy.

• 21:34Chris Bailey?

  That's right.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  But we still have deliberateness and intentionality.

• 21:39Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Sitting somewhere around that.

• 21:42Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Chris Williamson?

  Before we get into those three, how, what are the ways that you ensure that your deliberateness and your intentionality is supported on a daily basis?

• 21:53Chris Bailey?

  What a, what a beautiful question. I, I have a couple of different strategies that I use. And, you know, I really think deliberateness is a skill. It's not something we're born with, it's something that we can get better at over time. Uh, the first is, I have an hourly chime on my watch, on my Apple watch. Uh, that I've disabled all notifications from, because that would negate the effect of the chime. Uh, but essentially it just taps me on the wrist every hour, and I use that as an opportunity to reflect on whether I'm spending those ingredients intentionally. And so I think, okay, what am I doing right now? And is what I am doing something that I made the decision to do in the first place?

• 22:38Chris Bailey?

  Because an awful lot of our behavior is not something that we choose to do. Right? Even if it's defined by somebody else, we kind of go through the motions and there's this automaticity with, uh, with a lot of our actions that I, that I think

• 22:56Chris Bailey?

  is a sign that we have room to grow in terms of how intentionally we live. And so that is the first, I think, when that goes off, I just do a brief, very brief reflection. Uh, am I distracted right now? What am I working on? Is it important? Am I spending my time intentionally right now? It's become kind of second nature. Um, and when, when I'm happy with the proportion, it's never a hundred percent of the time. And I don't think, you know, maybe, not even a Buddhist monk on a meditation retreat will get to 100%. There's always an automaticity, especially when you consider that 40 to 45% of our daily actions are comprised of habits.

• 23:40Chris Bailey?

  Um, things that we do with that automaticity and there's, automaticity has, has a remarkable place in our lives because we don't have to force ourselves to work out every day. We get that, we get energy back and then we have more energy for other things. So that's one of them. The second is just a simple intention setting ritual that I do every day. Where at the start of the day, I think to the end of the day and I ask, "Okay, what three things will I want to have accomplished by the time that this day is done?" And it's a simple rule, and I think the best productivity advice should be, right? It's almost, it's kind of like how when something is designed really well, you think, "Oh, that's obvious."

• 24:23Chris Bailey?

  And then everything is designed like that, like the iPhone, right? Every phone looks like an iPhone now because they got it right. And when you get something right, it's so obvious. I think behavior is a lot like that too. And productivity is like that too. The best advice, like eat well, exercise, meditate, focus, tame distractions. It's all very, very obvious. And I would include this piece of advice in that, in that bunch. At the start of the day, fast forward to the end of the day, define three things that you want to have accomplished by the time that the day is done. What I, what I love about this frame is you think not about what you have to get done,

• 25:03Chris Bailey?

  but what you want, you think about what you want to be different in your life by the time you have reached the end of the day. And in that way, you make progress. You make progress every day and you won't always accomplish the three things. Nobody does. There's emergencies, there's fires, there's things that, that arise that we have to deal with. And this shouldn't be all that you do. If you only did three things all day, every day, you probably wouldn't have a job after much of a period of time. But that's the point, right? It's, it's in defining what is more important than everything else that we recognize the truth about productivity that not all tasks are created equal.

• 25:47Chris Bailey?

  Right, like take, write it, or maybe recording a podcast for, for an example, to use what we're doing right now versus watching Netflix, right? If, if our intention is to make progress with our work, it's very obvious which one of those leads us to make the most progress. There's this, this asymmetry of importance with regard to the things that we have on our plate. And recognizing that asymmetry and using that knowledge to inform how we, how we act and what direction we act in. So, you know, my three things today, I don't have them, they're in an app, but, but I'll recall them. So number one is to structure a talk. Number two is to have fun in a few interviews.

• 26:31Chris Bailey?

  And number three is to write a couple of blog articles. It's simple, there's email to do on top of all that. But those are the three core things that I will want to have accomplished by the end of the day. And I, I do three personal things most days as well. Because then you decide every day just how balanced you wish to be. And so there's a lot of simple strategies like that where we can make a pre-decision with how we act that can inform how our day manifests and, and increases how much control we have over our time, over time. So I, I love the hourly awareness chime as a simple method of reflecting on intention.

• 27:15Chris Bailey?

  I love the rule of three as well. And meditation and just general awareness, I find not only helps productivity, but also obviously awareness and mindfulness.

• 27:25Chris Williamson?

  How do you ensure that the three things that you have set out to be intentional about during the day are things which are given priority throughout the day? Now, I understand that the hourly chime is to ensure that you're supposed to do the thing that you're supposed to be doing at the time, but that thing that you're doing right then can be Email, it can be, you know, there's going to be a number of other tasks. And I think I quite like the idea of three things. What would I like to have done by the end of today to have moved me toward my goals? Because it allows for the fact that the sand that fills the cup of that day, the inevitable sort of small things, they're just going to accumulate.

