July 8, 2024 • 35 mins
By 2030 we'll only work 15 hours a week, predicted the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes back in 1930. He thought advances in technology and wealth would let us earn enough money to live in a day or two - leaving the rest of the week for leisure and community service.
How wrong he was. We seem to be working more than ever - with technology adding extra tasks to our workdays (like answering emails and monitoring Slack). Dr Laurie longs for more leisure time, but how can she tame her fear of being "unproductive"?
Computer scientist Cal Newport explains how we all got into this mess - and why we still treat modern employees as if they were farm laborers or assembly line workers. Reformed "productivity junkie" Oliver Burkeman also offers tips on how to concentrate our minds on fulfilling and important work - and not little tasks that chew up so much of our days.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and
the great depression that followed quite reasonably scared a lot
of people. Fortunes were lost, savings disappeared, factories closed, and
jobs evaporated. The only places doing a roaring trade were
soup kitchens and breadlines. Things looked bad, with no end
(00:38):
in sight. But one man wasn't that worried.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
We are suffering just now from a bad attack of
economic pessimism, so.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Said famed British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It is common to hear people say that a decline
in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in a
decade which lies ahead of us. I believe that this
is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
People were having trouble keeping a roof over their heads
and food on the table, but Keynes wanted them to
look to the far horizon.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
My purpose is to take wings into the future. What
can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life
to be one hundred years? Hence, what are the economic
possibilities for our grandchildren?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You might recognize the voice reading Keyes's words. It's my colleague,
the economist Tim Harford from the Cautionary Tales podcast. Tim's
very familiar with Keanes's rosy predictions about what life would
look like in the year twenty thirty.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Kaines thought that the Great Depression was just an economic blip,
albeit quite a painful one. He predicted that, thanks to
industrial and scientific developments, the economy would boom, and that
the standard of living enjoyed by people would improve dramatically. Indeed,
he suggested that most people would be so rich their
struggles to make ends meet would be consigned to history.
(02:02):
At last, they'd earn more than enough money to pay
their bills in just a few hours each week, with
the rest of their time freedom up to enjoy life.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
To people in nineteen thirty, these predictions must have been
mind blowing. Kines believed his grandchildren would enjoy a fifteen
hour work week, with ample time left not just to
relax in leisure, but to engage in a host of
purposeful activities like increased kindness and civic participation. And Caines
thought our whole attitude towards work would change radically as
a result.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high
social importance, There would be great changes in the code
of morals. For love of money as a possession, will
we recognize for what it is a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Well, dear happiness lab listener, congratulations, because you are currently
living in that utopian time that Caine's envisioned. How are
you enjoying your fifteen hour work week? To Kanses's credit,
we do have a much higher standard of living than
our grand parents. We also have smart TVs, dishwashers, microwaves, iPhones,
and the internet, fun and time saving gadgets the people
(03:09):
of nineteen thirty could only dream of. But although Kaines
was right about our increased incomes, he was wrong about
what would happen to our sense of busyness. Rather than
living relaxed lives of leisure, people in twenty twenty four
are working harder than ever. Americans today worked ten percent
more hours than they did in the nineteen seventies. Economists
have also observed a shift in the last few decades
(03:30):
and the usual relationship between a person's wages and the
number of hours they work. Historically, people who earn less
money tended to work more hours, but that relationship has
now reversed. These days, it's higher paid individuals who are
spending more time at work. They also report significantly more
time stress than they did in the previous decades. If
Kans had lived to see what workaholics we've all become,
(03:53):
he'd be very sad. Instead of a utopian work life balance,
our generation got side hustles and career cushioning and time
hacks and over employment and burnout culture. I've been thinking
about Kynes's predictions a lot these days, because lately I've
feeling busier than ever. I'm privileged to have a great
standard of living and a job I love, but my
(04:14):
to do list feels endless. I spend a lot of
time feeling frantic, fantasizing that any day now I'll finally
be able to get through all the stuff on my
plate so I can take a breather. But that fantasy
day of rest never seems to come. And what's my
solution to feeling so so overworked all the time. It's
usually to double down on my business. I try to
(04:34):
get through my to do list as quickly as I
possibly can, so I work long hours and multitask whenever possible.
But this endless quest to optimize my overloaded schedule usually
winds up increasing my sense of overwhelmed rather than decreasing it.
I end up feeling like everything is urgent, and not
just when I'm at work. Somehow, this obsession with using
time well leaks into my leisure time too. In the
(04:57):
rare moments I do get a break, I feel anxious
that I'm not getting enough productive stuff done, and as
is probably obvious, none of this overwhelm is all that
good for my quest to feel happier. This episode about
the happiness challenges that I struggle with, I'm going to
explore how I and so many others got this messed
up when it comes to busyness and productivity. Are we
(05:18):
doomed to our relentlessly overloaded schedules, or can we claim
the leisure time that Caine's envisioned as our generation's birthright.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
from what really make us happy. The good news is
(05:39):
that understanding the science of the mind can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Santos Okay, Wednesday May twenty nine, six am podcast interview
with person in the UK.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Nine am meeting with my lab manager, ten am brainstorm
meeting for my new course. Eleven am Zoom podcast recording.
Looking through my schedule on an average day, I'm pretty
much doing ten plus hours of work. Oh and I
have to make my husband's birthday cach. What happened to
the fifteen hour work week that Keenes promised us?
Speaker 5 (06:20):
If you do well in a career a professional era,
you can actually expect to get busier and busier and busier.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Writer Oliver Berkman has shared my sense of overwhelm for decades.
He always had too much on his plate, and like me,
he tried many a hack to team his overloaded schedule.
He even reviewed time management techniques and productivity tools for
The Guardian newspaper in a weekly article called This column
Will Change Your Life. Oliver desperately tried anything in everything
(06:47):
to get his packed schedule under control.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Fancy notebooks to organize your time in year, planners, pens
that cost too much money, you know, all part of
an attempt to try to reach this sort of position
of feeling completely in control of time.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Things finally came to a head one day about ten
years ago. Oliver was sitting alone on a park bench,
sxiously ruminating about all his undone tasks, when a scary
thought occurred to him, None of this productivity stuff is
ever going to work. In an instant, he realized that
no matter how much work and self discipline and time
management gear he marshaled, he simply was never going to
(07:24):
feel on top of all he had to do. That
dream of getting everything he needed to get done done.
It was always going to remain out of reach.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
The reward for good time management is more work.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oliver christent this painful realization the efficiency trap.
Speaker 5 (07:38):
Anything you do to try to use time more effectively
by becoming more efficient, seems to be a fairly general
law that what will actually end up happening is that
you get a lot more busy and a lot more stressed.
The sort of abstract way of talking about it is
that if you make a system capable of processing more inputs,
then it will just attract a lot more inputs. A
(07:59):
concrete example gives email. Right, if you get really good
at answering email at a really fast tempo. You end
up with loads more email because you're getting replies to
your replies and you have to reply to that, and
you get a reputation for being responsive. And it doesn't
just apply to email. If you're in a workplace setting
where there's some particular kind of project that needs to
be done and you get a reputation for being really
(08:19):
fast at completing that kind of project, you're going to
get loads more of those projects to complete. So that's
the trap of efficiency. It's an attempt to try to
get everything done, to get to the end of everything,
but because the supply is infinite, it's not actually a
good way to build a more productive or fulfilling life.
It's just a way to sort of get busier.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Oliver argues that this sense of overwhelmed has begun to
take over our entire modern existence.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
But we not only overwhelmed by work tasks, by email,
by things that we have to do. We're overwhelmed by
potential experiences. We could have bucket list places we could go,
things we could be doing on any given evening, people
to date, depending on your context, you know. So there's
all these kind of different ways in which there's just
more experience to be had in the world. So I
(09:04):
think that leads to sort of permanent state of feeling overwhelmed, A.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Permanent state of feeling of whelmed. Yep, that pretty much
describes my life these days, and all of our's tough
message is that if you're feeling that way too, it
is at least in some ways, your own fault.
