032: Experiments in Productivity with Chris Bailey

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, thanks so much for appearing here on How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Chris Bailey
Pete, how are you, my friend?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m doing so well, so well.

Chris Bailey
So well? Wow, that’s good. Me too. Good to chat with you.

Pete Mockaitis
I was cruising through your Twitter feed. It seems like just recently, you got some business cards from Elegant Press which looked amazing. Should I go ahead and buy some for myself?

Chris Bailey
I think you should. Oh, my gosh, you guys, anyone listening has to check out my Twitter feed just for that. I think, what’s my … It’s @wigglechicken, so twitter.com/wigglechicken.

Pete Mockaitis
Which makes me giggle every time I type it for the record.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, giggle at the wiggle, that’s what they’d say, as the kids say and yeah, every kid I know. They say “Bae” and “Giggle at the wiggle”.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that abbreviation for Beyonce or does that mean something else?

Chris Bailey
No. See, B-A-E is the abbreviation and I thought it meant like baby like my boyfriend or girlfriend or something but apparently, it means before anyone else. It doesn’t have to be … If you have Urban Dictionary, it will come up.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m learning.

Chris Bailey
There. We all learned something today.

Pete Mockaitis
Elegant Press is a Lithuanian company. That’s my heritage.

Chris Bailey
Really? Yeah, I couldn’t understand anything on their website but I looked at the gallery that they have on the site and the cards were so beautiful. It’s cool to go with the smaller shop like that instead of some big company that cranks out million business cards out everyday. They’re a bit more expensive, obviously, but sometimes that’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m in. Well, they’re not even paying for sponsorships.

Chris Bailey
They should.

Pete Mockaitis
Good work, I’m impressed there. It gets some free press and they’ve earned it. Oh, my gosh, we got so much to talk through. We’re going to run out of time, so I’m just going to run after it. You’ve mentioned all of this fun productivity experiments at alifeofproductivity.com, and I just want to open this up by making it a little freewheeling. Can you tell me which of your many experiments yielded perhaps the most shocking, surprising, or counterintuitive results?

Chris Bailey
As you mentioned, there is quite a few of them, everything from gaining 10 pounds of muscle to drinking only water for a month, living in isolation for 10 days, working 90-hour weeks, the list goes on. There is dozens, but of all of them, the one that comes to mind is meditating for 35 hours over the course of a week. I’ve had a meditation ritual for years at this point where I’d sit on a meditation cushion for about a half an hour a day.

When I started the project, I figured if I’m going to dedicate a year of my life to becoming as productive as humanly possible, meditation seems to conflict with the idea of productivity in basically every way that you can imagine. Meditation is about doing basically nothing where productivity is about doing as much as you possibly can, or so I thought.

At the beginning of the project, I stopped meditating entirely because I thought if I’m going to dedicate a year of my life to this thing, why do anything if you’re not going to do it right. But very quickly, I became more stressed. I gave up a couple of full-time job offers to start the project which was called the Year of Productivity at the time. All those thoughts came rushing in like when nobody was visiting in the first few months of the project like, “Oh, my gosh, I made the biggest mistake imaginable.” I gave up everything to do this weird thing and it isn’t working out.

I took fewer breaks because I worked through tiredness and fatigue. I had less energy to bring to my work because I didn’t have the awareness to step back from how much energy and focus I had in the first place. Of course, meditation is a practice of bringing more attention to what’s in front of you in the moment. Because I stopped meditating, I brought less of myself to what I was working on in the moment. Because of all these things, I became less productive.

Once I realized that maybe I made a mistake getting rid of this ritual, I designed an experiment to meditate for 35 hours over the course of a week. I did sitting meditation, walking meditation, every kind of meditation out there while trying to become productive in that situation. I found that I felt less productive during that experiment but when I looked to how much I actually accomplished during it, so beyond how productive I felt, what I actually got done, I realized that I was more productive in that week looking through the logs that I experiment than I had been throughout the entire rest of the productivity project. That blew me away. 