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  Like, you don't need to say, do my emails to know that you're going to probably respond to some emails.

• 28:11Chris Bailey?

  You'll probably do it.

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or go to the bathroom or, you know, go to the gym or whatever. Like, you know, those things are probably going to happen anyway. How do you ensure that you instantiate the things? Are you time blocking? Are you prioritizing, using an Eisenhower matrix? What have you found as the most effective way?

• 28:28Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, you mentioned how, how simple the rule is. And that's one of the beauti- I'll get to the, to the other part. But I just wrote a little note because I think it's important to, to mention in talking about this idea that we think in threes by default. You know, I mentioned earlier, the, the natural limit of our mind. It's called our working memory capacity, which I just think of our, as our attentional space, which is just what we focus on and bring into our mind in each moment. And we used to think that we can hold seven or eight pieces of information in our mind at one time. But the latest research shows that we can hold around three. And there are so many examples of, of this that abound in modern culture.

• 29:13Chris Bailey?

  We have sayings like, good things come in threes and celebrities die in threes. And the third time's the charm and the good, the bad, the ugly and blood, sweat and. Like, we grow up with stories like the three little bears, the three blind mice, the three little pigs, the three musketeers. Even across cultures, we group things together into threes. A story, a novel, we divide into three parts, the beginning, the middle and the end. The Olympics, they passed a few months ago. We divide into three parts, the, or we award three medals, right? Gold, silver and bronze. So we think in threes and that, that I think speaks to the science of productivity where, where. We need to accommodate the science with the tactics that we use.

• 29:58Chris Bailey?

  And it's a bit of a, a, a long connection between these two ideas. But that's why I, I think people will find it works pretty well. The, the way I do it is by putting these things somewhere obvious. This, this was what I did at the very beginning. Before this rule became just so ingrained in my day that it became invisible. And so that's why, you know, I don't have them obviously in front of me. Because I, I've learned to structure my time around this over time. And we all get better at this too. And, and at first you'll probably overshoot your intentions. Then you'll undershoot your intentions. You know, if, if you are a writer, for an example, it's an easy example when, when it relates to knowledge work.

• 30:41Chris Bailey?

  And you say that you want to write 500 words on a given day and you end up writing a thousand. The next day you might think, oh, yesterday worked so well. Today I'm going to set an intention to write 2,000 words. And again, you might write a thousand. And over time though, you settle into this understanding of your capacity for daily accomplishment. While accounting for the constraints related to how much time you have. So if you have meetings all day, how much attention you have. Maybe you're going through an anxious period because you're over caffeinating. And you can't necessarily bring your full attention to what you're doing. And how much energy you have.

• 31:20Chris Bailey?

  So accommodating whether you're going through a more tired time, whether you're maybe a bit more stressed and exhausted at a given time. But having these intentions somewhere very, very obvious that you see on a regular basis as you, as you get accustomed to a habit like this. And again, personal, personal productivity takes, will take what works for you and leave the rest. You may find over time you internalize them because your mind thinks in threes. But putting these things somewhere obvious, blocking off time for them. This is something that I also love that, that you mentioned. Having these chunks of time where you focus on just one thing that you know is important,

• 32:03Chris Bailey?

  right? If you want to cultivate presence with what you're doing, what a beautiful way of cultivating presence, deciding that you're going to do something at the beginning of the day, having the confidence to know how important it is as you go about your day. In the moment, it's so easy to get wrapped up in that thing because you have the confidence of that pre-decision. And so time blocking works really well. Having them somewhere obvious works as a nice reminder. And one other thing, if we're chatting about this ritual, this rule works so well. And I know it's weird to get obsessed over such a rule so simple, but I think one of the, that's A,

• 32:45Chris Bailey?

  where it's so powerful, but B, another reason it's powerful is it works across different timeframes. And so I personally, you know, have tried this out for different timeframes, but I've found that the best ones on which it works is every day, every week, and every year. It's a big jump between the week and the year. So do try out, you know, quarters, accommodate the rhythms and the constraints in your own work. But I find there's, there's, that's where the rubber meets the road with productivity. When our daily intentions feed into the weekly intentions, which feed into the overarching yearly intentions.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Are you suggesting here that each week and then each year, you make a decision, what would have had to have happened by the end of next week in order for me to look back on this week and consider it a success? And then the same at the year? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that everybody comes back to is this, any large accomplishment is just a series of smaller accomplishments made up by a series of micro accomplishments made up by a series of individual tasks. And that, given enough time, you could walk to the moon. Like, walking to the moon is just one foot in front of the other. It is just one step, then one step, then one step. And most of the time, when I find myself losing my way with productivity, it's because I have a poorly defined next step. It's because I don't know how to accomplish the next step, or it's because I'm waiting on something to

• 34:07Chris Williamson?

  facilitate the next step that I actually don't have. And this is one of the interesting changes that I've seen pivoting from my previous business, which was running nightlife, to doing the podcast full-time. And what I'm seeing is beforehand, it was a lot more collaborative work, whereas now it's, it's pretty much all on me. So my ability to procrastinate has become narrowed and far more personally accountable.

