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2024 GREATS: 950: Cal Newport: Slowing Down to Boost Productivity and Ease Stress

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Cal Newport shows how to achieve more by doing less.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why we’re measuring productivity all wrong
  2. The surprising math showing how doing less means achieving more
  3. The trick to eliminating tasks that don’t serve you

About Cal

Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast.

Resources Mentioned

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Cal Newport Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Cal, welcome back.

Cal Newport
Well, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to chat.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I have been loving your book Slow Productivity, and I would like it if you could kick us off with any particularly, strikingly, fascinatingly counterintuitive discoveries you made while putting this one together.

Cal Newport
The importance of doing fewer things is something that I think proved to be a pretty rich vein. So, I have this principle that’s in the book, it’s one of the three principles of Slow Productivity is do fewer things. And when most people encounter that for the first time, what they think I’m probably saying is like, “Look, it’s stressful to do a lot of things. You need to go easy on yourself. Stop trying to be so productive. Like, do fewer things and you’re just going to be happier.” But that it’s a sacrifice, right? You’re going to produce less, but you need to because it’s for your own sanity and psychological health.

As I really looked into this, though, one of the big surprises is, “Oh, wait a second. Doing too many things is like this endemic productivity poison. Like, it’s not just making people miserable, it’s an incredibly terrible strategy for trying to produce valuable stuff with your brain. And when you commit to doing fewer things, it doesn’t actually lead you to accomplish fewer things, and these are somehow separate.” And this was a pretty exciting discovery because I was ready for it to be like, “Look, we got to just reconfigure what we think reasonable amount of work is,” and this ended up to be one of these sorts of win-win situations.

Working on fewer things at a once not only makes your life much more sustainable, you’re going to produce more. Like, over the long term, you’re producing more. You’re finishing stuff faster. You’re producing better work. You’ll actually be better at your job in any sort of observable, measurable way if you’re doing fewer things right now.

Pete Mockaitis
So, doing fewer things in a zone of time, like a week or a month, results in more total things done over a longer arc of a year plus.

Cal Newport
Yeah. So, here’s the math on that, and really, let’s think about doing fewer things at once, like concurrently, “What is my count of commitments that I’m actively working on?” That’s the number that I want to reduce. Here’s the math of why this leads to more accomplishment, is that in knowledge work in particular, when you agree to a commitment, especially if it’s a non-trivial sized thing, like a project, it brings with it administrative overhead, like, “I have to send and receive emails about this project. I have to attend meetings about this project.” So, everything you say yes to has administrative overhead that is necessary to support the work, but it’s not the actual work itself.

So, what happens is when you’ve said yes to too many things, the quantity of administrative overhead goes past a threshold where it’s really sustainable, and now what you have is a lot of your day is now dedicated to talking about projects, like the talking to the collaborators, having meetings, sending emails, and these are fragmenting your day as well. So, it’s not just like, “Let’s do our administrative overhead hour this morning and then get to work.” No, no, no. These emails and meetings are spread out throughout your day, which means you really never have any ability to give something a long period of uninterrupted time to really give it your full concentration.

So, now you have a fragmented schedule, a small fraction of which can actually be spent working with real concentration on the actual projects, the rate at which you’re finishing things goes down. And so, by having, let’s say, ten things on your plate at once, the rate at which you’re finishing things is very slow. Like, most of what you’re doing is being in meetings and sending email. If you instead had three things on your plate, you’re going to actually finish those three things real fast because you have huge swaths of your day to actually work on them. And what happens after finish one of these three things? You can bring another thing on.

And so, if you work through this scenario, “How long will it take me to finish ten things if I work on them all at once versus if I just do three of them at a time?” That second scenario, it’s going to take much less overall time to get through those ten things than the first, and it seems counterintuitive because we’re used to thinking of ourselves like a computer or a robot, “This thing takes this much time, that’s just it. Ten things take ten units of time, that’s just it.” But it’s not like that. The overhead matters. So, doing fewer things at once actually moves things through faster and at a higher level of quality.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And not only that, so there’s the administrative overhead situation fragmenting our time and our attention and our energy, and there’s also the psychological factor of, “Oh, hey, I’ve made some great progress today,” or, “Oh, hey, celebrate. That whole thing is done. Feel good.” And then there’s just the market responding.

Like, I remember when I was land-lording, because if I had a unit that was almost ready to go, it did not produce rent. It’s like, “Oh, no, it’s really close!” I could maybe have someone come tour and say, “Now just imagine this, this, and this will be different when you move in.” And that didn’t really work for them, in terms of like, “Yeah, no, I’m ready to go with another option, because that place already looks done and beautiful, and maybe I can imagine what it would look like done but it’s not done now, and it’s not visually appealing,” that’s why they stage homes, you know, all that stuff. So, there’s benefits on numerous dimensions psychologically, and then starting to reap the rewards of what you have sown.

Cal Newport
Well, it’s important to remember busyness doesn’t create revenue. So, just like you don’t get rent for the days you spent painting and working on a unit you owned. You have to do that stuff, but it generates no money. And if you spend more time painting and spend more time rearranging, it doesn’t generate more money. You have to actually rent it. The same thing is true in knowledge work. Emailing about a project doesn’t generate revenue, attending a meeting about the project doesn’t give you revenue. Finishing the project does, right?

And so, what we should care about is, “How quickly am I completing projects? How good are they?” because that’s what actually generates revenue. But in knowledge work, more so than in like renting buildings, it’s also obfuscated and complicated because, “Well, I was working on this but also this, and I have seven different things I kind of do, and other people are involved, and no one really knows what I did.”

In that obfuscation, we get a lot of the problems with modern knowledge work because it’s hard to just say, “You produced nine this year, and last year you produced six and you’re doing better.” Because it’s hard to say that, we tend to fall back on what I call pseudo productivity, which is, “Well, let me just focus on this high granularity activity that’s highly visible, emails, meetings.” I just see you doing stuff and so I assume you’re productive. Like, that’s the core of the knowledge work dilemma, is we’re focusing on visible activity in the moment as opposed to quality accomplishment over time. From that fatal mistake comes like almost everything negative about the current knowledge work experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Cal, this is beautifully articulated. Thank you. We love actionable wisdom here, but let’s go meta and slow down, and say I would love for you to take us through that whole journey of history, philosophy, perspective, principles on this very concept of pseudo-productivity, knowledge, work, and how we have found ourselves in this current state that is kind of jacked up.

Cal Newport
Yeah, I mean, it’s a fascinating story. It’s what the first part of my book delves completely into, is just understanding how we got where we are. Because this is, by the way, just as an aside, it’s a big part of my approach is because I’m also a professor and a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown. I think a lot about culture, society, and technology and their interactions from the sort of removed of, “How do these systems work?” I think the systems matter.

And there’s a fascinating story when we look at what’s happening in knowledge work that spans from basically Adam Smith to Slack. Okay, so here’s what we get. Before knowledge work emerges as a major economic sector, which is really the mid-20th century, the term “knowledge work” is coined in 1959. Before that occurred, we had a pretty good handle on what we meant by productivity. It goes, “An economic concept that we could measure pretty accurately within specific organizations.” It goes all the way back to Adam Smith.

So, we first get good with measuring productivity in agriculture, and it’s a ratio, “How many bushels of wheat do I produce per acres of land I have under cultivation?” It’s a single number. And we also had in agriculture well-defined production systems, “Here is how I rotate my crops. If I change how I do this, and that number goes up, then I say, ‘Oh, this is a more productive way of doing it.’ And so, what we get here is sort of rapid innovation in cultivation of crops and planting systems because we have a number we can track.

Okay, we go to mills and factories. We could do the same thing, “Now I’m going to measure how many Model Ts are we producing per labor hour I’m paying for,” and that’s a number. And we have a very clearly defined production system, “And if I change something in that, we can see if that number improves.” This is what happened with automobile manufacturing. Henry Ford innovates the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts and that number went up by a factor of 10. They’re like, “Oh, great, this is a much better way to build cars.”

And this sort of quantitative productivity journey was massively successful. The industrial sector, the wealth created by the industrial sector, grew at a staggering rate from the 1800s into the 1900s. Some economists would say, essentially, all of the capital in which the modern Western world was built came from the productivity miracle of being able to measure these ratios, adjust systems, see how those numbers got better.

Then we get knowledge work. None of this works anymore because we’re not producing Model Ts, and we’re not just producing wheat on acres of land. It’s a complicated position where I could be working on a lot of different things that shifts over time. It’s different than what the person right next to me is working on. How we do this work is highly personal. There is no production system we can tweak as an organization. Everyone manages their own work and time internally however they want to do it. So, we have no systems to tweak, no numbers to measure, and this was really a big issue because, “How are we going to manage knowledge workers without these numbers?”

What we introduced was pseudo productivity. A crude heuristic that says, “We can use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.” So, I see you doing stuff that’s better than not. So, let’s all come to offices where we can have bosses. So, let’s make sure that you’re working all day. And if we really need to get ahead, let’s come in earlier and stay later. We can just increase the window of visible activity. So, we use this crude heuristic.

What happens where this goes awry is when we get to the front office digital IT revolution. So, we introduced computers and networks and then mobile computing and ubiquitous internet. And now suddenly, you can demonstrate visible activity, the thing that pseudo-productivity demands. You can demonstrate this at a very fine granularity, like sending individual email messages anytime, anyplace, and this is where pseudo-productivity begins to go off the rails.

Once I can be engaged in pseudo-productivity and measure pseudo productively anywhere at any time, and it has to be at this really fast, fine-grained granularity where it’s not just, “You saw me in my office during this hour,” but, “How many emails did you send to that hour? How quick were you to reply? How many things are you saying yes or no to?” It’s spun off the rails.

And we see this sharp discontinuity, if you study knowledge work, study how people talk about productivity in knowledge work, study how people talk about what’s good and bad about knowledge work, you get to the early 2000s, there’s a sharp discontinuity where suddenly we become unhappy. Just as email and laptops and then smartphones arrive, we suddenly begin to get much less happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And, Cal, what is the measure of that and what’s our approximate year when we start seeing that go, “Boom,” downhill?

Cal Newport
Well, you can see it in survey data, but where I like to look for this is actually in the tone of productivity books, because I’m a collector of business productivity. Look at the business productivity books from the ‘80s and ‘90s, like what are the big players here? It’s like Stephen Covey.

Pete Mockaitis
Getting Things Done, yeah.

Cal Newport
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, First Things First, you know, Eat That Frog. These are very optimistic books. Like, Stephen Covey’s whole thing is, if you’re careful in identifying what’s important to you and what’s urgent and what’s not urgent, you can figure out what to do with your day with the goal of actualizing all of your deepest desires and dreams as like a human, “We’re going to self-actualize you.” What’s the first big business productivity book of the 2000s? David Allen, Getting Things Done.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that was 2000, okay.

Cal Newport
And if you look at that, the tone is drastically different.

Pete Mockaitis
We’re overwhelmed. We’re drowning. We need help.

Cal Newport
We’re drowning, yes. I profiled him for The New Yorker. I really went deep on David Allen. It is a nihilistic book. Getting Things Done is like, okay, forget Stephen Covey trying to self-actualize our deepest goals as a human being. What is the goal of Getting Things Done? Can we find a few moments of Zen-like peace amid the chaos of the day?

Pete Mockaitis
After your weekly review, you can, Cal, and then it’ll pass.

Cal Newport
He’s trying to reduce work to this agnostic widget polling, like at least we can find some peace. It’s a very nihilistic book. But what changed between 1994 and 2003? Email. So, we see it. It’s just a change. And then what are all the biggest business productivity books of 2010s? We got Essentialism, The ONE Thing, my own book, Deep Work. All of these are books that are about, “How do we push back against the overload? How do we resist this? How do we find the things that really matter?”

I mean, it’s a complete tone shift where overload, having too much to do, being stressed out, becomes the defining feature of knowledge work once we get to the early 2000s. You don’t pick that up at all in the ’90s, in the ’80s, in the ’70s, and in the ’60s. So, the technology had this huge discontinuity in our experience of this sector.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so then, when it comes to the measurement has broken down, what is to be done there in terms of like there are, I think in your book you said, we’ve tried some really stupid things, like, “How many lines of code have you written?” or, “How many words have you produced?” And it’s like, “Well, I mean, were those lines of code brilliantly efficient? Were those words tremendously insightful?” or, “Are they kind of like bloated and lame and blah?” So, it’s like those might have a purpose of, “Kind of, if I can constrain them with a quality-paired metric as well.” It’s a real tricky beast, Cal. What is to be done here?

Cal Newport
Well, as long as you’re in the pseudo-productivity mindset, all the solutions are going to be like that. It’s going to be, if activity is what matters, my biggest concern, if I’m a manager, is you’re taking breaks from activities. So, I want to make sure, like, what was the big concern of managers about remote work? It’s like, “Well, what if there’s periods of the day in which the person is not doing things? That’s taking away the bottom line,” because we imagine knowledge workers like they’re on an assembly line, “Hey, if you stop putting the steering wheels on the Model T for an hour, we can’t produce Model Ts for an hour.”  It’s just this very direct.

So, what is the solution? We have to move away from this activity-based notion of productivity towards something that’s more outcome-based. And that allows for a much slower definition of productivity that has a lot more variation, a lot more idiosyncrasies, and is a lot more sustainable and meaningful for the people involved.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Can you give us some cool examples, or stories, or metrics, or numbers we might use when we talk about outcome-based? I’m thinking, in some fields it seems pretty straightforward, like sales. Like, okay, there’s revenue or gross profit generated from the sales that you’ve made. And that could look very different in terms of you were cultivating a relationship with a multimillion-dollar account for months or years, and you landed it, and we can measure that, and it’s way bigger than you hustling with your cold-calling, your cold-emailing to get dozens of smaller clients. So, there’s one outcome.

Cal Newport
And sales is an interesting example because I just met a salesman from a big tech company at a book event talking about Slow Productivity. And you know what he said? He said, “Look, in our company,” because sales is clear, unlike almost every other knowledge work, you have these metrics, like, “What did you bring in?” And so, it’s an interesting natural experiment. If we take a knowledge worker where there is a clear metric of success, do we see a drift away from pseudo productivity? And we do.

This is what the salesman told me. He said, “Yeah, in our company, the sales staff doesn’t have to go to meetings. Everyone else does. Everyone else. You got to go to meetings. If someone invites you, whatever, everyone in these more ambiguous jobs, yes. But the sales staff, all meetings are optional because they have this number and they want that number to be better. And the sales staff is like, ‘That number is worse if I’m going to meetings.’”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true, “What you do is so important, we’re not even going to put that at risk for anything.”

Cal Newport
Which shows how important were those meetings in the first place, right? Another place where we’ve seen innovation, like this actually is in software development, because software development, it’s knowledge work in the sense that it’s all your brain, but it’s pretty closely aligned with industrial manufacturing because you’re producing products. So, there’s much more of this notion of, like, “We’re shipping something. How long did it take to ship?” Like, it’s more measurable than other types of knowledge work.

We’ve seen tons of innovation, tons of innovation in software development that try to get away from just this completely generic activity base, because they learn, like, “I don’t care if you’re busy. What I care about is do we get these features added quickly? What’s our turnaround cycle on updates to the software?” Like, they have things to measure. So, what do you see in software development? You see a move towards these agile methodologies where, A, workload management is transparent and centralized. It’s not just, “I have a bunch of junk on my plate.” It’s, “No, no, it’s all on the wall, and this is what you’re working on, and it’s just this one thing.”

You see things like sprinting in software development, “We want you to do nothing but work on this feature until it’s done, and then we’ll talk to you again tomorrow,” because, again, whenever we begin to see adjacency, the actual measurable outcome, all of these tropes of pseudo-productivity that are really killing us in digital age knowledge work, they all begin to shatter and fall away. So, it’s like we have to take that mindset from sales and software development, and we need to move this into more types of jobs, we’d be clear about the workload management, work on fewer things at a time.

Just measuring performance at the scale of the year makes a big difference, “What did you produce this year?” Because when you’re talking at the scale of the year, you don’t talk about meetings or emails or small things you did. You talk about things you finished. So, just having like an annual perspective for thinking about productivity, that makes a difference. So, all of these types of things, we see it in software, we see it in sales, we need to move that to many more jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, the thought associated with, “What is the time horizon we’re looking at?” Because if it is a day, and I’m looking at, “How many emails did you send?” or, “How many hours were you logged on?” it’s like that tells me very little. If I look at a year, that could tell me a whole lot. And then, I guess, in a way, there’s some art and science right there in terms of evaluating, “What’s the ideal period by which we should be looking at and thinking about these things?” Do you have some perspectives there?

Cal Newport
Well, even allowing people to figure this out on their own can be really effective. Like, you say, “Okay, I want you just to make your pitch to me as your boss, like what you did that was valuable this last quarter or this last year.” Like, you can kind of figure out the timeframe when you write about it, just allowing the individual to report like, “Okay, here’s what I’ve been working on. I completed this and this, and we’re working on this big project, and we made this much progress on it. And I think this is all really important.”

Like, letting someone just describe why they’re valuable, because it’s not going to work if I ask you to describe why you’re valuable. You said, “Look, I just looked up my statistics. I’ve been sending 150 emails a day. I’ve been logging seven hours a day in Teams meetings. I’ve been in a lot of meetings.” Like, it sounds absurd when someone’s asking, “Quantify why you’re valuable.” You think about the big things. You think about it at a bigger time scale.

There are organizations that do this super explicitly. I profiled these in The New Yorker a few years ago, these organizations that had a very hardcore way of doing this, called ROWE, results only workplace environment, where it was all that matters is results, including when you show up to work, when you don’t, what days you don’t work. Everything is up to you, but they’re really, in these environments, they’re really hardcore about what are your results.

And because of this, it really banishes pseudo-productivity culture. If you’re like, “Hey, come to all my meetings,” you’re like, “No, because in the end, I’m going to be measured by these things I’m producing, and that’s going to hurt me. So, no, you’ve got to convince me to come to your meeting. And if it’s not going to be worth the time, I’m not going to do it, because all people care about is what I have produced.”

And they’re really interesting to study because, you see on the positive side, these hardcore results only environments, a lot of pseudo-productivity falls away. On the negative side, it is really difficult for a lot of people to leave the comfort blanket of all the obfuscation you could generate by just sending lots of emails and meetings because you can’t hide anymore. You produce or you don’t.

And there is, I think, a certain segment of knowledge workers, and it should be acknowledged, that do find some comfort or peace in being able to be much more obfuscated about their work, like, “It’s not really clear what I’m doing, but I answer my emails a lot, and I’m in a lot of meetings, and I sort of just, I’m around, and so it feels like I’m being productive.” When that goes away, it gets exciting for a lot of people, but it gets scary for some people as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve heard that in particular about the culture at Netflix, in terms of, like, it’s exciting and terrifying for this very reason. I think ROWE could also have some potential downsides with regard to collaboration and team camaraderie culture. It’s like, “I’m out to get my results. Period. So, get out of my way.”

Cal Newport
“Get out of my face.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s tricky to get all the pros without the cons. Well, the security blanket, you might feel secure in the moment, but I would venture to say, “If you’re not clearly creating value in excess of your salary and payroll costs, your security is quite slim come lay-off time.”

Cal Newport
I think that’s right. In the good times, where no one needs to be fired, it prevents you from being noticed in a negative light. Like, “Yeah, I’m not thinking about Pete. Like, I see him a lot. I’m sure that’s why I’m not thinking about them.” But you’re right. When times get tight, “All right, now we have to start reducing staff,” that’s suddenly when people shift their thoughts to not, “Are you doing something bad?” to, “What good are you bringing?” And, right, that’s when things get to be dangerous for you.

So, when times are good, you can just be really active and you’re not going to draw any attention. But when times are bad, ultimately people are going to wonder, “Hey, what do you do? What’s the value? Like, what would happen?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Like, what is it you do here?”

Cal Newport
I would say people, by the way, so my column for The New Yorker during the pandemic was named Office Space, in part because of exactly that reference that there was a lot of people in the pandemic, especially when they were forced to do all their work from home, and they could see like their partners and what their partners were doing for their jobs, and I think a lot of people in knowledge work had that same reaction of like, “What would you say I actually do here? Is it “I’m a professional Zoom meeting attender?” Like, is this really a good use of my graduate degree?” I think a lot of people had that crisis.

But, yeah, back to your point. If you’re producing stuff that’s valuable, not only does that give you security, it begins to give you leverage to slow down your definition of productivity. Because the more you can point towards, “I do this and I do this really well, but that’s also why I’m not just sending emails all day and a bunch of meetings. Hold me accountable for this. But in exchange for that accountability, you’ve got to give me more autonomy.” Like, that’s a fundamental exchange of trying to negotiate for a more sustainable, slower definition of productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And when it comes to this notion of doing fewer things, you mentioned the book The ONE Thing, which I love. And it’s so funny, when I read it, also with Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, it’s so calming to me, and I guess I like productivity books or non-fiction business-y books. But I think it’s also just like, “Oh, I don’t have to do everything. Okay, okay, that’s nice.” So, it’s just sort of reassuring.

But I’d love your perspective on, “How do we really select from a noisy world of thousands of options? What are those few things I’m going to do?” And the number you suggest is it, “It’s probably going to be more than one, but hopefully is less than five?” Is that the range you are shooting for?

Cal Newport
Yeah, for major projects. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, how do I pick and choose, like of hundreds of potentially good things, what really, really, really deserves my one to five?