Pete Mockaitis
The #1 week?

Chris Bailey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
This is top week #1, rank order data 52, this is the top dog?

Chris Bailey
You know, I think other weeks were more productive after I picked up the ritual again, but leading up to that point in the productivity project, that was the most productive week. It blew me away because …It got me thinking about productivity very differently as being not about how busy we are but rather about how much we accomplish over the course of the day because really, that’s what we’re left with at the end of the day.

It got me thinking also about other ingredients that are crucial to our productivity. Everybody knows time is important when it comes to our productivity. Our time is the most limited but our attention is the ingredient of our productivity that’s so often in the most demand and so it’s the most constrained. We have beeps and buzzes and notifications coming at us from every direction and interruptions as well. But also energy, energy is the fuel that we burn over the course of the day in order to get stuff done.

The more we cultivate these three ingredients, I think time, attention and energy, and also bring this deliberateness and this intention behind what we work on in the first place, I think the more productive we become. When we see productivity as not about how much we produce because you can produce email all day long and not really be productive but rather is how much we accomplish, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that makes total sense and I definitely want to dig into each of those ingredients, time, attention and energy in touch. You said meditation.

Chris Bailey
Those are a lot. I rambled on quite a bit there. You got me going with that question.

Pete Mockaitis
That was good. It was good and it worked for me. Meditation, that’s come up a lot of our guests in terms of personal practice for high effectiveness. I think some people are like, “What does that word exactly mean?” Just break it down like we’re eight-year-olds. We then say, “I am meditating for 30 minutes.” What is it that you’re doing?” Maybe we’ll say, “Nothing.” What does that mean in practice?

Chris Bailey
No, you’re doing something.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re breathing, you’re letting your attention flow, what are you doing?

Chris Bailey
Meditation, rather, I do have a pass in the meditation side of meditation cushion here in my office. I sit down and focus on my breath. That’s one type of meditation, there’s others too. Overall, meditation is the process of continually refocusing on one thing. You’ll notice very quickly if you sit down to do this for a couple of minutes. All you do is focus on your breath and it sounds like the easiest thing in the world.

Then, the idea is simple but communism is pretty simple and difficult in practice as well. Once you try to focus on one thing and that being your breath, it’s a neutral object of attention, so it’s not attractive, it’s not repulsive. It’s designed to be boring in a way as you can probably imagine. You continually refocus on your breath when your mind wanders off to think about something else.

That’s what meditation is. That’s really all it is and it sounds so simple to be almost stupidly simple, and it is. But that process of continually refocusing on one thing allows you to bring more attention to what’s in front of you and give a moment. It allows you to directly experience and be with whatever you’re working on or whatever it is in front of you throughout the rest of the day when you’re not on the meditation cushion.

That’s what meditation is. It’s a process of continually refocusing and not being too much of a hard ass on yourself when your mind does venture off to think about something else because it will. If you let your mind be just for a couple of minutes without trying to meditate, that’s hard enough. It goes to worrying about something that you forgot to do or if things, “Oh, I haven’t hangout with Pete in a while. Maybe I should give him a call or an email so we can get coffee,” to getting lost in that thought to what happened when you were last with Pete. Then, it goes down all these rabbit holes.

It’s amazing how little control we have over our brains. That’s the part that will baffle you when it comes time to meditate is the only place that we usually see how little control we have over our brains is when we’re falling asleep or trying to fall asleep and we can’t shut our brain off. But once you learn to continually refocus on that object of attention, it doesn’t … There are some people who say, “Oh, you got to sit a certain way. You got to do things a certain way,” but I don’t really think so.

I think all you have to do to get the neurological benefits of meditation is to continually and deliberately refocus on that one thing. If that one thing is a neutral object of attention like the sensations as your breath flows in and out of your stomach or, I guess, your lungs, maybe it does go into your stomach, who knows. But you observe the sensations of that and it’s a neutral object and your mind will wander but you continually bring it back and every time you do, you exercise your attention muscle a bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fantastic. Exercising the attention muscle. I like that.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, becausewhen you look at the neuroscience behind attention and the studies that have been done around attention, they show that in the average moment, we only bring 53% of our attention to what’s in front of us. We leave half of our attention and our focus on the table.