• 34:32Chris Bailey?

  Yes.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  It's not as if it's gone away, but it certainly has got rid of one of those brackets. Like, I'm never really waiting on someone. I have all of the things that I need. I have the book of the person I'm speaking to. I have their information, or I have the audio recording, or whatever. You know, I have all the things I need.

• 34:48Chris Bailey?

  You have that beautiful webcam, or I'm guessing a SLR for the video version of the podcast.

• 34:53Chris Williamson?

  Big fat SLR, yes. So you said earlier on, something that you bring up in hyper focus, which is that there is a trade off or a tension between thinking about future goals and our ability to focus. And this is something that I'd never really thought about very much, that focus is kind of an antithesis of our ability to do big picture thinking.

• 35:15Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Chris Williamson?

  Could you explain how that works? Also, sorry, the other thing, the main thing that I want to get into people today, the takeaway from your book is that focus, whilst being fantastic, isn't a panacea. It's not a cure all. It's not the thing that you want all the time. And it's the first time that I've ever heard anybody, really ever, but certainly within the productivity space, actually say, more focus isn't the answer. Because when you think about, I'm going to go and play ultimate frisbee later on today. When I think about that, I think, yeah, this is my time away from work. However, the, the point is for me to be fully focused on what I'm doing, as opposed to kind of more free flowing and,

• 35:59Chris Williamson?

  and present and feeling grace and ease and joy and kind of that scattered focus that you talk about. But let's go through the, the trade off between long term thinking, goals and focus.

• 36:15Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, and it's such a wonderful question because I think focusing on things all day long is one of the most disastrous things we can do for our productivity. And when you look at the, when you start with the research and work backwards to a logical conclusion of how we should spend our time, you know, first of all, we don't focus 100% of the time. By default, our mind is wandering about half of the time, which is not good when we don't want it to wander. Because when we don't want it to wander, we're usually trying to zero in on something that we intend to accomplish.

• 36:52Chris Bailey?

  But it is remarkable the ways that a wandering mind can support us in what we want to accomplish. One, one example that I love to use is the, how traffic flows down a highway. And so if you look at how traffic flows down a highway, what moves traffic forward is not how fast the cars are moving. What moves traffic forward, what allows it to move forward is how much space exists between the cars. And I think our work and our life are the exact same way. There's this wonderful quote that I'm sure most people have heard before from J R R Tolkien,

• 37:35Chris Bailey?

  where he has written that not all those who wander are lost. And I think the exact same thing is true with regard to our attention, with regard to our productivity. When our, here's a, an interesting idea, and, and I usually don't find statistics that motivating in and of themselves. Because I think in stories, just like everybody else on the face of the planet, but this statistic tells an interesting story, where when our mind is wandering...

• 38:07Chris Bailey?

  We think about our goals 14 times as often as when we're focused on something. That's sampling research done by Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan Schooler. I believe the name of this study is called Back to the Future Autographical Planning. I don't remember the full name, but you could probably find it through Google using those keywords. We unearth ideas when our mind wanders. We rest when our mind wanders, but we also plan when our mind wanders. And a good example of this that everybody is probably familiar with is taking a shower. If you're taking a shower, your mind is hardly ever in there just appreciating the shower.

• 38:51Chris Bailey?

  Even though there's a lot to appreciate, we turn inwards when our mind is in the shower. We think about the future. We think about what we have to get done later that day. We think about our goals. We think about our plans. We think about the intentions that we set that year, that week, that day. Right? While our mind recharges. And I think that's the key too. There's actually been research that has looked at different types of mind wandering. So when we're mind wandering, kind of just on the floor or something like doing nothing versus when we're mind wandering, doing something that is habitual. You know, that 40, 45% of the time that we're doing something that is a habit over the course of the day.

• 39:33Chris Bailey?

  And research shows that we come up with more ideas when we're doing something habitual because our attention ebbs and flows with that activity. It moves us along and there's a rhythm led to our attention, kind of like a heartbeat, where sometimes we need to intervene with something that we're doing out of habit.

• 39:54Chris Williamson?

  What would be an example of each of those?

• 39:56Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, driving is a great example of that. So maybe you're driving down the highway and hopefully there's space between you and the other cars. And you're kind of doing it out of habit. You have a bit of highway hypnosis where you're kind of immersed in the task. And you're thinking about that you need to pick up like a cantaloupe on the way home or something. But then you hit a detour. When you hit that detour, your conscious mind has to intervene.

• 40:26Chris Bailey?

  With the habitual part of your mind that's going through that activity automatically. And that that conscious intervention makes that activity have that rhythm, that heartbeat kind of rhythm that anchors us into the moment. What we usually do in a time like this is we just kind of listen to a podcast, we listen to an audiobook, and there's nothing wrong with that, of course. It can make something more fun, especially things that we tend to procrastinate on. You know, you mentioned procrastination. There are certain cues that, that, that, certain attributes that a task can have that make us more likely to put it off. That's something, whether something is boring, frustrating, difficult, ambiguous, unstructured, lacking in personal meaning, and lacking in intrinsic reward.