Speaker 5 (09:19):
I never want to underplay the sort of broader societal
and economic reasons for this, but in some sense we
do bring it on ourselves, or we at least collaborate
with the situation, because we're presented with this sort of
infinity of things to do, and the very first thing
we say to ourselves is like, Okay, let's find a
way to do an infinite amount of things.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
One reason is that being busy all the time makes
us feel kind of important.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
If you are somebody who has your self worth wrapped
up in your productivity, right, you think that you've got
to do a certain amount or reach some kind of
standard to sort of be okay, then being busy is
proof to yourself that you're in demand, that the spigot
of opportunities has not dried up, that it's all very
much part of feeling that you are doing all you
(10:04):
need to be doing to feel good about yourself.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I definitely felt called out by this comment. How often
have people asked me, Hey, how's it going, only to
get my standard response of Oh, I'm just so busy.
The frazzled feelings behind that reply aren't fun. But if
I'm being honest, I do feel weirdly proud of myself.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
We've created this situation that makes busyness into a status symbol.
So then obviously, by definition, you want to make sure
that you've got some of that business.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
But there's a cost to seeking out busyness for the
sake of busyness. We wind up stuck in a painful
psychological state that the journalist Marilyn Robinson has called a
sense of joyless urgency.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
I mean, I think that is just a very very
widespread feeling, the sense that you've really got to get somewhere,
but it's not really the place you'd necessarily want to
be going, and certainly the process of getting there is
not what you wanted to be doing.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
How did we all get so hooked into this joyless
relationship with our busy schedules. Oliver suspects that at least
some of the problem stems from how humans have learned
to think about time.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Going from introduction and widespread adoption of mechanical clocks and
then into the industrial revolution, we'll get this very long,
slow process that is characterized by people starting to think
of time as a resource. And once you have this
idea that like, there's you and then there's time, and
you're living your life sort of lined up against the
sort of a yardstick or a measure of some kind,
(11:24):
you have to keep up. If you use a bit
of time wrongly, you're wasting it. You can try to
squeeze more things into that time, and all of this
is kind of a spatial metaphor, right, It's all to
do with time as containers and little boxes. When you
really get right back down to the experience of being
in time, it isn't like that at all. We just
get this one moment and then the next moment and
(11:46):
then the next moment. I think we really need this
idea of being able to think about time as a
resource for all sorts of things. But it's a little
bit crazy, really when we try constantly to interact with
time as something that it isn't, which is something we
can sort of hord or endlessly fit more things into it.
None of it quite makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
But there's another way that our thinking about productivity doesn't
quite make sense, one that relates to the changing phase
of modern work. These days, a lot of our jobs
are a bit weird. The happiness lab. We're a turn
in a moment.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
Up until about the mid twentieth century, we had really clear,
well defined definitions of productivity.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Best Selling author and computer scientist Cal Newport has spent
a lot of time thinking about why modern work is
so overwhelming.
Speaker 6 (12:34):
So if you're in agriculture, it was bushels per acre
of land under cultivation, you could measure it. It was
a number you could change how you planted your crops,
that you could see if that number went up and down.
When we got to industrial manufacturing mills followed by factories,
we could do something similar.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
A factory manager on an assembly line can easily measure,
say the number of Widgets or Model T Fords produced
per labor hour. People could just tell if everyone was
using their time efficiently and contributing to the company's bottom line.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
All that fell out the window with knowledge work, which
really emerged as a major sector in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Knowledge workers create useful goods and services not through physical,
assembly line style labor, but through their thoughts. The modern
economy is full of such professionals scientists, doctors, writers, professors, attorneys,
even podcast hosts. But professionals like these don't end the
day with a bunch of widgets piled up on their workbench,
and that means it's harder to assess their productivity. Take
(13:30):
for example, what it would mean to define productivity in
my own form of knowledge work, making a podcast. How
could I make the happiness lab as productive as possible?
I could try to take a mathematical approach and define
productivity as the number of episodes we make. But should
I go with the sheer number of episodes? Maybe longer
episodes are better than shorter ones. Or maybe I should
(13:52):
count AD revenue per episode or listener downloads. Each of
these could be a reasonable metric for podcast productivity, So
what should I choose? Similar kinds of questions pervade pretty
much all knowledge work.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
We do not get a lot of direct feedback in
terms of how well is what you're doing right now
impacting what we care about. It's free floating.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And things get even more complicated when you ask how
you should be allocating your time to achieve whatever free
floating definition and productivity you came up with.
Speaker 6 (14:23):
The typical knowledge worker has many different things they're working on,
and what they're working on might be different than the
person right next to them. It can shift. It's more informal. Also,
how we do our work is very personal, which is
a real innovation to knowledge work we don't see in
other places.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Supervising factory workers on an assembly line is easy. You
figure out how to best build your widget, and you
tell your employees, hey, make the widget like this. But
none of that holds for a job like podcasting or
teaching or programming.
Speaker 6 (14:50):
Knowledge work is too complicated. It's creative, it's skilled. The
individual knowledge workers know more about what they're doing than
the people supervising them. So we got to allow the
individual workers autonomy. Allow them to have autonomy in figuring
out how they're going to do their own work.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
But managers did want some way to determine and whether
or not knowledge workers were putting in useful effort, so
they came up with what cal thinks is a very
problematic alternative pseudo productivity.
Speaker 6 (15:17):
So suitor productivity is a crude heuristic that says, visible
activity that's going to be my proxy for figuring out
whether or not you're doing useful effort. So the more
I see you doing things, the more productive. In scare quotes,
I'm going to assume you're being. This is the dominant
way I think we measure effective work.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
This need to monitor visible effort led to other changes
in the knowledge work sector, ones that had nasty implications
for a worker's sense of autonomy and happiness.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
When the knowledge sector grew as a big sector and
we said, how are we going to literally organize this work,
we said, well, let's just do what the factories do.
You will come to a building, we'll all gather in
the same place. We'll be there for a long shift,
so that we can just see that everyone is working.
That's why I know you're working, because you have to
come to this building and I can physically surveil you.
That's suitor productivity. There's nothing about cognitive work that says
(16:08):
the best way to do this is as many hours
as possible, or to do it in one contiguous shift.
But if our main metric for productivity is visible activity,
then it made life a lot easier for the managers, But.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Of course such surveillance didn't make life easier for the
knowledge workers.
Speaker 6 (16:23):
Suit of productivity makes us miserable, and has been making
us more miserable. It barely worked until about the two thousands.
Then digital technology enter the scene, and it spiraled out
of control. Because now I can leave a trace of
me working or not working by doing emails, et cetera anywhere.
Now there's an unlimited supply of work. Because one of
the things the digital age brought to us was zero
(16:44):
friction work assignment. I can just hey, can you handle
this sin boom? It's off my plate.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
This emergence of email and slack channels and team meetings
and group texts meant that workers had way more opportunities
to show off their visible activity, and managers quickly took notice, Hey,
I haven't.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Really been seeing you in the email chains recently. You
weren't at these zoom meetings. You are slow to respond
to the slack chack. What's going on? Maybe you're not productive.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
But managers weren't the only ones to embrace pseudo productivity.
Knowledge workers soon began to internalize this notion. Practices like
clearing your emails. To achieve inbox zero and being on
slack after hours became almost as important to workers as
the projects that made up their true job descriptions, especially
since incremental progress on the big projects will always be
(17:30):
harder to show off.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
You don't know if I'm at home or I'm in
my office, you're not in nearby. You don't know that
I'm working deeply on an article that leaves no trace,
but if I'm jumping onto email threads, that does leave
a trace, And so it biased us towards what's going
to leave the best trace through the environment of pseudo productivity, evaluation.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
And this desire to leave some tangible evidence of your
efforts has a terrible effect on the actual output of
knowledge work.