Cal Newport
Well, there’s two environments here. So, one is you work for someone. So, if you’re in an organization, what really seems to matter is just add constraints, and then you will see pretty naturally like what makes the cut. So, for example, one of the things I recommend if you work within an organization, where you can’t just directly say no to a lot of things, what you do instead is saying, “I’m going to keep a two-tier list of what I’m working on. Tier one is actively working on. Tier two is queued up for me to work on next. And as I finish something in the active tier, I pull in the next thing from the waiting tier, and that becomes something I’m actively working on.”

So, you artificially constrain the number of things you’re actively working on. And the rule is why this works is you say, “Okay, administrative overhead can exist for the things I’m actively working on. If it’s in my queue, then I don’t do administrative overhead. So, if you give me something to do and I put it on my queue, and I make this public, and you can look at it, and it’s a shared document, you can watch it. I can tell you, ‘Watch this march up my queue until it gets to my active work tier.’ Once it’s there, email me about it. We can have meetings about it. You can ask me how it’s going. But until it’s there, the answer is ‘I’m not working on it yet.’ And where is it in my list? You can look at it yourself.”

So, now you’ve restricted the administrative overhead that’s being generated to only a small number of the things that you ultimately have committed to. Once you have those constraints, it leads to better selection because other people are now involved. So, a boss comes in and says, “This thing, I want you to do this thing.” You say, “Great. It’s on my queue, it’s back here.” They’re like, “No, no, I need this. This is way more urgent.”

Well, now you can involve the boss, and be like, “Great. Well, which of these three things that I’m working on now should I swap out?” And now they’re kind of involved. Like, “Actually, you know what? Stop working on that thing. I don’t think that’s as important as I thought it was when we first thought about it. Move this in here instead. And now that I’m looking at your queue, take out these four things as well. That’s not where the priority is.” So, once you have constraints, you begin to get wisdom.

So, another, this is an example from the book, but another place where this began to happen was a division within a large research lab where they had a lot of projects coming at them. And what they did is they centralized this, they said, “Okay, we’ll put every project we want to work on, on an index card and we’re going to put it on the wall under this certain column. These are all things we want to work on. And then here next to it are the ones we’re actively working on now, and we label it with who’s working on it. And so, when someone finishes something, we pull something else in here, we decide together what to do next.”

And they have this heuristic that arose over time, “If something’s been on that left side of the wall for a while, and we keep pulling other things in but we’ve been leaving that alone, that’s probably not that important. You know, let’s take it down.” Like, if you’re on the wall too long and it never moved over to, like, “Let’s work on it actively next,” that was their cue of, “This was exciting when we thought of it, but it’s not that important.” So, once you have constraints, wisdom about what’s important and what’s not, it begins to emerge because you’re thinking about this in a way that you don’t, when all you’re doing is just saying yes to things and trying to keep up with everything at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if you have the constraints, it’s almost like a forcing mechanism such that it’s not so much like, “Oh, there’s a magical measurement, there’s a magical question, or a magical metric by which we use to measure that answers this question for us.” It sounds like you’re saying, “Yeah, that doesn’t really exist across all industries and types of work but, rather, put the constraints in and you’ll feel the tension, and you’ll see what just really, really has to get done soon and what can wait.”

Cal Newport
Yeah, just being forced to continually make the question of “What next?” forces a lot of wisdom. And I keep having to say, “Okay, what am I going to pull in next? What am I going to pull in next?” And making that decision again and again, what emerges from it is, like, a better understanding of, “Oh, this is the type of stuff that’s important to me. And this stuff I keep leaving over here, and moving other stuff ahead, oh, I guess that’s not really that important to me.” And it’s a lesson that comes out from people who use these two-tier pole systems.

It’s something I talk about often. You build up the muscle of understanding over time what matters and what doesn’t, because you keep making these decisions and keep getting feedback on what stays and what moves. And, then over time, you stop adding the stuff to your “to-work-on-next” list that you know, like that’s never going to be pulled off. And then you become much better at being like, “No, we don’t do that anymore,” because you’re like, “I’ve seen too many things like that type of project that we put on this list or we put on the wall and it sits there for two months that we finally take it down. I have now learned, I’ve gained wisdom, this is not the type of thing that we really need to be working on.”

So, you become much more self-aware of what you can actually do with your limited time and what’s worth doing with your limited time when you’re explicitly and consciously having to make these decisions again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say “explicitly and consciously,” that reminds me of some of the interviews we’ve had about decision-making with Annie Duke and others who suggest having a decision journal. And I think the practice perhaps of writing out, “What is the rationale by which I’m using to place this in the top tier or not?” And then having that written enables you to kind of reflect on it and say, “Oh, yeah. Well, that was true at the time, but things have shifted,” or, “Yes, this is the pattern I see over and over and over again. Like, it’s really important to a really big client. Okay, that seems to be a prioritization principle that we keep going back to again and again.”

Cal Newport
I love that technique. By the way, yeah, I know Annie talks about it. My friend Dave Epstein from “Range” and “The Sports Gene,” he was on the show recently, and he was telling me about how he does this as well. And part of the reason why I think this technique, like a decision journal, is effective in knowledge work is that we don’t otherwise have clearly defined processes.

One of the defining features of knowledge work is that organizational strategies, processes, how I figure out what to work on or not, how I figure out how to manage my day, all of this is informal and personal, and most people just wing it, it’s like, “Oh, my God, I just got this urgent email, so let me do this. Oh, and there’s a deadline. I’m going to stay up and do this.” When you keep a decision journal, what you’re actually creating over time is process, you’re like, “Oh, this is how I deal with this. This is the right way to figure out what to work on next.” We forget the degree to which, in knowledge work, we just wing it all the time.

It’s not like we have, “Here’s how I build cars. How do I improve that?” It’s the equivalent in knowledge work, if the way we built cars was just put a bunch of tools and parts in a warehouse, threw a bunch of engineers in there like, “Guys, build me some cars. Let’s go.” Everyone was just running around like, “Hey, can I have the wrench?” That’s the way we do knowledge work. So, if in that world, you’re starting to actually think, “How do I figure out what to work on? What didn’t work? What did work?” you start to think about that clearly.

It’s like the one-eyed man in the world of blind people, you’re going to have this huge advantage, you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m just really…why are people working so hard? Like, I’m really killing it over here, and I’m not even working,” because no one else is doing this. They’re just getting after it with Slack and email in their calendar, and just saying yes to everything, and trying to be busy. So, there’s a huge advantage once you start thinking process-centric within knowledge work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And to The ONE Thing, that is one of my favorite questions I think about often, “What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?” And I think that is one handy question. I’ve learned it’s not applicable in all situations, in all domains. But I’m curious, have you discovered any other organizing principles or questions that tend to serve people pretty well, pretty often?

Cal Newport
Well, I mean, first as an aside, have you heard Jeff Bezos’ version of The ONE Thing idea?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, until you articulate it. Lay it on me.

Cal Newport
So, this is like the big idea within Amazon when to figure out “What are we going to work on? And what are we not going to work on?” Bezos has this thing, “Is this something that’s going to make our beer taste better? And if it’s not something that makes our beer taste better, we shouldn’t be in that business.” And the case study he’s referring to was when, I guess, German brewers, beer brewers used to generate their own electricity. And then at some point, they plugged into a grid instead of generating their own electricity. There’s a lot of annoyance and logistical overhead with running your own generators and dynamos.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds tricky.

Cal Newport
It’s tricky, right? And they said, “Oh, we should just plug into the grid.” Why? “Because making our own electricity doesn’t make our beer taste better so let’s not put any energy into that. We want all of the people we hire to have their energy into making our beer taste better.” And so, Bezos brought that over to Amazon, “We should be focusing on the things that makes us money, that our customers really care about. Anything else, if we can outsource it, we should, or just not do it at all.”

And so, I really love that way, like, “What makes our beer taste better?” But that brings me to, I think back to your question, one of the other big principles is obsess over quality. And what this is really doing is, basically, in knowledge work, in some sense, figuring out, “What’s your equivalent of brewing beer?” Like, figuring out, “Me, as an individual employee, what’s the thing I do that’s most valuable? And if there’s nothing really there that’s valuable, what’s something I can learn to do that’s going to be really valuable?”

And once you identify that, you can focus more of your energy in, “My goal is not to be really responsive. My goal is not to make sure that everyone gets everything they need from me as fast as possible. My goal is not to be in every meeting where you need me. No, my goal is to do this thing better. I want to do this better and better because this bottom line helps our organization.” And one of the keys behind this idea is focusing on something that’s really valuable to your company or your organization, is like the foundation on which all radical engagements with slow productivity will eventually be built because it gives you leverage.

It gives you control over your job. It makes your value clear. You’re playing the right game. It allows you to focus on what matters and not these sort of accessibility routines that everyone else is trying to do with their email and with their meetings. And when you really begin to care on making your beer taste better, all of the busyness becomes unnatural to you. So, you say, “I don’t want to be on email or in meetings. That’s getting in the way of getting better at these marketing strategies or at writing this code.”

And so, slowness becomes natural, and as you get better, you get more leverage to make your work slower. So, that idea of figure out like what your equivalent is of brewing beer, what’s the thing you do best and focus on that, that unlocks almost everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, if I’m doing marketing, what’s giving me more impressions per dollar, or more purchases per, whatever, what’s boosting my conversion rate, etc. Or if you’re creating products, it’s like the beer tastes better, what will delight the customer all the more, and make them say, “This company rocks. I love their stuff. I would tell more people about their stuff. I’m going to buy more of their stuff.” Very cool.

All right. Well, so we’ve talked about, so we got three principles here. We’ve spent some good time on do fewer things, and we hit the obsess over quality. Can you unpack the third one for us a bit?

Cal Newport
That’s work at a natural pace. And the argument here, it’s a psychological argument, the way that we work in knowledge work, which is all out, all day long, year-round, is really unnatural. It’s unnatural in a sort of literal sense that human beings throughout our whole history as a species are used to having huge variations and intensity of what we’re doing. There’s really intense periods during the day and really quiet periods. Some months are much more intense than other months. In the winter, we’re kind of hunkering down. And in the fall, we’re doing the harvest, and it’s super busy. And we have all this variation, that’s what we’re wired for.

And then we got mills and factories. And in mills and factories, it made more money if people just worked as hard as they could as much as they could. And so, we switched for the first time in human history to just like work hard all day long, but it was very unnatural and very intolerable. We had to invent labor unions and regulatory frameworks just to try to make these jobs survivable, essentially.

When knowledge work emerged in the mid-20th century, we said, “Okay, how are we going to organize this labor?” And we said, “Well, let’s just do the factory thing.” Because that’s what was going on, that’s what was in the air. The core of the economy was industrial manufacturing. So, it’s like, “Great. We’ll just approach knowledge work like we do building Model Ts, eight-hour days, work as hard as you can.” Like, if you’re resting at all during the day, that’s bad. Pseudo-productivity activity matters, and it’s the same all year round.

So, we adopted this way of working. It was actually super unnatural and required all these safety mechanisms. We adopted the same thing without the safety mechanism, and it’s an exhausting way to work. It doesn’t, over time, produce more productive effort even if in the moment it seems more satisfyingly frenetic. So, work at a natural pace says, “You need more variation in your intensity on all sorts of time scales. It shouldn’t all just be all out.”

It also says, “You should take longer to work on your projects, that we make our timelines too small. Give yourself more time so that you have room for these up and down variations.” Like, this is the way all the great thinkers through time past work, up and down in intensity over time until eventually something good came out. That’s how we produce things with our brain, not the Model T model of just, “Clock in and turn that wrench as fast as you can until you clock out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then any sense for how do we tune in to knowing if we’re overall too much or overall too little? I know there’s going to be variability, busy seasons, lighter seasons, but any clues that we might focus in on to go, “Ooh, let’s crank it up,” or, “Let’s tone it down”?

Cal Newport
Well, that’s not the hard part. The hard part for people, actually, is just being comfortable with the idea that you shouldn’t always be cranked up. And then once you have that realization, there’s a lot more variation that just becomes natural. So, like a couple of things you can do. One, just start doubling your timelines for everything you agree to do. Instead of doing the typical trick of, “In theory, what’s the fastest possible time I could get this done?” and then falling in love with that timeline, “Oh, my God, that’d be great. If I could get this done before Christmas, this would be great,” and then we commit to this impossible timeline.

Double everything. So, give yourself much more breathing room. And, two, actually engineer seasonality. You don’t have to tell people about this if you work for someone else, but just schedule out your project so that the summer is going to be slower, but you’re really going to be getting after November. You can just start engineering variations in your workload. No one is tracking your workload so carefully.

There’s no graph somewhere in the central office, where they’re like, “I’m looking at Pete’s daily work project touches here, and they’re down in July versus whatever.” People, it’s all just chaos. They don’t know what’s going on. So, take longer and engineer seasonality explicitly into your project flow and your workflows. Just doing that is going to be like taking a deep breath.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Cal, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Cal Newport
Well, I mean, again, I think the key thing to keep in mind is don’t use the word productivity so confidently.

Pete Mockaitis
You live it.

Cal Newport
I mean, there’s a lot of talk where people are like, “I want to be more productive,” or, “Productivity is bad,” but people aren’t really defining their terms, and that’s a big problem. We all just assume we all know what productivity means, but we don’t. Like, when people say, “I want to be more productive,” what they really mean often is, like, “I want to produce more stuff over time.” When people are critiquing productivity, what they’re often doing is critiquing a sort of industrial notion of productivity, like, “The effort per day needs to be large.”

We’re not talking about the same things. Like, let’s define our terms. This is why I think it’s helpful to say pseudo-productivity is what we’re doing. Pseudo-productivity is different than quantitative productivity, which is what we used to do. Slow productivity is itself an alternative. Like, once we get clear about terms, a lot of the absurdity of what we’re doing just becomes self-evident. Like, a lot of this idea of, “I want to do this now instead of that. I’m going to do fewer things. I’m going to have more variation.”

When we realize that’s in contrast to pseudo-productivity, and that’s a part of slow productivity. Just having the terms clear, I think, really makes it better, much easier for us to make progress. So, that’s my final thing I would say is don’t be too confident that you know what people mean when they use the word productivity. I actually push on it, “What specifically are we talking about here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Cal Newport
Well, there’s an obvious answer to this question because I actually wrote a book with this quote in the title, so maybe I’m telegraphing I like this. Steve Martin, doing Charlie Rose interview about his memoir, “Born Standing Up.” And Steve Martin says, “People are always asking me, ‘How do you succeed in the entertainment industry?’” And he says, “The answer I give them is never what they want to hear. What they want to hear is, like, ‘Here’s how you find the right agent,’ or, ‘Here’s how you like get onto the writing staff.’”

And he says, “No, what I tell them is, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you. If you do that, all the other good things will follow.’” I wrote a book called “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” 10 years ago, 12 years ago now that was just inspired by that quote because that’s how important it is to me, because I ultimately think, especially in creative work, that’s what it all comes down to, “Be so good they can’t ignore you. The other stuff will work itself out if that’s where you’re focused.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Cal Newport
Well, this always shifts, but there’s a new study someone just showed me, which I found very satisfying, because I don’t use social media, and I’ve often argued with people for various reasons why I should. And one of the reasons they give me is, like, “Well, this is how, like, you’re an academic, and this is how people know about you, and know about your work. You have to be yelling at people on Twitter about Trump. And if you’re not, you can’t be a successful academic.”

A new study just came out where they studied the citation count of academics correlated to Twitter engagement, and found Twitter engagement does not lead to more citations. It does not lead to more notice to academics’ work. What does matter? Doing really good important work. And so, I found that study very satisfying. You’re not going to be able to tweet your way into intellectual significance. You just have to do good stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Cal Newport
A book I just read, which I really liked, was Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath. It’s a 1950’s-era book by a great Jewish theologian, talking about the Shabbat. But I found a lot of secular resonance in this book because he was looking at the theology of Shabbat, taking a day off of work, like as it said in Genesis, right in the Bible. And he has this really cool argument. I wrote an essay about it.

But he has this argument that’s like, “Look, you take a day off from work. This is not instrumental. This is not you have to take a day off work so that you’ll be able to do work better when you get back. It’s not instrumental. You take a day off of work so that you can appreciate all the other stuff in life that’s important.” In Genesis, it was like God looked at what he had done and said, “It is good.” It’s like gratitude and presence.

I just thought it was, from 70 years ago, looking at something that was written 3,000 years ago, is a really sort of timeless idea that it’s not just, not everything is just the work, and breaks from work is not just about making the work better. It’s about all the other stuff that’s important to you. And it’s a slim book, it’s beautifully written, it has these original woodcut illustrations which are fantastic. A really cool read. I recommend it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Cal Newport
I recently have gone down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Cal Newport
Yeah, because I wore off on my MacBook, I wore all the keys off because I write a lot, and the plastic was cheap in this generation. I wore every key off. You can’t see any key. And so, I got a cover for it with the keys on it, and I wore all those off too. So, I finally bought a nice, a NuPhy, N-U-P-H-Y mechanical keyboard, and, oh, I love it. Just the click and the clack. It’s substantial. I love writing on it. Your fingers spring back up with the keys so that you can type faster. I don’t know, I’ve enjoyed it. I write all the time. I enjoy writing more on this than I did when I was on just the MacBook keyboard, so I love my NuPhy wireless mechanical keyboard.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you find it’s quoted back to you often?

Cal Newport
I think people, really, like more recently, one of the things that come back to a lot is this idea that activity doesn’t matter, busyness isn’t monetizable, your email inbox is not going to be remembered 10 years from now, but what you produce that you’re proud of, that’s everything, and just this idea of output over activity. That’s what keeps coming back to me. That’s what people seem to be quoting when they’re talking about this book or calling into my podcast, so I like that. Busyness is maybe satisfying in the moment, but is forgotten in the mist of history.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Cal Newport
Do fewer things. Like, trust this idea that if you cut down the number of things you’re working on right now, you will look back when this year is over and be much more impressed, and proud of what actually got accomplished.

Pete Mockaitis
Cal, this is fantastic stuff. I wish you much fun and slow productivity.

Cal Newport
Thanks, Pete. I’m going to go slowly get some things done.

1014: How to Make Meetings Better for Everyone with Calendly’s Darren Chait

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Darren Chait discusses how to make meetings more engaging using data from Calendly’s State of Meetings 2024 research.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why 81% of respondents want more meetings 
  2. Three meetings to keep—and the one to stop 
  3. Surprising statistics on meeting etiquette 

About Darren 

Darren Chait is the VP of Marketing at Calendly, leading the world-class marketing organization. Previously, he was a co-founder of Hugo, the leading meeting workflow solution powering meetings for tens of thousands of customers backed by Google, Slack and Atlassian.

In a prior life, Darren was a corporate lawyer at one of Australia’s leading law firms, where he attended meetings for a living – the start of his passion for meetings and the future of work.

Resources Mentioned

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Darren Chait Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Darren, welcome.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into your unique vantage point, your insights, your wisdom. So, you work at Calendly, which is my all-time favorite meeting scheduling software. Use it in two businesses. So, great job, guys.

Darren Chait
Good to hear those. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious, while you’ve been there, how many meetings have been scheduled in Calendly?

Darren Chait
Personally? Thousands.

Pete Mockaitis
Thousands? Millions?

Darren Chait
Well, yeah. I’d say thousands. I’ve been at Calendly for two and a half years. I think I probably would have exceeded hundreds. I spend a lot of my day in meetings, like we all do, which is why it’s such a good topic for discussion. And I really try and schedule most via Calendly because who’s got time to jump around with the back and forth and try to coordinate multiple schedules? And being an Australian, living between the US and Australia, time zones are a nightmare. So, I need Calendly to work, and luckily, so do other folks.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many meetings has the Calendly software product platform scheduled for humanity?

Darren Chait
That’s a very good question. That’s not a number that we’ve actually published before. So, you’ve heard it here first, if I had to do the math quickly, I wonder if we’ve crossed a billion, it’s possible, but I’m not sure. So, keep that one between us, all right? But I want to look into that. It’s the number I should know off the top of my head.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’ll say rounded to the nearest billion and one million.

Darren Chait
Exactly, that’s right. It’s closer to a billion than zero, but it could even be more. I’ll have to check on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so that’s cool. So, a billion meetings, and you’ve been in many yourself, personally there. I’d love to hear, off the top of your head, what are some of the most striking, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us workers and meetings from your vantage point here?

Darren Chait
We’ve recently published a report on this. We do it every year, and the 2024 State of Meetings Report, went in and asked over a thousand workers a whole lot of questions about meetings. And what I love about this process, this piece of content is because we do it year on year, things are changing right in front of us.

So, the number one thing that jumped out at me, which I can’t reconcile, I don’t know what your thoughts are, Pete, but 81% of workers want more meetings. Here we are talking about meetings being the bane of our existence, competing with productive work, there’s a million and one memes about meetings that should have been emails and those sorts of things, but the overwhelming majority say, “Give me more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. Okay, now I imagine that the devil’s in the details in terms of do they want more meetings like the ones they’re having right now? Or are they looking for something else on the menu that they haven’t received yet to appease their appetite?

Darren Chait
Yeah, exactly. It’s both. So, number one, firstly, productive meetings was the caveat there. We want more productive meetings. Are we having productive meetings today? Yes and no. But I think there’s a more interesting take, which was my opinion, anyway. We sort of said, “Why? Like, how do meetings help you?”

