Prioritization Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome back!

Jon Acuff
It’s good to see you again, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about procrastination. You got a whole book about this. Tell us, what do you know or have discovered about procrastination that’s new and fresh and surprising and interesting that we should know?

Jon Acuff
Well, I think the really interesting thing to me is that it’s not necessarily a problem. People use it as a solution. It’s just not a good solution. Meaning, if they don’t want to tell their mom they’re not coming home for Thanksgiving, procrastination goes, “No problem. We don’t have to do that for, like, seven months. We can wait until the last second.”

Or, I’m afraid of getting negative reviews of my book. Procrastination says, “No problem. I’ll solve that. You’ll never get a negative review. I mean, you won’t get to write a book, but you’ll never get that.” So it’s not a laziness problem, which is why so many of the willpower discipline things we do don’t ultimately work.

It’s really more of a figuring out how to give yourself permission to do those things that you really want to do or really need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Permission to do the things you really want to do or need to do. I’m also curious about the things we don’t want to do. I guess we need to do them, but we don’t want to do them. I think that’s where it gets me. It’s not so much…

Jon Acuff
Like what? What do you procrastinate on?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Well, I think there’s tax things. It’s a joke, every year, my accountant is like, “Yeah, we’re deferring, right? Yeah. Didn’t need to ask.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that’s funny.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah.  there’s plenty of things in terms of, “Oh, it would be good to have…” I think that’s for me, like, “It’d be nice to have the result of that thing, but, ugh, doing the work seems exhausting and overwhelming, and I just don’t want to right now.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I think that’s 100% fair. I love that you admitted having the result would be great. I think a lot of people won’t admit, “You know, I’d really just like to have done the thing, but I don’t want to do all this.” For me, entitlement is when I go, “I wish my LinkedIn profile, and I had a better LinkedIn presence.” And you’re like, “Yeah, you haven’t used LinkedIn for, like, five years.” Like, “Yeah, it’s really suffering somehow with my complete lack of effort.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Yeah, go figure.”

Jon Acuff
And to me, that’s entitlement is when I go, “I want blank, but I haven’t done any of the work.” I just think, as far as doing stuff you need to do, but don’t want to do, it’s about selling yourself into doing it. Like, in the book, one of the ideas is, like, you’re the greatest, Pete, salesman in the world because, before every decision you’ve ever made, whether it was good or bad, first, you sold yourself into it.

So I think a lot of goals comes down to your ability to sell yourself into doing something you want to do or need to do, but you don’t feel like doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to need to talk about that at length, but I want to zoom out a smidge and get the big picture. What’s your overall message about procrastination and the latest insights from your in-depth research here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the overall is there’s four permissions you need, and if you do these permissions in this order, it’s almost impossible to not be successful. And I want to say very clearly, I couldn’t have written this book as book two.

If, at 36, Jon Acuff wrote a book called Procrastination Proof: Never Gets Stuck, I’m an arrogant guesser. I’m going, “Maybe, I don’t know. I’ve written one book before. Clearly, I’m great at not procrastinating.”

But by book 11 at 50, I’m like, “Yeah, for someone as distracted as I am, for somebody who has such a hard time focusing to have written 11 books, I figured out how to kind of do some difficult things that maybe you shouldn’t put off.”

So the ultimate idea behind the book is permission, and the four types of permission are permission to dream, permission to plan, do, and review. So those four actions – dream, plan, do, review. And if you do those in that order consistently, everything gets really easy and often really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yeah, I want to hear about these permissions. And can you tell us a bit about the research process by which you landed there? So you did some substantial surveying, right? And talking to folks and identifying some real themes and patterns that appeared at high frequency.

Jon Acuff
Well, the benefit to my job, Pete, is that the way I write a book is I find a problem in my own life and I figure out if there’s a solution for it, and I spent a few years doing that. And then I ask, “Do other people have it?”

And if a lot of other people have it, then I go research to figure out, “Okay, how does it apply to other people, not just me?” It’s not a helpful book if it’s, essentially, how Jon Acuff beat Jon Acuff’s procrastination. That’s not a good book. That’s a manual for me.

So what happened with this book, I worked with this PhD named Mike Peasley, he’s a professor at MTSU. And so it started with, we did a study on, “How many people think they’re living up to their full potential?” meaning there’s something they really want, but they’re not doing it.

And we asked 3000 people and 96% of them said they were not living up to their full potential. So then I go, “Okay, there’s this huge audience.” And then the research kind of goes from there into testing it in a community online, testing it with real live audiences. Like, it’s one idea.

It’s one thing to have an idea in this office, it’s another thing to take it to a Fortune 500 company and go, “Hey, here’s how this permission works.” And you can tell instantly, “Oh, no, that’s not their world at all,” or, “Oh, no, the permission to dream is not helping the cattle ranchers,” or, “Permission to plan is not helping the engineers.”

So a lot of what I do is then go test it on the road and then, eventually, it ends up in a book. So it’s a longer process than my other books used to be, but I think it turns out a better product.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then could you speak to us about these permissions?

Jon Acuff
They’re really, really simple. I mean, the first one, permission to dream, you have to have a reason to change. No one ever changes just because. I’ve helped a million people with their goals. I still haven’t met somebody that said, “I woke up today and decided to have grit. I just woke up today and decided to sacrifice.”

No one willingly leaves their comfort zone, and they shouldn’t. It’s comfortable. The only reason people leave their comfort zones is there’s something outside it worth being uncomfortable for. And it’s usually one of two things – desire or disappointment.

Desire, meaning they bumped into something they really want. Disappointment, they woke up at 42 and their career wasn’t where they wanted it to be. They lost their job to AI and they don’t have much of a choice. The disappointment finally got loud enough to go, “I got to change some stuff or this isn’t going to work.”

So that’s the dream. You got to have a sense of why you want to do something and what you want to do before you even move it into planning. And planning is you answer the question, “How will I do it?” Doing is, “Are you doing it?” And review is, “Did it work? Are we headed in the direction we want to go?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now let’s talk about the word permission in terms of it’s just me. I don’t have to appeal to some authority as the principal or a government official for the permission, the access to do any of these things. So can you unpack this word here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. Somebody the other day told me they had a weight loss goal, but if they lost weight, they’d be breaking family norms. Because in their family, they grew up in their family of origin, food was comfort. Food was security. Food was family. Food was tradition.

Big Southern family, like you had big Southern plates of food, and to be health conscious felt like divorcing the family you were from. And so he needed permission to go, “No, I have permission to love my parents where they are, but I don’t have to repeat my childhood. I don’t have to. I get to lose weight. I have permission to have a healthy lifestyle. I have permission to care about what I eat and how I look and how I exercise.”

So a lot of times, even if you’re an individual, that doesn’t mean you’re free of kind of hangups that are getting in the way. So a lot of times it is that sense of like, “What are some of the broken soundtracks I believe?”

Take money for instance. Money is the last taboo we have in our country. Like, I know men that’ll tell me the worst things they’re dealing with. But if you go, “Hey, what’s the financial number you’re thinking about retiring with?” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, we don’t talk about that. That’s super sensitive.”