Speaker 6 (17:54):
So one of the consequences of pseudo productivity is that
it gets in the way of the ability to give
the most important things you do unbroken attention. How do
we get our brain to actually produce value. It's the
ability to focus intensely on some If you want to
produce the best things you're capable of using your brain,
you don't want to be distracted. I want to focus
(18:15):
on this hard thing I'm doing until it's done. Pseudo
productivity punishes that.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I've totally been punished by my internalized pseudo productivity. I'll
be in the middle of writing a podcast script or
an academic paper when I'll hear a ding from a text,
so I peek at my phone, get distracted, and take
longer to finish the task I'm really supposed to be
focused on. And that sense of distraction doesn't just bubble
up during actual interruptions. Whenever I find myself deep in
a writing project, I'll inevitably think, you know, I haven't
(18:42):
checked my email in a while. I wonder if there's
something important next thing. I know, I'm deep in my inbox.
I've internalized the importance of visible activity so much that
I start feeling anxious whenever I'm not engaged in it,
and that anxiety gets worse when my bigger projects fail
to produce an obvious output. For a while, it feels
almost easier to spend my time on dumb, pseudo productive
(19:03):
stuff like clearing my inbox.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
And now we have whole departments, we have whole teams
and organizations producing a lot less valuable work because we
are servicing this crude proxy that doesn't actually get to
the core of what it means to be productive. It's
completely cross purposes.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
But pseudo productivity doesn't just impair actual work productivity. It
also increases our stress levels and decreases our happiness.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
There's an unavoidable consequence of pseudo productivity that you're going
to get overloaded and you're going to stay overloaded. Saying
yes to someone asking you to do something is very important,
right because that's a very clear signal of activity. We
have to get rid of pseudo productivity. We need much
more humanistic, psychologically aware, and evidence based approaches for saying
(19:51):
this is what we mean by productivity in the knowledge sector.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Thankfully, Cal has come up with just such an approach,
one that he outlines in his fabulous book Slow Productivity,
The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. Accomplishment without feeling
burned out, Sign me up. Cal's idea for slow productivity
was inspired by the slow food movement, a campaign in
the late eighties pushing back against fast food culture arguing
(20:18):
that people should take the time to grow and cook
their own healthy food.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
Slow food actually gives us a couple really good ideas
for how to form a reform movement. One it says,
when dealing with a cultural situation that's displeasing, don't just
attack what you don't like, give a positive alternative. The
second part of their reform program was don't just try
to create the better thing looking forward, make sure that
(20:42):
you're also drawing from wisdom that is accumulated in the past.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Cal now applies the same approach to fixing our overwhelmed schedules.
He turned to knowledge workers of the past, professionals who
lived back in John Maynard Keynes's day and even before,
to see how they produce their most effective work. Such
insights led Cal to develop the three core principles of
slow productivity, doing fewer.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
Things at once, working at a more natural pace, and
then obsessing over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Let's start with doing fewer things at once.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
Well, when we're doing fewer things, we are relieving ourselves
of not just a lengthy task list, but the administrative
overhead that comes along with each of those items on
our task lists. And this is something I think people
often overlook is that when I say yes, I'm not
just saying yes to eventually, how many hours am I
(21:34):
going to spend writing the report or doing the committee
or whatever it was I said yes to. When I
say yes to something, it's also going to come with
persistent administrative overhead responsibilities. It's going to be emails back
and forth with people who are involved in it. All right,
every Wednesday we got to like jump on zoom, and
it's going to be cognitive space taken up by the
fact that, hey, this thing's ongoing in some part of
(21:56):
your brain wants to think about it. So when you
say yes the lots of things, even if you're not
working on the actual projects at the same time, all
of their administrative overhead begins to pile up. And so
what happens is the more things I've said yes to,
the less time I actually have to work on things.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
This hit me like a ton of bricks. When I
look at my own calendar, I see days and days
broken up with staff meetings and check ins and random appointments,
cal calls, commitments like these productivity termites. They eat up
the big blocks of time in our schedule, so much
so that little solid foundation is left for the stuff
that matters.
Speaker 6 (22:31):
And this is a negative feedback cycle that can get
pretty nasty, because once you have enough of your day
servicing commitments but not working on them, you fall behind.
And the only way to escape from the spiral is
to start reclaiming time outside of work hours, and they
have to work on the weekends and late at night
and early in the morning. Doing fewer things at once
(22:52):
is not the same as doing fewer things overall. In fact,
you're going to accomplish a lot more per year if
you keep your plate much more sparse.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
But it's not enough to streamline what you work on.
You also need to work at a more natural pace.
As cal looked to the great writers and thinkers of
the past, he realized they didn't work the way most
of us do today.
Speaker 6 (23:11):
So a knowledge work emerged. We said, okay, how are
we going to deal with this? We said, we'll use
pseudo productivity as our metric for effective action. Well, what
was the best way to monitor pseudo activity back then?
We said, we'll run our offices like a factory.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Managers brought knowledge workers into a building where they could
be observed. Employees were stuck there for eight hours a day,
working the entire time. But applying a factory model to
writing good computer programs or academic papers or podcast scripts
doesn't work that well.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
So Cognitive work is not something that you can just
churn out of your mind like a widget, as many
hours as you want in a row. It's not like
putting steering wheels on a model T. It needs way
more ups and downs. I have to get the right information.
I need to think about what I want to do,
and then there's periods of great intensity, But then that
might need to be coupled with periods where I'm really
pulling back. My brain is recharging and trying to find
(24:00):
new inspiration. Our brain does not operate like an assembly line,
but we run it that way, and now I think
we have a lot of misery because of it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Kel argues we need to take a much more humane
approach to our schedules. We need to build in the
natural variability that thinking well requires. We need to expect
that some days will be filled with more progress than others,
and we need to intentionally build in time to recharge
without beating ourselves up over it. And cal has a
specific suggestion for doing this, a practice he calls small seasonality.
Speaker 6 (24:29):
Standard seasonality is what our Neolithic ancestors used to do.
The winter, I don't do as much work as the fall.
When I'm bringing into harvest, and you have these variations
of seasons, so we can shift intensity at smaller scales.
I'm going to take the three weeks in December before
we get to the holidays, and I pull back for
those three weeks. It's a lower intensity period that's not
(24:49):
as big as a season, but it gives me some variation.
You could do this at an even smaller scale. I
don't schedule meetings on Mondays. Don't tell anybody this. When
someone wants to set up meetings, you can propose all
sorts of times, just never happen to propose a time
on Mondays. So now every week you have this first
day that has a fully different field than the other days.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But working naturally also requires taking a healthier approach to
your workspace.
Speaker 6 (25:13):
If our work primarily uses our brain, everything that impacts
our brain is relevant to our work. So just like
if I was an athlete and my work primarily involves
my body, other things I'm doing to my body matters.
If I'm sort of doing a bunch of squats right
before a soccer game, it's going to matter. But we
don't think about this with cognitive work. But the environment
(25:34):
that our brain is exposed to impacts how our brain functions.
And so when you see that laundry basket at your
home office, there's a whole other part of your brain
that says, we gotta do laundry. When are we gonna
do laundry? Which means your efforts to write a book, chapter,
whatever is going to be degraded. So if you make
a living with your brain, you have to separate where
(25:54):
you do this brain work from where you live. Location
matters if you're a.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Remote worker, Cal recommends finding a spot that doesn't remind
you of all your other daily pressures. Find a coffee
shop or co working space, even a large closet, anywhere
that stops you from c and thinking about all the
stressful stuff in life, so you can focus on your
important projects. And once you're settled down to work, Cal says,
you need to obsess over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 6 (26:18):
Obsessing over the quality of what you do is the
glue that holds the other two principles together. There's two
things that happen once you start caring about quality. One,
it justifies for yourself going slower, because to do things
really well, you have to slow down. On the flip side,
when you get really good at something. Because you obsess
over your quality, you get more leverage and control over
(26:39):
your work life, and it becomes easier.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Obsessing over quality can help produce burnout in other ways, too.