And if you look at all the different reasons why people love meetings, 51% said connection with colleagues, 44% said more collaboration, and the list goes on. And what it really led me to think is that we’re in this new world where we’re now post-COVID, we can’t blame COVID anymore, but it’s certainly reset the way we work. We have many, many, many remote-first companies out there, many, many, many hybrid companies, and some companies that are operating in a traditional office environment, but we’re really just seeking out connection.

So, yes, we want more productive meetings, but based on what respondents said in this particular survey, and what I hear talking to folks every day, meetings are how we stay connected. It’s how we build relationships at work, it’s how we make the work we do human. So, I guess it’s not that surprising if you think about it like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we like more meetings, in so far as they are productive and connecting. Got it. And can you lay it out for us, just how much time are we spending in meetings these days?

Darren Chait
Most of us, in terms of the respondents, are only having one or two meetings a day, but about half are having three or more meetings a day, and I guess it comes down to what you do for work, right? So, this year for 20% told us, they’re spending more than six hours per week in meetings, which, 20% doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But I think there’s a few things to consider.

Firstly, the folks that are customer-facing, we heard way higher. We saw five, six hours a day in some cases. The folks that aren’t customer-facing, so in roles that they don’t need to be talking to customers, just internally, is where we saw those numbers of one or two meetings a day.

The other thing is you might have two meetings a day at two hours in total, which doesn’t sound like much, but think about the time needed to prepare for the meeting, to travel to the meeting, in some cases, attend, take notes, travel from, identify what the follow-ups were, share them out, and before you know it, your two hours of meetings a day could be closer to four. And that’s why the cost of these meetings and making them productive and valuable matters so much.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about making them productive and valuable. What are some of your top insights and discoveries here associated with what makes meetings excellent versus bad?

Darren Chait
The fundamental question is whether you need a meeting at all. It’s 2024, we have a ton of technology at our fingertips, there’s so many different ways to collaborate and communicate, but in many cases, we just jump straight back to the calendar.

I used to tell my team, I’m in a different role, there’s only three reasons you need a meeting, the three D’s: debate, discussion, and decision-making. So, if that’s not going to happen, does it need to be a meeting? Can I send them a video, right, with, “Here’s what I want you to know, the background on this particular topic,” or, “Here is the plan for next quarter,” or, “Here is some feedback on something I’ve read.”

If I don’t need debate, discussion, or decision-making, I can share that asynchronously via video. And there’s many other different ways we can achieve that. So, if you don’t need to have a meeting at all, that’s the number one way you can reduce the cost of those meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose connection as well, it doesn’t fit into the nice 3D framework, and it’s not necessarily about making productive value creation happen, but that is a key source of reason and value of a meeting going down.

Darren Chait
That’s a very good point. I think you’re right, and it sounds like that’s what people are craving. So, even if we could do everything async, we would be losing out on that element of connection. But then, again, is a meeting always the best way to achieve that connection? Can we catch up spontaneously? Can I give you a call? Can I text you and say it’d be great to have a one-on-one and check how things are tracking and hop on the phone? Different style of meetings can, obviously, favor connection and can be achieved that way.

But a traditional meeting, if I have eight people in the room, in a meeting room with some slides up on the screen and so on, debatable the level of connection you get there. But it’s a good point and something to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, with the three D’s – the debate, the discussion, the decisions – what are some inappropriate meetings then, meetings we’re having where this is not occurring that should perhaps sound the alarm bell for us, and make us say, “Wait a sec, maybe this meeting should not exist anymore”?

Darren Chait
The knowledge sharing meeting, I think that’s the one. worst culprit. So, where I’m just coming to share information, “So, can everyone come because I need to present the 2025 plan for whatever with you?” And you come along, and everyone’s happy because I’ve got some interest in the 2025 plan, and I go and tell you a story for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, and that was helpful to know. I need to know your plan.

But do we really need everyone in a meeting on the schedule that I dictated, joining the Zoom call, or traveling to the meeting, sitting there at the same time, perhaps having distractions because I’ve determined the time that they have to listen, and really, they’re just gleaning this information from me. Could I not have shared that some other way? So, that’s one. I think that jumps out at me a lot.

The other alarm bell for me when I look at a meeting is the attendees – too many or too few. Too many is where everyone has some sort of, you know, interest in the topic. They all join this meeting and you’re never going to have any real debate or discussion, right? There’s 20 people in the room. Even if there’s 12 people in the room, that’s just not going to happen. We can’t have this productive discussion with, effectively, a conference that we’re running.

Or, too few people in the room, or the wrong people in the room. How are we going to make a decision? I can’t go and talk about planning or strategy when Pete clearly is a stakeholder who couldn’t attend and has to be a part of the decision, or talk about what we’re doing for social next year where there’s no social media marketing folks there. So, the attendees is the second red flag that jumps out at me.

And then, I guess, the third thing I’ll say, which is back to really tips for a great meeting, they sound obvious, but we don’t do them well, which is goals for that meeting. So, when you actually look, and ask yourself, you shouldn’t have to ask yourself, it should be clear, but if you have to ask yourself what the goal of the meeting is. If you can’t answer that very quickly, we shouldn’t have had that meeting. We didn’t need that meeting in the first place.

So, what do we need to walk out of this room with, virtual or physical? If we haven’t achieved this, this meeting has been a waste of time. If you can’t express that for a meeting, at least once it’s started, I think we’re making a mistake here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when it comes to the right number and the right people in the meeting, you have some work there associated with folks having a specific role. Could you expand on that?

Darren Chait
So, one of the downsides to virtual meetings in 2024 is the risk of multitasking and distraction. We know that 52% of workers report multitasking always or often in virtual meetings. Now, yeah, it doesn’t surprise me, but when you look at it like that in the numbers, it’s mind blowing. That means, in every meeting I go to, more than half the folks in the room are doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
When they’re remote?

Darren Chait
Yeah, they’re doing both. Now, how well can we do both? Well, I won’t debate you on that topic, I know we’ve all got different views there, but you don’t have 100% of their attention. And I’ve got a goal here for this meeting, we don’t want to walk out of the room without achieving this meeting, but I know half the people there are doing something else. So, that’s number one.

And then, to more directly answer your question around engagement level for different types of meetings, if I have an assigned role in that meeting, we saw more than 90% say that they’re engaged in that meeting, “I’m actively listening.” So, an assigned role, I might be chairing, I might be taking notes, I might be presenting a piece of it, everyone’s kind of listening. Very few said otherwise.

But if I don’t have an assigned role in that meeting, it’s almost inverted. We see, at this point, almost 30% of folks who are somewhat disengaged or completely disengaged. And that role, again, could be part of a brainstorm, providing a status update. Again, taking notes, whatever the role is, it makes a very, very big difference.

The reason I like this stat, it sounds obvious, again, naturally, if people don’t need to be there, number one, they’re not going to be engaged. But even if people need to be there, it’s really important to run these meetings in a way where other folks are involved, where there’s collaboration happening, if you want everyone to be engaged. And as I mentioned, particularly for virtual meetings, you’re competing with that 52% who are doing something else otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s kind of fascinating, and there’s a whole lot of debate right now like, “Everybody come back to the office!” “No, we don’t want to come back to the office!” Or some people are like, “No, we’re fine, you don’t need to go back to the office.” So, that’s sort of raging now in 2024, and probably will continue in 2025.

And so, I can imagine, if those people who are calling the meetings are aware of these phenomena, that’s probably sort of annoying to them, “No, I would like you to be physically in the space such that you cannot be multitasking.” But, at the same time, I think some people really do perhaps think and function better when we’re multitasking.

I’ve been to meetings where someone’s on his walking treadmill desk, and it’s like, “More power to you. I think your brain is working better when you’re moving, and that’s cool.” Or folks are able to just kind of move around a little bit, or fidget with some things, or ponder. I think, I don’t know, I don’t have any evidence in terms of scientific randomized control trials on this, but I think some people just happen to be in a more comfortable thinking, working groove when they have the flexibility to be in their own space.

And yet, having a little bit of that forced pressure of, “No, you’re here and there’s no escaping. There is no multitasking available in this room without you looking rude and embarrassing yourself.” So, it is really juicy and personal what’s at stake here.

Darren Chait
I have two views on that. I think fascinating point. One is what sort of multitasking, right? So, I’m a big fan of the walking meeting. A lot of my team will know, I’ll put in the AirPods and go for a walk and have a conversation at the same time. Certain meetings, right? That works great when we’re catching up about the week and I’m helping to hear and unblock.

But if I’m going to have a really direct conversation with you about feedback or performance, or we’re trying to solve a problem that might be financial and we’re sharing our screen, obviously, you can’t do it that way. Similarly, if I’m sitting in a meeting and I’m now working on writing a piece of content, there’s no way I’m listening or engaged with what you’re saying. No part of my brain can do that. So, I think it comes down to definitions of multitasking. It’s a fair point that some types of multitasking can be productive.

The other side I was going to mention is around remote, and Calendly, full disclosure, Calendly is a remote-first company. What we mean by remote-first is we designed a workplace, a way of working, that takes into account the fact that our team is remote. And I think what we learned through the pandemic, many companies sort of just picked up their culture and dropped it in online and ran into a lot of issues. Different businesses have different views on the topic, and that’s why many companies have required their employee base back to the office, either full-time or part-time.

If you design a meeting culture around the way you’re set up, I don’t think it makes any difference. So, if I’m running highly collaborative meetings where everyone’s engaged and has a role to play in that meeting, I’m going to see the same levels of engagement, or higher even, than I would if I force everyone into the room such that they can’t be on another device, such that they can’t be doing something else.

And to your point, Pete, many people do better because you think better when you’re on your treadmill while you’re in that meeting or when you go for your walking meeting, and we allow for that. So, I guess what I’m saying here is your meeting culture and the way you meet has to be purposeful and intentional based on the way your organization operates.

Pete Mockaitis
And to your point about our own idiosyncrasies and perceptions, you’ve actually got some fun tidbits about etiquette, like what we consider to be rude or unacceptable. This is fun, because I think some people wonder, “Is it okay if I do this on this meeting?” Well, you actually have some answers. Lay the numbers on us, Darren.

Darren Chait
So, in general, we asked a whole lot of questions around, “Is it okay to eat in a meeting? Is it okay to schedule over lunch?” and those sorts of questions, things we do all the time. And let me run you through some of this data.

So, in general, we saw that 23% think eating in a meeting on camera is totally fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so 77% thinks it’s not fine.

Darren Chait
No, no, no. But, if you’re on mute and your camera’s off, that’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis
And they’ll never know.

Darren Chait
Most people thought that was okay, 68% said that’s fine, “I just don’t want to see you taking those bites.” I thought that was interesting. I’ve definitely been a bit self-reflective after that because I’ve probably been guilty of that over the years. But some more, I guess, relevant ones to the way we work, the dynamics with camera on and camera off is really fascinating. So, when most people have their camera on, 39% said it’s okay for you to have your camera off, but, obviously, 61% said the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
So, 61% said, “I want those cameras on.”

Darren Chait
Yep, that’s right. “If some people’s cameras are on, yours better be on,” that’s what they’re saying. And that kind of makes sense, right? You’re trying to build connection here. You know you’re remote in these examples, they’re virtual meetings. It’s hard to do that when you’re the one that’s not there. You think about the real world parallel. So, I wasn’t too surprised by that, the people weighed it up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what would the real world parallel be, like you just have a black bag over your head? It’s like, “Okay, I’m not available to be looked at.”

Darren Chait
It’s true. It’s true. Again, it’s funny with technology because, just a few years ago, if you weren’t in the office, hopping on the phone is totally acceptable with no camera. But now that we have the likes of Zoom at our fingertips, no longer good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it gets to the notion of, “Well, hey, if this was a properly sized meeting with the proper people in attendance, it makes sense for everyone there to be on their camera,” in most contexts, as I think through it. And yet if it’s like, “Well, you invited 80 people to this meeting when, really, only nine are there,” it’s sort of like the other 71 are more so spectators, so, like, it seems to make sense to turn the cameras off at that point.

Darren Chait
And that’s why I blame the media organizer, or the onus is on the media organizer. If you have a meeting where folks consistently have their camera off, or if they are doing things while the meeting is running, rather than go to the attendees, and say, “Why are you doing this?” you should be looking at yourself, and saying, “Hang on, what is it about this meeting that disengages, that means that folks can go and do something else, or have their camera off?”

So, I think that’s the feedback there. I think related to multitasking point, before I shared some data with you around how many people are typically multitasking during a meeting, but what surprised me is 70% said that’s okay. They don’t have a problem with it. So, then 30% said, “Nope, everyone should be there.” I don’t personally agree with that.

Again, if you’re running a great meeting and everyone needs to be there, I think that number should be lower. But I think it’s a sign of the fact that we’re not all running those great meetings. We’re all attending many meetings. We don’t have enough hours in the day to get our work done because we’re attending all of these meetings that maybe I didn’t need to be in and that’s why I’m multitasking and that’s why I think it’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s some good stuff about inside a meeting. Anything else you want to share about best or worst practices when you’re inside a meeting?

Darren Chait
So, generally, I mean, from a data standpoint, we asked some questions about folks calling in when they’re not at their desk, but others are at their desks, only 37% thought that was okay. I was offended by that one. Again, I’m a fan of that walking meeting. If people are at their desks, you should be calling in the same way and so on, so similar sorts of insights.

But really, we’re just seeing the same trends again and again in terms of great meetings, great engagement, everyone needs to be there, everyone’s there. Poor meetings, unclear goals, not everyone needs to be in the room, didn’t need to be in a meeting, everyone disengages, and technology has made that so much easier, because I can click one button and turn my camera off. And again, I can’t do that in the live meeting like we discussed.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really intriguing. The word “should” is so heavy, like, with judgment, you know. And I guess it varies how strongly people hold these “shoulds.” Like, is it more like, “I’d kind of prefer if it were on,” versus, “I can’t believe this unprofessionalism on the other side”?

But I think that really highlights the need to have these conversations because we might very well be entering into this situation, blindly unaware, it’s like, “Well, no, I got my video camera off because, I mean, it’s during lunchtime and I’m hungry and I’m going to get really cranky if I don’t eat. You’re going to have a dumber Pete if I don’t eat. So, this is all in everyone’s best interest for me to be eating right now.”

So, I’m just thinking, “Hey, I’m making prudent decisions that make sense for me and my team and organization.” And unbeknownst to me, I’m getting some judgments from others participating in the meeting, so it sounds extra super important that we have those conversations candidly and upfront so that we’re not incurring the negativity that can just be unspoken and foment and grow, you know?

Darren Chait
Well said. And it gets even more complicated culturally because different demographic factors drive different opinions. I saw in the research, for example, 72% of folks in the US feel like it’s okay to eat off camera, but only 64% in the UK felt that way. So, if you’re meeting with Americans, have your lunch. If you’re meeting with Brits, maybe not a good idea. And there’s generational differences and all sorts of others. So, to your point, being clear on expectations and the way we’re operating this meeting matters because you’re never going to make everyone happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah, that’s handy. Well, I think it’s just good that the fact that you have this report gets some people thinking and perhaps more likely to discuss, “Oh, hey, I had no idea that a reasonable portion of you might find my behavior completely unacceptable. Why don’t we go ahead and chat about that, shall we?”

Darren Chait
We actually had that a few weeks ago. We have a weekly meeting with the team, and a lot of the team don’t have their camera on, and there’s 40-something people in this meeting, and I get it. Everyone’s got busy. This meeting has just been dropped on their calendar. We haven’t really found a time that suits everyone. It’s impossible with so many folks, and about half of them come with camera on, half come with camera off.

And for the people that are presenting content in that meeting or sharing and driving the discussion, it’s really difficult because there’s no feedback, right? When I’m chatting live with video, we can read each other’s faces and body language and build a great relationship. If you’re just a name, it becomes really hard.

So, we did two things at the same time. One is we set expectations. I said to the team, “Hey, I really want to make this into a meeting that you have your camera on, and I’ll explain why.” And I gave that rationale. And at the same time, we redesigned the way we ran that meeting so it was a lot more collaborative, we had a lot more engagement. Even though it’s a big team, we’d have breakouts most times, we’d have polls running, we’d have an open agenda that anyone could add to.

And both of those things together, a terribly designed scientific trial, both of those things together changed the way this meeting operated. So, I think it comes down to, as we keep saying, right, being clear on expectations and why it matters, but also creating meetings where we want to be there, we get value out of them, and naturally I’m going to be engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Darren, let’s dork out a little bit, if I may, on tech tools. So, Calendly is one of the finest software as a service tool as I’m aware of on the planet. So, yep, I said it. I made it, Darren. You can quote me if you like.

Darren Chait
It must be true then. I’ll take that. I was going to say, just capture that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it sounds like you’re doing some cool stuff with regard to the open agenda, the polls. Lay it on us, in terms of when you’re in meeting, what are some cool tech features you’re utilizing, and how’s it go down?

Darren Chait
So, firstly, talking about Calendly, as you and hopefully many of the listeners are familiar, we make scheduling automation software, so we make them very easy to book meetings with you and with your team and co-workers from your website, directly by sharing a link, balancing multiple schedules, round-robining, allowing lead routing, whatever the use case is, we want to make scheduling very easy.

And the reason I share this with you is some of my favorite features and tools out there related to meetings actually happen in the pre- and post-. So, I know one of the common reasons I hear why people buy Calendly reminds me of great meeting practice, which is confirming the meeting, sharing out content before the meeting, and sending that thank-you or that follow-up after the meeting.

But, in general, whatever tooling you’re using to do that, you got to do it, you just got to do it. You have to make sure that everyone knows why they’re coming, what the goal is, and making sure they’re actually attending, and then that you capture the value afterwards. So, sure, use Calendly’s workflows by all means, but otherwise, find a way to do it.

Outside Calendly, we spoke earlier about avoiding the meeting. Here at Calendly, we’re big fans of Loom. Loom is an asynchronous video collaboration tool. They’re actually now part of Atlassian, but you can buy Loom independently too and they’ve got a free tier I believe. And the reason I love Loom is it helps me avoid those meetings when I don’t need meetings, but it does it in what I would call a high bandwidth way.

So, here’s what I mean. If I want to share something with you, Pete, I can go and send you an email or a message, say, a Slack message, and say, “Hey, Pete, I want you to know what I’m thinking about this topic, and here’s some feedback on this work,” you just deliver in bullet points. You’re going to come to work. Firstly, I can do it on my schedule, time zone, the way I work, when whatever my workday looks like.

But you’re going to come to work, you’re going to read this message, and you’re going to have 50 questions, right? You’re going to wonder if what I really meant was this or that, if I’m unhappy about that, what the tone was there. Or, I can send you a video, which is what Loom allows me to do. I can record a video, and say, “Hey Pete, great work there. I want you to be even better because you’re next in line for that director promotion. Here are some tips to make your amazing work absolutely incredible.” And I can run through that.

And, very quickly, you’re seeing my tone, my body language, the words in between, the real words, and you’ve got a completely different message delivered, and we’ve avoided that meeting with all those questions. So, async video tools like Loom, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis
I love Loom so much, and I’m amazed at just how much you could accomplish there. We bought a company about a year ago, and much communication between buyer and sellers is like, “Hey, so here’s kind of how I’m thinking about the financing situation, dah, dah, dah.”

And so, like, we’re going into all these details of a spreadsheet, and so it’s like, “Huh, this is kind of high stakes kind of a communication, and yet we all recognize that, yeah, this is the best way to do it. We want to say, ‘Wait, what was that sell? Where did you get that number? Where’s that coming from?” And we can’t find the right time to meet together quickly, but it’s like, so it really kept our back-and-forths moving faster as opposed to, “Oh, I guess we could all meet Thursday.” “No, give me the Loom Monday, and then we’ll all have our comments Monday evening.”

Darren Chait
Exactly. I love it. What a great testimonial. So, I think that’s an absolute secret for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. So, Loom or something like it enables you to, very quickly, easily do a screen record share. You can see your face in a bubble and mark up documents or spreadsheets or work products of any sort. Very cool. Any other favorite tools?

Darren Chait
So, at my core, I’m a marketer. I crave voice of customer. I want to hear from the customer all the time. So, looking for solutions that allow me to do more of that, and there’s lots out there and it depends on the nature of customer and so on. So, without going to a specific solution, because I think it depends on the company, if you can find a tool that helps you record customer conversations and allows you to share them around internally, that is game-changing. That helps us organize.

Because, in my marketing org, I can go and tell you what the customer says, I can give you slide deck after slide deck, spreadsheet after spreadsheet, until you’ve heard a real human standing right there, talk about the value they get from your product or service, the challenges they have with your product and service, nothing aligns you more like a marketer. But it’s also an area that we’re very interested in directionally at Calendly.

We are moving beyond just scheduling. We are very interested in tasks around meetings, preparation, engagement, and follow-up. I think you’ve got to find ways to capture what’s discussed in meetings and circulate them and surface them and share them to create that organization that’s always working for the customer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, when you say record the voice of the customer. Is that just as simple as, “Hey, we’re on a Zoom, or a Google Meet, or whatever, and I’m clicking record, and now here’s the snippet”? So, what you’re saying is there’s tools that make it even simpler than that?