And some of them have hangups about money because they grew up in a family where money was considered evil or must be nice or, “They’re rich, we’re not.” And if you get to a certain level of success, you therefore, become greedy.

So they need a permission to go, “No, I have permission to do. I have permission to go as hard as I want at this business on this job.” So there’s so many different areas where the lack of permission holds you back.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And talking about money, I guess, I’m thinking in terms of you hear so much, at least I do, in terms of scams, and scandals, and swindles, and crypto rug pulls, and extractive private equity yuckiness that feels gross to me, such that I think I’m vibing with what you’re saying is I do feel a little bit of resistance internally in terms of really going after some money-making opportunities, because it’s like, “You know what? I’m doing fine. And I don’t want to be like those mean private equity dudes. Hmm.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, “I don’t want to step on next. The only way to get ahead is you have to take advantage of people.” Or, the one that I saw somebody asked the other day, it was like, “Why is it binary where I can either have a really great business or I can be a great dad? Why does our culture present it as like…?”

Because I’ve had friends, and I’ll go, “I think you should really start that business.” They go, “Ooh, I don’t want to, like, forget my kids names. I’ll never see them.” As if there’s only two options – not pursue your dream or get a divorce and not attend your daughter’s first communion.

And it’s like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of options. It’s just you’ve made it very binary.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So how do we grant ourselves or acquire this permission if we’re feeling some of this conflictedness?

Jon Acuff
Well, part of it is identifying it. Some of it’s just labeling it. Like, there’s a really great exercise that we talk about a lot where it’s like you write down a goal and then you write down your reaction to the goal. So you write down, “Okay, I want to retire with $5 million.”

And you write down like, “Oh, that would be impossible,” or, “Oh, I don’t have enough time for that,” or, “Oh, I’ve already made too many bad decisions,” or, “Oh, somebody who has that amount of money is always like this.”

And you start to identify, “Oh, these things are going to hold me back.” Most of the things we wrestle with in life are mindset issues. They’re not physical problems. Where we live, like at least in the Western world, I never have to fear a tiger.

I never leave my house and I’m like, “Just, hey, be careful. There’s a lot of physical predators out there.” It’s only things like procrastination, imposter syndrome, inner critic, overthinking, you know, perfectionism.

And so a lot of times, it’s identifying those things so that you can actually start to work with them. That’s a great first step to go, “Oh, this is holding me back. I’m overreacting in this situation because I have something that’s holding me back. Let me identify that so I can actually deal with it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about that weight and big Southern cooking plates situation. Let’s say someone has identified that, “Okay, I would like to be slimmer, but, ooh, that feels hard, that feels risky because of these beliefs, these associations, this history,” what do I do with that?

Jon Acuff
Well, I mean, I guess it would depend on, like, if it’s an event you’re talking about, meaning, “I’m trying to be in shape, and I’m going home for Thanksgiving,” or, “I’m going home for Christmas, and I know that there’s going to be a lot of food, and a lot of food discussion.” Like, having a game plan and going, “Okay, what do I want to do with that?”

My favorite definition of discipline, which I put in the book, is “Make tomorrow easy today.” Make tomorrow easy today. What can I do today that makes tomorrow easy? That’s constantly how I’m thinking, “What can night me do to hook up morning me?” “What can Monday me do to hook up Friday me?”

So in a situation like that, if somebody said to me, “Okay, I’m trying to break these family norms,” I’d go, “Okay. Well, is it, like, related to a specific thing? And if it was, then we’d come up with a plan for that thing.”

If it was related to the decisions you were making of like, “Oh, man, every time I feel stressed, I do this and I know it’s a short-term solution.” Well, let’s change that. You know, like, let’s change the rhythm of that. Let’s find a different way to deal with stress than that. Like, if you know that’s where you tend to go, you have permission to make different choices.

And then maybe it’d be, let’s get some community. So now you have a communal sense of it. Like, for me, I worked out alone a long time, and I joined a community called F3 where it’s a free men’s workout in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s fun.

Jon Acuff
And I love it. And that changed my approach to working out. Like, that gave me new norms. Now I’m with a bunch of other dudes at 5:30 in the morning. That’s a new norm for me. What’s fun is if you do this long enough, not doing it becomes weird.

Meaning, when you first work out, when you first write, when you first build a business, whatever, it’s hard and it’s uncomfortable. But then you get into such a rhythm that, if you miss a week or two, you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t right.” There’s this really sweet spot where the good habits, when you miss them become weird and it flip flops.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally feel that, experientially. And I think about it almost, like, a dirt road when you got the groove established. It’s easier to be in the groove than out of the groove. Like, today, I had an odd early meeting. And I knew, and actually set multiple alarms because it deviated from my regular schedule so often.

And so I dropped the kids off, and I knew I got to get right to the office for my early meeting. And, mindlessly, I’m driving to the church for, because that’s usually what I do is I hang out in the chapel for some prayer, post-kid drop off.

And I was like, “Wait, no, no, not today. That’s not…We do that almost every day, but today, I have an early meeting. So I got to get to the office right away.” And so it’s so funny how the autopilot move is just, “Oh, I turn here toward the church.”

And I think that is the case with, well, almost everything in terms of, “Oh, I’m working out in the morning, so that’s what I do.” And then it’s like, “Oh, no, no, today is a different day. We don’t do that.” And so it really tracks that, like, the first one or two or three times it’s like a force of will, effortful, intense. And then it’s easier and easier.

And I guess different people put different numbers on it. But, Jon, if I may, when do you think the groove has more momentum than the new groove?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, like, I love if you Google “How long does it take to start a new habit?” there were nine million answers, and it’s like 30 days, 90 days. I mean, for me, I think, at least, it takes a season, meaning like it takes a fall, it takes a summer.

Like, it takes a, you know, for me, three to four months chunk of time of like now F3 for me, like getting up at 4:55 is crazy. For, like, the first eight weeks, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” Now, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Now I’m into it.” So, for me, it usually takes at least a season.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you.

Jon Acuff
How does it take you? I mean, what’s your number?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, well, it’s not binary, you know? It’s hard for me to, like, establish the cutoff because I’d say the second day is easier than the first, and third’s easier than the second, and the fourth, and so on and so forth. So I don’t know where I would draw the line. But, I don’t know, maybe 40-ish.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that feels good. I’ll hold you to that, 40-ish.

Pete Mockaitis
At this point, it feels harder to not do the thing that I started doing 40 days ago.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so permission to dream. And let’s talk about planning.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so where people get stuck there is dreaming runs on optimism, planning runs on realism. So dreaming, “Anything is possible. This is going to be amazing. It’s going to be huge.” And then you have to transition kind of into the real world, into reality.

And one of the simplest tools you can do is really just be honest about your calendar. I meet people all the time that’ll go, “I have these 30 different goals. I have 10 different dreams.” And I’d go, “Well, let’s put a number associated with them.”

And then they put an hour or timeframe with them, and I’ll go, “Well, how many hours of free time do you have in your week?” And they go, “Free time? What are talking about? I’m very busy. I’m slammed right now.”

And you go, “Well, you have a 12-hour goal chunk and a week that has zero hours, like that’s why you’re going to keep procrastinating. It’s not because you’re just delaying. It’s because you don’t have the time to pay that bill. Let’s figure that out.”