Burnout typically emerges when we experience what clinicians call a
values mismatch in our work. We want to produce work
of a certain standard, but we just don't have the
time or bandwidth to accomplish that. When we can't give
meaningful projects our full attention and creative energy because we're
doing so many other things, we feel cynical and overwhelmed.
(27:04):
But obsessing over the quality of our work prevents that
sort of values mismatch. We wind up able to put
our full passion and energy into what truly matters. But
this ability to focus on what truly matters requires one
other important, but very painful realization. There may never be
enough time to do everything we really care about.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
We've got minds that allow us to conceive of an
infinite number of things we want to do, or could do,
or should do, and yet we are these sort of
animals who can only do so much of it.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
The happiness lab or return after the break.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
The desperate side of being a productivity junkie is that
it is an attempt to sort of not have to
confront certain truths about either one's own life or human
life in general, and the fact that you know, in
case of time management, there just isn't enough time for
all the things that feel like they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Former productivity junkie Oliver Berkman now embraces all the tenets
of slow productivity that Cal Newport described earlier. He does less,
tries to work at a more reasonable piece, and focuses
on high quality work. But Oliver thinks there's one more
painful truth we must confront if we want to find
the utopian work life balance promised by John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
If you're convinced that in the end there must be
a time for everything, then you're not going to say
no to the right things. You're not going to make
the right choices about what not to spend your time on,
and as a result, it's just going to be more
and more stuff incoming.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Oliver explores this idea in four thousand Weeks Time Management
for Mortals. The four thousand weeks in the book's title
refers to the length of the average human life span.
Pretty sure, right, The.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
Important point is just that it's finite that has an
end point. It means that there's no reason to assume
that there will be time in a day or in
a life to do all the things that feel to
you like they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
No time in a life to do all the stuff
that matters. I can't what Oliver is saying here, but
I find the realization terrifying.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
I do think that humans have, since the beginning of
humanity railed against their finitude. Most of our worst problems
with time, the ways we end up procrastinating, distracting ourselves,
feeling unfulfilled, feeling too busy, feeling overwhelmed, can be traced
back to various forms of this avoidance. It's because we
want to make ourselves feel unlimited that we try to
(29:26):
set up ludicrous productivity systems that are going to enable
us to do absolutely everything.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Embracing the idea of a time limited life can help
us come to terms with the fact that we're simply
never going to get everything done, which forces us to
become intentional about what we choose to do.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
You don't get to choose not making tough decisions about
what you do with your time, but you can make
wiser or less wise ones. First of all, ask yourself
how much time you reasonably have available, and then decide
what are the most important tasks to put into that box.
So maybe that strikes people as very obvious, but in
fact I think what people instinctively do instead is the opposite.
(30:01):
They get up in the morning and say what has
to be done by the end of the day, paying
no heed to the question of whether there's actually enough
time to do it, and then you make bad choices.
You try to clear the decks, you try to do
all the short stuff first, and you find you've got
no time for the really important stuff. You end up
feeling inadequate and dumb because you didn't get through the list.
And it's just a sort of recipe for procrastination and psychodrama.
(30:22):
So it's really just about saying, this is the time
that is available, given that, what shall I do.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Oliver admits to struggling with this level of acceptance from
time to time. Luckily he has sparked time management gurus
like his wife around to help him.
Speaker 5 (30:36):
I remember on a couple of occasions asking aloud in
her presence, whether I really had enough time left to
meet a deadline? On something that I was working for,
and of course corresponds always like, that's the wrong question
you have this time. The question is what's the wisest
use of that time. All of our time is trade offs.
You're always choosing not to do things, and so the
(30:57):
question is, just, given this available time, what's the best
way to spread my attention and energy?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
And Oliver thinks one clearly bad way to spend your
attention and energy is with constant multitasking. Recognizing your finitude
and embracing a limited life means coming to terms with
the fact that you're not going to have time to
take in every new tweet or blog post or news article.
Monotasking requires sacrificing all that.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
It's strange how difficult it is. It shouldn't be that difficult.
Just not always filling every available attentional channel. It's always
going to feel easier to veer away from that challenging, difficult,
uncomfortable thing to some pleasant and compelling source of distraction.
This is especially the case now because we didn't used
(31:41):
to have places to go when we got distracted that
were explicitly designed by very well paid geniuses to keep
us their as long as possible. On the other hand,
we are part of the problem, right. I mean, it
is not in my experience anyway that I'm sort of
sitting writing a chapter filled with joy and absorption and
then like somehow Edil Musk's Twitter comes and kind of
(32:05):
grabs me from my desk and drags me kicking and screaming. No,
it's more like I find the task difficult because it
matters to me, and I'm not one hundred percent confident
I can do it, and all sorts of emotions are
brought up by doing it. On my better days, I
can say that's that thing again. It's not actually that
I can't write this chapter, or that I've got to
go and waste an hour online. It's that writing brings
(32:25):
up these feelings for me because I care about it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
We also need to avoid those comforting but pseudo productive activities.
A big one for me is my daily practice of
clearing the decks.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
Trying to get through all your email and little stuff
and all the bits of paperwork needs to be doing.
People come in, they feel anxious about all this stuff.
There's an itch that needs to be scratched, So you
do with all that first, and then you're supposed to
feel very calm and at piece, and you can really
focus on the thing that matters.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
I can't tell you how many hours of my working
life are spent on this stuff, just sending off one
more unimportant message so I can get closer to inbox zero.
We're doing a bunch of stupid errands just so I
can cross something off my to do list. When I
say it out loud, deck clearing is obviously not a
smart approach, but it feels so scary to leave so
much stuff undone.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
Prising that we feel anxious. But the wise response to
that kind of anxiety is to do what one can
to hang out with the anxiety, to tolerate the anxiety,
and trying to wean yourself off the practice of clearing
the decks in response to it, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Oliver admits that the strategies he recommends require emotion regulation,
but he's come to appreciate how much a more realistic,
more mortal approach to productivity increases what he's able to
get done.
Speaker 5 (33:36):
Some people see it as quite depressing. I think it's
incredibly liberating to be like, it is not your faults,
that you are a finite human and from that basis
you can then try and do the most meaningful things
that you can do.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I'm still a long way from enjoying the leisure filled
utopia that Kent's envisioned, but making the show has helped
me establish better habits. I've put cal Newport's slow productivity
approach into practice. I started doing less at one time
and saying no to more projects. And I've stopped checking
my inbox as the first work task of the which
gives me more morning hours for the projects I want
(34:12):
to work on. And I'm already seeing the benefits. I'm
happy to report that my calendar has slowly begun recovering
from all of productivity termite damage, and I'll be trying
out some small seasonality by taking a few weeks off
from the show. But in spite of this progress, I
have been struggling more than I expected. With one piece
of advice you heard today, It was Oliver Berkman's idea
(34:33):
that we need to embrace time management for mortals. You see,
I don't really like the idea that I'm finite. I
hate thinking that I ultimately won't have time for all
the important stuff in life due to the fact that
I'm going to die someday I find the idea that
I'm limited to four thousand weeks utterly terrifying. But could
my avoidance of my inevitable demise be doing more harm
(34:54):
than good? Okay, it helps if I close my eyes.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
I am going to die. I am going to die.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I am going to die. Could I wind up happier
by accepting, maybe even well becoming my own mortality? How
is it literally talking about it right now?
Speaker 5 (35:12):
Us together?