• 41:10Chris Bailey?

  So the process of doing it is not rewarding. And making something more fun, listening to a podcast, doing chores around the house, if you have that intention to make something more fun because you've been putting them off, that cancels out a bunch of the triggers that a task can have. But other times, we want our mind to wander. Because it not only makes us more productive, when we think about our intentions, our goals, our plans, our, there I use the word dreams, our mind wanders to the future quite a bit, too. Researchers call this our mind's prospective bias.

• 41:50Chris Bailey?

  This is one of the most remarkable parts of zooming in on this idea of attention in the, in the book that you mentioned. I won't mention the name of the book again because I hate when people plug their stuff constantly. But when you look at where our mind wanders to, our mind wanders to think about the future 48% of the time. So about half of the time, our mind is just kind of in the shower, we're driving, we're doing the dishes.

• 42:17Chris Bailey?

  We're planning, right? And 28% of the time, we're thinking about the present. Where this is when you're typing up an email and you can't figure out how to phrase it. So you walk across your, what do you call it? A flat, an apartment. And on the way there, when you're on your way to make a cup of green tea, not coffee, the solution hits you. And then you run back, you type up the email, you figure out how to phrase it and you forgot about the green tea in the first place. We do want her to think about the past around 12% of the time, but a lot of that time, we're recalling ideas. Sometimes we do recall, you know, those cringe-worthy memories, those stupid things that you've said.

• 42:58Chris Bailey?

  We do recall that sometimes, but most of the time, we're, we're thinking about ideas. And where we connect all three, where all three meet in the middle, it's great to plan. It's great to rest. It's great to recharge doing something habitual. But when we connect the past to the present, to the future, to the present, to the past, to the future, and so on, we think about an idea that we heard on a podcast and we connect that to a problem that we're facing in that present moment. And we connect that to a conversation we might have in the future. And then we think about that future conversation. When we connect all three mental temporal destinations, we arrive at ideas that we

• 43:41Chris Bailey?

  would never have arrived at if we were just focused on something. If we were on Twitter, if we were checking email one more time. There is, you know, economists refer to it as diminishing marginal utility, where our enjoyment of something goes down. You know, that, that 30th bite of ice cream is way less novel than the first and the 31st, by God, you might be throwing up. Productivity is the same way, right? That 30th check of email is probably a lot less necessary than just going for a walk. It's mind wandering that makes that space between the things that we do meaningful.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  So if that's the advantage of how to unfocus, of how to relinquish our focus throughout the day, talk to me about the science and the strategies around when we need to put the hammer down, when we need to actually get in, we've got a thing that we need to do.

• 44:43Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  The proposal needs finishing, the podcast needs editing, the article needs writing, whatever.

• 44:48Chris Bailey?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's, it's funny because relative to the research on that deliberate mind wandering, which I call scatter focus, because deliberate, saying deliberate mind wandering every time is, is kind of awkward. You know, relatively speaking, the steps to devoting our full attention to something are quite simple. And if you look at the rhythms that our attention has throughout the day, you know, the research shows something very, very obvious in hindsight. And it's funny how much research is sometimes conducted to prove something so obvious. You know, we focus on something, our mind gets distracted

• 45:30Chris Bailey?

  by something internal or external, which is, and sampling studies show that we get distracted internally versus externally about the same proportion. Then we notice that our mind has veered off, then we bring it back. It's simple, right? This happens repeatedly as we ebb and flow through periods of intentional mind wandering, unintentional mind wandering, and focus. You know, the mind wandering, again, about half of the day, focus the other half. So we can combine this with some ideas from the science of intentionality, which I find to be interesting and something I'm planning on doing a deeper dive into in the

• 46:13Chris Bailey?

  future, too. We can choose, first of all, what we want to focus on. And ideally, that's something that is productive. And so it produces something that will lead us to make progress that we want, or something that is meaningful.

• 46:31Chris Bailey?

  An experience that we want to live fully, right? Because that's what life is, right? Like, what's the point? If we're not gonna just have this deep presence with what we're doing? If we're just running from one moment to the next? So, the pre-decision, for lack of a better term, the choice. That's where intentionality comes in. Then, ideally, you know, here's the thing about obstacles as it relates to anything. Goals in general, focus too. Obstacles are infinitely more difficult to deal with when they come up compared to dealing with them ahead of time. And so, you mentioned working out a time or two.

• 47:15Chris Bailey?