So that’s a big part of it for people with planning is, “Okay, how do you actually pay the price of the thing you want?” And maybe you don’t want the thing. Like, I would argue, if you won’t spend half an hour with Claude or ChatGPT having it interview you about the thing, you probably don’t really want the thing.

And maybe you’ve just carried that goal along for a long time of, “I think I need to write a book,” “Someday I want to start a business,” “I’ve always wanted to run a marathon,” but if you won’t even spend, like, half an hour kind of just investigating what would that take, maybe it’s not a goal you care about. And that’s fine. Like, I love getting rid of fake goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about this half-hour AI interview protocol. How does this go down?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, if I have something I want to do that’s new, that I don’t know how to do, I often will say, “Okay, one, I love the whole, like, tell me how to write the best prompt to get the thing I want.” So then I’m not even really writing the prompt.

But if I might say, okay, like, an example for me is I’m doing something called Stage & Page, where it’s a one-day intensive for speakers and a one-day intensive for writers. So I might say, “Hey, you know, I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I want to be able to help people that have just started. Interview me about my first year of public speaking because I know these things, but it’s been a while.”

“You’re the best journalist in the world. You write for a magazine called Stage & Page, and I want you to ask me 10 really insightful questions about my early experience as a speaker.” And then it interviews me, and then it’ll summarize that, it’ll create content out of that. But it’s a really easy way versus just a blank piece of paper.

So if I was going to run a marathon, start a business, you know, figure out how to lose 10 pounds, I would say, “Interview me,” so that I really have a sense of why I want to do it, what I want to do, what are my limitations, “Oh, you’ve got a couple injuries. Let’s figure that out.” Like, the interview format is so much easier than just trying to willpower your way into a blank piece of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So you are engaging in that conversation to get the beginnings of some kind of plan going. Is it fair to say, you don’t expect the AI to spit out the perfect plan, but rather it gets you going so that the planning has begun and the ideas are multiplying?

Jon Acuff
Well, and, no, the problem with AI, the fatal flaws, I still have to do it. Like, I keep working with people and they’ll like give me like, there’s like this AI document arms race that happens in small businesses where I go, “Hey, I think we should try blank.”

And then somebody comes back with a 30-page document that they haven’t even read. Like, AI just created it and now we’re going back and forth on documents. So, yeah, I don’t expect AI to come up with the plan because it’s never really been a lack of information.

Like, if you don’t do the thing, you have a great library in your town. Every town has a great library. So I still have to do it, but it gets me from stuck. The book is designed deliberately to move people through it quickly, meaning it’s 71 short chapters.

And I did that deliberately, and they’re short and they’re punchy and they’re all connected. I did it deliberately because nobody wants to read a thousand-page book about procrastination. Like, if your procrastination book has 90 pages of notes, you’re not a procrastinator. You’re a monster.

Like, that’s Jane Goodall writing about monkeys. I’m a monkey writing for other monkeys. So I just want the person to get started. And if they go, “I have to figure out the perfect plan for this goal,” they’re never going to do it.

But if they say, “Can I be interviewed for a half an hour?” even a podcast, they could take you and go, “I really like Pete’s show, and here’s an episode. I like his style of asking questions. Interview me about a book that I want to write as if you’re Pete.”

And then, like, that’s the easiest, most casual way to go, “Oh, okay. Now I’m feeling a little bit.” It’s not that intimidation of like, “I got to figure this out.”

Pete Mockaitis
And then, so that gets you started. How far do you go with the plan before you do?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, I like to do what I call audition a goal. I think a lot of goals fail because people try to commit to something for a year they’ve never done for a day. That’s like marrying somebody you just met at speed dating.

So if you told me, “Hey, I have this thing I’ve been putting off that I want to do,” and it was sizable. Like, we’re not talking about, like, you got to clean out one closet. Like, we don’t need to roadmap that. It’s like one closet. Like, I don’t want you to interview yourself. Like, “You run California closets and are asking me about how I store my socks.”

But if you had a goal that was at least a month’s worth of time, I would say, “Hey, let’s do a one-month audition. Like, what if we just tried this thing for 15 minutes a day for 25 for the next 30 days?” Because I don’t want to trigger perfectionism.

But if we tried that and it was like, “Let’s just see.” And then at the end of the 30 days, you can double down and do half an hour. And at the end of that next 30 days, you can add more time, more time, more time.

I would try to ease you into it. I wouldn’t try to get you to plan an annual thing, like, right out of the gate. Or, “From start to finish, here’s how I’m going to write and publish and market my book.” Like, no way. No way. I’d try to get you to write for 15 minutes a day for 30 days in a row, and see if you even like writing, and see if you even like this exercise at all. So, yeah, that’s the next thing I would do.

Pete Mockaitis
Audition a goal. So, like, the goal is auditioning before you, the director, who will determine if it gets the role.

Jon Acuff
“You’ve made it through. You now get to be part of my summer. Like, I gave you May and, congratulations, I just picked you up for the summer. You’ve now made it for the next summer. And not only have you made it, resources will be dedicated to you. I’m going to give you time and maybe even money. Like, oh, that’s exciting.” You’ve won the audition.”

Pete Mockaitis
Do I need to have a director’s chair and beret when I’m auditioning a goal?

Jon Acuff
I don’t think a beret ever makes a situation worse. Like, maybe a funeral. Like, if you don’t own a beret and then, all of sudden, at your mom’s funeral, you show up in a beret, lot of questions, lot of questions.

Pete Mockaitis
These are the key insights, Jon, that we count on you for. Thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I hope people are taking notes right now. I hope they pulled over. Probably pulled over on that one, like, “Wait a second. We’re going into berets now, Pete.” And you probably didn’t even put that in the description, if I know you. It’s just a surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
No, not yet. And let’s hit the permission to do now.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the first two are great, but if you don’t actually do it, it ultimately doesn’t matter. So the thing that I like about doing that I think people have a hard time with is maintaining motivation. We tend to think motivation will grow as we work on a goal. That’s just not how it works. Motivation is often the first thing to leave.

So I spend a lot of time helping people make it through the middle, or what I call the montage. Like, we love a montage in a movie. We don’t like being in one in our own life. Meaning, we love to watch Rocky IV, and there’s an eight-and-a-half-minute scene where he trains against Drago.

A prize fight training camp takes eight to 12 weeks. So we saw 1% of the experience, but when we try to write a book, start a business, you know, parent teenagers, whatever this big goal is, there’s a lot of middle.

And so a lot of what I do is teach people how to build a motivation portfolio. Meaning, collect enough motivation so that when you’re discouraged, which you’re going to be, you have a long robust list, not just one thing.

If you only have one why, like that why won’t show up most of the days, and you’ll go, “Ugh, I’m not even going to do the thing.” But I’d much rather you have a whole list where you can go, “Oh, it took me till number nine.”

And here’s a silly example, because you said, it seemed like you were familiar with F3. Like, one of my motivations for doing it is, the night before I text three friends and say, “I’ll give you a ride tomorrow,” because I’ve just put myself into a corner.