Speaker 1 (35:13):
No, seriously, I hate hate thinking about it. We'll get
some answers and explore the benefits of memento mori in
the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santos
Pushkin. The stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and
the great depression that followed quite reasonably scared a lot
of people. Fortunes were lost, savings disappeared, factories closed, and
jobs evaporated. The only places doing a roaring trade were
soup kitchens and breadlines. Things looked bad, with no end
(00:38):
in sight. But one man wasn't that worried.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
We are suffering just now from a bad attack of
economic pessimism, so.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Said famed British economist John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
It is common to hear people say that a decline
in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in a
decade which lies ahead of us. I believe that this
is a wildly mistaken interpretation of what is happening to us.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
People were having trouble keeping a roof over their heads
and food on the table, but Keynes wanted them to
look to the far horizon.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
My purpose is to take wings into the future. What
can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life
to be one hundred years? Hence, what are the economic
possibilities for our grandchildren?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
You might recognize the voice reading Keyes's words. It's my colleague,
the economist Tim Harford from the Cautionary Tales podcast. Tim's
very familiar with Keanes's rosy predictions about what life would
look like in the year twenty thirty.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Kaines thought that the Great Depression was just an economic blip,
albeit quite a painful one. He predicted that, thanks to
industrial and scientific developments, the economy would boom, and that
the standard of living enjoyed by people would improve dramatically. Indeed,
he suggested that most people would be so rich their
struggles to make ends meet would be consigned to history.
(02:02):
At last, they'd earn more than enough money to pay
their bills in just a few hours each week, with
the rest of their time freedom up to enjoy life.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
To people in nineteen thirty, these predictions must have been
mind blowing. Kines believed his grandchildren would enjoy a fifteen
hour work week, with ample time left not just to
relax in leisure, but to engage in a host of
purposeful activities like increased kindness and civic participation. And Caines
thought our whole attitude towards work would change radically as
a result.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high
social importance, There would be great changes in the code
of morals. For love of money as a possession, will
we recognize for what it is a somewhat disgusting morbidity.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Well, dear happiness lab listener, congratulations, because you are currently
living in that utopian time that Caine's envisioned. How are
you enjoying your fifteen hour work week? To Kanses's credit,
we do have a much higher standard of living than
our grand parents. We also have smart TVs, dishwashers, microwaves, iPhones,
and the internet, fun and time saving gadgets the people
(03:09):
of nineteen thirty could only dream of. But although Kaines
was right about our increased incomes, he was wrong about
what would happen to our sense of busyness. Rather than
living relaxed lives of leisure, people in twenty twenty four
are working harder than ever. Americans today worked ten percent
more hours than they did in the nineteen seventies. Economists
have also observed a shift in the last few decades
(03:30):
and the usual relationship between a person's wages and the
number of hours they work. Historically, people who earn less
money tended to work more hours, but that relationship has
now reversed. These days, it's higher paid individuals who are
spending more time at work. They also report significantly more
time stress than they did in the previous decades. If
Kans had lived to see what workaholics we've all become,
(03:53):
he'd be very sad. Instead of a utopian work life balance,
our generation got side hustles and career cushioning and time
hacks and over employment and burnout culture. I've been thinking
about Kynes's predictions a lot these days, because lately I've
feeling busier than ever. I'm privileged to have a great
standard of living and a job I love, but my
(04:14):
to do list feels endless. I spend a lot of
time feeling frantic, fantasizing that any day now I'll finally
be able to get through all the stuff on my
plate so I can take a breather. But that fantasy
day of rest never seems to come. And what's my
solution to feeling so so overworked all the time. It's
usually to double down on my business. I try to
(04:34):
get through my to do list as quickly as I
possibly can, so I work long hours and multitask whenever possible.
But this endless quest to optimize my overloaded schedule usually
winds up increasing my sense of overwhelmed rather than decreasing it.
I end up feeling like everything is urgent, and not
just when I'm at work. Somehow, this obsession with using
time well leaks into my leisure time too. In the
(04:57):
rare moments I do get a break, I feel anxious
that I'm not getting enough productive stuff done, and as
is probably obvious, none of this overwhelm is all that
good for my quest to feel happier. This episode about
the happiness challenges that I struggle with, I'm going to
explore how I and so many others got this messed
up when it comes to busyness and productivity. Are we
(05:18):
doomed to our relentlessly overloaded schedules, or can we claim
the leisure time that Caine's envisioned as our generation's birthright.
Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to
be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What
if our minds are lying to us, leading us away
from what really make us happy. The good news is
(05:39):
that understanding the science of the mind can point us
all back in the right direction. You're listening to the
Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Santos Okay, Wednesday May twenty nine, six am podcast interview
with person in the UK.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Nine am meeting with my lab manager, ten am brainstorm
meeting for my new course. Eleven am Zoom podcast recording.
Looking through my schedule on an average day, I'm pretty
much doing ten plus hours of work. Oh and I
have to make my husband's birthday cach. What happened to
the fifteen hour work week that Keenes promised us?
Speaker 5 (06:20):
If you do well in a career a professional era,
you can actually expect to get busier and busier and busier.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Writer Oliver Berkman has shared my sense of overwhelm for decades.
He always had too much on his plate, and like me,
he tried many a hack to team his overloaded schedule.
He even reviewed time management techniques and productivity tools for
The Guardian newspaper in a weekly article called This column
Will Change Your Life. Oliver desperately tried anything in everything
(06:47):
to get his packed schedule under control.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Fancy notebooks to organize your time in year, planners, pens
that cost too much money, you know, all part of
an attempt to try to reach this sort of position
of feeling completely in control of time.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Things finally came to a head one day about ten
years ago. Oliver was sitting alone on a park bench,
sxiously ruminating about all his undone tasks, when a scary
thought occurred to him, None of this productivity stuff is
ever going to work. In an instant, he realized that
no matter how much work and self discipline and time
management gear he marshaled, he simply was never going to
(07:24):
feel on top of all he had to do. That
dream of getting everything he needed to get done done.
It was always going to remain out of reach.
Speaker 5 (07:32):
The reward for good time management is more work.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oliver christent this painful realization the efficiency trap.
Speaker 5 (07:38):
Anything you do to try to use time more effectively
by becoming more efficient, seems to be a fairly general
law that what will actually end up happening is that
you get a lot more busy and a lot more stressed.
The sort of abstract way of talking about it is
that if you make a system capable of processing more inputs,
then it will just attract a lot more inputs. A
(07:59):
concrete example gives email. Right, if you get really good
at answering email at a really fast tempo. You end
up with loads more email because you're getting replies to
your replies and you have to reply to that, and
you get a reputation for being responsive. And it doesn't
just apply to email. If you're in a workplace setting
where there's some particular kind of project that needs to
be done and you get a reputation for being really
(08:19):
fast at completing that kind of project, you're going to
get loads more of those projects to complete. So that's
the trap of efficiency. It's an attempt to try to
get everything done, to get to the end of everything,
but because the supply is infinite, it's not actually a
good way to build a more productive or fulfilling life.
It's just a way to sort of get busier.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Oliver argues that this sense of overwhelmed has begun to
take over our entire modern existence.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
But we not only overwhelmed by work tasks, by email,
by things that we have to do. We're overwhelmed by
potential experiences. We could have bucket list places we could go,
things we could be doing on any given evening, people
to date, depending on your context, you know. So there's
all these kind of different ways in which there's just
more experience to be had in the world. So I
(09:04):
think that leads to sort of permanent state of feeling overwhelmed, A.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Permanent state of feeling of whelmed. Yep, that pretty much
describes my life these days, and all of our's tough
message is that if you're feeling that way too, it
is at least in some ways, your own fault.