  That's a good example of that. We all have fitness routines or fitness ambitions. And the truth is, if you have a period of travel coming up, anticipating that period of travel and how you're gonna work around it will prevent your workout routine from falling through the cracks. But if you scramble to find a gym right when you land in New York City, you'll probably not end up doing much at all, unless you have some external cues like your Apple Watches telling you to close your rings on that particular day. So, the second step is eliminating as many external distractions and interruptions as you can, but also internal distractions and interruptions. Keeping a distractions list, if your mind veers off to think about something that you

• 48:00Chris Bailey?

  have to do as you focus on something, is one powerful way.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  What's a distractions list?

• 48:05Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, it's, so, I have many pages of distractions here. It's just a list of anything that you want to do that isn't what you have intended to do. So, if you really want to focus on something, you know, you set a timer for however long you want to focus on something, and your mind will go all over the place. You'll think about somebody you need to email, you'll think of somebody you need to follow up with, you'll think of something you need to buy on Amazon, you'll think of just all, you'll think of the fact that you need to buy cantaloupe on your way home tomorrow. When those things arise, you put them on the distractions list, and so that when your focus timer goes up, and the duration of which will get, increase over time as you

• 48:49Chris Bailey?

  get better at this skill of deliberateness. When that timer goes off, you can tend to what's on your distractions list. So you don't veer off track.

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference between that and a capture process from GTD?

• 49:01Chris Bailey?

  Nothing.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay, cool.

• 49:03Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, nothing at all.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  People that are listening will probably be familiar with getting things done.

• 49:08Chris Bailey?

  Have you had David on the show?

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  David's been on the show.

• 49:10Chris Bailey?

  He's great.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  He's absolutely fantastic. He was the one that introduced me to a vertical bookcase. So he's got in his office.

• 49:18Chris Bailey?

  Do tell.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  He's got a vertical bookcase, which has a copy of Getting Things Done in each of the 73 languages.

• 49:25Chris Bailey?

  Seventy three.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Some insane number of languages it's been translated into.

• 49:29Chris Bailey?

  Wow.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  And he had this bookcase and I was really impressed by it. And then I ended up buying two of them. So David, if you're listening, thank you for the suggestion.

• 49:37Chris Bailey?

  And send me a link after.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  It's dude, it's absolutely dope. It's the coolest thing. That with a Phillips Hue strip up the back of it, a little bit away from a wall. And you've got what looks like a vertical tower of books.

• 49:50Chris Bailey?

  Like a hail with a halo around.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  Gorgeous. It's good. Well, at least I think I think it's cool. Right.

• 49:57Chris Bailey?

  It's funny because when I've chatted with him, I always thought it was just a stack of books that look like they could topple over at any moment in time.

• 50:05Chris Williamson?

  First thing I said, I was like, David, that's a big, tall stack. It's actually a vertical bookcase, Chris.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so that's us looking at how we can bring a little bit more focus in.

• 50:18Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  What about environment design? Because having an environment which engenders a particular type of mindset is something that I think most people will be familiar with. I think it's broadly understood that you're supposed to go from a place to a place to a place. And if you can try and have, this is the place where I do my work. This is the place where I watch my Netflix. Or a lot of the time, people like myself, maybe even have different devices that they do things on. So I have, I have a type of device for social media. I have a type of device for watching Netflix on. I have a type of device for doing emails and so on. What did you learn that was new or novel? When it comes to focus and environment design?

• 51:02Chris Bailey?

  Oh, oh, there's, there's, there's so many directions to go. I'll, I'll, I'll share just one because I tend to ramble. As you, as you could tell by now, we're 53 minutes into the podcast, or however long you edit this down to.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  53 minutes.

• 51:16Chris Bailey?

  53 minutes, baby, let's go. So, one, one interesting thing that, that I found in the research is the extent to which how messy our environment is influences how we think. And so we're more creative when our environment is messy, and we're more productive and focused when our environment is clean. And the creativity is informed by these different environmental cues that send ripples of, of thought through our unconscious mind that when those ripples hit, an idea that becomes sufficiently activated so as to break through into our conscious

• 52:00Chris Bailey?

  attention, lead us to a creative insight. This is when you're walking through a bookstore and you're just kind of wandering to think about ideas. And then you encounter some random cue that leads you to think about a brilliant idea you wouldn't have arrived at otherwise. It's kind of like scatter focus. It's kind of a similar mode. Dreaming is the same way. There's the, the dreaming brain network that we have is a neural correlate with the daydreaming network that we have. It's just intensified and we have less awareness to when, when this mind, when this mode is activated.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure that you'll have heard the story. Was it Isaac Newton that used to fall asleep with ball bearings in his hand?

• 52:43Chris Bailey?

  I think it was Edison.

• 52:45Chris Williamson?

  Edison?

• 52:46Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Chris Williamson?

  Used to go for a nap in the middle of the afternoon, thinking about a maths problem or some sort of issue that he was coming up with, ball bearings in his hand. As he fell asleep, the ball bearings fell out of his hand, hit the floor, woke him up. But what he was doing was he was using that sort of liminal sleep state, that Perry sleep state, to get him into that default mode, switch off.

• 53:08Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. And then he would go and write stuff on the board.

• 53:12Chris Bailey?