What that means in practice is we’re not engaged with our work. Our mind is off wandering to what we forgot to do or it’s worrying about something or it’s often a fantasy land somewhere. It’s not directly engaged with the work that’s in front of us. I think there’s a direct connection between how much focus we bring and how long something takes. If we bring 53% of our attention which the average person does into our work, we’re going to accomplish half as much as somebody that brings a full attention to their work and does work out that attention muscle.

It speaks to another point when it comes to productivity, one of the things that I discovered in the productivity project is that there is a lot of productivity BS out there. But for all the time you spend reading about productivity, you have to make that time back and then some or else you’re basically just looking at productivity porn.

Meditation is one of … You like productivity porn. It’s very entertaining and engaging but it doesn’t lead you to accomplish more which the best tactics out there do. Meditation is one of them, so you spend time meditating but you … It’s a way of exchanging your time for attention and so you’re able to bring more focus to your work and you have more clarity when you’re trying to work on something and you have more energy at the same time because you give your mind a few moments to rest. Rest as difficult as meditation maybe, it’s worthwhile because of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That was simple, clear, persuasive. I dig it.

Chris Bailey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to ask you the greatest question that has plagued me and perhaps all of mankind for a decade.

Chris Bailey
What is the meaning of life, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think I’m okay with that one. Well, I’m big on Jesus and the trinity being an eternal exchange of love and we’re made in His image. That’s how I like to roll.

Chris Bailey
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Chris Bailey
The Christian and the Buddhist getting together for this podcast. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a bit of a joke, maybe.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. Christian and Buddhist walk into a podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll see what comes out the other side.

Chris Bailey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Along those lines, my big question is, and I think it’s just part of the human experience but some days, and you mention this in your book too. Some days are you’re rocking, you’re rolling, high energy. It seems like tasks, so it’s like, “Simple, child’s play. I’m just going to blaze through those and enjoy doing it.“

Chris Bailey
Write 10,000 words, it’s nothing.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Then, there are other days where it’s like, “Ugh, everything seems like a slog. I’m tired. It’s tough.” It’s like, “I don’t want to.” There’s a lot of that, and I’ve tried to pinpoint like the biggest variables or levers that make all the difference and I think there’s a lot of them from exercise, and nutrition, and sleep, and having a good plan and all that. But I love to know since you have obsessively explored this question. What have you found to be like the top leverage points, the biggest difference makers that turn it into a rocking day versus blah-slog day?

Chris Bailey
I’ll going to give a blah-slog answer to be honest with you. It really is the basic stuff. It’s what we eat. It’s how much we sleep and it’s whether or not we get enough physical activity. That’s probably the most boring answer imaginable. It’s very like eat-your-spinach type advice but really,there is nothing better to do for your energy levels than get enough sleep and exercise and move enough. Get your 10,000 steps in and maybe rearrange the habits of your life to allow you to do that.

There really is no better advice than that. I’ll tell you, I spend a lot of time searching for it and there are kind of things that you can do in addition of that like stop drinking caffeine habitually, instead use it as a strategic boost before you do certain high-leverage tasks like maybe an interview, a job interview if you’re more of an extrovert. If you’re an introvert, caffeine might be too big of a hit and it might make you feel overwhelmed in certain situations, maybe drink more water is another, one of them that I would put on that same level.

Take frequent breaks because we have a limited pool of physiological energy in our brain that once we deplete it, our productivity is toast. But beyond the basics, it’s crucial to internalize these things which is why reading about them can be so powerful. Those are the basic things that you can do for your energy that really do make a difference in how much you accomplish.

They’re simple, right? But sleep, as an example, is a way … I frame it in the productivity project as exchanging your time for energy because I think it really is a connection that linear, but it’s not linear. For every hour of sleep you miss out on, I think you lose more than that amount of time in productivity the next day because it’s such a crucial tactic.