Darren Chait
Totally, yeah. I know a lot of enterprise organizations use Gong, for example, where sales calls are recorded, you can search and share snippets so there definitely are. But, again, it’s a bit like some of the meeting features and workflows I mentioned earlier. It’s a way of working more than a particular tool that matters. And we really have seen total change in the way we work and collaborate and how customer-centric we are as we’ve created that culture of sharing meetings.

Because the thing about meetings, right, I should have said at the beginning, is we love to hate them. Yes, they drive all of these great outcomes for our business, but it’s where business gets done. If you think about external meetings, every meeting you have with someone outside your business is somehow tied to making money, or recruiting to have the right team to make money, or build relationships that ultimately may lead to customer acquisition, whatever it is.

So, the fact that we’re letting the value of these meetings dissipate into thin air when the meetings end doesn’t make sense. So, we need to capture them, and the same rationale is, the same reasons why we have to make sure we take notes, we have to make sure that we have follow-ups, and make sure those follow-ups actually happen and so on. So, just all of these ways of working and tools out there are all really reminding us of the fact of the value of every meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, inside a meeting with remote technology operating, you mentioned open agenda, polls, whatever. So, these are just the features baked into your Zoom or Google Meet or whatever you’re using?

Darren Chait
Yep, yep. In many cases, yep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, just making the most of them. Like, they’re there for you. Go ahead and learn about them. Try them out.

Darren Chait
Yep, and like that, we won’t be eating in meetings anymore, right, because I’ll be so engaged in what we’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
“I get to vote! I’m excited!” It might not be immediately that transformational.

Darren Chait
Yeah, that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
It may or may not be that immediately transformational.

Darren Chait
There you go. That’s the disclaimer.

Pete Mockaitis
But you’re right, it is fun. It’s intriguing. I don’t know about you, but something about real-time data, there’s a little bit of a reveal. If it’s an interesting question, like, “Oh, hey, how many of you are calling in from the West Coast?” It’s like, “Okay, I don’t know.” But like, if I’m genuinely wondering in terms of like, “Hey, we came up with 12 ideas. I’d love for everyone to vote on which ones they think are the most likely to be high impact and they want to start on first.” Like, I don’t know about you, but that just gets my heart thumping a little bit. Like, “Ooh, who’s going to be the winner?” It’s like election night, like county by county.

Darren Chait
You know what though, Pete, if you said, “Does anyone have any views on how we should prioritize this?” Silence. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Darren Chait
We use a lot of Miro here as well. Miro is an online whiteboarding tool, and there’s a few of them around as well, and some of them are embedded in other products and so on. The reason I like Miro is it allows a very fluid, freeform way to collaborate in the form of whiteboards. But they have a lot of great real-time tools you can share.

You can share your Miro board for your Zoom or directly, and it’s great for voting. People can put stickies. They can contribute to a conversation. They can drive that collaboration in a real way. So, that’s what you’re reminding me of as you’re talking about that behavior because it definitely does exist.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. Well, Darren, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention, any top do’s or don’ts?

Darren Chait
So, one other thing to mention that we noticed in the research this year, and again, I’m not surprised, but also really cool at the same time. We asked, in general, we asked all the respondents in this survey their views on the role of AI in meetings, if they’re interested in the use of AI in meetings.

2023, 17% said yes. This year, almost 50% said yes. But we’re all learning so much about AI every day and the advent of all the big players in tech in AI. It’s now very clear, to these respondents at least, that it’s here, we’re heading there. Most products are releasing AI features now, particularly those in the meeting space, Calendly included, and we’re coming up there soon.

So, I think it’s fascinating to see that AI has unlocked a ton more powerful online, and it’s a logical place to start, right, to make us more productive in our meetings, more effective. So, that trend in just 12 months was really surprising to me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Darren Chait
One of my favorite quotes, in general, in business, comes from, it’s actually been quoted many times by many people so I won’t try to attribute it, which is not to confuse work with progress. So, something I often think about is, “Is this just work keeping me busy or is this actual progress or output?” So, “Don’t mistake work with progress” is one of my favorite business quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Darren Chait
Team of Teams, General Stanley McChrystal. Definitely a bit of a less conventional business book, but a must-read if you’re leading a team.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Darren Chait
I don’t end my day until I’ve got a plan for the next day. I think, especially with time zones and the likes of Slack and other tools now that bombard us when we’re not online, you always wake up, you always start your day feeling behind. So, I, at least, want to start my day having clarity for the goals for the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Darren Chait
Absolutely. So, obviously, if you want to learn more about Calendly, Calendly.com. But on LinkedIn, always happy to connect and chat and nerd out on these topics, and we can, yeah, definitely dive more into what we’ve learned. You can also, if you go to Calendly.com. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link or other resources to the State of Meetings 2024 so you can dive into this data. And there’s many more thoughts and perspectives here that we didn’t have time for, but you can nerd out on the State of Meetings yourself as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Darren Chait
Go through your calendar, and look at those meetings that are competing for productive time. See what you can cut, and then choose a favorite meeting and see if you can make it that much better. Go and look at who’s attending. Look at your process around setting agendas and planning. Look at the tooling that you’re using to power that meeting, scheduling all the way through to follow-ups, and see if you can get that favorite meeting performing that much better. And no doubt you will, you’ll see the results and you’ll move on to the next one. So, meetings really are a hack for team productivity, and I encourage you to try it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Darren, thank you. I wish you many excellent meetings.

Darren Chait
Thanks, Pete. Likewise. Great to chat.

1011: How to Defeat Overwhelm and Get SO MUCH Done in 15 Minutes with Sam Bennett

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Sam Bennett shows you how to transform the way you work through the magic of the 15 minute method.

You’ll Learn

  1. The impressive amount you can get done in 15 minutes
  2. How to deal with the overwhelm 
  3. Why it’s worth “doing it grumpy”

About Sam 

Sam Bennett is the author of Get It Done, Start Right Where You Are, and most recently, The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. A writer, speaker, actor, and creativity/productivity specialist, she is the founder of TheRealSamBennett.com, a company committed to helping overwhelmed creatives and frustrated overachievers get unstuck.

Sam is also a popular course instructor on LinkedIn Learning with over a million class participants worldwide. She lives in Connecticut, and you will find her online at www.TheRealSamBennett.com and 15MinuteMethod.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Sam Bennett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sam, welcome.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. Hi, everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting. We’re talking about The 15-Minute Method: The Surprisingly Simple Art of Getting It Done. And could you tell us a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made while researching this stuff? You’ve been in the game for a while and you’ve settled in on 15 minutes.

Sam Bennett
I have. I have, yes. So, let’s talk about how you can change your life in 15 minutes a day. Because, here’s the thing, people are always going to be like, “Sam, is it really possible to change your life in 15 minutes a day?” I’m like, “You already are. You’re already living your life in 15-minute increments. You may not be describing it that way, but, you know, that’s how time works, as far as we know.”

And the thing that I’ve noticed, over and over again, is how much a person can get done in 15 minutes. Everyone is always shocked, “Oh, my God, I got so much done.” And how much you can get done in 15 minutes every day, for a week, for a month, for a year, for six years, for 60 years, and it sort of makes logical sense, like, “Oh, yes, if I practiced my ukulele every day for 15 minutes, you know, in not very long of a time, I would be a better ukulele player.” Or, “If I did my prayer and meditation practice every day for 15 minutes.”

Every medical and health professional in the world will tell you, if you move your body in any way, shape, or form every day for 15 minutes, you’re good, you know. And even things that people think like, “Oh, you know, I want to write a book. I can’t do that in 15 minutes.” Well, if you sit down and write every day for 15 minutes, you can get out about 250 words. And so, in about 200 days, that’s 50,000 words, that’s a book. So where were you 200 days ago, and would you like a book right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, understood. Could you share with us any particularly inspiring tales of folks who have taken this particular prescription and just really ran with it and seen cool things?

Sam Bennett
So many. I got an email from a guy who was, funny, he said he got the book on Audible, and he said he’s from Philadelphia so he’s a natural-born hater, and he got a certain amount of ways through the book and decided, “Oh, no, this isn’t for me. This isn’t for me,” and he turned it off. But then something kind of kept tapping him on the shoulder and so he went back to it and he started to listen again.

And by the time he wrote me, he said he had listened three full times all the way through, and he had started doing some 15-minute tasks that were sort of changing things for him. But the biggest change is that he was able to quit his job that he has been trying to quit for nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. So, what are the tasks that enable one to quit a job much more rapidly than, I guess, his default approach? And how do you put those into 15-minute increments? That’s intriguing.

Sam Bennett
I think a lot of it has to do with keeping your promises to yourself. We build esteem and respect with other people by keeping our promises to them. We build self-esteem and self-respect by keeping our promises to ourselves, but sometimes we get caught in the loop of not keeping our promises, “Oh, I’m definitely going to go to the gym today. I’m definitely going to give them my two weeks’ notice. I’m definitely going to tell my spouse this isn’t working,” and then we don’t, because it’s scary or it’s hard or it’s not the right time or whatever.

I don’t have any judgment here about how fast things are or are not supposed to happen. I think we’re not always in charge of that. But I think, for him, there was something about spending every single day, 15 minutes a day, on something that mattered to him, right? So, this is one way to approach the 15-minute method, is pick something that lights you up, that brings you joy, that you’ve always been naturally interested in, that you’ve always good at, maybe something you’d love to do as a kid or you used to do, you know, before the kids, and reincorporate that into your life.

Because even though, yeah, you may not join the Bolshoi Ballet anytime soon, 15 minutes of ballet can make you feel like a ballerina again, and that can carry over into your life, right? So, I think that was a lot of it, and learning that he could trust himself to be an entrepreneur, to take the reins of his own life. Because, okay, here’s the thing, it was a family business. So, the person he was trying to quit was his dad, which, you know, makes it a little loaded.

And he said, yeah, he said he had felt just so much calmer and clearer about his life because he was making the steady incremental progress. And they were negotiating their summer vacations, and the guy said, “Yeah, oh, and after August 15th, I won’t be back.” And his dad said, “Okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right then.

Sam Bennett
Like, total non-deal. It was so exciting. I was really pleased for him. But sometimes it’s a lot more, a lot less dramatic. I had a client who had moved to North Carolina to take care of her ailing mother. Her mother eventually died, and now she’s living in this house with all of her mother’s stuff. Again, giant, overwhelming, like, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this in 15 minutes a day.” It’s like, “Well, but you got to start somewhere.”

So, she starts with her mother’s office, and she starts sorting her mom’s papers for 15 minutes a day. Okay, great. Making some progress there. And then she figures out that her mother’s record player is in there and all her old albums, and music was something they really shared a love for. So, she started putting on albums and playing an album. So, that’s like 22 minutes is like half a side of an album. Children, albums are how we used to listen to music.

And then she found a box of her mom’s old stationery, you know, that beautiful, heavy cotton linen stationery that they just don’t even make anymore. So, she started writing notes to people because she’d moved away to North Carolina. And then she had all these notes, and so then she had to walk to the mailbox every day, and she started to get to know the neighbors and the dogs and the mail carriers.

And, like, all of a sudden, this little 15-minute task of “I need to clear out my mom’s office” starts turning into “Oh, I’m rekindling my love of music. Oh, and I’m reconnecting with my friends. Oh, and I’m connecting for the first time with this new neighborhood.” Like, you start to follow the sparkly breadcrumbs and it’s amazing where it leads.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, I’m curious, why 15 minutes?

Sam Bennett
Because that’s about as much time as anybody’s got. I mean, you read the article, it’s like, “You should spend five hours a week in the gym.” I’m like, “Really? What five hours would that be? Could you please point that out to me, those five hours, because I don’t see it?” But 15 minutes, pretty much everybody’s got 15 minutes. I don’t care how busy or overcooked you are. You’ve got 15 minutes. And that whole feeling of like, “Oh, no, my work needs me, my kids need me.” Not for 15 minutes, they don’t, and, in fact, it’s kind of a good exercise for all of you to have to let people leave you alone for 15 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose if I were to get all nerdy and optimize-y about it, I might say, “Well, why 15 and not 12 or 18?”

Sam Bennett
Well, and that’s the whole thing, right? Make your own adventure, right? If 15 minutes doesn’t work for you, but 12 does, fantastic! Do 12. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but 7 does, great! Do 7. If 15 doesn’t work for you, but an hour and a half does, terrific! I don’t care. I’m not your mom. But the idea is to start doing something, to be taking baby steps every day.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay, so there’s no precise super neuroscience magic behind the 15 number. But I would, if I may, give you a little more of an extra credit on it. I think that 15 is, approximately 15, has some magic to it, in that it’s big enough to actually achieve a thing and go, “Okay, cool. I bought a thing. I found a thing that solves this problem I’ve been dealing with for years by clicking around Amazon, reading their reviews, looking at four options, and now I bought the thing, and so, okay, done.”

Sam Bennett
Done. Off the list.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s long enough to do something meaningful, but it’s short enough to not spark resistance, like, “An hour? Oh, I already don’t want to do that. This is going to be miserable.”

Sam Bennett
Exactly. Exactly. And so, I offer a thing for sale on my website called The Daily Practicum, and every weekday for 15 minutes at 12 noon Eastern, we hop on the Zoom, wave hello, start the timer for 15 minutes, 15 minutes later, it goes off. And everybody looks back up at me, they turn their cameras back on, with, I swear, this post-orgasmic glow about them. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh! I did it! I did it! I made that phone call! I’ve been putting off that phone call for six weeks and I made that phone call!” Amazing.

“Oh my gosh! I sent an email to my friend. She just lost her husband and I didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to say something, so I just did it. I just wrote it, and I sent it, and now it’s done.” Or, “I sat out in the garden with the sun on my face for 15 minutes.” Everybody’s always astonished at how much they can accomplish, how great it feels to accomplish something, something tangible, something that’s meaningful to you, to be taking those baby steps toward a bigger project.

And the little secret with The Daily Practicum, especially for our neuro-spicy friends and our extrovert friends, being in a group, knowing that there’s other people also working at that same time, we call it parallel play or body doubling, is really helpful. It’s sort of a form of positive peer pressure. It works. It just works.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Well, we had Taylor Jacobson, who founded Focusmate, on the show, and that is a tool that likewise helps you say, “Okay, now I’m meeting a person and we’re doing a thing even though you’re remote.” That accountability magic is powerful. Well, how many people show up at noon for this thing?

Sam Bennett
You know, it depends. There were some people who were there every single day. There were some people who were sometimes there and sometimes not. There were some people who are never there, but they keep the subscription going because it’s worth it to have it on their calendar every day because just they can’t do it at that time, but the fact that it’s on their calendar makes them remember to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And it sounds like one theme there is something that we’ve, historically, avoided, resisted, put off, ignored, deferred. There seems to be some magic there in particular. Like, there are some extra goodies that you receive in terms of reward or benefit internally, psychologically, when that’s the case.

Sam Bennett
Definitely. Definitely. And I really, again, in the same way that I’m not particularly attached to 15 minutes, specifically, I’m not at all attached to what you spend it doing. And some people come to me and say, like, “I have no idea, Sam. I don’t even know where I would start. I don’t even know what I would spend my 15 minutes on.” I’m like, “Okay. Well, great. Maybe you spend your first 15 minutes making a list of 15-minutes-es, what might interest you, what’s sort of tapping on your shoulder, what seems kind of fun.”

You could also spend 15 minutes staring at a blank piece of paper, because 15 minutes of enforced boredom never hurt a person. And when was the last time you looked at a piece of paper for 15 minutes without reaching for your phone?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, you’re giving a lot of cool ideas here. In fact, in your book, you got a chapter with 52 suggestions. I’m curious, are there a couple within that listing that a lot of people have grabbed, and said, “Wow, this is so transformational, Sam. Thank you”?

Sam Bennett
I think the things that I see the biggest “wow” on is taking a walk every day for 15 minutes, even just, you know, once around the building. Connecting with people, taking 15 minutes to look up an old colleague or an old school friend or somebody you haven’t talked to in a while, and just pinging them in whatever way you like to ping people. I mean like, “Hey, you know, I just thought about you and how great you are and I’d love to catch up.”

Because, you know, Pete, relationships are everything. The quality of your relationships is the quality of your life. And those little just catching-up phone calls can lead to amazing things. So, I think those are probably the two biggest wows. But I also like, yeah, anything that you just feel like is too big, that you’ve just been putting off because it’s too overwhelming. The minute you start thinking about it, you get completely overcooked.

And this happens with highly creative people, right? We get an idea and, all of a sudden, we see it in full color, sequels, theme parks, international grassroots movement, you know, it’s all there, and then we immediately go, “Oh, my gosh, how could I even…where do I even start with that idea?” So, I’ve been giving the example of if you have to clean out your garage, which obviously everybody’s going to go like, “Sam, I can’t do that in 15 minutes, I need like two weekends.”

Okay, first of all, again, where are those two weekends? And if you did have two weekends, I seriously doubt you’d want to spend them cleaning out the garage. But let’s say the garage has really been weighing on you. It’s upsetting. It’s causing some stress family, like, “Let’s take care of the garage.” So, I would say, for the first 15 minutes, just make yourself a mug of something.

I’ve got my little Art Before Housework mug here, and just go out and, like, contemplate the garage. Be with the garage. See what the garage has to say to you. Don’t do anything. Just take it in. And it may be that around minute 11, you go, “Wait a minute, those seven boxes belong to my brother Jeffrey. Jeffrey, come get your boxes!” And now you’ve cleaned out a whole corner of the garage and you don’t have to do anything.

And maybe the next day, you go out again with a mug of something and look in one of those Rubbermaid tubs, and you go, “Oh, that’s got holiday stuff in it.” You make a little sign with your Sharpie that says “Holiday” and put it towards the back because you only need that stuff once a year. And maybe the third day, you take that broken bicycle and you roll it out to the sidewalk with a sign that says “Free broken bicycle.” And in this way and fashion, a person could, in fact, clean out their entire garage in 15 minutes a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it. And it’s funny, as I visualize it, I’m thinking, “Uh, Sam, you forgot the step dust out the cobwebs so it doesn’t feel gross walking around there.”

Sam Bennett
That would be another excellent 15-minute task, but cobwebs are hard to get rid of. You could get pretty far with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, totally, you could. I got to fix cobweb duster, too. It feels good.

Sam Bennett
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s actually more effective than just, whatever, a paper towel. So, yeah, there’s little extra bonus tips sprinkled throughout it here, Sam.

Sam Bennett
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And, contemplate, I love it. That’s a valid, useful thing to do because it’ll spark all sorts of ideas and potential strategy, and maybe saves you from getting in too deep in a silly way when you can just call someone else and have them do part of it for you.

Sam Bennett
Also a valid strategy. That’s another great way to spend 15 minutes. Call the nice people who will come and do it for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so I’d love it if you could zoom out a little bit in terms of, psychologically, what’s going on here. You’ve got some interesting insights in terms of, you say overwhelm is an inside problem and not an outside problem. Not so much like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s too much stuff!” but something inside of us. Explain.

Sam Bennett
Yeah, it’s an inside job. We feel like it’s happening because, “Oh, my gosh, everything’s coming at me with such an equal level of intensity, and I don’t know where to start and I don’t know where to begin, and I just feel overcooked.” But that’s not actually true because, when we look at people who work in chronically overwhelming circumstances, the person who is working the front desk at the emergency room, first responders.

I did a television interview on a news channel with a woman who said, “Oh, like when we’re covering breaking news, or when something tragic has happened and we’re reporting right in the moment.” I’m like, “Right. Those are circumstances that many people would find overwhelming, but you are not overwhelmed. You are doing your job, right?” The reporter is not overwhelmed. The person at the ER is not overwhelmed. The first responder is not overwhelmed. They’re running into a burning building, but they are not overwhelmed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, Sam, that’s actually eye-opening right there. Like, is that really true? Have we talked to the people? I’ve got a buddy who’s firefighter. I should ask him.

Sam Bennett
You should ask him. I’m sure there are sometimes things that are freaking, but it’s their job. They’re trained for it. I spent most of my adult life working as an actor, and especially as an improviser. I was with the Second City in Chicago and played with a lot of those alumni out in LA. And even just getting up on stage with no script and no agenda and four chairs would, to many people, be overwhelming. We’re going to improvise for two hours off of one suggestion or make a play up as we go along. But that wasn’t overwhelming to me, that was my job. It was fun. It’s fun for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s funny, now that you mention it, as I’m reflecting on times that I or loved ones have been in the emergency room, the folks around me seemed so chill and calm and, like, they’re taking their time, it almost annoyed me, like, “Can’t you see this is very serious and urgent?”

Sam Bennett
That’s right. I also think about the people who work in hospitality or the people at the airlines. Every single time I go to an airport, you’re in line for the security check, and there’s always people who are like, “I mean, we’ve got to catch a plane.” I’m like, “Kitten, everyone in this building has to catch a plane. That’s why we’re here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so noted. So, then, indeed, there are folks who are in a situation we might find overwhelming who, yet, don’t feel overwhelmed. What is their secret? Or how can we get some of that inside of us?

Sam Bennett
So, I think some of it is just that, like I said, they’re doing the thing. They’re dealing with what’s right in front of them, they’re trained, they’re prepared. Also, I think they’re engaged. They’re engaged in what they’re doing. When you’re overwhelmed, you’re sort of outside of things and thinking about things as a whole.

And sometimes, I think, we say we’re overwhelmed when we’re actually underwhelmed. Like, I’ve done that where I’ve written out a to-do list, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m exhausted before I even start. Like, I don’t want to do any of this.” That’s not overwhelm, that’s underwhelm. That’s, like, “This is a lot of stuff that really should be delegated out to somebody else. Or, does it even need to be done at all, really?”