  Yeah. And what a beautiful way of harnessing the, I don't know if my schedule is conducive to holding the handful of marbles over a, over a metal plate and, and waking up when they, when they hit the plate, but. You know, whatever you can do to activate, and alcohol is kind of similar to, to, to sleeping. Because when we consume alcohol, our mind wanders more, but we become less aware of the fact that it has wandered in the first place. So when you have a drink, your mind is more likely to wander off to some far, far away place and you kind of snap back to reality, oh, there goes, there goes your attention again.

• 53:51Chris Bailey?

  And, uh, and, you know, but you're less aware, you know, our, our metacognitive skills plummet when we consume alcohol. So journaling, if you have a glass of wine or, or Scotch nearby can be a helpful reflective strategy, too.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  Go back through what you said a little bit earlier about the elements that make it more likely that we're going to put a task off. Because I think that that structural identifier for, for a lot of people will be, they continue to come up against things that throughout their week, they just procrastination is like inbuilt into them doing the task, even if the task is routineized. So what are some of the common ways that tasks can be structured in a way that makes us want to put them off and also give us some solutions?

• 54:42Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, for sure. So those are, I'll, I'll try to recall them. This is a true test of whatever, I don't know. This is a true test of how good of an editor you are on the pod. No, I'll try to do it. So those are whether a task is boring, whether it is frustrating, so the process is tedious, whether it's difficult or ambiguous. No, those are, so whether it's difficult, whether it lacks personal meaning, so we can't connect with it, whether it lacks intrinsic rewards, and whether it is ambiguous or unstructured. So the process of doing it is not. Rewarding in and of itself. And so you can look at something like doing our taxes is a really good example.

• 55:27Chris Bailey?

  Or you know, you're a business owner, but bookkeeping is another good example of this. Where that's boring, that's frustrating, that's difficult. There's no meaning in paying taxes unless you, I don't know, maybe you find meaning in that. It's ambiguous. This is why the half trillion dollar tax prep industry exists in the United States. Netflix, not boring, not frustrating. This is why we engage with Netflix as we put off other things because it's kind of the opposite of this. But what we can do with this knowledge is we can look at something that we're putting off and we can compare how we relate to that task because it's about us, right? Two people can relate to a task completely differently. We all have different interests and we'll have to adapt for that.

• 56:11Chris Bailey?

  But we can look at what triggers a task sets off in order to connect with why we're putting something off. And so that's kind of the first of all, the awareness of why we're putting something off in the first place. But it's like, I think you mentioned this a bit earlier, defining the very next thing you have to do to move something forward. That's a simple strategy, but it works because it disables a few of those triggers. It makes something immediately more structured. It makes it immediately less ambiguous and a few of the other ones as well. Shrinking how long we do something for until we no longer feel resistance to it. This works really well for meditation, which is in itself a process of understanding the

• 56:55Chris Bailey?

  resistance embedded within the depths of our mind. We can shrink how long we meditate for. This is an idea that I found from my friend, John Krop, who teaches meditation to lawyers. What he'll do is he'll guide people through, okay, do you want to meditate for half an hour? No way in hell the thought of it puts me off. Okay, what about 20 minutes? No. What about 50? No. 12? No. 10? Maybe I could do 10. And so you meditate for 10. And in the process of understanding that resistance and getting to a level that is just beneath it, you know, first of all, the resistance we have to doing things is stacked at the very beginning of a task, jumping in a cold pool. You know, once we do so, we acclimate very quickly.

• 57:37Chris Bailey?

  But understanding that resistance and working with it makes something more structured, less ambiguous, less frustrating, and we see that there's an end in sight. And so the process becomes a bit more rewarding too. Uh, one, one other random idea that comes to mind is connecting with our future selves. So our future self is our self, but from the future, it's just ourselves in the future. Uh, and so when we put something off, we're giving it to ourselves to do, our future selves to do. Uh, and here's the interesting thing, you know, speaking of the science of, of productivity a little bit.

• 58:18Chris Bailey?

  Um, if, if you were to wheel somebody into an FMRI brain scanning machine and you ask them to think about themselves in the future, but also just a total stranger, like, I don't know, Taylor Swift comes to mind because I've been listening to her music all day as I've been writing, great, simple music. What you would find is the two brain scans would be virtually identical to one another. For most of us, most of us view our future selves as a stranger. And what this does, and this is a measure called our future self continuity. So it's just a measure of how tight we are with our future self. Uh, if you find that you continually put things off to tomorrow, when you give it to your future self,

• 59:03Chris Bailey?

  you need to raise your level of future self continuity. So that you don't feel as though the things you're putting off are something you give to a stranger like Taylor Swift to do, so that you have this connection to this, this timeline of your life. Uh, and so a couple of ways of doing this, one of my favorite, actually this is a video podcast. So I can, I can get the picture.

• 59:30Chris Bailey?