Speaker 5 (09:19):
I never want to underplay the sort of broader societal
and economic reasons for this, but in some sense we
do bring it on ourselves, or we at least collaborate
with the situation, because we're presented with this sort of
infinity of things to do, and the very first thing
we say to ourselves is like, Okay, let's find a
way to do an infinite amount of things.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
One reason is that being busy all the time makes
us feel kind of important.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
If you are somebody who has your self worth wrapped
up in your productivity, right, you think that you've got
to do a certain amount or reach some kind of
standard to sort of be okay, then being busy is
proof to yourself that you're in demand, that the spigot
of opportunities has not dried up, that it's all very
much part of feeling that you are doing all you
(10:04):
need to be doing to feel good about yourself.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
I definitely felt called out by this comment. How often
have people asked me, Hey, how's it going, only to
get my standard response of Oh, I'm just so busy.
The frazzled feelings behind that reply aren't fun. But if
I'm being honest, I do feel weirdly proud of myself.
Speaker 5 (10:23):
We've created this situation that makes busyness into a status symbol.
So then obviously, by definition, you want to make sure
that you've got some of that business.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
But there's a cost to seeking out busyness for the
sake of busyness. We wind up stuck in a painful
psychological state that the journalist Marilyn Robinson has called a
sense of joyless urgency.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
I mean, I think that is just a very very
widespread feeling, the sense that you've really got to get somewhere,
but it's not really the place you'd necessarily want to
be going, and certainly the process of getting there is
not what you wanted to be doing.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
How did we all get so hooked into this joyless
relationship with our busy schedules. Oliver suspects that at least
some of the problem stems from how humans have learned
to think about time.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
Going from introduction and widespread adoption of mechanical clocks and
then into the industrial revolution, we'll get this very long,
slow process that is characterized by people starting to think
of time as a resource. And once you have this
idea that like, there's you and then there's time, and
you're living your life sort of lined up against the
sort of a yardstick or a measure of some kind,
(11:24):
you have to keep up. If you use a bit
of time wrongly, you're wasting it. You can try to
squeeze more things into that time, and all of this
is kind of a spatial metaphor, right, It's all to
do with time as containers and little boxes. When you
really get right back down to the experience of being
in time, it isn't like that at all. We just
get this one moment and then the next moment and
(11:46):
then the next moment. I think we really need this
idea of being able to think about time as a
resource for all sorts of things. But it's a little
bit crazy, really when we try constantly to interact with
time as something that it isn't, which is something we
can sort of hord or endlessly fit more things into it.
None of it quite makes sense.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
But there's another way that our thinking about productivity doesn't
quite make sense, one that relates to the changing phase
of modern work. These days, a lot of our jobs
are a bit weird. The happiness lab. We're a turn
in a moment.
Speaker 6 (12:22):
Up until about the mid twentieth century, we had really clear,
well defined definitions of productivity.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Best Selling author and computer scientist Cal Newport has spent
a lot of time thinking about why modern work is
so overwhelming.
Speaker 6 (12:34):
So if you're in agriculture, it was bushels per acre
of land under cultivation, you could measure it. It was
a number you could change how you planted your crops,
that you could see if that number went up and down.
When we got to industrial manufacturing mills followed by factories,
we could do something similar.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
A factory manager on an assembly line can easily measure,
say the number of Widgets or Model T Fords produced
per labor hour. People could just tell if everyone was
using their time efficiently and contributing to the company's bottom line.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
All that fell out the window with knowledge work, which
really emerged as a major sector in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Knowledge workers create useful goods and services not through physical,
assembly line style labor, but through their thoughts. The modern
economy is full of such professionals scientists, doctors, writers, professors, attorneys,
even podcast hosts. But professionals like these don't end the
day with a bunch of widgets piled up on their workbench,
and that means it's harder to assess their productivity. Take
(13:30):
for example, what it would mean to define productivity in
my own form of knowledge work, making a podcast. How
could I make the happiness lab as productive as possible?
I could try to take a mathematical approach and define
productivity as the number of episodes we make. But should
I go with the sheer number of episodes? Maybe longer
episodes are better than shorter ones. Or maybe I should
(13:52):
count AD revenue per episode or listener downloads. Each of
these could be a reasonable metric for podcast productivity, So
what should I choose? Similar kinds of questions pervade pretty
much all knowledge work.
Speaker 6 (14:06):
We do not get a lot of direct feedback in
terms of how well is what you're doing right now
impacting what we care about. It's free floating.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
And things get even more complicated when you ask how
you should be allocating your time to achieve whatever free
floating definition and productivity you came up with.
Speaker 6 (14:23):
The typical knowledge worker has many different things they're working on,
and what they're working on might be different than the
person right next to them. It can shift. It's more informal. Also,
how we do our work is very personal, which is
a real innovation to knowledge work we don't see in
other places.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Supervising factory workers on an assembly line is easy. You
figure out how to best build your widget, and you
tell your employees, hey, make the widget like this. But
none of that holds for a job like podcasting or
teaching or programming.
Speaker 6 (14:50):
Knowledge work is too complicated. It's creative, it's skilled. The
individual knowledge workers know more about what they're doing than
the people supervising them. So we got to allow the
individual workers autonomy. Allow them to have autonomy in figuring
out how they're going to do their own work.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
But managers did want some way to determine and whether
or not knowledge workers were putting in useful effort, so
they came up with what cal thinks is a very
problematic alternative pseudo productivity.
Speaker 6 (15:17):
So suitor productivity is a crude heuristic that says, visible
activity that's going to be my proxy for figuring out
whether or not you're doing useful effort. So the more
I see you doing things, the more productive. In scare quotes,
I'm going to assume you're being. This is the dominant
way I think we measure effective work.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
This need to monitor visible effort led to other changes
in the knowledge work sector, ones that had nasty implications
for a worker's sense of autonomy and happiness.
Speaker 6 (15:46):
When the knowledge sector grew as a big sector and
we said, how are we going to literally organize this work,
we said, well, let's just do what the factories do.
You will come to a building, we'll all gather in
the same place. We'll be there for a long shift,
so that we can just see that everyone is working.
That's why I know you're working, because you have to
come to this building and I can physically surveil you.
That's suitor productivity. There's nothing about cognitive work that says
(16:08):
the best way to do this is as many hours
as possible, or to do it in one contiguous shift.
But if our main metric for productivity is visible activity,
then it made life a lot easier for the managers, But.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Of course such surveillance didn't make life easier for the
knowledge workers.
Speaker 6 (16:23):
Suit of productivity makes us miserable, and has been making
us more miserable. It barely worked until about the two thousands.
Then digital technology enter the scene, and it spiraled out
of control. Because now I can leave a trace of
me working or not working by doing emails, et cetera anywhere.
Now there's an unlimited supply of work. Because one of
the things the digital age brought to us was zero
(16:44):
friction work assignment. I can just hey, can you handle
this sin boom? It's off my plate.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
This emergence of email and slack channels and team meetings
and group texts meant that workers had way more opportunities
to show off their visible activity, and managers quickly took notice, Hey,
I haven't.
Speaker 6 (17:00):
Really been seeing you in the email chains recently. You
weren't at these zoom meetings. You are slow to respond
to the slack chack. What's going on? Maybe you're not productive.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
But managers weren't the only ones to embrace pseudo productivity.
Knowledge workers soon began to internalize this notion. Practices like
clearing your emails. To achieve inbox zero and being on
slack after hours became almost as important to workers as
the projects that made up their true job descriptions, especially
since incremental progress on the big projects will always be
(17:30):
harder to show off.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
You don't know if I'm at home or I'm in
my office, you're not in nearby. You don't know that
I'm working deeply on an article that leaves no trace,
but if I'm jumping onto email threads, that does leave
a trace, And so it biased us towards what's going
to leave the best trace through the environment of pseudo productivity, evaluation.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
And this desire to leave some tangible evidence of your
efforts has a terrible effect on the actual output of
knowledge work.