And so, this is part of the reason why I want people spending 15 minutes a day on the stuff that lights them up, that engages them. And I know I can hear the people, I can hear you all out there, saying like, “Yes, but, Sam, that would be selfish. That would be selfish of me to spend 15 minutes on my own thing.” And I want to say, again, you’ve got it backwards because what’s actually selfish, what’s actually an imposition on us, is when you are walking around exhausted and stressed out and with no sense of humor, and the rest of us have to deal with you like that. That is selfish.

You show up rested, prayed, meditated, walked, creatively fulfilled, whatever it is, we love that version of you. You’re calmer. You’re less reactive. You’re a better listener. Like, please, please claim that 15 minutes for yourself, and do the thing that you know keeps you a little bit lit up inside. And, Pete, I have a revolution I want to start.

All right. Stay with me, everybody. I have had every job in the world. I’ve delivered flowers, I was a barista, I was a whitewater river guide, I produced radio shows. Like, you name it, I did it. But I’ve never had a job in corporate America. So, I always have this feeling of like, “What are they doing in there? I don’t understand.”

But I keep reading the statistic that 77% of employees are disengaged. Seventy-seven percent? That’s a lot. I mean, if somebody took away 77% of your money, you would notice. If you lost 77% of your friends, you would be bummed, right? And it seems to me that this must be a very expensive problem for businesses to have three-quarters of their people walking around not giving a flying hooey about what’s going on.

So, here’s my thought, here’s my revolution. I want businesses to start saying, “Okay, everybody, we recognize that you are human beings, and we want to give you 15 minutes a day just for you. So, every day between 9:00 and 9:15, or between 4:15 and 4:30, that’s your time. You don’t check your email. Don’t make your dentist appointments. You spend that time on something that matters to you. If it has to do with work, fine, but it doesn’t have to. Please do you.”

And, certainly, businesses have tried this kind of thing before. But here’s what I think will work. So, now, we go into our meeting, we have this habit of 15 minutes a day where everybody does their little thing, and I can sort of imagine the water cooler talk of like, “What did you do?” “Oh, I wrote crappy poetry.” “I love crappy poetry. I was writing crappy poetry last month. It’s cool.”

But we go into the meeting and, I say, “Oh, hi, I’m Sam from Events. And today, I spent my 15 minutes working on a needlepoint project for my godchild that I started when she was born, and now she’s about to graduate from high school, so I’m really excited to get it done.” Now, there are studies that show that if you let people say something about themselves as people at the beginning of a meeting, they will be more innovative and more productive in the meeting because you have reminded them of the fullness of themselves.

They’re not just Sam from Events and Pete from Sales. They’re like, “Oh, I’m Sam from Events and I do needlepoint, and that was taught to me by my grandmother and, and, and.” So, now I’m bringing more of me to the table. And then, down the table, there’s Debbie, “I’ve never liked Debbie. We don’t get along.” But then Debbie says, “Oh, yeah, I’m Debbie from Accounts, and I spent my 15 minutes today doing cross-stitch.” “Doing what? Well, now, we’re needlework buddies. We can talk embroidery floss. And no wonder she gets on my nerves because she’s a counted cross-stitch person. No wonder she’s in accounts, like that’s detail work.”

And do you know what we call that? Engagement. People being engaged with each other personally, and people will do way more for each other than they’re going to do for any job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That sounds lovely. I mean, if you say some organizations have done this, can you share some of these cases?

Sam Bennett
Google, quite famously, had a thing where you could devote, I think, a fifth of your time. I think one day a week you could spend on a project sort of your choosing. I think the idea was that it was sort of help humanity or help Google or help, you know, it wasn’t so much on enriching yourself as it is enriching the world. There’s been a couple of other places that have tried.

But I think just treating people like grown-ups and just acknowledging, like, “We get it, you’re people with a life, and we want you to have a full and rich life, and we’re going to just give you 15 minutes a day to do something about that,” it seems to me to be very inexpensive way to say we care about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like it a lot. I like to imagine that in terms of, “Yes, folks are talking about it and you…” especially if it’s sort of the same time across the whole organization for everybody, then we all know. Because some organizations, for example, they will have the week between Christmas and New Year’s is just off for absolutely everybody, or right around the 4th of July.

And people just rave about this because it’s like, “It’s not just my vacation. I know everybody’s gone. Nobody’s expecting anything from anyone and/or sending anything to anyone. If they do, they know they’re the ones who are not to expect anything.” So, I think that’s pretty cool. So, likewise, if you had that daily 15 minutes, that’s just kind of fun to imagine.

Sam Bennett
Well, exactly. Maybe if some people wanted to get together and do like 15 minutes of chair yoga every morning, or they wanted to take a little walk around the building or something, you could do things in groups. I mean, there’s all kinds of, people come up with amazing things that they can do. Get together a little rock and roll band, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you say this 15-minute approach defeats perfectionism. How does that work in practice?

Sam Bennett
So, perfectionism is a big word that sort of covers a multitude of destructive behaviors. So, I think one of the things with perfectionism is sort of breaking it apart a little bit, because it is made up of a lot of little parts, and to say, “Okay, which of these is really functional for me?” because there are some just faulty beliefs in there.

And sometimes I’ll hear from people, like, “Well, I just feel like if it can’t be perfect, why would I even bother to do it at all?” I’m like, “Okay, that’s an interesting perspective. Where did you learn that perspective? And is that really what you want to be teaching your children, if it can’t be perfect the first try, you shouldn’t do it at all? I doubt that’s what you want to model for your children. I think you probably want to teach your children to, like, “No, try it. Stick with it. See where it goes.” Right?

So, be a good parent to yourself now, and let that voice that says, “You better live up to this standard, young lady, or nothing good is going to happen for you.” There’s also just the overthinking. Some of us get a little addicted to planning out every last little thing inside of our minds but then never actually taking action.

I had a friend who, when he was a kid, he used to buy all the science books and he would study all the experiments until he really understood all of them but he never actually did any of them. He just worked it out inside of his head, and he was like, “Okay, good, I’m done.” So, that’s a worthwhile intellectual exercise, but would you like to bring something into the world? Like, would you like to try it?

I think it also works for kind of what you were saying before, “It’s only 15 minutes, and you’re going to do it again tomorrow anyway, and the next day. So, how perfect is it going to be in 15 minutes? And you’re going to have plenty of time to perfect it later, so it just sort of hopscotches right over all that pressure.”

And I think it also gives ideas a chance to flourish. I think a lot of times people psych themselves out initially by going, “Well, I have an idea, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. I’m still thinking about whether or not it’s a good idea.” And I work with all kinds of people. Academy award winners, Emmy award winners, award-winning writers, famous people, not famous people, and I’m here to tell you, there’s no such thing as a good idea. There’s only ideas, and some of the ones that you think are terrible turn out to be fantastic. And some of the ones you think are fantastic turn out to be completely dull.

Like, you don’t know until you bring it to life, or start to take the steps to bring it to life. So, to get out of that pondering mode, and out of that inner judgment mode, of like, “Oh, it’s got to be good. It’s got to be a good idea.” No, it just has to be an idea. Like, just start, and then see where it takes you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now you have a number of fun phrases, and what you’ve just described reminds me of one of them. Can you unpack a couple of them for us? One is the alchemy of effort, and the second is grumpy magic.

Sam Bennett
So, the alchemy of effort is something I noticed as an artist, but I see it in real life, too. Not that art isn’t real life. But there’s a magical thing that happens when you have a little idea and you take some steps towards it, and then maybe you share it with the world. It sort of changes the minute it hits the air. And then you work on it and it changes, and then maybe someone sees it and it’s changed again because they’ve seen it and they’ve had a reaction to it. And now they are changed and it is changed and then you are changed by that feedback.

And we get this little sort of Mobius strip, this little infinity loop of you putting out energy and effort and ideas and other people responding to that, and that shaping and gaining momentum and influencing you and influencing the world. Like, it’s really exciting and fun, and it’s the joy of the creative process, it’s that communion, that sense of like, “Ooh, I did something and people got it. They heard me. They felt seen. They enjoyed it. They laughed. They sang along,” whatever it is.

Or they loved the equation. They loved the app. I mean, creativity is not just art. Everyone is creative. And I just think that that little cycle is so magical. And every time you stop yourself from sharing your gifts with the world, you’re stopping that alchemical magic from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the grumpy magic?

Sam Bennett
Grumpy magic is a little process that I put into the book. It’s a little thing that I teach but, really, what it is, is just a reminder to everyone that, you know, I work in personal development now, and no shade to my personal development brothers and sisters, but there can be a certain amount of oppressive optimism, and what we might refer to as “toxic positivity.”

And I just want to say, you can create magic in your life being very grumpy, and very tired, and very pessimistic, and not that interested. I notice that grumpy people have happy marriages. I notice that pessimistic people often make lots of money. It is not a prerequisite for you to be 100% spiritually aligned in order to get what you want. So, don’t wait to feel good. Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels like there’s some merch there, Sam, if you don’t already have it.

Sam Bennett
Do it grumpy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think that’s really good, and it’s nice and short, too, because “Do it grumpy,” it’s kind of hard for me to think about remember big, long things or complicated things. It’s like, “Ah, there’s this thing, but I don’t feel like doing it.” And so, I sort was able to have that conversation with myself, it’s like, “Okay. Well, in 15 minutes later, or 30 minutes later, you might still not feel like doing it, but then it’ll be behind you and that’s kind of cool. You’ll feel better having it behind you than you will stewing in the fact that you don’t want to do it for this period of time, even if you try to distract yourself with other more fun things.”

Sam Bennett
One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And don’t underestimate the positive effects of smugness. Like, when you do something hard or something you don’t want to do, but then you do it anyway, it’s a little bit like when you go to the gym in the morning and you just spend all day being like, “That’s right. Hair toss. Hair toss. I’m awesome. How are you?” You know?

Like, that feeling of a little bit of inner pride of like, “Yeah! I did that. I told myself I was going to do it, and I did it. I didn’t feel like it, but I did it.” Like, that’s good. That spills over into your life and has a really positive ripple effect. So, all that like, “Don’t be too proud of yourself. Don’t be too big for your britches.” No! Buy bigger britches, for sure. Be proud.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Sam, any other top do’s, don’ts, things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Sam Bennett
I just want everyone to remember that y’all are doing great. You’re doing great. People love you. You’re making a difference at work and in your community and in your family, and it’s okay to take the pressure off the gas pedal, maybe. And some of you are driving with your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time, sort of not really letting yourself succeed as much as you might want to, and I just want to say you’re doing amazing. And maybe just 15 minutes a day can help tweak you up to the next adventure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sam Bennett
My favorite quote is, “The cure for anything is salt water, sweat, tears, or the sea.” It’s from the Danish author Isak Dinesen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Sam Bennett
I remember cutting out an article from a piece of paper, probably from a newspaper, probably 30 years ago, that was done by a wealth management company. And they found that, across the board, at all levels of wealth, two-thirds of the people felt like they would be better off if they just had twice as much. So, even the millionaires were like, “Uh, I’m not sure. I think if, really, if I had twice what I have right now, then I would be okay.”

And that little bit of information made me realize, “Oh, it’s not about the number. Feeling okay, feeling secure in your life, feeling like you have a good nest egg is not about what that actual dollar amount is. It’s a decision to feel okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And a favorite book?

Sam Bennett
You know, what’s bubbling up for me is the Little House on the Prairie books. I must have read those a thousand times as a girl, and I still think about them a remarkable amount. I think there’s something about that homesteader spirit that I kind of like.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Sam Bennett
Levenger Legal Pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the little discs?

Sam Bennett
Oh, no, I don’t do the disc ones. I do these here, I’ll show you one of them. They’re nice heavy pieces of paper and they’ve got room at the top to put a date and a subject title, and then there’s a little space along the side so you can make annotated notes. I can put little action items on the side. I do everything. I’m an analog girl, Pete. I like legal pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, doesn’t Levenger have a little magic to make it easy to take an individual sheet from that and to put it in elsewhere and organize and stuff?

Sam Bennett
They do. They have a system called Circa that is like that, those little things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Sam Bennett
My favorite habit is probably my 15 minutes a day. I do mine before I even roll over in bed. I do a little sort of breathing prayer meditation practice thing that I sort of have made up over the years. And, like I said, I do it before my eyes are even open. I think that liminal time right there between waking and sleeping is a really valuable time, a very fertile time, especially for highly sensitive people, highly creative people, busy people.

So, to stretch out that moment for myself and connect with my feeling of the divine, and my own body, and my own breath, it really makes a difference for me in my day. And when I don’t do it, I really notice it. And if I don’t do it for a couple days or a couple weeks, things really go off the rails. So, I don’t know how many more times I need to prove that to myself before I just do it every day. I’m pretty consistent, but even so, it’s not every day. But that’s the beauty of 15 minutes a day. Like, you didn’t do it today, you’ll do it tomorrow. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Sam Bennett
Yeah, one that I hear a lot is “Get a C.” Stop trying to get an A+ in everything. Just get a C. C is the grade that you get for showing up and doing the work. Not doing the work better than everybody else, not being in the front row with your hand raised, just show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work, show up, do the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Sam Bennett
You can find me at TheRealSamBennett.com, and you can hop onto my email list there, which is where I kind of do everything is via email, but I am also on the socials. I am also on all the socials as The Real Sam Bennett. 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sam Bennett
Yes. Start doing your 15 minutes, and then write me and tell me all about it, and we’ll be pen pals and best friends because I want to hear about your projects.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sam, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many delightful 15-minute increments.

Sam Bennett
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. What a treat.

1010: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Work with Jeremy Utley

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Jeremy Utley reveals why many aren’t getting the results they want from AI—and how to fix that.

You’ll Learn

  1. The #1 mistake people are making with AI
  2. ChatGPT’s top advantage over other AI platforms (as of late 2024) 
  3. The simple adjustments that make AI vastly more useful 

About Jeremy 

Jeremy Utley is the director of executive education at Stanford’s d.school and an adjunct professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering. He is the host of the d.school’s widely popular program “Stanford’s Masters of Creativity.” 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Jeremy Utley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Utley
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to chat, and I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing one of maybe the most fascinating and surprising discoveries you’ve made about some of this AI stuff with all your poking and prodding and playing.

Jeremy Utley
I’ll poke the bear right from the get-go. My observation is most people are what I call prompt hoarders, which is that they’ve got a bunch of Twitter threads saved, and they’ve got a bunch of PDFs downloaded in a folder, marked, “Read someday,” but they aren’t actually using AI. They’re just hoarding prompts.

And I think of it as empty calories. It’s a sugar high. And what a lot of people are doing is they are accumulating, for themselves, prompts that they should try someday, but they’re never trying them, which is akin to somebody eating a bunch of calories and then never exercising.

And my recommendation, like, here, I’ll give one simple thing that somebody would probably want to write down. Hey, when you’re jumping into advanced voice mode, isn’t it annoying how ChatGPT interrupts you? Well, did you know that you can tell ChatGPT, “Hey, just say, ‘Mm-hmm’ anytime I stop talking, but don’t say anything else unless I ask you to”?

Everybody who’s played with advanced voice mode one time is like, “Oh, my gosh, I got to do that. That’s, oh, it is annoying.” And I guarantee you 95% plus, people who even think that, will never actually do it because they think it’s more important to listen to the next 35 minutes of this conversation than actually hit pause and go do that. And my recommendation would be, stop this podcast right now, go into ChatGPT and actually do that. That would be like going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking I’m doing that right now. Is that okay? Is that rude?

Jeremy Utley
Yes, of course. No, it’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’m following your suggestions. So, in ChatGPT, iPhone app, I’ve got Pete Mockaitis, I just issue the command, like, “Remember this”?

Jeremy Utley
I would open a new voice chat. So, from the home screen, on the bottom right, there’s kind of like a little four-line kind of a button. If you hit that, that’s going to open a new conversation in Advanced Voice mode. And the first thing I would say is, “Hey, I want to talk to you for a second, but I don’t really need you to say anything. So, unless I ask you otherwise, would you please just say, ‘Mmm-hmm,’ one word only and let me keep talking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Hey, ChatGPT, here’s the thing. When I’m talking to you, what I need you to do, if I ever stop talking for a moment…there, he just did it.

Jeremy Utley
Isn’t that hysterical? Yeah, that’s hysterical.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Amber, when I’m talking, I need you to remember to only interrupt with just the briefest mm-hmm, or yes, or okay until I ask for you to begin speaking. Do you understand? And can you please remember this?

Amber
Be as brief as possible with confirmations and wait until prompted to speak further.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. It’s done.

Jeremy Utley
Now what you need to do is you actually need to continue the conversation. And you need to see, “Does ChatGPT respond with mm-hmm?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that. And I love those little tidbits in terms of, “Hey, remember this and do this forever.” Sometimes I like to say, well, I have. I have said, “Give me a number from zero to 100 at the end of every one of your responses, indicating how certain you are that what you’re saying is, in fact, true and accurate and right.”

Now, its estimates are not always perfectly correct, but I know, it’s like, “Okay, if he said 90, I’m going to maybe be more inclined to do some follow-up looks as opposed to if I get the 100.”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, I think that’s great. I think there’s all sorts of little things. The problem is, right now, people are accumulating, or they actually aren’t even accumulating, but they think they’re accumulating for themselves all these tips and tricks, but they aren’t using any of them. And so, to me, what I recommend folks do, I actually just wrote a newsletter about this just yesterday, it went out this morning.

What I recommend folks do is take 15 minutes per day and try one new thing. It requires two parts. Part one, a daily meeting on your calendar that says “AI, try this.” And that’s it. It’s just 15 minutes, “AI, try this.” And thing number two, you need an AI-try-this scratch pad, which is just a running list of things that you heard.

So, like everybody’s scratch pad right now, if they’re listening to this conversation, should include, one, tell ChatGPT to only say mm-hmm unless you want a further response. That’s not forever, but at least in a one interaction, right? And, two, they should tell ChatGPT to always end its responses with a number, an integer between zero and 100, to indicate its conviction of its response.

Everybody literally what? We’re 10 minutes into this conversation, not even, everyone should have two items on their scratch pad. The problem is most people are going to get to this, to the end of this interview and they aren’t going to have a scratch pad and they aren’t going to have any time blocked on their calendar to do it.

And the next time they use ChatGPT, it’s going to be mildly disappointing because they’re coming off a sugar high and they think the treadmill’s broken, basically. So, I mean, obviously, there’s a ton there that we can unpack, but I think for most people, what most people fail to understand is the key to use is use.

And just like a treadmill doesn’t help you combat heart disease unless you actually get on it, AI is not going to unleash your creativity or your productivity unless you use it and learn how to use it. And that, to me, that’s pretty much my obsession these days, is helping people be good collaborators to generative LLMs.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And I suppose we could dork out about so many tips and tactics and fun things that you can do. But I’d love it if you could just orient us, first and foremost, in terms of, if there’s research or a powerful story that really makes the case that, “Hey, these things are really actually super useful for people becoming awesome at their jobs for reals as opposed to just a hype train or fad.”

Jeremy Utley
I’ll tell you about my good friend, let’s call him Michael. It’s not his name. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. But Michael was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and he and his family wanted to move back home to Tennessee.

And he was looking for a job, and he got a job offer from a firm. And he reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’m kind of bummed because I feel like this firm is low-balling me. But my wife really just wants me to take it because she wants to be back near family in Tennessee, and I’m really struggling with knowing ‘Should I push back?’ because I know that I deserve more, but I don’t want to screw up this opportunity to get close to family.”

And I said, “Well, have you role-played it with ChatGPT?” And he said, “What do you mean roleplay with ChatGPT?”

Pete Mockaitis
Of course, the question everyone asks.

Jeremy Utley
Right. And I said, “Well, you can roleplay the negotiation and just kind of get a sense for what the boundary conditions are.” And he’s like, “Okay, wait. What do you mean?” And I said, “Well, open ChatGPT and tell it you want to roleplay a conversation. But, first, you want ChatGPT to interview you about your conversation partner so that it can believably play the role of that conversation partner.”

“You want it to start as a psychological profiler and create a psychological profile of your counterpart. And then once it creates it, you want ChatGPT to play the role of that profile in a voice-only conversation until you say that you want to get feedback from its perspective and a negotiation expert’s perspective.” And he’s like, “Give me 15 minutes.”

So, he leaves, texts me in 15 minutes, “Dude, this is blowing my mind. What do I do next?” I said, “Well, Michael, the next thing I would do is tell your conversation partner that you want it to offer less concessions, and you want it to not be nearly as amenable to recommendations because it’s had a bad day or it’s slept poorly or something, okay? I want you to get a sense for what does it feel like if the conversation goes badly, right?”

He goes, “Okay, I’ll be right back.” Comes back, “Dude, this is blowing my mind.” And he did a series of these interviews, and I touched base with him. And a couple of days later, I said, “Michael, what’s up?” And he said, “Well, three things. One, I didn’t know what my leverage in the conversation was until I roleplayed it a handful of times. Two, I didn’t have clarity on what my arguments were until I roleplayed it a few times, what the sequence of my argument should be. And, three, and most importantly, I’m no longer nervous about going into this negotiation.”

And then a week later, he dropped me a note saying, “By the way, we’re moving back to Tennessee, and I got a much better salary than they had originally offered me.”