I have a rule in the book and I frame it as pseudo-scientific rule. There is no hard science behind it because everybody is wired so differently, but the rule is that, and it’s a good one to live by, for every hour of sleep you miss, you lose two hours of productivity the next day. You end up losing more time than you gain if you miss out on an hour of sleep.

It’s simple advice but it really is a powerful stuff when it comes to managing your energy. Like you said when we were chatting about this question. First, sometimes, you do everything right and for some reason, you just don’t have enough energy in the tank and the day is a slog and I found that even though I’ve been exploring productivity so much, I still have a day like that every once in a while even though I understand most of the dots that lead me to behave a certain way or feel a certain way.

Sometimes, that’s just the reality and some days, the opposite will be the case and everything will seem effortless. But I think when you do what you can to have enough energy by doing the basics as well as the smarter things like drinking caffeine, strategically drinking more water, taking more breaks than you are already, I think that will help you quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, fabulous. I’d be curious to hear if you’re open to disclosing, what’s your ratio there in terms of even when you’re doing all the things right, what proportion?

Chris Bailey
I am an open book, man. Anything you want to ask, I am game. The proportion of days, I would say it’s tough these days because I travel quite a bit with the work that I’m doing. I would say once a month or so at this point and it used to be a lot worse. About once a month, I have a day where it’s just a drag. I’m dragging my heels the entire day, better than I used to be but sometimes, I’m just like, “Why the heck do I have no energy today?” And I really have no idea.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, fair enough. Thank you for that input there. We talked a good bit.

Chris Bailey
I should qualify … Sorry, I keep interrupting you, but I should qualify that by saying that I spent a whole year making an effort to invest in my productivity and my energy levels and I’ve been curious about this stuff for a decade. I would hope I would be at least there.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, understood. That’s handy as I think about a benchmark to strive for, and that’s pretty cool. Now, we talk about some good detail on the energy side of your three resources there. Can you talk to us about what are some of biggest things that make a difference in the time part of the equation?

Chris Bailey
I think it’s interesting because the three ingredients are so interwoven with one another because when you decide you’re going to spend time on something, you’re really deciding that you’re actually going to spend attention and energy on that thing at the same time. They are so interwoven that they’re hard to untangle from one another.

I think one of the key things that you can do with time is choosing what you spend your limited time on it in the first place. That, I think, is the promise of productivity is that we have such a finite. Our time is finite. We only have so much of it here on this earth and so why not spend it more intelligently. That’s where I come at things from. I think that’s where productivity deserves to have a place in our life is because our time is so limited. Productivity is kind of a resource that we can use to get everything that we have to do done in a shorter amount of time so we have more time for the things that are actually meaningful to us.

It goes back to that idea of intention. Choosing what we work on before we work on it instead of just working on autopilot mode which is it’s an easy mode to default into when we’re overwhelmed, but when we’re overwhelmed, it’s just so much more important to choose what we spend time on it in the first place.

One of my favorite ways to set those intentions on a daily basis is the rule of three. It’s a really simple rule, but there is something in our brain where we’re wired to thinking three’s and you can look at our culture to see this as well. We have the three little bears, the three musketeers, the three blind mice. We have three Olympic medals, gold, silver and bronze. We divide stories in the three parts, the beginning, the middle and the end and the list goes on and on and on and on. When we set intentions in three’s I find that’s a really, really powerful way to work.

The rule of three is this: At the start of the day, you fast-forward before you connect and everything like that. You fast-forward to the end of the day in your head and you ask yourself, “By the time the day is done, what three main things will I want to have accomplished?” Those become the three things that you work on over the course of the day and it really is that simple.

The process of doing that, it only takes a minute, first of all, so you don’t have to spend hours organizing everything on your plate, but it is powerful because you take the time to separate what’s important from what isn’t and choose not only what’s important but making active decision of what isn’t as important as those things while you consider your limits.