And I know in the morning I’m not going to text three guys and go, “Hey, it turns out I’m a wimp. Never mind.” Like, I now have some accountability there. I now have that motivation to fulfill what I promised to those three guys.

So that’s what I try to help people when it comes to doing. I’m never, like, anybody who listens to this show or reads the kind of books I write, it’s not a question of whether they’ll do it. It’s a question of whether they’ll keep doing it. And that’s where you really have to lean in.

Pete Mockaitis
So I like that. A motivational portfolio, we’ve got multiple sources of support pulling upon you. One was some of that accountability. People are expecting you to show up and give them a ride there. You said nine. Give us a quick rundown of maybe a bundle of things that might go in a portfolio.

Jon Acuff
A couple others? Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I wrote this book, Soundtracks, and we ended up turning it into a Soundtracks card deck, so it’s 52 cards. So sometimes I’ll have these in my pocket, and one will say “Hills pay the bills.”

And it’s a reminder to me of, like, when I have to do the hard things, if I do them and if I climb the hills, other people don’t, I get to see vistas other people won’t. And that could be something like a canceled flight in Chicago in January, where I had to spend the night, like, at the worst airport next to O’Hare. Like, nobody wants that. Nobody.

But, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, hills pay the bills.” So sometimes it’s a soundtrack. Sometimes it’s a literal song where I know when I hear this type of music, I always feel this type of way. Sometimes it’s a movie clip. Sometimes it is a friend that I go, “This is my most uplifting friend. And anytime I’m stuck, if I call so-and-so, 30 seconds of conversation, I feel like I can conquer the world.”

Sometimes it’s 10 minutes of walking around the neighborhood because I need some endorphins and some sunshine. Sometimes it’s caffeine. Sometimes it’s like, yeah, an espresso would really help at two o’clock when I’m struggling.

So I think everyone should be a great note taker about themselves. I think you should be the best documentary filmmaker about your life because, then, you figure out how you work best, and then you can repeat that. And so that’s what I mean by a motivation portfolio.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this a lot. We had Dr. Ethan Kross on the show, who wrote a book, Shift, about your mood, and so this is kind of reminding me of that because he mentions music specifically as a tool. So when you say portfolio, you just have a big old list of options in terms of, “This is the thing I could remember or do to take the action.”

Jon Acuff
Well, because I know I’m not going to want to. Like, why pretend I’m always going to feel motivated to write a book? I’m not going to. Someday, the financial motivation will motivate me, I’ll go, “Oh, it’s how I pay the bills. It’s how I put my kids through college. Great.”

Some days, I won’t care about that. Some days, showing my kids an example of hard work will motivate me. Someday, it won’t. Like, sometimes I’ll be like, “They’re not even really watching. Like, I can take it easy on this,” you know?

So, yeah, collecting those and that’s, to me, part of that is just self-awareness. Like, if you have self-awareness, it’s a lot easier to accomplish your goals, because then again, you figure out, “This works. This doesn’t work. I should repeat this thing that does work. I should stop doing this thing that doesn’t work.”

Like, a simple example. Pete, if my phone is in my bedroom, I stay up later. I don’t need another test of that. I’ve checked that box. I know that. So a simple hack for me is I leave my phone downstairs when I go to bed.

Like, imagine me going, “Man, I found a sleep hack. It’s unbelievable. Here’s how to like…” It’s the simplest thing. I just realized over and over and over again, if I have my phone near me, I’m going to look at my phone, and I’m going to stay up later than I really want to.

So I found a workaround, which was leave the phone downstairs. Like, it’s not complicated. That motivates me to go to bed earlier. Like, “Eureka!”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Jon, I love that specific example. I was once, true story, in Vanderbilt’s Sleep laboratory, having all sorts of things attached to my body. And I said, “So what are the top sleep tips?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s don’t bring your phone in your bedroom, but no one wants to hear that,” as she continues strapping electrodes to me.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Simple as that, “Okay, that was that.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, jeez, that’s so funny. Were you doing it for money or to fix your own sleep? Like was this a…?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we were curious if I had sleep apnea. It turns out I had mild sleep apnea. I’ve since overcome that. That was fun.

Jon Acuff
Survivor. Survivor.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. So that’s really cool. The motivational portfolio, it’s like layers upon layers upon layers of backup systems.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I want it to be easy. I want, like, again, make tomorrow easy today. So I know, like, because nobody’s job is easy. Like, writing a book has a lot of, like, identity and emotion around it.

I’m right now in the marathon part of the book release, meaning I’ve already released the book. I sprinted to the finish line and now I’m in the marathon part, and I need to talk about it constantly and I need to promote it.

And every author loves writing a book. Most hate selling a book. But guess what? If you don’t sell it, you don’t get to write other books. And so now I’m like, “Okay, for me, in the next six months, how do I motivate myself to do 500 different types of promotion around Procrastination Proof versus I hide from it. I hope Oprah discovers it in her dentist office, whatever.”

And I was like, “No. For me to do that thing will be difficult, how do I make it easy? How do I motivate myself to stay on top of this book?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so good, if I may. Could you give me three more things that can go in a portfolio to get motivation cooking?

Jon Acuff
Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, an item you want to buy can go in a portfolio. There’s a woman I know that grew up in Indiana, kind of small town, and she always wanted to buy a Louis Vuitton purse. That was her thing, like, “When I make it, when I become an executive…”

Like, that was her symbol to the point that when she went to Paris, France with her husband, he tried to buy her one, and she said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She was like, “I don’t want you to buy this for me. I need to do this. This is something I’ve thought about.”

So sometimes it’s okay, “I want to buy this thing,” or, “I want to be able to give this person this thing.” That’s a great one. Another one can be, “By this date, I want to accomplish blank.” Everybody has had the vacation moment where you get a lot of work done right before vacation.

Because you’re going, “How do I make tomorrow easy today? I want to have a really peaceful vacation. So if I clear these things off my plate, I will.” So you get a boost of energy. You could just say, “Where are some deadlines like that that I want to say before I go to this, I’ve done these three things before I go to this. I’ve done these three things?” To me, that’s another one.

And then the third one, I’d say, is like this principle of do difficult things in beautiful places. Meaning, if there’s something you’re putting off, go do it somewhere beautiful. Like, don’t try to crank on something in your office. If you’re stuck, go to a coffee shop.

Don’t run somewhere ugly. Like, make that part of the reward, like, “Oh, I’m going to go to, you know,” I don’t know, “Pinkerton Park, because I love that park,” versus, “I’m just going to run around this treadmill.” You’re already doing a difficult thing. Why add more difficulty?

And so, again, you just get creative and curious about yourself, and you’ll start to notice. Like, last one I’ll give you, I bought a Timex watch. I don’t mean to brag, but, obviously I’ve achieved some success. I bought a Timex watch that has Snoopy on it jumping into a pile of leaves.

So on the days when I feel tempted to write a boring, serious book devoid of humor, I can wear that watch and be like, “Oh, that’s charming. That’s delightful. Like, look at Snoopy having so much fun. He’s with Linus. They’re jumping in the leaves.” Very silly trigger for me. Wouldn’t work for most people. No problem.