  And you can edit out the dead air in the audio. Well, look at the production quality over here. Uh, this is, this is a picture that it, people think, people, when they visit my, uh, my office here, they first of all, they think, wow, this guy's really full of himself because he has a picture of himself across, across the, the way there, but then they see the picture and then they think I'm just a weirdo. Uh, this is a, a picture of me created with an app called Aging Booth. And there's another one called Face App that does pretty much the same thing. It can show you what you're like in the future. They have done studies where they they put somebody with a control group, obviously. And they put some, they give somebody a live projection of their face.

• 1:00:15Chris Bailey?

  But the the projection is aged 20, 30 years into the future. And then, at the end of this experiment, right? After somebody sees this projection of themselves answering just some random questions. They gave the two groups of participants a thousand dollars to either, you know, a theoretical thousand dollars, or else it would have been a very expensive experiment. They gave everybody this grand to divide between their present selves and save for retirement. And what they found is that those who saw this projection of their future selves saved significantly more for retirement compared to those who didn't.

• 1:00:59Chris Bailey?

  And those who are more connected with their future self, they save more money for retirement overall. They're less likely to put off work to tomorrow, less likely to agree to unproductive meetings. So connecting with your future self, you can print, you know, you can frame, frame a picture of it if you want. But also just journaling about alternative futures. You know, one in which you make the change that you've been putting off. One in which you you build that pipeline of of podcast episodes and don't put that off. And another where you don't and suffer the consequences. That leads you to step into the shoes of your future self. By the way, by the way, this is why the rule of three works so well in that frame.

• 1:01:44Chris Bailey?

  At the, you fast forward to the end of the day and you think, what three things will I want to have accomplished? That's your future self. Same with every week, same with every year. It's it's in bridging the gap between where we are and where we want to be that we overcome procrastination, that we get to where we want. And so, yeah, understanding the triggers. Connecting with our future self, creating a bit more structure by defining the next thing, or shrinking resistance. One final way is to list the costs of putting something off. And so, the fascinating thing about procrastination is it is a purely visceral and emotional reaction to something that we do not want to do. Like, there's no logic

• 1:02:29Chris Bailey?

  embedded within the construct of procrastination whatsoever. And so, when we list the costs of doing something, we activate the logical centers in our mind to overcome that emotional impulse. There's a procrastination researcher named Tim Pichel, who describes procrastination as when we give in to feel good, when we give into that emotional, instinctual part of us. And by firing up that logical prefrontal cortex in our mind, we overcome those impulses. So, long ass answer, I know, but that's a bit of a geek out on the psychology of procrastination.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  I think it's important.

• 1:03:13Chris Bailey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  A question I've been had, I've had in my mind for a little while. Do you think that people who think about productivity are happier on average than the people who don't?

• 1:03:24Chris Bailey?

  No, I don't. And

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  I would agree, in my experience.

• 1:03:29Chris Bailey?

  It, I think it, well, I think it relates to savoring. People who focus too much on accomplishment, I think accomplishment focus drives productivity focus often, because they're, it's like you said-

• 1:03:45Chris Williamson?

  Productivity is in service of the thing, right?

• 1:03:48Chris Bailey?

  Exactly. It's like you said, our micro actions contribute to our goals overall. There's actually been studies that are conducted in this field of savoring research, where they found that the wealthier somebody is, the less likely they are to savor their lives. And savoring is, you know, just when we enjoy something in the moment. And it's the process through which we convert experiences, positive experiences, into positive emotions, right? When you have this cup of green tea, and you enjoy every sip, and you find yourself present with every sip.

• 1:04:32Chris Bailey?

  That that creates meaning, right? When you enjoy the the things in your life that are good. But the research shows that the more accomplishment driven somebody is, the less likely they are to enjoy their lives, the less time they spend savoring. Savoring is a skill that we can get better at better at over time. But I completely agree that the more driven somebody is, the more ambitious, especially to achieve traditional measures of success, somebody is, the less happy they are. Yeah.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  That seems to be the case, I think. So there seems to me to be a undercurrent at the moment of new wave productivity slash lifestyle design writers, coaches, influencers that are taking a much more holistic, broad frame view. I think you would fall into that. I think that Ali Abdaal's new book is is moving toward that. But you see everybody kind of enter this world in the Gary Vaynerchuk hustle and grind until your eyes bleed. Like that kind of GTD, how many things can I get out of my day? I'm going to delegate, I'm

• 1:05:51Chris Williamson?

  going to have my system set up, so on and so forth, right? How much can I automate? And how much can I just brute force achieve?

• 1:05:57Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Chris Williamson?

  And then over time, you realize that if the goal of productivity is to do the thing that you intended to do, and the thing that you intended to do is to live a life which in retrospect, you're glad you lived.

• 1:06:09Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Chris Williamson?

  All of the things that you take on the step to do that are all they're all not in service of the end goal of actually being happy or living a meaningful life.

• 1:06:19Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  And I do think if I was to be able to bet on a prediction market for this, I'd say that there's probably a pretty high likelihood that you're going to see a movement toward this holistic, high performance, more fully rounded productivity view that.