You can actually, at the start of the day, if you feel that you do have less energy and that it’s a slog to go to work and get out of bed. You can adjust the accordingly and set smaller intention so that you are more likely to achieve them and so that you can take easy on yourself as you work with that intention. It’s a guiding light over the course of the day so when everything hits the fan which so often it always does, you can have that guiding light for what’s actually important that you determined ahead of time because the toughest time to think about your productivity is when you’re doing the work. When you do the preparation ahead of time, it can make all the difference in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
I have experiments with that numerous times and it’s so funny when I’m planning out my list, it’s interesting because some of those things, it’s like they’re just going to happen anyways. I’ve got three podcast interviews today and I’m doing a workshop tonight like they’re just going to happen. I’ve made commitments to people and I’m just going to show up and do them. It’s like I’m not going to be like, “Yo, Chris, sorry not feeling it. Peace.” Like that’s just not going to happen.

I go back and forth with myself on that. Well, these really are the important things that are going to happen today. Does that count? Am I cheating? Like there’s …

Chris Bailey
No, I think you got it. The beautiful part of this rule is that you can account for the constraints you’re going to have. If your time is more constrained or it’s pre-defined how you’re going to spend it,you can set intentions to do those things a certain way. The way I frame if I have a day that’s loaded up and interviews like today is because I like to compartmentalize the interviews that I do to a day or two or a week these days. I can just set an intention to give myself a lot of the space to recharge between them and to just have fun in the interviews. That’s how I frame it. My intention is to have fun.

Even though the thing is pre-defined, it informs your intentions throughout the day because it limits the amount of time that you get to spend how you choose. You can also set intentions about those things that are pre-defined so you can do at an even better job of them. Maybe a challenge is another way. If a report is due by the end of the day, you can set a challenge like, “Okay, I want to get this thing done by 1pm today,” so I have the afternoon off as an example.

You can make things more fun and less boring and frustrating sometimes with your work too. It’s a way of choosing what you work on in the first place but also of accounting for the constraints that you have so that you can approach your work a bit differently too and reflect on it a bit then.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s really cool and one thing I have been experimenting with along those lines is to also have three habit pieces because in some ways, well, prayer, exercise, drinking water, it’s probably just going to happen because it happens about everyday when I’m on track but not necessarily. I’ve been thinking it’s like, “Okay, these are the three things that require independent initiative and these are the three habits that I intend to maintain.” In so doing, I guess, for me, I’m thinking about … I feel the list is real. It’s valid if you will. When I check them off, I feel like Mortal Kombat flawless victory.

Chris Bailey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. It’s like elation like I did it. It’s almost like if they’re too easy, it’s like it didn’t count.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, totally, man. That’s the thing is you can adjust with time and so at the start … It’s funny, it’s a rule that’s so simple but there’s such power behind it in that simplicity. We’re talking about defining three intentions. It’s so simple. You can talk for hours about that. I forgot the point I was going to make. It was a good one too. Oh, man, I lost the grip of it.

Pete Mockaitis
You want to achieve victory and feel the elation of it. It’s flexible.

Chris Bailey
Oh, now, I know. At first, when I started doing it, I would make the intentions too small and way overshoot them. Then, I would make the intentions too big and feel like crap because I didn’t achieve them but over time, you settle into this equilibrium where you understand how productive you can be over the course of the day. You have the awareness to know how much potential you have to get stuff done. You can say no to things accordingly. You can plan out projects accordingly. You can define your day accordingly. You can coordinate your team accordingly.

Having that, it’s like hyperawareness of exactly what contributes to your productivity over the course of the day but also how much potential you have to actually get stuff done. There’s a certain power to that and it comes over time. It doesn’t come right away naturally but as you overshoot them and undershoot these three intentions enough, you settle into a really nice rhythm where you’re really productive everyday.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig. We got the energy. We got the time. We touched on intention when it comes to meditation. What are some of the other key practices when it comes to making intention work for us?