One year, I wanted to write a book faster, so I bought carbon fiber Nike running shoes. Bright green. Obnoxious. The most expensive shoes I’d ever owned from a running perspective. Wore them every time I wrote that book. Ridiculous? Totally. Totally ridiculous. But it was another one of those things.

And the more you study high performers like you do, the more you find they’re playing games like this all the time. They’re playing little games behind the scenes to do the things that most people don’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
So if I perceive that I have many lucrative opportunities and I just need to go to work, I should put a large pickaxe in my office because there’s a gold mine that just needs me to go to work on it.

Jon Acuff
Gold, you could do that. Yeah, or get rid of your chair and do a little cart, like one of those carts they carry the gold in. Maybe you just sit in that. Maybe you, overalls, like Yosemite Sam or something. I don’t know, we’re just spitballing, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I want to hear the one-minute version of permission to review and then how procrastination is the most well-funded fear in human history.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the one minute is, I’ll give you the soundtrack for it, “Data kills denial, which prevents disaster.” Data kills denial, which prevents disaster. All the review is telling you is what’s really going on. And we hate a review, dude. We hate it.

The first time I saw this, I was at a restaurant in New York, everybody was going to get a crazy meal. They opened the menu and they had put the calories next to the menu. And everybody’s order changed. Everybody changed their order to sad grilled chicken salads with dressing on the side, not the side of the plate, the side of the restaurant.

So all that to say, if you want to go the direction you really want to go, become friends with data, become friends with a review.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Now this well-funded fear, what’s the scoop?

Jon Acuff
Well, yeah, so Netflix doesn’t fund perfectionism, Hulu doesn’t fund inner critic, but every single one of those modern-day services funds procrastination. In 2017, the CEO of Netflix said, “Our number one competitor is sleep.”

They are actively funding procrastination, meaning they don’t want you to go to sleep. They don’t want you to get in shape. They don’t want you to write your book. They don’t want you to publish your podcast. They want to turn your time and attention into ad revenue.

And I like those services. That’s not a criticism of them. Just know the score. Like, it’s easier now to procrastinate than it ever has before because you have a pocket casino. Like, that’s a real thing. And in the same way that Dr. Vanderbilt told you, “Yeah, the trick to sleeping is to leave your phone in another room.”

If you said to me, “What’s the trick to writing a book?” I’d go, “Well, why don’t you open your screen time and take an hour back from your greediest, hungriest app, and apply that to writing.” Like, that’s not, even the busiest people, if you ask them to open their screen time will go, “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea I spent six hours on Facebook last week. I would have said, I would have guessed an hour.” Like, that’s what I mean by it’s the most well-funded.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so we have a quiz. If you go to JonAcuff.com/quiz, that’ll show you where you might be tempted to get stuck and what to do about that. So it’ll put you into one of the four categories. You’re a dreamer, you’re a perfectionist, you’re a hustler, you’re an analyst. So JonAcuff.com/quiz will be a whole lot of fun.

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

Jon Acuff
I love Jim Rohn’s quote, “Don’t wish it was easier. Wish you were better. Don’t wish you had less problems. Wish you had more skills.” Like, that’s one of those, that’s in my motivation portfolio. Like, when I go like, “It’s so hard.” Like, “No, I wish I had more skills to deal with this challenge. Am I being invited into a skill?” That’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Jon Acuff
Daniel Kahneman wrote about it in Thinking, Fast and Slow, where they had college kids make sentences out of words. And one group of college kids had words related to being old in their collection: slow, retired, bald, Florida, etc.

And when they tested how fast they walked later, the students who had read the words about being old physically acted old. They, unknowingly, acted like old people just from reading the words. My favorite study because it speaks to the power of your mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon Acuff
I always say War of Art, Stephen Pressfield. That book, for me, really kicked off my own writing journey.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite nugget, something that Jon Acuff shares that gets quoted and tweeted a lot?

Jon Acuff
I often say, “Starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers.” So starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers is one of the things. And then the other one that gets tweeted a lot is, “Be brave enough to be bad at something new.”

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

Jon Acuff
JonAcuff.com is my site. I have a podcast called All It Takes Is A Goal. And I’m big on LinkedIn now. If you listened to the whole episode and just didn’t skip to this, I’m big on LinkedIn. Hit me up.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I would find somebody 10 years ahead of you and 10 years behind. The 10 years ahead, we know. It’s a mentor. It’s a time machine. Somebody who’s been to the future you want to get to, and will tell you how to do it.

Person 10 years to 20 years behind, they grew up in the new way and can teach you the new way very quickly. I grew up in the old way. I’m 50. For me to do the new way, I have to unlearn the old way first. When I connect with a 27-year-old and they show me something about AI, like, it speeds me up.

So I would just encourage you, know somebody 10 years ahead of you, somebody 10 years behind you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jon, thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Marc, welcome!

Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to chat and let’s kick it off. I know you have studied productivity, done many experiments, worked it, iterated it. Could you share with us your most surprising discovery you’ve made about us humans and being productive so far?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Most surprising? I mean, maybe it’s just the simple fact that managing your time is so very important and yet it doesn’t get much attention from the public in general, from people at work. If you think about managing time, because time governs everything else, you can adopt a new habit and it might be really good for you. Let’s say it’s exercise or it’s breathing or it’s meditation or whatever, but if you can adopt an exercise, a practice, which is using a time better, then that’s all of the above and many thousands of other things.

So, I find it surprising that, although time management is a thing, if you ask people on the street, what are their systems for managing time, they haven’t thought about it all that much. And yet, that is the entirety of our existence, of our conscious experience of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Starting off light, our existence and conscious experience of life.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Straight into philosophy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, yeah, I think that does ring true. We had Demir Bentley on the show who wrote a book called Winning the Week. And he said that this is, indeed, a theme he has observed amongst many of his high-performing clients, is that they all agree, “Oh, yes, planning the week is one of the most important things I could possibly do,” but they don’t do it. And so, almost universally, is the observation there.

So, share with us, what are we missing? Like, why aren’t we doing it? Are we just oblivious to the true benefit? Do we think it’s kind of a nice to have? We haven’t really seen the light, experienced it firsthand? Why are we dragging our feet here?

Marc Zao-Sanders
I think, probably, the main reason is just that life gets in the way. There are so many emails in your inbox, there are tasks to do in a task management system, or communications in Slack or Teams, or whatever it is, our mobile phones now as well. So, there are just so many reasons to not carve out some time for yourself and think about how to spend it well. We’re just hugely, hugely distracted.

So, I’d say that was a big thing with it. And I think, also, with any habit, you need to persevere with it a little bit to feel the benefits. And I think people need to get past that first day or two days to see the benefits of timeboxing or, indeed, another time management technique. Yeah, I think that’s it. And it’s a shame because I think we could, if we all lived more intentional lives, we would be happier. We would be more productive. We would get on better with each other. We’d be better human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe paint a picture for us in terms of an inspiring story of somebody who did just that? They weren’t bothering with the timeboxing approach, and then they adopted it, and what happened for them?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, one such person is me. It has worked for me as an individual. And that’s the key thing, I think, for anyone listening to this. You need to think, “Does it work for you as an individual?” There are studies, there’s all sorts of science that says that this works. But the key thing, really, is not whether it works for a bunch of other people, it’s whether it works for you.