It turns out one of generative AI’s unique capabilities is imitation and taking on different roles. As an example, you can go into any conversation you’ve ever had with ChatGPT and just say, “Hey, would you mind to recast your most recent response as if you’re Mr. T?” And, instantaneously, “Yo, fool, I can’t believe you didn’t believe the last thing I said,” just immediately starts doing it. It doesn’t take much.

And the power, actually, emotionally and psychologically, of having roleplayed with a very believable conversation partner has a profound psychological and confidence boost effect to the person who’s engaging the roleplay.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect in terms of, yes, that is a top skill that the AI has, and about the most lucrative per minute use case I can think of a typical professional doing. And you’re right, that confidence, I have actually paid a real negotiation coach, and he suggested we do a roleplay. And I had the exact same experience, like, “Oh, you know what, I guess I don’t feel so silly asking for what I wanted to ask for now. It seems fairly reasonable for me to do so. And I’m going to go ahead and do so.” And it worked out rather nicely. And so, to know that you can do a decent job for near free with AI instead of hiring a phenomenal negotiation coach is pretty extraordinary.

Jeremy Utley
It’s remarkable. And so, we actually, my research partner, Kian Gohar and I wrote a weekend essay in The Wall Street Journal about this topic. But think about a salary negotiation as a flavor of a broader thing, which is difficult conversations. Maybe it’s a performance review. Maybe it’s a termination conversation. Maybe it’s talking to a loved one about the fact that you’re not going to come home for the holidays.

There’s all sorts of scenarios where roleplaying the interaction increases your confidence, strengthens your conviction, helps you, perhaps, exchange perspectives. Perspective taking is a really important thing, to understand, “How did this land to the perspective of my conversation partner?” That’s actually something that’s really hard for humans to do but an AI can read it back to you in a way that’s really reflective of your conversation partner, and, in a way, that you can understand.

So, we wrote a whole article about this but that’s just one class of activities. But the point is it really helps when you actually do it. Again, the tendency is for somebody right now to go, “Oh, cool, roleplay.” But if they don’t pull out their scratch pad, and say, “Ask ChatGPT to be a conversation partner in this upcoming salary negotiation, or my quarterly performance review, or my conversation with my loved one about our care for our kids,” or whatever it is, you just won’t do it.

I’ve even built, and you can link it in the show notes if you want, I built a profiler GPT, which is basically, it’s a version of ChatGPT which remembers who it is, unlike Drew Barrymore in “50 First Dates” where you have to remind ChatGPT who it is every time. A GPT is just like a Drew Barrymore who has memory, right, and like a real human being.

And what this GPT is instructed to do is interview a user about their conversation partner as a psychological profiler would, and then create an instruction set to give the user to copy-paste into a new ChatGPT window of instructions to GPT to perform the role of the psychological profile that it created. So, that’s totally free, but somebody can just open that up and you can say, “My significant other, Sherry,” and all of a sudden, this GPT will just interview you, ask you a bunch of questions, you answer them, and then it spits out an instruction set to a new GPT to play the role of Sherry in the scene that you have told it about.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. And it also illustrates one of your core principles to effectively using AI is to flip the script a little bit and say, “No, no, you ask me questions.” Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Jeremy Utley
I mean, why is our default orientation that I’m the one with the questions and an LLM is the one with the answers? That’s how everybody approaches it, right? Because that’s how Google works, right? We never think, “Google, ask me a question.” It’s like, “Uh, what are you talking about?” A language model is not a technology, it’s an intelligence. That’s how I would invite people to think about it.

And you can get to know another intelligence, in a weird way, that sounds kind of crazy, but one of the things you can do is another intelligence can help you get to know yourself better. And the simple way to think about it is, here’s another thing for your AI-try-this scratch pad, folks. Get ready to write this down.

Think of a difficult decision you’re trying to make in your life, “Okay, should I take this job? Should we make this decision? Should we move? Should we put our kid in this other school?” whatever it might be, think of that decision, and then go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk about this. But before you give me any advice, would you please ask me three questions, one at a time, so that you better understand my perspective and my experience?”

Well, that is right there. If you say you were trying to figure out whether you’re going to send your kid to a new school, I have four children so it’s a very realistic kind of decision for me. I can Google and learn all about the school. But should I send my child to the school? I’m just going to get their marketing material and it’s not going to be contextualized to me at all. But if I go to ChatGPT, and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about sending my child to this school, I’d love to get your advice. But before you tell me anything, would you please ask me three questions?”

All of a sudden, well, it’ll… “Tell us about your child’s favorite subjects.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about any weaknesses or difficulties that your child has had in school thus far.” I’ll tell it. “Tell us about your child’s favorite teachers.” I don’t know, but an LLM will ask questions like that. And then it will say, “Based on your answers, here’s how I would approach this conversation.”

That’s what I mean by turning the tables on an AI, is put it in the position of an expert that’s getting information from you rather than the default orientation, which is you’re the expert and you’re getting information from the AI.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, we’ve been saying the words ChatGPT a lot. I’m curious, in the world of LLMs, we got your ChatGPT, we got your Claude, we got your Perplexity, we got your Gemini, we got your Grok.

Jeremy Utley
Don’t forget Llama.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you think of them as having different strengths and weaknesses? Or are they kind of all interchangeable for whatever you want to use them for?

Jeremy Utley
I don’t think they’re interchangeable, but I don’t think it’s necessarily because of the underlying model. I think a lot of it is a UX thing. I think that the best AI is an AI that’s available to you that you will use. Again, the key to use is use. So, which is the best AI? Well, it’s the AI that you’re going to use. So, where are you? Most of the time you’re on your mobile. So, I would say it’s probably the AI that’s got the best mobile experience.

And what’s your default orientation? My belief is that the far better orientation towards AI is voice, not fingers. If you think about how you typically interact with a machine, you’re typically typing stuff into a machine. And I like to affectionately refer to my fingers, like as I wiggle them in front of the screen, as my bottlenecks. These are my communication rate limiters right now.

Notice you and I aren’t typing to each other. Like, that sounds absurd, right? And yet that’s how we talk to most machines. I’m typing into the terminal. Well, now, I mean, OpenAI, besides developing the world’s fastest growing consumer application, they created the world’s best voice-to-text technology. And furthermore, now they’ve got AIs that actually just process voice, don’t even go to transcription.

But the point is AIs are now capable of understanding natural language. We talk about this phrase, natural language processing. You probably hear that phrase, natural language processing. And that means something technically. I think to humans, the important thing about natural language processing isn’t what happens technically, but it’s actually you as a human being can now use your natural language, which is your spoken word with your mouth instead of your fingers.

And I would say to anyone who’s listening to this, if your default orientation to any AI, ChatGPT or otherwise, is fingers, you are limiting yourself. You’re trying to run with crutches. It’s, like, you’re in a sack race, okay? Use your voice, lose your thumbs, and watch the level of your interaction skyrocket.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, as we speak in late October of 2024, as far as I know, having played around with the apps, it seems like, indeed, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has got the voice natural interaction thing down the best, as far as I am aware of. Is that your experience?

Jeremy Utley
In my experience, it is. The only other comparison I would say is Meta’s Llama has voice as well, which you can access via WhatsApp or anything like that. The caveat, I would say, is, you know, I was doing a demo. I had a reporter at my place yesterday, kind of I was doing a demo of how I how I use AI in my personal workflow as a writer. And one of the things that I was showing was I’ll use OpenAI ChatGPT voice mode, but then I’ll often grab all the text with my cursor or with my mouse, and I’ll drop it into Claude, and I basically will parallel process ChatGPT and Claude.

So, the fact that Claude doesn’t take voice input isn’t a hindrance if I’m on my computer. When I’m on my mobile device, which, I’m probably on my mobile more than I’m at my computer actually, Claude doesn’t handle voice input, and it’s a little bit unwieldy to go back and forth in apps on your mobile relative to toggling between windows on your computer. So, it’s not to say that means ChatGPT is the best, but when you say, if you have to choose one, right now the model which is most optimized for voice interaction in a – intuitive interface. That, to me, is the way that you should prioritize, is, “What’s intuitive? What can handle the widest range of human input?” And ChatGPT’s got great vision and great voice recognition. And, therefore, I would use that. I’ll give you another example. I’m taking Spanish classes with my kids, okay, and we’re doing these lessons and we have a tutor talking to us on a bi-weekly basis.

And I get this assignment. I’ve got to conjugate a particular verb, and she wants us to write it down. We got to take pictures of it right now. Write it down in my notebook. I’m trying to conjugate this verb, and I kind of get stuck. And I’m thinking, in my mind, like, we only get her twice a week. I’m not going to be able to talk to her until Thursday. It’s Tuesday afternoon. And I thought, “I wonder if ChatGPT can help me.” And I just take a photo of my notebook and my crappy chicken-scratch handwriting, okay, in Spanish, by the way.

I take a photo, I say, “Hey, you’re my Spanish tutor. Can you tell me what I’m doing right now?” “Oh, it looks like you’re trying to conjugate the verb “estar,” and it looks like you’ve missed seven accent marks. If I were going to correct your paper, I would do this,” and rewrote all of the statements that I just made, but properly. “I made this change because of this. I made this change because of this. I made this change…”

And I go, “Dude, it read…” I mean, if you see my handwriting, it’s abysmal. But I did miss all the accent marks, it got that right, because I’m not an accent marker. But, anyway, the point is, the vision capabilities are spectacular too. And when you start to think, again, right now, write that down on your AI scratch pad, people.

Like, people are listening, and the thing is it’s like popcorn at a movie, and we’re just like, “Nom-nom, that’s so interesting. Oh, photos of AI should do that.” You will not do it if you don’t write it down. I’m obsessed with this idea. As you probably know, I’ve got this AI podcast called Beyond the Prompt, which we have amazing kind of experts and lead users and things like that.

We had a guy, who’s former dean at Harvard, 30 plus year learning scientist veteran named Stephen Kosslyn, recently. And he’s kind of the father of the school of thought called active learning. Maybe some folks have heard of it. Active learning, some people mistake as, you know, learning by doing, which isn’t exactly correct, but doing what you learn is an important step.

And what he says is he would contrast what’s typically known as passive learning, which is just consumption, but he would say it’s not actually learning at all. It just happens to you. It’s like you’re renting it. And that information has a very short shelf life and a very short expiration window. Any information that you consume but do not use, you effectively did not consume it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes, well said. Well, I’d also love to get your pro take here. It seems like we’ve got a whole lot of cool things we can do that are very handy. What are some things you recommend that we not do, or some limitations like, “No, no, you’re not prompting it wrong. It’s just not going to do what you want it to do right now”?

Jeremy Utley
You know, I’m not a fanboy, I’m not a stockholder, I don’t have any secondary shares. I have yet to butt up against the limitations of use, to be honest with you. I think, right now, most people’s primary limitation is not the technology, it’s their imagination. I would say, like, one way that I’ve put it to students at Stanford is, “The answer is yes. What’s your question?” “Could it…?” The answer is yes. The problem is, for most people, they don’t actually have a question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jeremy, if I could put you on the spot a little.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, please, please, please, by all means, but the challenge is actually finding a question worth asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One thing I’ve tried every which way I can to say, “Yo, here’s a transcript of a podcast interview. What I want from you is to give me 10 options for titles that would be great, that are kind of like these dozens of title options I’ve written for you right here, I previously selected, or teasers.” And then whenever I do that, I get 10 or 20 options, and I go, “Hmm, not one of them am I like, ‘Yes, that is intriguing. That is awesome. That’s a phenomenal title that I want to use.’”

Now, it can nudge or steer me in some good directions, like, “Okay, that was a good phrase there. That was a good word there.” And maybe that’s sort of good enough in what I should expect from it in terms of, yeah, you can have a back-and-forth dialogue, it’s not going to spit out the perfect thing the first time, and be grateful for that. But I don’t know, since you are the master, any pro tips on how I can make it do this thing it just doesn’t seem to be able to do?

Jeremy Utley
So, this is great. What I’m hearing you say is actually a great case study of what we observed in our study, which got published by Harvard Business Review and Financial Times and NPR. We studied teams trying to solve problems, and you could call “Titling this podcast” as a problem that you’re trying to solve. We studied teams and individuals trying to solve problems with generative AI and studied “What do they do?”

And one of the kinds of natural problems that people have is they treat an LLM like it’s an oracle. Like I give it a question and it just magically gives me the right answer right off the bat. And what we would say is teams that treat AI like an oracle tend to underperform. But that’s not to say that everyone who uses AI underperforms. There’s a small subset of folks we studied who actually outperform.

The difference is they didn’t treat AI like an oracle. They treated AI like a co-worker, like a collaborator, like a thought partner. And so, what that interaction might look like is you ask for, say, 10 or 20, “Make it like this.” And then you get the output, and what it looks like to…let me ask you this. If an intern gave you 10 titles that you thought were mediocre, what would you do? Would you fire the intern?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I would say, “Oh, hey, thank you for this. This is my favorite. This is my least favorite. That kind of what I’m looking for is, generally, more actionable, more intriguing, based on the needs of our listeners,” da, da, da, da.

Jeremy Utley
Do you do that to ChatGPT?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve tried it sometimes.

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, you got to kind of, you got to critique the model’s output. You got to give it feedback. And I had that experience, actually. I had a hero of mine, Ed Catmull on my show a while ago, founder of Pixar, and I wanted the perfect title, of course. It’s, like, got to be the best title ever, right? And I asked for 10 and then I immediately always asked for 10 more.

I don’t even read the first 10. I asked for 10 more and never had ChatGPT say, “Dude, come on, you didn’t read my first ones, you know.” And they’re mediocre, you know, they’re okay. And I said, “Hey, I like one and three in the first set. I like seven and nine in the second set. Can you give me 10 more like those?” What do you think, are they better or worse?

Perfectly the same. Like, not any better, not any worse. And I was like, “Huh, but why? Why didn’t I like one?” I said, “Huh, okay,” I had to think. And what’s funny is, in our study, people who underperformed, AI feels like magic to them. It’s, like, they don’t do as well, but they’re like, “Wow, it just happened so fast.” People who outperform, who use AI to get to better work, it doesn’t feel like magic. It feels like work.

And that’s actually, that’s kind of a fundamental tension. I think we expect it to feel like magic or it sucks. And the truth is it’s just like working with another collaborator, and you do get to better outcomes if you’re willing to put in the work. And in this case, for me at least, the work was, I like number one because I’m a nerd and it has like an obscure movie illusion. I like number three because there’s a pun, and I’m a punny guy. I like number seven because there’s a movie reference baked in and I like number nine, whatever it is.

Then I said to ChatGPT, “Would you leverage that rationale as design principles for another 10, please?” six of the 10 were better than anything I had thought of. But the point is, it does require that collaboration. Now, that being said, that’s as a one-off interaction, Pete. I think what you should do in this case, if that’s it, and what anybody should do is, if there’s a routine workflow, like, how often do you title a podcast?

Pete Mockaitis
At least, twice a week.

Jeremy Utley
Okay. So, to me, that’s kind of square in the crosshairs of a task that it’s kind of a creative challenge, probably takes some amount of time. There’s a potential, you know, so there’s, call it, there’s a two-by-two somewhere that you would hire BCG to spit out, right? But you got a two-by-two, and this probably falls in the top right corner in terms of, like, it’s in GPT’s wheel housing capabilities, and there’s enough regularity that it would meaningfully impact your life or productivity. Great. Okay, there’s your two-by-two. I think that that’s a prime candidate for making a GPT.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just make a full-blown GPT?

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, why would you not make a podcast-naming GPT? And then you would put in its knowledge documents, all of the titles and your rationale. And then, importantly, it’s not that you make a GPT and you’re done. You make a GPT, then you try it, and then you see where it’s deficient, and you work to get it right, and then you reprogram, you iterate the instructions to the GPT relative to the work that you had to do in addition.

And what’s the process for that? I would say probably you’re going to instruct the GPT, “I want you to analyze the transcript. I want you to find what are the key points of emphasis in the conversation. I define emphasis as we spent more than two minutes on it or whatever,” I don’t know, right? “I want you to find wherever there is more than five back and forth, that’s evidence that this was particularly engaging.”

Or, furthermore, you might develop a protocol where, after your calls, you have a two-minute Zoom call with yourself, where you say, “Hey, here are the four things I thought were interesting.” And you load that into the GPT as well. I don’t know, “Consult the transcript and the follow-up call transcript that I’ve provided for you. Look for these points, then distill these into these brand guidelines, perhaps, or whatever it is. Then do this, then do this.”

You’d kind of walk the GPT through, you would actually articulate and codify that workflow. And then you would test it, and then you’d iterate it, and you’d test it, and you’d iterate it. And you’d get to the point, I would say, probably, if you’re doing it twice a week, by the end of the month, you’ll probably get to the point where, if you really take it seriously to iterate the GPT’s instruction set, over the course of a month, you’ll have something that’s really great.

Now, the problem is most people aren’t really systems thinkers and they just want to do like a one-off kind of like band-aid solution, which is fine. I’m probably more that way myself, unfortunately. So, I’d rather just, it’s less painful on a one-off just to do the work again myself. Systematically, it’s much more painful to do it one-off every time by myself. And so, you kind of got to decide.

And to me, that becomes a function of “What is a task whose output you would refuse to settle for less than exceptional?” That’s a great task for a GPT because you’re not going to be okay with anything less than a really good GPT. And it summons the requisite activation energy required for you to continue to invest in iterating it.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, it starts with a mindset of, “Okay, don’t talk to it like it’s an oracle. Expect we’re going to need some back and forth, some collaboration, some iteration, some refinement.” And then it’s your bullish take that, at the end of the day, it’s going to cut the mustard and deliver the goods.

Jeremy Utley
Unequivocally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Jeremy Utley
That, to me, is it’s unfathomable that it can’t deliver on that use case.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. You heard it here first.

Jeremy Utley
I mean, really and truly, and I’d be happy to workshop with you if you’d like. But, to me, that is absolutely a use case that GPT can shine with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we talk about use cases. You’re real big on idea flow. It’s getting a whole lot of ideas, a whole lot of creative options generated. Tell me, how do you use AI in that endeavor well?

Jeremy Utley
Well, the easiest thing to do is, which you did well in your example, is request options. I think, for most people, they ask one question, they expect one answer. And with a probabilistic, non-deterministic model, which means LLMs are probabilistic in nature, every time you ask a question, you’re going to get a different answer.

And sometimes the answer is there’s a higher degree of overlap, sometimes they’re radically different, even within the same instruction sets. You could say it’s a bug. I actually think it’s a feature because I believe in variability of thinking is actually what drives creative outcomes. And so, when you realize that, then, “Wow, I could hit regenerate and it will reconsider the question again?” “Yeah.” “Well, why wouldn’t I hit regenerate five times?” Great question. Why wouldn’t you?

And most people go, “I’ve never hit regenerate.” I think it’s actually probably the most important button on the screen. Because you have a collaborator, you and I are going back and forth, and I say, “Hey, Pete, what do we do about this?” You go, “Well, here’s an idea.” And I go, “Okay. Well, what else?” And you’re like, “Okay, let me dig deeper,” and then you say something. I go, “Okay. Well, what, like five more ideas?” And after a while, you’d be like, “Dude, I gave you all my ideas.”

But ChatGPT is not like that. AI is not like that. And so, one of the simple tricks for idea flow with AI is recognizing you’re not going to tire itself out. In fact, you need to recognize your own cognitive bias. I mean, it’s one of my kind of nerd obsessions is what’s called the Einstellung effect, which is the tendency of a human being to settle on good enough as quickly as possible, demonstrated since the 1940s by Abraham and Edith Luchins, where they’ve kind of documented, very clearly how human beings kind of get in a cognitive rut, and they just want a good enough answer, and they don’t actually get the best answer. They just get a good enough answer.

And so, to me, the key to maximizing idea flow with an AI is recognizing that the creative problem in that collaboration is actually your human cognitive bias, not the AI’s bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Oh, boy, Jeremy, I could talk about this forever. But before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you share any other top do’s and don’ts?

Jeremy Utley
One thing, I think, is a really simple thing that you can do, and it’s not unrelated to your idea of asking ChatGPT or whatever, for a number, kind of saying how confident it is. One thing that you can often do is ask it to evaluate its own work, “Scale of zero to 100, how great was the previous response? Be like a tough Russian ballet instructor, give me critical feedback.” And it’ll go, “Oh, it’s a 60 out of 100 for this reason.”

Well, then you could say, “Okay, based on that feedback, can you rewrite it as 100 out of 100? Rewrite it as 110 out of 100. Now, regenerate it. Now, regenerate it again. Now, grade that one. Is it really 100? Bring in another Russian judge. What does the second Russian judge think?” So, one thing that you should definitely do is get AI to evaluate its own work. It’s far better at being objective.

Like, as a simple example for me, and then I also want to mention chain of thought reasoning, so make sure I come back to that. But one thing I’ll do is I’ll do kind of parallel processing between ChatGPT and Claude, and I’m having both work on something. I take their output and I feed it to the other, and I ask, “Which one is better? Is Claude’s work better or ChatGPT’s work better?”

You would think that they both advocate for themselves. They don’t, but they almost always agree. It’s fascinating, actually. There are times where ChatGPT is like, “I actually prefer Claude’s response for this reason, this reason.” And if I go to Claude, it goes, “I think my response is stronger for this, this, this.” And half the time, it’s the other way.