Chris Bailey
I think one of the biggest things, and everybody talks about multitasking and it goes in one ear and out the other, but one of the biggest things that you can internalize when it comes to attention is thatthe fewer things you try to focus on the moment, the more productive you become. Focusing on three things at one time is infinitely better than four. Focusing on two things at one time is infinitely better than two. Focusing on one thing at one time is as productive as you can become.

The relationship between those numbers is exponential where the more things you try to focus on at one time, the more your productivity plummets but the fewer things you focus on at one time, the more your productivity in how much you accomplish. You’ll feel less busy and your brain might even, in some ways, be less stimulated because you don’t get the dopamine head of constantly rapidly switching between things. You’re able to dive into whatever you intended to do so much deeper and you become aware of the tasks nuances and you become more likely to achieve a flow state.

Working on as few things as possible in the moment is one of the best things that you can do for your productivity. I see that as being integral to managing our attention. Meditation helps you bring more attention to what you’re doing in the moment and simplifying how many things you do in the moment in the first place creates the … It cultivates the ground for you to become as productive as possible.

What that means is restructuring your environment in a lot of different ways so that the distractions aren’t there in the first place. Because the simple matter of fact is the distractions we have in our work are more attractive than our work itself. That’s what makes them distractions. If our work was more stimulating than Twitter, we wouldn’t be on Twitter. We would be working 100% of the time.

The honest truth is, when we multitask, our brain is more stimulated but we invariably accomplish less. When we define our environment ahead of time and put our phone in the other room when we’re working or we put it into airplane mode or sometimes even disconnecting from the internet is a powerful thing that we can do. I wrote most of my book, Disconnected from the Internet, which allowed me to shift it, I think, six weeks ahead of schedule over the eight-month timeline, I think. I think it’s six or eight months that I had to, I forget what the heck it was.

One study I found in my research in the productivity project, it shows that when we spend time on the internet, we spend 47% of our time on the internet procrastinating. We live half of our … It takes twice as long to do stuff because we waste half of the time that we’re spending. Doing these simple things to make it easier for us to not be distracted in the moment and recognizing that distractions are more attractive than our work so much of the time is crucial, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. That’s good. That’s good stuff. Well, now, before we shift gears to the fast favorites segment, I’d like to get you …

Chris Bailey
Oh, that sounds exciting, fast favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. It will be fast strapping in. Before we do that …

Chris Bailey
I’m strapping on already. It’s going to be good.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear … Let’s hit the procrastination piece. Part of it is you’re stimulated by other things that are distractions that are more interesting in the moment. Then, you also highlighted some research in your book about some of the key procrastination triggers and tactics for overcoming that. Could you speak to that a bit?

Chris Bailey
Yeah, for sure. This is the approach that I take with a lot of the things that I experiment with is, the place I start is with the science and I work backwards to what we have to do everyday to live in accordance. It turns out that the science behind procrastination is it’s fascinating. There are certain attributes that a task can have that make us more likely to procrastinate on it. Those are whether a task is boring, whether it’s frustrating, whether … I had to pull up the list, whether it’s difficult, whether it lacks personal meaning, whether it lacks intrinsic rewards so it’s not rewarding in and of itself. Whether it’s ambiguous and whether it’s unstructured.

The more of these attributes the task has, the more likely we are to put it off. Take doing your taxes as a pretty good recent example today. Doing your taxes has pretty much every trigger under the sun. It’s boring. It’s frustrating. It’s difficult. It lacks personal meaning unless you find meaning in giving money to the government. It lacks intrinsic rewards unless you do one of those apps where you can see the amount that your refund is going to be, go up. For me, I have to pay tax every year because I’m self-employed so that’s not so fun. It’s ambiguous. It’s unstructured and so we put it off until the last minute. I think last year here in Canada, they even extended the tax deadline because people didn’t have it done in time. The reason that the entire tax industry exists, I think it’s a $500 billion industry in the US, is because taxes is so aversive to us because it sets off pretty much every trigger under the sun.