So, I mean, my personal story is that I’m 45 years old, about to be 46. And when I started my career 20 something years ago, life was hard. I started in strategy consulting and the pressure was pretty intense.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve been there.

Marc Zao-Sanders
I was suffering, frankly. I was a disorganized mess, yeah, the performance issues. I was, but more importantly, I wasn’t feeling very good about the work that I was doing. So, I established a little bit of control by setting up what I called a daily work plan. So, that was just an Excel file. I’d write in the Excel file. These are the things I really need to do today.

This is roughly how long they would take. And I’d check them off. They would sum up then to the productive hours that I’d had that day. That was good. That was much better. And it made me feel better about work, more confident with what I was doing. But it didn’t tell me, at any given moment, what I should be doing. It wasn’t linked to other meetings to my calendar.

So, then, yeah, I saw this article in Harvard Business Review. It’s called why “To-Do Lists Don’t Work.” And it immediately resonated. I changed what I was doing as an individual, overnight. And then, over the next five years, I sort of honed the technique. I made it my own. I wrote my own Harvard Business Review article that became very popular.

And that led to the book, and talking to many, many people over the years about timeboxing and how it can help not just with your, I mean, it’s really not just about your productivity. It’s really mostly about how you feel, the control that you feel as you go through the day, as you’re going through the maelstrom of a knowledge worker’s day. It can be unpleasant a lot of the time, but if you focus on one thing at a time and you’ve planned that out, it feels a lot better.

So, yeah, the case study I would give most of all, first and foremost, that I know and have lived is mine, but, obviously, I’ve heard that story, that kind of story from many, many people, from, I mean, literally, from around the world. That’s, I mean, just one other thing to say about that, that the book’s been, and I’m an unknown author.

I was an unknown author before I started this, and yet the rights were bought up in 33 languages because the story, because this idea of making your life more intentional through, basically, through your digital calendar resonated across cultures, across languages. And there’s also a bunch of case studies at the end of the book as well, stories from individuals that have made timeboxing work for them in their specific situations too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s cool. Works for you, works for them. I actually am curious to hear about the studies. And, in fact, in your Harvard Business Review article, at the very top, it says a recent survey of 100 productivity hacks, timeboxing was ranked the number one most useful. Tell us a bit about that and any other, I guess, researcher evidence saying, “This isn’t just a cool thing Marc likes doing. It’s pretty proven for lots of folks.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, that study was done a long, long time ago. I did a lot of the research for it, but this is well before I’d written the book or even had an idea about writing the book. I had no, literally, no affiliation with timeboxing. I mean, I happen to do it myself, but actually a lot of the other techniques on the list, I also happen to do.

So, the way that we conducted that study was to look at lots and lots of thought leadership pieces online and categorized them according to which time management technique, which productivity hack or tip they were, and then just see how common they were. And that gave rise to an ordering, a top 100, and, yeah, like you say, timeboxing came top.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that came about by votes or by most frequently cited amongst industries?

Marc Zao-Sanders
No, exactly, most frequently cited, so how many times they were coming up. And it’s not only that. If you look at a lot of the other entries on that list, and like you say, it’s linked to in the in the book and probably on some articles on my site, you can see that many of the other techniques on the list are very, very similar to timeboxing or, actually, they form a subset of timeboxing.

I’ll give you an example. Just saying no, so just saying no is a thing in business. It’s been encouraged a lot over the last five, ten years. By the way, I think this is more of a nuanced thing. Sometimes people should say yes more than they do. It depends on the person and the context. But sometimes they should say no.

Well, saying no is partly dependent on how busy you are and what you’ve got on. If you timebox, you’re not just saying no or just saying yes, you’re doing so on the basis of what you’ve got on your plate. It’s something that you can point to, point your boss to, or point colleagues to. So, just saying no is, it goes very, very nicely hand in hand with timeboxing, just like so many of the other items on the list.

I’ll give you just one other example as well. “Eat That Frog,” the Brian Tracy idea of, you know, do the most difficult thing at the start of the day. Well, again, it’s not like timeboxing is saying you should do the most difficult thing, but if it suits you as a person, then here’s a system where you can put the most difficult thing at the start of the day, again, just completely, consistently, and to support that system that Brian Tracy came up with or popularized.

But also, if you’re the opposite, if you’re someone who needs to slowly, slowly build momentum through the day and start with some smaller tasks, which suits certain people better than it does the Brian Tracy method, that’s also consistent with timeboxing because here’s a system where you can build up slowly with some easier, smaller tasks at the start.

So, my point is that, yeah, timeboxing is very flexible with, it was number one itself, but it’s also works, so nicely with virtually every other time management technique.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then we say there were timeboxing a lot. Can you lay it on us? What exactly are we talking about here?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I’ve got a definition, but maybe it’s better to describe it in terms of what I do at the start of the day. I’ll come back to a definition after that. So, I wake up, I get dressed, I brush my teeth. And then the very first thing that I do is spend 15 minutes thinking about my day and how I should spend my time. So, those 15 minutes are definitely the most productive of my entire day.

I couldn’t really, now, I can’t really imagine not using them like that. I don’t need more than 15 minutes. I do normally need 15 minutes because sometimes your emails have come in overnight, an idea has occurred to you overnight, and you need to take that into account along with other entries in your calendar. So, it’s a little bit of work, but just 15 minutes.

And then those 15 minutes lead you to have a day where it’s full of what you really wanted to do, what really mattered, what you intended to do. This is what I mean by intentions, giving yourself the space to become aware of what your intentions are, what’s important to you, and then having a system for making sure that they happen. So, that’s what it is, you know, that’s sort of my experience of it. I do that each and every day. I do it in the morning. Some people do it the night before.

But in terms of a definition, which, it’s probably slightly less useful, but I’ll give one anyway. So, I described in terms of what, when, one, enough. What I mean by what is deciding, giving yourself the space to think through what is most important. And then when is deciding when it should start and when it should finish, not being too ambitious, but being ambitious enough with those timings.

One means doing, is single tasking. Just do that one thing in that slot, nothing else. And then enough is doing it to a good-enough level. You’re not aiming for perfection here. Perfection doesn’t really exist for any of us. Do it so that it’s good enough that you can share with others and move things on in your workflow or in your life, whatever the context happens to be. So, yeah, that’s kind of how, that’s the lived experience of it as well as the definition.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that seems pretty simple, and yet, in your experience and that of luminaries throughout history – Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, etc., – it’s revolutionary, you say.

Marc Zao-Sanders
It’s revolutionary in that anyone who wants to achieve a lot and feel good about doing that needs to really use their time well. And I think there’s just something very fundamental about timeboxing. It is working out what’s important, setting a time to do it, not being distracted by anything else, and doing it to a good-enough level.