Speaker 6 (17:54):
So one of the consequences of pseudo productivity is that
it gets in the way of the ability to give
the most important things you do unbroken attention. How do
we get our brain to actually produce value. It's the
ability to focus intensely on some If you want to
produce the best things you're capable of using your brain,
you don't want to be distracted. I want to focus
(18:15):
on this hard thing I'm doing until it's done. Pseudo
productivity punishes that.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I've totally been punished by my internalized pseudo productivity. I'll
be in the middle of writing a podcast script or
an academic paper when I'll hear a ding from a text,
so I peek at my phone, get distracted, and take
longer to finish the task I'm really supposed to be
focused on. And that sense of distraction doesn't just bubble
up during actual interruptions. Whenever I find myself deep in
a writing project, I'll inevitably think, you know, I haven't
(18:42):
checked my email in a while. I wonder if there's
something important next thing. I know, I'm deep in my inbox.
I've internalized the importance of visible activity so much that
I start feeling anxious whenever I'm not engaged in it,
and that anxiety gets worse when my bigger projects fail
to produce an obvious output. For a while, it feels
almost easier to spend my time on dumb, pseudo productive
(19:03):
stuff like clearing my inbox.
Speaker 6 (19:05):
And now we have whole departments, we have whole teams
and organizations producing a lot less valuable work because we
are servicing this crude proxy that doesn't actually get to
the core of what it means to be productive. It's
completely cross purposes.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
But pseudo productivity doesn't just impair actual work productivity. It
also increases our stress levels and decreases our happiness.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
There's an unavoidable consequence of pseudo productivity that you're going
to get overloaded and you're going to stay overloaded. Saying
yes to someone asking you to do something is very important,
right because that's a very clear signal of activity. We
have to get rid of pseudo productivity. We need much
more humanistic, psychologically aware, and evidence based approaches for saying
(19:51):
this is what we mean by productivity in the knowledge sector.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Thankfully, Cal has come up with just such an approach,
one that he outlines in his fabulous book Slow Productivity,
The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. Accomplishment without feeling
burned out, Sign me up. Cal's idea for slow productivity
was inspired by the slow food movement, a campaign in
the late eighties pushing back against fast food culture arguing
(20:18):
that people should take the time to grow and cook
their own healthy food.
Speaker 6 (20:21):
Slow food actually gives us a couple really good ideas
for how to form a reform movement. One it says,
when dealing with a cultural situation that's displeasing, don't just
attack what you don't like, give a positive alternative. The
second part of their reform program was don't just try
to create the better thing looking forward, make sure that
(20:42):
you're also drawing from wisdom that is accumulated in the past.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Cal now applies the same approach to fixing our overwhelmed schedules.
He turned to knowledge workers of the past, professionals who
lived back in John Maynard Keynes's day and even before,
to see how they produce their most effective work. Such
insights led Cal to develop the three core principles of
slow productivity, doing fewer.
Speaker 6 (21:06):
Things at once, working at a more natural pace, and
then obsessing over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Let's start with doing fewer things at once.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
Well, when we're doing fewer things, we are relieving ourselves
of not just a lengthy task list, but the administrative
overhead that comes along with each of those items on
our task lists. And this is something I think people
often overlook is that when I say yes, I'm not
just saying yes to eventually, how many hours am I
(21:34):
going to spend writing the report or doing the committee
or whatever it was I said yes to. When I
say yes to something, it's also going to come with
persistent administrative overhead responsibilities. It's going to be emails back
and forth with people who are involved in it. All right,
every Wednesday we got to like jump on zoom, and
it's going to be cognitive space taken up by the
fact that, hey, this thing's ongoing in some part of
(21:56):
your brain wants to think about it. So when you
say yes the lots of things, even if you're not
working on the actual projects at the same time, all
of their administrative overhead begins to pile up. And so
what happens is the more things I've said yes to,
the less time I actually have to work on things.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
This hit me like a ton of bricks. When I
look at my own calendar, I see days and days
broken up with staff meetings and check ins and random appointments,
cal calls, commitments like these productivity termites. They eat up
the big blocks of time in our schedule, so much
so that little solid foundation is left for the stuff
that matters.
Speaker 6 (22:31):
And this is a negative feedback cycle that can get
pretty nasty, because once you have enough of your day
servicing commitments but not working on them, you fall behind.
And the only way to escape from the spiral is
to start reclaiming time outside of work hours, and they
have to work on the weekends and late at night
and early in the morning. Doing fewer things at once
(22:52):
is not the same as doing fewer things overall. In fact,
you're going to accomplish a lot more per year if
you keep your plate much more sparse.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
But it's not enough to streamline what you work on.
You also need to work at a more natural pace.
As cal looked to the great writers and thinkers of
the past, he realized they didn't work the way most
of us do today.
Speaker 6 (23:11):
So a knowledge work emerged. We said, okay, how are
we going to deal with this? We said, we'll use
pseudo productivity as our metric for effective action. Well, what
was the best way to monitor pseudo activity back then?
We said, we'll run our offices like a factory.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Managers brought knowledge workers into a building where they could
be observed. Employees were stuck there for eight hours a day,
working the entire time. But applying a factory model to
writing good computer programs or academic papers or podcast scripts
doesn't work that well.
Speaker 6 (23:39):
So Cognitive work is not something that you can just
churn out of your mind like a widget, as many
hours as you want in a row. It's not like
putting steering wheels on a model T. It needs way
more ups and downs. I have to get the right information.
I need to think about what I want to do,
and then there's periods of great intensity, But then that
might need to be coupled with periods where I'm really
pulling back. My brain is recharging and trying to find
(24:00):
new inspiration. Our brain does not operate like an assembly line,
but we run it that way, and now I think
we have a lot of misery because of it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Kel argues we need to take a much more humane
approach to our schedules. We need to build in the
natural variability that thinking well requires. We need to expect
that some days will be filled with more progress than others,
and we need to intentionally build in time to recharge
without beating ourselves up over it. And cal has a
specific suggestion for doing this, a practice he calls small seasonality.
Speaker 6 (24:29):
Standard seasonality is what our Neolithic ancestors used to do.
The winter, I don't do as much work as the fall.
When I'm bringing into harvest, and you have these variations
of seasons, so we can shift intensity at smaller scales.
I'm going to take the three weeks in December before
we get to the holidays, and I pull back for
those three weeks. It's a lower intensity period that's not
(24:49):
as big as a season, but it gives me some variation.
You could do this at an even smaller scale. I
don't schedule meetings on Mondays. Don't tell anybody this. When
someone wants to set up meetings, you can propose all
sorts of times, just never happen to propose a time
on Mondays. So now every week you have this first
day that has a fully different field than the other days.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
But working naturally also requires taking a healthier approach to
your workspace.
Speaker 6 (25:13):
If our work primarily uses our brain, everything that impacts
our brain is relevant to our work. So just like
if I was an athlete and my work primarily involves
my body, other things I'm doing to my body matters.
If I'm sort of doing a bunch of squats right
before a soccer game, it's going to matter. But we
don't think about this with cognitive work. But the environment
(25:34):
that our brain is exposed to impacts how our brain functions.
And so when you see that laundry basket at your
home office, there's a whole other part of your brain
that says, we gotta do laundry. When are we gonna
do laundry? Which means your efforts to write a book, chapter,
whatever is going to be degraded. So if you make
a living with your brain, you have to separate where
(25:54):
you do this brain work from where you live. Location
matters if you're a.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
Remote worker, Cal recommends finding a spot that doesn't remind
you of all your other daily pressures. Find a coffee
shop or co working space, even a large closet, anywhere
that stops you from c and thinking about all the
stressful stuff in life, so you can focus on your
important projects. And once you're settled down to work, Cal says,
you need to obsess over the quality of what you do.
Speaker 6 (26:18):
Obsessing over the quality of what you do is the
glue that holds the other two principles together. There's two
things that happen once you start caring about quality. One,
it justifies for yourself going slower, because to do things
really well, you have to slow down. On the flip side,
when you get really good at something. Because you obsess
over your quality, you get more leverage and control over
(26:39):
your work life, and it becomes easier.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Obsessing over quality can help produce burnout in other ways, too.