But it’s actually exceedingly rare that they disagree. They often will say the other’s is better, but they almost always agree with the other’s assessment too, which is fascinating, which is to say you can have models evaluate one another’s work. The other thing, the other huge do, probably the single greatest empirically validated finding is that the best way to get better output from an LLM. is to prompt it with what’s known as chain of thought reasoning, which is to say, tell the language model to articulate its thought process before answering.

And so, humans have this tendency, so do AIs, of what we all know as ex post rationalizing. So, if I ask you, “What’s your favorite color?” You say, “It’s blue.” “Well, why did you say blue?” You go, “Oh, well, I like the sky, and I like the ocean, and da, da.” But if instead, I say, “Hey, tell me how you think about what your favorite color is,” and you go, “Well, I probably think about my favorite things.”

And then I go, “Well, what are your favorite things?” You go, “Well, my wife, obviously, and I think about her eye color, and they’re green. You know, green’s my favorite color.” “Well, is it blue or is it green?” Actually, and for me, even as I think through that thought exercise, green, emphatically. I take my wife’s eyes any day over the sunset. That’s a no-brainer, right?

Well, similarly, language models do the same thing. If you ask it for an answer, and it says blue, and then you go, “Why did you say blue, ChatGPT?” it will ex post rationalize. And blue is very subjective, but even with things that are objective, more objective, it will ex post rationalize its answer. If, however, you say, “Hey, before you answer the question, would you walk me through how you’re going to think about solving this problem?” It will articulate its answer and it arrives at, from a research perspective, empirically better, more valid, more cogent, etc. responses.

And the reason it does so is because of how language models work. They aren’t premeditating their answers. So, what it’s not doing, as Pete asks a question, and then it thinks of its answer and writes it out. That’s not what happens. What happens is Pete asks a question and it reads the question and says, “What’s the first word of the answer?” and it says it.

And then it reads your question, and the first word it thought of, and says, “What’s the second word?” And then it reads your question and its first and second word, and thinks, “What’s the third word?” So, it’s not premeditating responses. It’s, literally, only predicting the next token. And so, when you ask it for an answer, the only thing it’s predicting is its answer.

If, however, you ask for reasoning and then answer, it first next token predicts reasoning, and then it incorporates the reasoning that it has articulated in its response, which results in a much better response because it’s not only considered your question, but it’s also considered reasoning first. And as a user on the other side of the collaboration, what that enables you to do is not only, one, get better responses, but, two, you can interrogate its reasoning too.

And you can say, “Actually, it’s not that I have a problem with your answer. I have a problem with how you approach the question. I actually think you should do this.” And then you can guide its reasoning path because you’ve asked it to make its reasoning explicit. Those are the two probably biggest do’s, I would say, when you ask for do’s and don’ts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And it sounds like the key is that you ask for it in advance as opposed to, “How did you come up with that?”

Jeremy Utley
Yeah, exactly. That’s ex post rationalizing. It will give you a great answer. It’s a sycophant. LLMs have been programmed to be helpful assistants. And when you realize what that means, it’s a euphemism for suck up. So, if you ask it what it thinks, it’s going to say, “I think that’s a really great idea, Peter.” But if you say, “I don’t want you to compliment me. I want you to be brutally honest. Don’t pull any punches,” like, you got to really ask an AI to level with you to get honest feedback.

When you’re aware of that, it influences how you collaborate with the model, which goes back to the question earlier about idea flow. It’s recognizing your own, I mean, there are limitations to the technology, but a lot of times the truth is we want a suck up. I don’t want to hear how my first draft sucks. I want to hear, “Actually, you don’t need to do any more work. You go have a coffee.” That’s what I want to hear.

And if I don’t realize that the model has been trained to be a suck up, I ask it, assuming I’m getting the truth, and then when it tells me I’ve done great work, I say, “Well, let’s take a break, boys. We’re all done here.” Whereas, if I realize, “You know what, unless I really push it to give me straight feedback, it’s probably going to tell me I’ve done a great job. And I know my human cognitive bias is to overweight the response that I did a great job, and to underweight…” So, you have to understand yourself. In a way, the key to good human-AI collaboration is to really understand our own humanity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you. And now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jeremy Utley
One is Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who said, “No matter how heroic one’s imagination, a man can never think of that which would never occur to him.”

The second quote that I love is Amos Tversky, Danny Kahneman’s lifelong research partner, who died prior to receiving the Nobel Prize. But Amos Tversky was once asked how he and Kahneman devised such inventive experiments. And he said, “The secret to doing good research is to always be a little underemployed.  You waste years when you can’t afford to waste hours.”

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jeremy Utley
I think there’s a great one that I always come back to called the creative cliff illusion, which is conducted by Nordgren and colleagues at Toronto, I want to say. You can look it up, creative cliff illusion. But the basic idea is when they ask participants what their expectations of their creativity over time were, there is an illusion that one’s creativity degrades to a point that reaches a cliff where it almost asthmatically falls off. And people’s, their expectation is, “I’m just going to run out of creative ideas.”

The paper is obviously called the Creative Cliff Illusion because then, when they test people, it’s not true. They don’t run out of creative ideas. They, actually, their creativity persists. And my favorite part of the study is the shape of the creativity, over time, the variable that it’s most highly correlated with, i.e. “Does creativity dip or does it increase?” because it does increase for some people. The variable that determines the shape of your creativity over time is actually your expectation.

So, if you expect that you will keep having creative ideas, you do. If you expect you will cease having creative ideas, you do. And so, that to me is just totally fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. And a favorite book?

Jeremy Utley
I love Mark Randolph’s book about the founding of Netflix called That Will Never Work. It’s a fascinating story about entrepreneurship, about grit and perseverance, and about ideas. And there’s a lot of very practical takeaways about the importance of experimentation in finding product market fit and succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Jeremy Utley
I’ve got an electric chainsaw, and I love tromping around the woods, just chainsaw in hand, like, just in case I need it. It’s just so fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And a favorite habit?

Jeremy Utley
NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol, Andrew Huberman. It’s, basically, laying down and becoming totally still, not for the purpose of sleep, necessarily. It’s okay if you do sleep, but it’s not in order to sleep, but to facilitate neurological replenishment, connections between neurons, and codification of memory. And I try, if I can, to NSDR once a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with the folks; they quote back to you often?

Jeremy Utley
I talked earlier about the value of variation in one’s thinking. And the truth is ideas are naturally occurring phenomena, which is a nerdy way of saying they’re normally distributed. So, you got some really great ideas, very small, it’s a bell curve, right? You got a lot of ordinary ideas and you got some stupid ideas. Steve Jobs called them dopey ideas. He regularly shared dopey ideas with Sir Jony Ive.

Taylor Swift says, “It’s my hundreds or thousands of dumb ideas that have led me to my good ideas.” You got dopey or dumb on one side of the spectrum, you got delightful on the other side of the spectrum. The quote that I often say that people remember and resonates, and they take with them is, I tell people, “Dopey is the price of delight.”

The only way you get good ideas is by allowing yourself to have bad ideas. And the reason most people don’t have better ideas is because they won’t allow themselves to have worse ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you to point them?

Jeremy Utley
JeremyUtley.design And LinkedIn, I’m happy to chat with folks on LinkedIn. My website, JeremyUtley.design, I’ve got a newsletter folks can subscribe to. I’ve also got an introductory AI drill course where you get two weeks of daily drills for, you know, they say you need 10 hours of practice with AI to start to become fluent. This gives you daily practice to get your first 10 hours under your belt.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a final challenge or call to action for folks who want to be awesome at their jobs? Sounds like we just got one.

Jeremy Utley
To me, it’s very simple. Do one thing you heard here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Jeremy, this is fun. This is fascinating. Thank you. And keep up the awesome work.

Jeremy Utley
Thank you. My pleasure.

1005: How to Feel Energized Every Day with Dr. Michael Breus

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Michael Breus cuts through the noise and discusses the three most important wellness habits: sleeping, drinking, and breathing.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top habit that leads to better sleep 
  2. Just how much water your body needs 
  3. What many get wrong about breathing 

About Michael

Michael J. Breus, Ph.D.,is a double board-certified Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Sleep Specialist. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have taken and passed the Sleep Medicine Boards without going to Medical School. He is also the founder of sleepdoctor.com.

Dr. Breus is the author of four books with the newest book (2021) Energize! Go from dragging Ass to kicking it in 30 days, adds the concepts of Movement (not exercise), and Intermittent Fasting to his already famous Sleep Chronotypes. And it was recently named one of the top books of 2021 by The Today Show. In his 3rd book (2017) The Power of When, which is a groundbreaking biohacking book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your biological chronotype (early bird or night owl). Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise and much more based on over 200 research studies.

He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 400 interviews per year (Oprah, Dr. Oz, The Doctors, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and more). Dr. Breus has been in private practice for 23 years and recently relocated to and was named the Top Sleep Doctor of Los Angeles by Reader’s Digest.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Michael Breus Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

Michael Breus
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here eight years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. It’s been a while. You were one of the first and one of the longest episodes because I had so much I wanted to talk to you about sleep. So, thank you for bringing it.

Michael Breus
Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear, any really fascinating new discoveries that you’ve made in the world of wellness, energy, sleep, drinking, and breathing that you’re excited about to share right off the top?

Michael Breus
Well, you know, I’ve got a new book coming out and I’m pretty excited about it. I mean, let me tell you why I wrote the book because I think that’s really the most important part, is I just think wellness is too fricking complicated. Like, I was at the gym the other day and this woman, she kind of finished an exercise and then she was just, like, sitting there, like, you could tell she was visibly confused at what was the next thing she was supposed to do. And I feel like all of wellness has sort of started to turn into that.

Everybody’s asking me, “Should I buy a sauna? What green drink should I have?” And they’re not even looking at, “Are they getting enough sleep? Do you have enough water in your body? Do you know how to breathe correctly?” So, I started thinking about it after I read a book my friend Joe Polish wrote called Life Gives to the Giver, and he was talking about these skills that you gain over time, and that one skill, sometimes a particular skill will, once you have it, will kind of topple over and then maybe make some other skills a little bit easier.

They called them dominoes, so I was like, “Well, I wonder what the dominoes of wellness are?” What are the fundamentals? Like, what is the DNA of wellness? What are the two or three things that you just got to get right for everything else to make sense? And sleeping, hydrating, and breathing kind of made sense to me.

If you look at the world’s records, the longest a person has ever gone without sleep is about 11 and a half days. Started hallucinating. It was pretty, pretty messed up. It wasn’t pretty. Pretty much kind of in a corner, sort of shaking to the side. But you look at how somebody can last without water, which, by the way, I do not recommend to anyone, three days is about as far as you’re really going to get. And then when you look at breathing, how long are you going to last without breathing? Without assistance, I think that the record is something like 11 and a half minutes, 12 minutes underwater, something like that.

But I started to think about, like, “What are the fundamental things that our body can only live without for a very short period of time?” Believe it or not, we can go without food for, like, 30 days. We can go without exercise for a lifetime, I think. I think a lot of people have proven that one. You can go a long time without doing a lot of stuff.

And so, then I said to myself, “Okay, these three feel like it. Let’s dive into the literature and see what there is to see.” Obviously, I know the sleep literature pretty well, but this book is not a repeat of that. What I really decided to do more of was look at, “Okay, well, what are the five big mistakes? Like, what are the five things that people are just screwing up with their sleep?” If they just fixed one or two of them, I swear to you, life would be so much easier.

Then I started to really dive into hydration. And, to be fair, I was never a hydration guy until I started to become a runner and live in Arizona at the same time. So, I really had to know and understand that from a runner’s perspective, but also started to really wanted to learn about hydration from an overall perspective.

I’m 56 years old now, and a lot of my contemporaries are finding that hydration is a bit of a challenge, and so really understanding what are my hydration needs, and then breathing, and then you start to think about breathing, like, “All right, come on, Michael, like, how bad could I be breathing? I mean, I’m alive, right? Like, this really shouldn’t be that difficult.”

If you start to look at the Indian and the Ayurvedic culture and history, you start to learn that some of the yogis and some of the people way back in the day, they’ve been doing some pretty interesting breathing techniques for a very long period of time, and they get incredible results. There’s breathing that slows you down, makes you sleep, turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. There’s breathing that hypes you up and turns on your sympathetic nervous system, and we use these techniques today.

If you go from standstill to running across a field, trust me, you’re using some breathing techniques, hopefully, fairly efficiently and fairly quickly. So, I started to say, “All right, can I make it easy? Can I make it straightforward?” So, what I did was I said, “Look, I’m going to set my alarm five times a day,” and I did this for myself just to kind of test it out, and I chose the times based on my chronotype.

And then during each one of those little five-minute periods of time, I have water, I do a breathing test. I’m focusing on something for my sleep, and, honestly, it’s now become ingrained as a habit, and it’s wonderful. Most of my patients tell me this is a great starting line for wellness, and I think that’s really what’s great about it, is you don’t have to worry about, “Do I have an exercise routine? How much protein should I have? Do I need creatine?” You know, it’s more like, “Hey, dude, just breathe and sleep and hydrate, and guess what, you’re like 50% there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fascinating stuff. And I’m curious, you mentioned your patients, do you have a tale of transformation in terms of a professional who’s like, “Yeah, okay, okay, okay, sure, sure, sure, sleeping, hydrating, breathing, got it,” and then they did it? And what kinds of results can unfold for people who think they’re doing it fine, but then put some attention on it and to do it masterfully?

Michael Breus
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I think the devil is in the details, for sure, when it comes to people and how they follow it and how they adapt it. I found some really cool adaptations for people. As we get older, we start to lose touch with some of our thirst signals, we don’t realize that we’re thirsty. And so, I had one woman who really, you know, she just forgot to drink all the time. And so, what we did was we paired television – she liked to watch her shows at night – with tea, and so not caffeinated tea, obviously, because that would be bad for her sleep, but we used to call it tea and TV.

And so, we would actually just put on her phone a reminder, “Tea and TV.” And it was something that was that simple for her that allowed her to become hydrated. And then, to be honest with you, she started to become more motivated for her weight loss goals. Now I’m not saying that this is some miraculous recovery, and I’m not saying that she lost 50 pounds because she started doing tea and TV. But what I am saying is that something as simple as hydration can kickstart other behaviors that you’re just not motivated to do.

It’s very, very, very hard to be motivated when you’re tired, when you’re dehydrated, and when you’re out of breath, it just doesn’t work well. Now, as far as, like, looking at some pretty drastic people, I belong to a men’s group, and on every Sunday, we go for a hike, which is awesome. We have a great time, and it’s beautiful here in California, there’s a million places to go hiking. And we have a varied age range in our men’s group. We have guys that are probably in their late twenties, all the way on up till their eighties.

And so, for the older guys, we always make sure that we’ve got people in the front of the line, people in the back of the line, a little extra water, things like that, just to be thoughtful. And this one guy comes on the trip and he is a fairly robust guy, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m a camel. I don’t need to drink water.” And we’re like, “Bro, you need water,” and we kept trying to give him water, trying to give him water. Three-quarters of the way up the trail, he totally bonks. We have to call EMS. It’s a mess. So, those are the situations that you obviously want to avoid.

Now, the good news was, for that particular individual, he came back to do hikes a few weeks later, and we had absolutely no problems with him because he was able to stay hydrated. So, I think there are some pretty cool stories out there about people who are definitely finding something new about themselves from this, but I think it’s one of those things that you didn’t think about. So, I have had a couple of patients turn to me and say things like, “I’m not as grouchy all of a sudden,” which is kind of fascinating. Again, not something that you would have expected.

I had one spouse tell me that they were much more interested in being intimate with their partner because the partner just seemed like a different person. Their mood had changed, their ability to communicate was better, all of these different things. Now, I’d like to blame it on the Sleep, Drink, Breathe program that it was going to be fixing all of your marital woes, but I’m not convinced it will. I will tell you though, if you do it with your partner, it’s a fun thing to do together and it’s something that a couple can do to get healthy together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very pleasurable. Thank you, good doctor. Well, so let’s talk about these in sequence. When it comes to sleep, I’m curious, how big a deal is it if we get okay sleep, you know, maybe six and a quarter-ish hours a night versus great sleep, seven and a half plus hours a night? Is that fine or is that pretty consequential a difference?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I’ll tell you, is it only matters when it matters. So, as an example, if you’re getting six and a quarter hours, and then, all of a sudden, you get five, you are screwed. But if you’re getting seven and then you get five, you can snap back from that very easily and be pretty good that day as well as the next. So, it really has to do with compliance and consistency, I think, is the two biggest things with sleep.

Because if you can just build a steady, solid base of good quality sleep, and it doesn’t have to be…I mean, again, we’re talking about minutes here. I’m talking about quality, right? So, I don’t care if you have six hours of sleep, as long as it’s super high quality, if that’s what works for you. But remember, the deal here is it’s not to get the least amount of the good stuff, right? Like, people seem to think it’s this kind of game.

Remember, sleep is recovery. This is what your body needs to do in order for you to get to your next step. So, by ripping it off, by limiting it, whether it’s through time or caffeine, is kind of foolish when you start to think about it because you’re going to need that body to repeat that activity again and again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say “screwed,” what exactly does that mean in practice?

Michael Breus
Well, I mean, so for example, it really can depend. I mean, I have some people who, as an example, let’s say you’re normally getting seven hours of sleep and something terrible happens and your flight is delayed and you’re sleeping on the floor of the airport and you get five hours and then you have to go on television the next day, you’re probably going to be just fine, right? Because, yeah, you’re not feeling so great, but you’ve been getting seven hours of sleep.

If you’ve been getting six hours of sleep and that’s really not what your body needs, your body needs seven, your anxiety is going to increase significantly with this new added stress of not having slept well, on top of now being in a stressful situation. My guess is that, usually at that point in time, a lot of people reach for stimulants in order to kind of counteract that level of sleepiness.

And so, once you start to go down that path, you end up overstimulating because your body is, unfortunately, dehydrated because it hasn’t slept, and now you are kind of in this little bit of a death spiral where you’re amping up your anxiety while you’re amping up your caffeine. Usually, the performance is probably a B, B-minus, of what you would want it to have been had you been sleeping probably seven hours, where it could have easily been a B-plus or an A-minus, again, just from a rebound.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I found is the consequence can be even greater in so far as when I’m well rested, and tell me if there’s some cool science on this so it’s not just my anecdote, when I’m well rested, I’m ready to take on the important but not urgent and not pleasant task that have tremendous strategic value.

Michael Breus
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m kind of sleep-deprived, it’s like, “Nah, I don’t feel like it. I’ll maybe do that later.” And so, in a way, if good sleep makes the difference between doing those things and not, over the course of a career, it could have a multimillion-dollar impact.

Michael Breus
Absolutely. And I think we see that with hydration and with breathing as well. So, I mean, I 100% agree that if you can have your body kind of in a flow state, in a mindset where… it might not be perfect, it might not be all, I’m getting my best ideas every single second, but it might be, “Hey, I’m going to do the blocking and tackling that needs to be done of trimming this email list, or creating better copy, or doing more editing,” or whatever it is, absolutely, I think, sleep, hydration, and breathing, all of which, again, if you can put it on kind of a schedule, it makes it so much easier.

It’s interesting, when you look at entrepreneurs in particular, and you look at people who are like, “Grow, grow, grow. I got to get my business going,” some of them have some of the worst wellness habits you’ve ever seen. They’re all coffee junkies or energy drink, I mean, I shouldn’t say all, there’s a lot. And that ends up playing a big role when, in fact, if you slept well and you were hydrated, you’d be shocked at how much energy you have. So, I think there are some things in there that I think could be super-duper valuable at any stage of business.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, you know, Michael, I don’t know how many podcasters you chat with who have, in fact, read dozens of full-text studies, randomized controlled trials of different sleep interventions, but I have because I’m a fiend for this sort of thing. And what I find interesting or sad, I don’t know, is that often sleep hygiene education is used as the control and sees almost no result as compared to the active intervention. So, how do you, in the position of educating, help make an impact here? Like, what do we need to do if sleep hygiene education is so lame it’s the control?

Michael Breus
So, number one, I love the fact that you brought this up, and it’s important that you’re thinking about it this way as well. So, number one, let’s be super-duper clear for your audience members, sleep hygiene just by itself, in and of itself, it barely does shit, like, let’s be fair. Now, if you do the opposite of sleep hygiene, like if you have a drum set in your bedroom, of course it’s not going to go well, super-hot room, lights all on, I get it, okay? That seems like it’s kind of like the no-duh of sleep is sleep hygiene to me.

But I think there’s something in between, like a sleep disorder, and I guess what you’d call disordered sleep, which is just sort of, like, “I wish I had some guidelines. I wish I had some evidence. I wish I had a few things that would really work that I could follow that were straightforward and simple to be able to allow me to get better sleep.”

So, one of them is, no matter what your chronotype is, if everybody out there just wakes up at the same time, seven days a week, not five days a week, seven days a week, biologically speaking, you set a process in motion so that your melatonin production becomes consistent at a very specific time every single night. It is exactly 14, roughly 14 hours, I shouldn’t say exactly, roughly 14 hours after you wake up.

So, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m., 14 hours later is 8:00 p.m. and that’s when your melatonin is going to go on board and start to work. That’s why people start to feel sleepy around 9:30, 10:00 o’clock. However, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m. during the week and 9:00 o’clock on the weekends three hours later, melatonin production is three hours later, which means your brain doesn’t even going to think about going to bed until 1:00 o’clock in the morning.