But you take something like watching Netflix, it’s not boring. It’s very entertaining. It’s not frustrating. It’s not very difficult to be honest with you. It probably lacks personal meaning but it’s pretty rewarding. It’s not ambiguous and it’s structured. They even give you … I would know this. This is what I’ve heard but I’ve heard they even give you a little preview of the next episode before you finish watching the current one so you can click it and just go to the next one and watch the entire season of House of Cards in two days earlier or a couple of months ago but I’m definitely not speaking from experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly not.

Chris Bailey
No, definitely not but when you look at which of these triggers a task has when you notice that you’re putting it off, then you can make a plan to flip them around and so if you notice that a task is boring, you can make a game out of it by saying, what I’d like to do with my taxes is for every 15 minutes I spend working on them, I’ll put two or three box into a fun fund that I can spend afterwards. Or if it’s unstructured, you can create structure around by doing research or hiring a tax company to do it for you so you can earn back and buy back a bit of your own time that way.

By looking and breaking down these tasks, you can reverse these triggers and twist them around so you can become more productive because procrastination is a huge productivity stuff because forming intentions is one thing and it’s a beautiful ritual and exercise, but procrastination is in essence a breakdown of our intentions because we intend to do one thing and we end up doing another. When you have that awareness that comes with doing fewer things in the moment, when you have more resiliency because you meditate more often, when you have more energy to bring to your work and when you have tactics like that where you can break these things down to really dissect why a certain task is so aversive to you in the first place, you can flip them around and fire up the logical part of your brain to overcome the emotional part of your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Yeah, I’m on board. Let’s do it. Now, we’ll procrastinate a little longer and talk to some of the …

Chris Bailey
No, we should have done that segment after, just saying.

Pete Mockaitis
You know what? I don’t feel like it. Let’s just call it a day.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I bet.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s not true. I very much want to know some of your favorite things. Could you kick it off by hearing a favorite quote, something that inspires you again and again?

Chris Bailey
Oh, favorite quote? Oh, man, I have a few of them and none of them are coming to mind right now. Let’s get back to that one. I’ll give that one to you later.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, sure. How about a favorite study or piece of research?

Chris Bailey
That we spent 47% of our internet time procrastinating. It’s one that I keep coming back to you because I keep falling into that trap of wasting time on the internet. I think it just goes to show that technology is a tool and it’s a tool that supports our work. It’s not meant to be our work and it can become such an immersive distraction when we’re not careful.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Chris Bailey
I would have to say Getting Things Done by David Allen or Linchpin by Seth Godin. I’m a huge fan of both of those books.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, David Allen is the man, episode 15, What what? Good guy, good guy.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. A quote for you is “You can only connect the dots looking backwards not looking forwards.” That’s the essence of the quote, I forgot the exact one but Steve Jobs said that.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite website or online resource?

Chris Bailey
Google is pretty good. You could get to any other website for that. If I had a choice of website, I would just do Google. I’m a big nerd and so I like any Apple news site. It’s pretty geeky, probably nobody else would pick that. Google, I’d have to go Google.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fair enough.

Chris Bailey
You can get to any other site, man. It’s like you get them all for the price of one when you pick that.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a bargain.

Chris Bailey
What’s your favorite website? Besides your own website, you can’t pick your own. I was going to say that but I thought …

Pete Mockaitis
You do follow the rules. We’ll mention that too. I’m going to go …

Chris Bailey
It’s so corny to pick your own.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s something different. I think TED. TED is just so high quality again and again, and interesting and worthwhile so I would have to pick that.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, that’s a better one. It’s better one than Google. Has anybody ever said Google to that question?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’re innovator in that way so I think

Chris Bailey
I’m an early … Yeah, because I’m not an early adopter of Google. It’s 2016 a lot of people use Google.

Pete Mockaitis
I remembered in high school, the teachers are like, “Oh, my gosh, Google is just amazing.” That was like, we were excited like it really is better than Lycos and AltaVista and HotBot and Yahoo and Excite.