Burnout typically emerges when we experience what clinicians call a
values mismatch in our work. We want to produce work
of a certain standard, but we just don't have the
time or bandwidth to accomplish that. When we can't give
meaningful projects our full attention and creative energy because we're
doing so many other things, we feel cynical and overwhelmed.
(27:04):
But obsessing over the quality of our work prevents that
sort of values mismatch. We wind up able to put
our full passion and energy into what truly matters. But
this ability to focus on what truly matters requires one
other important, but very painful realization. There may never be
enough time to do everything we really care about.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
We've got minds that allow us to conceive of an
infinite number of things we want to do, or could do,
or should do, and yet we are these sort of
animals who can only do so much of it.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
The happiness lab or return after the break.
Speaker 5 (27:44):
The desperate side of being a productivity junkie is that
it is an attempt to sort of not have to
confront certain truths about either one's own life or human
life in general, and the fact that you know, in
case of time management, there just isn't enough time for
all the things that feel like they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Former productivity junkie Oliver Berkman now embraces all the tenets
of slow productivity that Cal Newport described earlier. He does less,
tries to work at a more reasonable piece, and focuses
on high quality work. But Oliver thinks there's one more
painful truth we must confront if we want to find
the utopian work life balance promised by John Maynard Keynes.
Speaker 5 (28:22):
If you're convinced that in the end there must be
a time for everything, then you're not going to say
no to the right things. You're not going to make
the right choices about what not to spend your time on,
and as a result, it's just going to be more
and more stuff incoming.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Oliver explores this idea in four thousand Weeks Time Management
for Mortals. The four thousand weeks in the book's title
refers to the length of the average human life span.
Pretty sure, right, The.
Speaker 5 (28:45):
Important point is just that it's finite that has an
end point. It means that there's no reason to assume
that there will be time in a day or in
a life to do all the things that feel to
you like they matter.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
No time in a life to do all the stuff
that matters. I can't what Oliver is saying here, but
I find the realization terrifying.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
I do think that humans have, since the beginning of
humanity railed against their finitude. Most of our worst problems
with time, the ways we end up procrastinating, distracting ourselves,
feeling unfulfilled, feeling too busy, feeling overwhelmed, can be traced
back to various forms of this avoidance. It's because we
want to make ourselves feel unlimited that we try to
(29:26):
set up ludicrous productivity systems that are going to enable
us to do absolutely everything.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Embracing the idea of a time limited life can help
us come to terms with the fact that we're simply
never going to get everything done, which forces us to
become intentional about what we choose to do.
Speaker 5 (29:41):
You don't get to choose not making tough decisions about
what you do with your time, but you can make
wiser or less wise ones. First of all, ask yourself
how much time you reasonably have available, and then decide
what are the most important tasks to put into that box.
So maybe that strikes people as very obvious, but in
fact I think what people instinctively do instead is the opposite.
(30:01):
They get up in the morning and say what has
to be done by the end of the day, paying
no heed to the question of whether there's actually enough
time to do it, and then you make bad choices.
You try to clear the decks, you try to do
all the short stuff first, and you find you've got
no time for the really important stuff. You end up
feeling inadequate and dumb because you didn't get through the list.
And it's just a sort of recipe for procrastination and psychodrama.
(30:22):
So it's really just about saying, this is the time
that is available, given that, what shall I do.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Oliver admits to struggling with this level of acceptance from
time to time. Luckily he has sparked time management gurus
like his wife around to help him.
Speaker 5 (30:36):
I remember on a couple of occasions asking aloud in
her presence, whether I really had enough time left to
meet a deadline? On something that I was working for,
and of course corresponds always like, that's the wrong question
you have this time. The question is what's the wisest
use of that time. All of our time is trade offs.
You're always choosing not to do things, and so the
(30:57):
question is, just, given this available time, what's the best
way to spread my attention and energy?
Speaker 1 (31:03):
And Oliver thinks one clearly bad way to spend your
attention and energy is with constant multitasking. Recognizing your finitude
and embracing a limited life means coming to terms with
the fact that you're not going to have time to
take in every new tweet or blog post or news article.
Monotasking requires sacrificing all that.
Speaker 5 (31:21):
It's strange how difficult it is. It shouldn't be that difficult.
Just not always filling every available attentional channel. It's always
going to feel easier to veer away from that challenging, difficult,
uncomfortable thing to some pleasant and compelling source of distraction.
This is especially the case now because we didn't used
(31:41):
to have places to go when we got distracted that
were explicitly designed by very well paid geniuses to keep
us their as long as possible. On the other hand,
we are part of the problem, right. I mean, it
is not in my experience anyway that I'm sort of
sitting writing a chapter filled with joy and absorption and
then like somehow Edil Musk's Twitter comes and kind of
(32:05):
grabs me from my desk and drags me kicking and screaming. No,
it's more like I find the task difficult because it
matters to me, and I'm not one hundred percent confident
I can do it, and all sorts of emotions are
brought up by doing it. On my better days, I
can say that's that thing again. It's not actually that
I can't write this chapter, or that I've got to
go and waste an hour online. It's that writing brings
(32:25):
up these feelings for me because I care about it.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
We also need to avoid those comforting but pseudo productive activities.
A big one for me is my daily practice of
clearing the decks.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
Trying to get through all your email and little stuff
and all the bits of paperwork needs to be doing.
People come in, they feel anxious about all this stuff.
There's an itch that needs to be scratched, So you
do with all that first, and then you're supposed to
feel very calm and at piece, and you can really
focus on the thing that matters.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
I can't tell you how many hours of my working
life are spent on this stuff, just sending off one
more unimportant message so I can get closer to inbox zero.
We're doing a bunch of stupid errands just so I
can cross something off my to do list. When I
say it out loud, deck clearing is obviously not a
smart approach, but it feels so scary to leave so
much stuff undone.
Speaker 5 (33:09):
Prising that we feel anxious. But the wise response to
that kind of anxiety is to do what one can
to hang out with the anxiety, to tolerate the anxiety,
and trying to wean yourself off the practice of clearing
the decks in response to it, I suppose.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Oliver admits that the strategies he recommends require emotion regulation,
but he's come to appreciate how much a more realistic,
more mortal approach to productivity increases what he's able to
get done.
Speaker 5 (33:36):
Some people see it as quite depressing. I think it's
incredibly liberating to be like, it is not your faults,
that you are a finite human and from that basis
you can then try and do the most meaningful things
that you can do.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I'm still a long way from enjoying the leisure filled
utopia that Kent's envisioned, but making the show has helped
me establish better habits. I've put cal Newport's slow productivity
approach into practice. I started doing less at one time
and saying no to more projects. And I've stopped checking
my inbox as the first work task of the which
gives me more morning hours for the projects I want
(34:12):
to work on. And I'm already seeing the benefits. I'm
happy to report that my calendar has slowly begun recovering
from all of productivity termite damage, and I'll be trying
out some small seasonality by taking a few weeks off
from the show. But in spite of this progress, I
have been struggling more than I expected. With one piece
of advice you heard today, It was Oliver Berkman's idea
(34:33):
that we need to embrace time management for mortals. You see,
I don't really like the idea that I'm finite. I
hate thinking that I ultimately won't have time for all
the important stuff in life due to the fact that
I'm going to die someday I find the idea that
I'm limited to four thousand weeks utterly terrifying. But could
my avoidance of my inevitable demise be doing more harm
(34:54):
than good? Okay, it helps if I close my eyes.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
I am going to die. I am going to die.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
I am going to die. Could I wind up happier
by accepting, maybe even well becoming my own mortality? How
is it literally talking about it right now?
Speaker 5 (35:12):
Us together?
Speaker 1 (35:13):
No, seriously, I hate hate thinking about it. We'll get
some answers and explore the benefits of memento mori in
the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santos
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