So, by keeping just this one habit, like this would be a better habit than listening to almost all of the sleep hygiene, again, don’t sleep with a drum set in your room with lights on in a very hot room, but if all you did was keep your wakeup time consistent, notice I didn’t say bedtime, but wake up time consistent, you could actually make a biological process in your body consistent that helps you fall asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. Number one, that’s your top.

Michael Breus
That’s my top. And it doesn’t matter what your chronotype is. Now, I’ve mentioned the word a couple of times, and I know, Pete, you know what chronotype is, but for your audience members, I created a system called chronotyping, where you can take a quiz, you go to chronoquiz.com, and it’ll teach you what type of sleeper that you are.

So, there are four different types. Early birds are now called lions, night owls are now called wolves, and we figured this out. Now, what’s even better is waking up at the right time based on your chronotype. So, chronotype turns out to be genetic and it’s something that I can show you. It’s a quiz. It’s like 30 questions online. Like, it’s not very long and it’s fairly accurate. We’ve had over 4 million people take the quiz now, and so we’ve really been able to kind of dive deep and get some interesting data out there.

And it’s quite fascinating to learn about these different chronotypes because it tells you a lot about the person’s personality and things like that. So, not only waking up at the same time, but if you wake up based on your chronotypical wakeup time, it’s even better. In truth, you end up needing less sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s beautiful. And what’s interesting is, between the last time we spoke and now, I spent a night in the Vanderbilt Sleep Laboratory hooked up to a lot of things.

Michael Breus
Oh, nice. Tell me. Tell me.

Pete Mockaitis
They informed me, much to my surprise, and being a regular weight, a normal weight, that I had a mild case of obstructive sleep apnea.

Michael Breus
Oh, what were your numbers? Do you remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you for asking. My apnea hypopnea index was 9.1.

Michael Breus
That’s not very much.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it is. So, it’s mild, but I was experiencing sleepiness in the day, and so I’ve been doing some things and that has helped.

Michael Breus
So, what did you do about it?

Pete Mockaitis
But as I’ve learned, this sleep apnea business is apparently pretty widespread.

Michael Breus
Oh, it’s amazing how many people have sleep apnea that is undiagnosed. Now, here’s the thing, is you have to really understand sleep apnea and its consequences to really gain an appreciation for it. So, first of all, mild sleep apnea in somebody who’s fairly lean, like you are, is something that, in most cases, we may or may not decide to treat. But, as an example, for somebody who may have been a bit bigger, then we might’ve said to ourselves, “Hmm, they’re already putting a load on their heart because they’re a little bit bigger, so, cardiovascularly, that could, in the future, be problematic.”

We want to make sure, even with mild sleep apnea, that that isn’t putting an extra load on the heart. So, therefore, even somebody with the exact same numbers as you, let’s say nine, but let’s say had an additional 60 pounds on them, we would probably consider treating it at that point. Also, to be fair, their symptomatology would probably be much worse than yours. You just said anything that you reported was kind of mild, whereas somebody with 60 pounds on them at your height would probably have significant different symptomatology, I would gather, probably more severe. So, it’s interesting when you start to look at it.

For folks out there who want to know a little bit more about what we’re talking about, an apnea hypopnea index means the number of times that you stop breathing or almost stop breathing divided by the amount of time that you spend in bed per hour. So, Pete stopped breathing in his sleep or almost stopped, according to the numbers he reports, as roughly nine times an hour. Now, you might say to yourself, “Holy crap, nine times an hour, that’s once every six minutes. That seems like a lot, Michael.” So, let me give you the scale.

So, it’s 5 to 15 is mild, 15 to 30 is moderate, 30 and above is severe. Also, one thing that we don’t know about Pete as of yet is how low did his oxygen desaturate while having these events. That can also be a severity criteria as well. If I have somebody who stops breathing in their sleep nine times an hour but their oxygen dumps into the 80s, I’m treating that immediately because I’m concerned that they may have other things that could be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for asking. About 92-ish.

Michael Breus
So, that’s fantastic. So, we never want to see it going below 92, if at all possible. 90 is kind of like that lower rung where it’s like, “Okay, let’s just make sure it’s above 90 and then you’re okay.” But 92 is actually a better number to have. And on room air during the daytime, you’re probably 96-98.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, all that’s to say, so we’re getting into it, but I think it’s important, so if folks have no idea that they might have sleep apnea…

Michael Breus
Most don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
…what would be some telltale signs? And I’m going to say it, Oura Ring let me down on this one. Other people may love their Oura Rings and I think it’s great for other purposes, but it left me at the door.

Michael Breus
Well, it’s not diagnostic. Yeah, it’s not diagnostic for sleep apnea, number one. So, first of all, if we’re thinking trackers, everybody probably knows that Apple Watch just came out and is now actually tracking for sleep apnea. So, they actually will tell you, supposedly, if you’ve got sleep apnea. I don’t have the app as of yet, so I haven’t tried it out.

So, if you’re looking for trackers, that’s one that might be possibly helpful to do so. But to be fair, usually your bed partner will tell you. The person sitting next to you is going to tell you if you’re snoring, they’re going to tell you if you stop breathing in your sleep. You may actually experience it as well. You could wake up and be like, “Ahh,” and gasping or choking from air and trying to do that. So that could be a telltale sign.

If you wake up in the morning with a headache, that is absolutely a sign. It usually is due to oxygen deprivation causing that kind of swelling in the brain, which is not good. Also, depression, anxiety, moodiness, things of that nature, that up-and-down nature of that, of it all, that can certainly be a symptom or a sign of sleep apnea, and then of course daytime sleepiness, so just being tired, falling asleep at work, not performing, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if folks are thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like me,” I’ll say one of the easiest things I’ve discovered to assess this is just like the SnoreLab app, you get an audio of yourself, like, “Hey, there’s me stopping breathing. Whoa! Okay.” And, two, you could just get, like, sleeplay.com has an overnight test.

Michael Breus
Yeah, we sell them actually from Sleep Doctor as well. We have a full line of tests. It’s literally, you push on a button, and we do a full telecommunication with one of our doctors, so you actually meet with one of our doctors, talk about your symptomatology, they decide if it’s appropriate, send a test to your house. Believe it or not, the tests now are disposable.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought that was weird. I thought that was weird. But I’ll tell you my results from the test were almost identical to my results from the Vanderbilt Sleep Lab, and, oh, so much cheaper.

Michael Breus
Right. And easier, right? And in a better environment, I would argue, an environment more tailored to what your natural sleep would look like, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Very good. Okay. So, there you have it. You might have sleep apnea, you don’t know it, take a look at that and the dividends could be huge. Waking up at the same time. What else would be maybe your number two hottest tip for improved sleep?

Michael Breus
I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s kind of the not tip. It’s the, “Don’t think that it’s just going to go away on its own because it’s not.” Everybody thinks that, “Oh, you know, I’m just stressed out and I’m supposed to sleep like crap right now,” or, like, “I’ve got three kids, I’m supposed to sleep like crap.” That’s actually not the case. So, it’s not going to go away on its own.

If you are not happy with either the quality or the quantity of your sleep, and, by the way, don’t confuse the two. Don’t think that just because you sleep more, it’s going to be better, because it might not. So, understand how things like caffeine, alcohol, affect your sleep. Possibly follow my 3-2-1 rule, which is: three hours before bed, stop alcohol; two hours before bed, stop food; one hour before bed, stop fluids. That will save you some trips to the bathroom and, hopefully, make you have some better sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now let’s talk hydration.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Good Doctor, you said that we can lose touch with our thirst signals as we age, but if we’re in the prime of our careers, can’t we just drink when we’re thirsty and call it good?

Michael Breus
I wish it worked. Unfortunately, as I take a sip, it doesn’t. So, what happens in a lot of cases is if we are sleep-deprived, and I think we’ve pretty much established that we are a sleep-deprived society, the signals don’t come as often as they should. So, believe it or not, our thirst meter, if you will, is off if you’re sleep-deprived. So that’s number one.

But let’s say you’re well-slept and your thirst meter should be on the mark, part of the problem is that we don’t have a solid understanding of what that amount should be. I started diving into the literature because, honestly, it was really kind of foreboding. And I’ve seen everywhere from 50 ounces a day to 130 ounces a day recommended. So, like, the problem is that nobody knows what they’re shooting for.

So, I actually developed a formula based on your weight and what’s called your uptick, so your ability to absorb water and then how much you would actually need in order to do that based on your weight, so, it’s quite simple. So, you just take your weight, you multiply it by 0.6, and that’s the number of ounces that you should drink.

Pete Mockaitis
My weight in pounds and not kilograms?

Michael Breus
That is correct. Pounds. And so, if you’re a 100-pound person, you should have 60 ounces of water. If you’re a 200-pound person, you should have 120 ounces of water. Now, you want to add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise. That’s it. That’s the whole formula. Weight times 0.6 and then take that number and add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise, and that will get you pretty much right as rain. The key here is to sip not chug it, and you want to get at least 30, I’m sorry, 40 ounces before noon because otherwise it’s tough to get all that water down without having to pee all night long.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s very clear and direct. Thank you. All right.

Michael Breus
I like to prescribe water. I think it’s the best supplement out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, water, is it always water? Other beverages are just as fine or not as good? Or what’s your take?

Michael Breus
Well, you know what? That’s a great question. So, number one, there’s a lot of types of water, believe it or not. There are water enhancers, by the way. We can talk about that. But I think you can throw a couple of cups of coffee in there. I don’t have a problem with that. I would prefer if you could stay away from the sugary stuff.

So, if you like sparkling water, that’s great. If you like carbonated water, I don’t have a problem with it. I’d stay away from soda, if you possibly can. But I’m also here to tell you that if you’re not going to drink and the only thing that’s going to get you to drink is a Diet Coke, fine. Drink your Diet Coke. I’d rather you get the fluid than not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s talk about these enhancers, these electrolytes, the powders, etc. Are they handy? And under what context?

Michael Breus
Yep, so that’s exactly how you should think of them, as handy and only under certain contexts. So, I did a little comparison in the book, looking at things like liquid IV and LMNT and a few others, and here’s what I can tell you. First of all, there’s a lot of sodium in these, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but here’s the thing. What they’re trying to do is create a barrier with the water-salt balance in your body. Because when you get too salty, your body wants more water. When you have too much water, your body wants more salt. So, that’s basically kind of how the whole thing works.

These packets of electrolytes are mostly salt, so you want to be careful, especially if you have high blood pressure, about dumping these things into your water bottle every day. Why I said I like the word “handy” is because you should have a packet with you, but you should use them sparingly. So, I would say, as an example, if you’re a runner and you run five miles every day, and you do a long run on the weekends, then I would use it for the long run on the weekends.

So, times where you’re going to be extra exposed or have a significant more energy expenditure, I think it makes a lot of sense because that helps keep that hydration going. But I want to be also clear about something, is using one of these products does not preclude you from drinking more water.

So, what a lot of people will do is they’ll pour this thing in, and they’ll think, “Oh, I don’t need to have my however many ounces because I’ve put my hydration multiplier in.” No, no, no, no, no. You still need the same amount of water. You just need to really think about these times and when to use it, and I would argue you probably already know when those are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking if I am consuming this much fluid, for some that could be quite the uptick. Am I going to have to go to the bathroom all the time? Or are there some strategies for this? What do I do?

Michael Breus
Yeah, so it turns out that you don’t have to go to the bathroom all the time. So, it’s kind of interesting. There’s a section in my book that looks at bladder control, actually, and here’s what’s fascinating is, as you learn to drink more water, your bladder and your body absorbs it quite nicely and can control it. So, you won’t see a huge uptick in bathroom breaks. You will for the first two weeks, but by the third week it levels itself out quite nicely and it’s not really any more than usually what you’re used to. Here’s an interesting little factoid, is that no living mammal can pee for longer than 21 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to try it. I don’t think I’ve ever timed it before.

Michael Breus
Well, you will never not time it now. Everyone who is listening, I can assure you, is now, the next time you pee, you’re going to think about it. But if you pee for 21 seconds, you have truly emptied your bladder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Breus
Challenge out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the stopwatches coming out. That seems kind of short, intuitively, but, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Michael Breus
Wait till the next time you pee, and it’s like, it’s not a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It’s a 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, you know, that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then is there a certain amount of fluid that I can only…? You said don’t gulp or guzzle. Like, is it 16 fluid ounces an hour? Or is there a guideline for, like, what’s going to be just more than what your body can deal with?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I tell people, is you want to think of your body like a sponge. So, you know when you walk out in the morning to the sink and there’s this kind of shriveled block and it’s pretty hard you could probably hammer something with it, that’s your sponge, right? That’s your body when you first have water. And if you pull the spout and you put water on it, if you put a lot of water on it, it just rolls off. It doesn’t really get absorbed.

But if you have a slow stream, it slowly gets absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, and then the whole thing grows, and then finally, when it gets too much water, it basically overruns. That’s exactly how you should think about drinking. You’re the sponge. You don’t want to throw 20 ounces down your gullet because it’s not going to get absorbed. But if you sip it, you’ll be surprised.

So, my favorite technique for doing this is, every morning, one of my morning routines is, I call it the three 15s, where I sit on the edge of the bed and I take 15 deep breaths, then I get 15 minutes of sunshine, and I drink 15 ounces of water. So, while I’m getting my 15 minutes of sunshine, every minute I just take a gulp, and I’m outside, I get the sunlight, I get the vitamin D, it turns off my melatonin, and I’m breathing. Like, I don’t know how many that is. It’s past a quadruple.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, all at once. All right. Well, any other do’s and don’ts when it comes to hydration?

Michael Breus
Well, one thing for people to know, and this is kind of weird, but it’s actually a truism, you can actually drink too much water, and this can happen. It’s happened actually at a fraternity hazing and things of that nature. You can actually make somebody toxic by putting too much water into them or into your body. As a matter of fact, was it Brooke Shields, actually had this happen? She was overhydrating and she overhydrated so much that she actually went unconscious and passed out. So, you can go to the other side of water. So, again, balance is sort of key here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about breathing.

Michael Breus
Yeah, let’s talk about it. It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to breathe, it’s actually quite remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what are we doing wrong, exactly?

Michael Breus
Well, that’s the right question. It’s like, “Well, Michael, are we doing something wrong? I mean, we’re alive, right? So how wrong could it be?” I would say some of the biggest things that we see people that are doing that are actually just not helping with their breathing, number one is their breathing is too shallow. Number one, that puts much bigger load on the heart. Number two, you actually get about half as much air. Taking a long, deep belly breath, and then kind of letting it go through your diaphragm, actually extends the lungs and allows your heart to slow down, which is much more healthy, generally speaking.

So, one of the things that we do is we breathe in a too shallow of a way so it’s just very light repetitive breaths. The other biggie that we do is we’re too mouthy. Too many people are mouth breathers. That can be due to congestion. That can be due to people just not really thinking about it, but in a majority of cases when people are mouth-breathing, it’s basically like putting leaded gas into the engine because you get every bacteria, virus, particulate, everything is coming right through the mouth, straight into the lungs, and kind of gumming up the works.

And then I think the other big one, and there’s actually six breathing problems, but I think these are the big three. People forget to breathe. Do you ever do this, Pete? I have this happen to me every once in a while. Like, if I’m concentrating, like if I’m playing a video game or I’m watching something, I’m just there and then, all of a sudden, I realize, I’m like, “I forgot to breathe.” I start to breathe again. Do you ever do that?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure.

Michael Breus
So, that’s something that people do as well. And, again, getting people more thoughtful about breathing, in general, turns out to be a great idea. And the yogis and the Ayurvedics and that culture has done such an amazing job of teaching us so many different kinds of breathing. I utilize several of these different types of breath work in the book, and it’s fun. It’s fun to actually try some different things out.

I’ve tried the hyperventilation breathing called Kundalini breathing. That was quite an experience for me. I’ve also tried the 4-7-8 breathing. This is a technique that I utilize actually in the middle of the night for many of my patients. So, people who wake up in the middle of the night can’t return back to sleep. My favorite technique then is 4-7-8 breathing.

So, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Slowly breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, you breathe out for a count of eight. This was a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil for the Navy SEALs to help them lower their heart rate so they could shoot in between heart rates for long range snipers. So, this is a great technique you can utilize.

I utilize it before I go on stage. I utilize it in the middle of the night. It’s one of those great things that will just dump your heart rate super-duper quick and allow you to breathe better. So, I think there’s a lot out there. There’s more out there than you might imagine on breathing, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re breathing through the mouth, we have some negative impact associated with just sucking in the microbes, pathogens, etc.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m curious, like what’s really at stake when we breathe optimally, versus we breathe with just kind of without any thought to it?

Michael Breus
So, oxygen transport, and so it all has to do with energy. So, for folks out there who want more energy, shallow breathing is never going to get you there unless it’s super-duper forceful. So, I would argue that all of your energy, remember, oxygen is the fuel that lights the sugar fire that is your energy. So, when we eat something, it all gets broken down into glucose and then stored as either fat or glucose, and so we need something to light that on fire to create energy. That something is oxygen.

And so, by taking small, shallow breaths and unfiltered breaths, what ends up happening is we get bad quality air, and we don’t get enough air, which means we don’t have enough fuel for the fire and we don’t have enough energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And then, you’ve got a few changes you recommend, so we’ve already covered the using your nose and bring it into the diaphragm. Any other top things we’re getting wrong?

Michael Breus
Well, I think just being thoughtful about breathing and thinking about it is probably one of the biggest things that I want you to do. And let’s be fair, you don’t have to do something crazy, okay? Like, a lot of people turn to me, like, “Oh, Michael, you learned all these crazy breathing techniques. I’m not a meditator. I’m not a yoga person. I don’t know how to do those things.” Wrong. This is just breathing we’re talking about.

One of the techniques is you breathe. You hold one nostril closed, and you breathe in through one nostril, and then you breathe out through another nostril. That’s the technique. This isn’t hard stuff, but what it does is it allows you to be purposeful in your breath work. It allows your heart rate to go up and down in ways, shapes, and forms that causes other things to happen in your body, like melatonin to be produced, or cortisol to be produced, or things like that. So, it’s really quite powerful. Honestly, I was kind of surprised, because when I went into this, I’m like, “What am I going to learn about breathing?” I was shocked.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one of your suggestions is to strengthen your diaphragm, and I’d love to get your hot take on, I guess they call it respiratory muscular training, RMT, with tools like The Breather, but do you think that’s worth doing?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I think. I don’t think it’s worth spending a ton of money on a bunch of fancy gadgets and gizmos. There are actually some things that you can buy on Amazon for 20 bucks that can actually help strengthen your breathing quite nicely. But the big thing to do is, again, in the Sleep, Drink, Breathe programmatic book, where we have these five separate times throughout the day where we have you do different things, you’re breathing at all five of those times, you will naturally begin to strengthen just by doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing, even if that’s the only technique that you do.

So, the good news here is, I think if you if all you did was buy the book and follow the program, your diaphragm is going to get stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Michael, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Michael Breus
Well, here’s the deal, is I feel like the book is a little bit like a ticket. So, if you buy the book, you actually send me a copy of the receipt and I then send you all this cool stuff. So, I actually have got several lectures that I’m doing live that you’ll be invited to join. You get the plan immediately for free right there, so even before the book comes out. There’s a couple of different things in there that I think you’ll like.

Also, you are entered into a drawing for a free mattress. So, we’re going to have several mattresses that we’re going to give away for people who are doing that. So, it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re definitely looking forward to it. So, if you get a chance, go to SleepDoctor.com/book, and check it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael Breus
So, I heard Nelson Mandela once say, “I never lose. I only win or learn.” 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Breus
I think, for me, the most interesting research that came out was when they started studying narcolepsy to help insomniacs. So, they started to learn, genetically speaking, what was going on with narcoleptics and make them feel so sleepy to try to understand how we could help people with insomnia. I thought that was a really cool application of the science.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. Now, I have to know, is there a one weird trick from narcoleptics that helps them snap into sleep immediately?

Michael Breus
Well, so it opened up a whole line of genetic work and possible new drug therapy, actually. So, there are actually several companies now that are looking at the on switch for narcolepsy as a potential on switch for people with insomnia, but not at that level, of course. And so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Breus
Well, my all-time favorite book is Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. But I just read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and that was just powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Breus
Probably my pillow because I’m a sleep doctor. I love my pillow. I actually have several pillows that I utilize. One is from a company called InfiniteMoon. I have no affiliate anything with these companies. InfiniteMoon, they make a cool, really good pillow called The Curve and then something called Sleep Crown. Now, this is weird. This is a pillow that I actually put over my head and it actually helps. I don’t know why. It’s just so damn comfortable and I really enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Michael Breus
Sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael Breus
Head on over to SleepDoctor.com and check out my book. You’re welcome to ping me on Facebook, TikTok, all of those. And I have a YouTube channel where I’m now doing some really fun, interesting videos. So, if you get a chance, check it out there, throw me some comments.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Breus
Here’s my final call to action, is do yourself a favor and just consider your sleep, your hydration, and your breathing, in what it could do for your overall performance, whether that’s your work performance, your relationship performance, or your personal performance, and see if it’s something that might be interesting for you. You might be surprised.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, it’s been fun once again. Good luck and good sleep.

Michael Breus
Thank you. I appreciate it. Wishing you some sweet dreams, Pete.