I mean, it’s very hard, I think, to launch an argument against that. I’m going to invite you to do that, Pete. And, actually, I wanted to ask you if you timebox.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, challenge accepted.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so go ahead. I mean, which of those elements, which of those four elements of the definition would you say, “Eh, that’s actually not that important”?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no. I suppose, I don’t think that it’s not important. I just think we can come up with lots of excuses for why, “Oh, that’s a nice view, Mark, but I don’t think that’ll quite work for me,” or, “Yeah, that sounds cool, but…” so I think there’s a lot of buts that it might be worth our time digging into to a few of those.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Of course. I mean, some people will see that and then not act on it. I mean, of course that happens. It does require a little bit of discipline, and anything that requires even a modicum of discipline can be ignored, and some people will take the path of lesser immediate term resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
“No, Marc, instead, I’m just going to get this cool app. That’s going to fix my time management problems. This fun little app instead.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, yeah, I mean, there are some apps that will do some of this for me and for a lot of people. It’s connecting with your intentions and making sure that you’re doing the things that you want to do at the right time, requires a little bit more of yourself. So, yeah, sure, you can have AI just arrange things for you, but then are you going to be happy with the order of them?

And even in the processing of you’re putting these tasks into your calendar, your brain starts to think about, you know, starts to problem-solve. So, you’re making a little bit of progress with each of them, even in the act of doing it. So, yeah, there are apps and there’s AI, and that’s fine for some people. It’s not for me. It’s not the method that I advocate.

I’m a little bit more old school. So, while I advocate having a digital calendar and making that sync with your various devices, rather than a sort of paper-based system, AI is not something that you need for timeboxing. Not in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, certainly. Well, so then I suppose, with regard to discipline, for folks who think, “Oh, that sounds cool, Marc, but I just couldn’t even do that because I’m a creative, flexible, fluid kind of a personality. I don’t really do well when I’m tied down,” what do you think of that?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay, so I hear this, obviously, sometimes, “They just wouldn’t work for me. Well, it wouldn’t work for me.” Okay, so, I mean, a few things to say. But the first one that occurs to me is like, even if you’re a creative, you’re already timeboxing to some extent because you’ve got meetings in your calendar, right? That’s unavoidable. And however creative or uncreative those meetings are, you’ve got those meetings.

And you have to have some sort of timekeeping system to make sure that you attend those meetings more or less on time. I mean, even if you’re five, 10 minutes late for most of your meetings, as some creatives might be, the meeting is there and it is important and you’re probably annoying some people by being a little bit late.

So, it’s not like this is a brand-new system that I’m suggesting you sort of foist-force into your life. We’re all creative or non-creatives, and also, we’re all creative in some respect. But all of us are using our calendar to spend time specifically, at the very least, with meetings. What I’m saying with timeboxing is let’s extend that a little bit further so that we also do it with some of the work that we do on our own so that we can achieve more and actually, with creativity, specifically, achieve more creatively.

You’re much more likely to achieve the state of flow and get to what Cal Newport and others call deep work, scale the heights of our capability if you remove all of your distractions, if you get to a period of time where you’re just working on one thing. So, I would say that it actually, I mean, genuinely, I think that it supports creativity. It doesn’t stifle it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to discipline, if folks think, “Boy, Marc, I just don’t think I have that level of discipline. That sounds really hardcore. That sounds Navy SEAL-esque to go from thing to next thing, to next thing, to next thing with perfect rigid execution. That sounds beyond my meager willpower capabilities”?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. If someone said that, if you said that, for example, I would say, I mean, first of all, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be rigid. It also doesn’t need to be productive thing to productive thing. One of the productive things might well be having a break, might be lying down, might be having a cold shower, might be taking your dog for a walk. It’s just positive, intentional activities that you know, by the end of the day and even actually during the day, are going to be really, really good for you.

The other thing I’d say to such a person or, you, potentially, Pete, is, well, like I said, you’re already doing it to some extent. And then also, well, why don’t you just try it? For tomorrow, you could put into your calendar right now, I mean, actually, if you’re listening to this, or watching this right now, anything you could do to get started is put a 15-minute time box, just an event, into your calendar for tomorrow morning at a time that suits you.

I mean, obviously, you need to be awake. You need to be awake enough to get it done. And in those 15 minutes, plan out some of the rest of your day. I will plan out a lot of the rest of my day because I’ve been doing it for 20 years now. But do it for a couple of hours or three hours or four hours.

And once you’ve tried that for a few days, and I imagine you will achieve some success and you’ll get into a snowball effect, a virtuous circle, you’ll be doing it some more. And if it really doesn’t work for you, well, then stop, but give it a try.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. So, we don’t need to start with the entirety of the day that, indeed, could feel intimidating. Understood.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t let perfection or completion be the enemy of the good here. Get something done. And I’m a big believer in 80-20 and pretty good and doing a decent job of things rather than sort of Navy SEALs perfection, anything like that. I don’t come from that background. I don’t have that in my locker. I’m just a regular guy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so let’s talk about, it sounds like the hardest part of all is we’ve got dozens, hundreds of options, things that have landed in our to-do list with varying levels of seriousness, urgency, importance. How do you begin to decide, “Ah, yes, this is, in fact, the thing that goes on today’s calendar”?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. So, first of all, what you’ve just described is exactly the reason that timeboxing is important. Most of us knowledge workers, at any given moment, could be working on 20, 30, 40, maybe 100 things. They would all be somewhat legitimate. And the existence of so many different things that we could do is stressful in itself. So, you’re doing one thing, and two or three or five or 20 of the other things occur to you. That is so stressful. And that stresses me out every single day.

So, that’s the reason that, the main reason I would say, that timeboxing is important, it kind of pushes all of those other things away and focuses you on a single thing. So, that’s why it’s important. If you have 100 items, though, and how are you going to decide, I’ve got a trick which is very concrete, very tangible, very easy.

So, let’s say you’ve got a to-do list, Pete. You’ve got 100 items on it and you don’t know where to start. Some of those things are going to be very important. Some of them less so. It’s probably accumulated over weeks, months, maybe even years. I would say grab it, put it into a spreadsheet, go down the list, and just score them very roughly on a of an approximation of both urgency and importance. Just sort of, you know, merge the two together, give them a score between zero and 10 every single one.

Now, look, even if you’ve got 100, it’s going to take a little while to do it, but it’s not going to take you more than 10 minutes. This is not a huge, huge task. So, you score them all, zero to 10, and then you sort it on the score that you’ve given it. So, most the highest numbers will go to the top. And then as soon as you’ve done that sort, you will see immediately there’s a group of tasks at the bottom that you really could just delete.

And that is hugely reassuring, gratifying. It’s such a relief to see the list look like that. And then there are tasks at the top that really will be super important because you’ve given them an eight or a nine or a 10. You might want to do some further ordering of those. And that’s also a huge relief because those big important items that you knew were lurking in your to-do list are being surfaced properly. So, they will get your attention.

So those, you know, three, four, five, 10, whatever it is, items that you really had to do are going to make their way into your calendar and get done. And that is so, I mean, it really is about control, like taking control of your life by having a system to understand what is most important, and get it done. This is a specific tactic for dealing with a long to-do list.

And then you can do that even every so often when you’ve only got 20 items, it also works. It sounds, I don’t know, maybe for some people it sounds a little bit much to put into a spreadsheet, but much better that than just leaving it there to gather dust and bother you every so often.