• 1:06:37Chris Williamson?

  The satisfaction that you get from getting things done and from moving yourself towards your goals is important.

• 1:06:42Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Chris Williamson?

  That is only correct when it's mediated by moving yourself toward goals that you genuinely want. So, working out what you want, working out what you want to want, working out how your intentionality and your deliberateness on a day-to-day basis ensures that the things that you do move you toward it. Then, only after you've done all of that, do the actual tactics around implementing something that facilitates all of the layers that are above it, only does that then come in. And then finally, you need to be able to have the off switch as well.

• 1:07:13Chris Bailey?

  Yes.

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  So, we've had this big, big, big bulk of productivity work, which has come out over the last sort of 10 and 20 years, which is really easy to read, Cal Newport's deep work, you know, seminal books, like awesome, really, really great books.

• 1:07:24Chris Bailey?

  Amazing books.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  And yet, there is this whole other side of what's this in service of? What are you doing outside of this? Does this contribute to your long-term goals of happiness and meaning? Is it making the world a better place? All of this stuff, I think, is what's next. And I'm hoping that the question of are people who think about productivity happier on average will be flipped. Because what people, what exists under the umbrella of productivity in five to 10 years' time should hopefully include people who have worked out how to optimize their off-time, who have worked out how to optimize their intentionality, their deliberateness, their

• 1:08:08Chris Williamson?

  micro actions contributing to their long-term goals, their scattered focus, that, you know, all of that stuff. So, I think that the more holistic and the more wide-ranging it is, the better it'll get. But I would agree that at the moment, we're not quite there.

• 1:08:21Chris Bailey?

  Yeah, and I think what would define this field as being holistic is that the values that we manifest through our actions and through our pursuit of productivity aren't just related to cold accomplishment, which doesn't really...

• 1:08:40Chris Bailey?

  Prove to be a satisfying end in and of itself. You know, you can always accomplish more. There's one study that I encountered that asked everybody of all incomes, how much they more they wanted to make to be happy. And no matter how much somebody made, they said 50% more than what they already made. And that includes the wealthiest people that were surveyed. And I think that's indicative of something deeper, which is that the problem is not that, the problem is the pursuit of more at all costs, right? And that's, that's pure, you know, it's all about what values you're manifesting through

• 1:09:24Chris Bailey?

  that pursuit of productivity, I think. If the values you're manifesting are greed, are just attaining more of everything that you have because your life revolves around dopamine, which is what propels this pursuit of more, but also propels us toward distraction, right? Seeking more of everything that we have, including more money, as well as just checking Instagram more are directly related because both are the result of a, of a mind that is overtly dependent on dopamine. I really hope we see going into the future, I'm going to try to do this in my own work as well.

• 1:10:02Chris Bailey?

  I, in fact, just handed a book in last week about this more holistic, holistic's the best word I can come up with right now. But this, this warmer, this friendlier, this, this more meaningful

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  It's a more global view, I think, of what people want out of productivity. Dude, I mean, you're in the, you're in the position to do it. You know, people like you and Ali and Cal have the opportunity to use the influence to not only be able to get people to do lots of things, but to actually understand what it's in service of.

• 1:10:39Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Chris Williamson?

  And I'm, like I say, if I could bet, if I could put some money down, I'd put a good bit of cash down that I think this is the next big The next big sort of push that we're going to see, you have this sort of swing, right? Like a pirate ship.

• 1:10:56Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  You have intensities up to one side, you have intensities that come back to the other, and then you find somewhere in the middle that is about the right level. And I think that hopefully we're going to see counter to some great productivity books. We're going to see some sort of anti-productivity or what do you do outside of it?

• 1:11:13Chris Bailey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  And then those two blended together. So yeah, the next, the next five to 10 years, I think of, of writing in this space is going to be really cool. And you're well positioned to do it, man. So whatever it is that's coming out next, I'm excited to see it.

• 1:11:24Chris Bailey?

  I can't wait.

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  Chris Bailey, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out what you do, where should they go?

• 1:11:32Chris Bailey?

  So my books, I have saved the plug for the end of the show. Hyperfocus is the one that you've, intense name, but really just about acting more intentionally every day. Productivity Project is where the, is my other book where I pulled some of that procrastination, some of those procrastination ideas from. And Time and Attention is the name of my podcast as well. My site is a life of productivity.com. That, that's enough plugs.

• 1:12:00Chris Williamson?

  Has that got all of your blog posts on?

• 1:12:03Chris Bailey?

  Yeah. And they're all up there for free. There's an annoying newsletter pop up that you need to X out of, but everything is ad free. And, you know, I put it out there for, you know, cause I kind of, my, my whole business model is I share whatever I can freely in the hopes that people will either buy the books or book me for a speaking, speaking gig, because those are the main revenue sources and then try to give out as much as I possibly can for free outside of that.

• 1:12:32Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:12:34Chris Bailey?

  Thanks so much.