Chris Bailey
I still remember AltaVista like I’m a relatively younger guy but I remember hopping on to AltaVista for sure and that Yahoo directory. Remember the Yahoo directory?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. In a way, it was fun playing around there.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, it was fun how much effort it took to get something to certain website because once you got to where you wanted to go, it felt like you had accomplished something. But these days, when any website are at our fingertips, we’re so spoiled, man.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Chris Bailey
Wikipedia, that’s another good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely, rock solid. How about a favorite nugget that you share that fans really resonate with like you say it and people are nodding their heads. They’re retweeting. They’re highlighting it in your Kindle book. What is it?

Chris Bailey
“That productivity is not about how much we produce, it’s about how much we accomplish.” That’s the one that I think resonates with people because you could produce email all day long and not accomplish a single thing. You can produce tweets all day long and you can do busy work all day long but really, busyness is no different from laziness when it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. How about a best way to find you? Should we go to alifeofproductivity.com or @wigglechicken on Twitter? Where would you want to point people?

Chris Bailey
Man, my website is, like you said, alifeofproductivity.com. That’s where all the experiments are. There’s no ads or sponsorships on that thing. There’s one of those annoying newsletter popups that comes up on some sites but you can exit out of that never see it again. My book is called The Productivity Project. That’s in bookstores everywhere, pretty much everywhere on the planet right now which is really cool. You can walk into a bookstore and pick up a copy. I’m on Twitter @wigglechicken and @aloproductivity. It’s stand for A Life of Productivity.

If you want blog, articles and the occasional brain dropping from me, I’ll just throw one more out there at folks. I’m doing a lot of productivity courses now. One of the things that I hear from companies is that they want their employees to become productive but they don’t want to bring in some cold and corporate expert on productivity. They want to introduce this new idea that productivity isn’t just about time. It’s about focusing well. It’s about managing our energy well as well.

That’s one of the things I’m doing more and more of is these courses and speaking and so I’ll drop a mention for that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
I could even hear the drop, that’s nice.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. The force is dropping actually. Metaphorically, it was, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but the lingo, it drops. It doesn’t release, it drops.

Chris Bailey
It drops, yeah. Well, it just dropped again. Oh, my god, it keeps dropping. I can’t, yeah, stop it from dropping.

Pete Mockaitis
I hope there’s lots of recurring revenue there with all the dropping repeatedly.

Chris Bailey
Every time this drops, I get, wow. I can just do this all day instead of traveling around it, doing courses.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s hugely value-added.

Chris Bailey
I can just drop this pen. This is actually a very nice pen. I should mention this pen. I should give this pen a plug, not that a pen needs a plug especially one by Pilot but it’s a Pilot Precise V5 RT. You should put a link to it in the show notes.

Pete Mockaitis
I will.

Chris Bailey
It’s the best pen I have ever written with. You go to the website or you got the Amazon page for this pen and there’s poetry on the page dedicated to this pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, come on. I’ll check it out. I’m a huge fan of office supplies. I’ve liked the TUL Needle Point Gel Ink private label of OfficeMax. I don’t know if that’s still going to be around with the merger. I hope it is but I’ll check out yours as well. Final challenge or call to action or parting thought for those seeking to become more awesome at their jobs?

Chris Bailey
Tomorrow morning before the day starts, fast forward to the end of the day in your head and ask, “What three things you’ll want to get done by the time the day is done?” It’s so simple and it only takes a couple of minutes but it’s one of those productivity tactics where you earn all the time back that you spend on it. Those are rare. If you pick up a copy of the productivity project, I went through hundreds of productivity hacks and tactics throughout the year and for this book, I don’t know how many pages this thing is. I think it’s 287. It’s a 287-page book but there is a 1,000-page book out there of all the stuff that didn’t work. But that is one of the best tactics out there that will give you so much more time back when you spend time on it in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Chris, this has been a real treat. Thank you so much and best of luck with your courses and book and speaking and dropping things.

Chris Bailey
Thanks so much.