And, occasionally, you’re going to be getting fines because you haven’t dealt with some tax issue or responded to some letter. So, I mean, it’s literally costly, financially costly, to not address it and not address it in some kind of systemic positive, repeatable way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I love that so much. And you mentioned 80-20 and so much of what you said there, I’m vibing with a ton. And the phrase “somewhat legitimate,” I think is, oh, so perfect for the items that hang out in our to do this.

Marc Zao-Sanders
At the top that we’ve got.

Pete Mockaitis
They are somewhat legitimate and, yet, Vilfredo Pareto would say they are not the vital few of the 80-20 rule.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, find the vital few. Find the vital few and do those.

Pete Mockaitis
And it is such relief, you’re right, to see a huge list and to see many of them drop off. It’s like the fastest way to get something off of your to-do list is to decide thoughtfully, thoroughly, not to do it, “Hey, that’s off my to-do list and legitimately so.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
Exactly. Yes, it’s basically pruning. And there is no more efficient way of pruning a list than via a spreadsheet. So, the spreadsheet is not officially part of timeboxing. It is a very effective method for, yeah, for getting to the vital few, as you put it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I would like to hear a little bit about some of those questions by which we might use to determine what is calendar-worthy. And so, vital few, 80-20 type things suggest that vital few activities produce 16 times the output per unit input than trivial many items. So, there’s that. I also love the ONE Thing question. We had Jay Papasan on the show earlier.

What’s the one thing such that, by doing it, everything else will become easier or unnecessary? So, that’s a huge win in terms of a prioritizer. We had Greg McKeown talking essentialism, in terms of like raising your standard, like cleaning out your closet, not from, “Might this someday be useful?” “No, no, low standard,” to, “Does this spark joy?” Marie Kondo style, high standard.

So, any other sort of uber powerful questions that are super handy in the universe of prioritizing?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, well, the main one for me is actually the emotional response you have to a specific item. So, as you’re going through the list, you will feel stressed or you have some sort of emotional response to some, and to some you just will have the absolute opposite.

What I’m suggesting is that, where you have a stronger emotional response, in general, you’re going to want to action those. So, I think that’s a proxy for importance for what matters to you that comes from your soul, actually. You don’t really need to ask any other questions. It’s just what is your response to this particular item.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say strong emotional response, is it either positive or negative? Is a go signal for action?

Marc Zao-Sanders
No, definitely. It might well be negative. I mean, look, for example, let’s say a tax return. A tax return, for most people, is not going to be hugely positive, but that doesn’t mean that you leave that and let’s find the good stuff. No. What I’m saying is that any kind of strong response probably means that either, you know, because you really want to want to do it because you’re enthusiastic about it.

In general, we don’t need help with those sorts of tasks. So, it’s actually more the ones where you have some sort of negative response. And to just dwell on that particular example, because that’s something that a lot of people feel when it comes to that time of year, getting something like a tax return back to whoever needs to see it.

The problem with not addressing it is that you just die a thousand deaths instead. You will need to do it in the end, and maybe you incur a fee as well if you go beyond whatever the deadline is. But even if you hit the deadline, if you worry about it 17 times before you submit it, well, why have you done that? Much better to confront it, be front-footed, and get the thing done on your terms proactively.

I use the term. I use the word agency a lot with timeboxing. It’s taking back your agency. You be in control. Don’t let the world happen to you. You decide what needs to happen and when it’s going to happen and get it done.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, ooh, die a thousand deaths, or sigh a thousand “Ugh.” Like, “Ugh, maybe tomorrow.”

Marc Zao-Sanders
Or, timebox instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so we got some thoughts on how to choose what goes in on this day’s calendar. Do you have some pro tips on how do I think about how long should that thing take? How long should I work in a bout of work, rest, breaks? What are some of the pro tips to designing a day to be a masterpiece?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Okay. Well, exactly, it is like that. It’s sort of like you’re an architect, you’re designing, you’re like an alchemist of the experience that you’re going to have that day, and the ordering matters. I mean, if you think, let’s say you’ve got to write, I don’t know, a summary of a podcast, right? That’s one of your tasks. And you also want to go to the gym.

Now for some people, it will make a lot of sense to go to the gym first and then do the write-up. And for others, it will be the other way around. It really depends on how your brain works, how your mood is, what energy you have, maybe some of the logistical, the contextual elements of your day, but, really, the order really matters.

So, yeah, build in breaks. Consider that the order matters. I mean, for me, for example, when I’ve got difficult things to think about, I like to have some exercise built in to give me a chance to think about them in a diffusive way. So, I can just be a little bit more relaxed and have sort of answers come to me while I’m doing some hard or semi-hard exercise.

So, yeah, build in some breaks, build in also some slack. If you don’t have any slack and you go, like you were saying earlier, Pete, from thing to thing to thing, if anything breaks or anything takes a tiny bit longer, and you haven’t responded to it, then you can have a cascading, a negative cascading effect. So, build in some slack, build in some breaks.

I mean, to be a little bit more specific, okay, it varies from person to person, but for me, every couple of hours, I will need 10, 15 minutes, normally 15 minutes of a break. And that could be anything. Just get a drink, take the dog for a walk, have a shower, meditate, close my eyes. There are a lot of ways of having a break that aren’t just to default to the canteen or the kitchen and eat something that’s not that healthy for you.

So, with breaks, there’s a bit of an art to it as well. And think a little bit more about what’s going to refresh you and give you energy. But I would say that there’s no hard and fast rules about how much time or how many breaks you should take. It’s really, just coming back to that word intention, what works for you. Think hard about what works for you.

You can take as a guideline, you know, how I spend my day. And in the book, I’ve got some screenshots of how that is, but that won’t necessarily be that way, done that way, it won’t be for everyone. The point is to have a system, like timeboxing, which is super flexible and can accommodate different attitudes to different needs for taking breaks and having slack and what you do in those times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. And then when we’re actually doing the calendaring, do you have any pro tips in terms of 15-minute increments, or color coding, or anything that makes this go better?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Both of those, for sure. So, I mean, 15 minutes, so I have three sizes of timebox. And, again, other people can take a different view, and it is flexible to having different denominations. But my denominations are 15 minutes, 30 and 60. It’s nice and easy, there’s only three sizes so I don’t have to spend long thinking, “Is this a 48-minute task or a 17-minute task or whatever?” It’s just, like, a small, medium, large. And I know what small, medium, large are.

They also stack nicely up to an hour. There’s obviously 15s, you know, go into 60, so does 30. And then you asked about color coding. Well, I do color code my calendar, and this is to get a handle on, I mean, quite literally, get a view, a literal view of the balance of my life. So, I have five different areas of my life at the moment. So, there’s one business that I advise, another business that I advise, things that are for me to do with my soul and my wellbeing. And then there’s speculative activities as well.

So, I’ve got a few different categories of my life that I’ve deemed to be important for me right now. Okay, so if I color code the items as they go into the calendar, I can see at a glance at the end of a week, how much time I’ve spent on each of these areas. And, actually, the way that both Google and Microsoft do calendars now, they’ll toss it up for you.

So, they’re telling you, “Well, you’re spending 30% of your time on your…” as I put it, “…soul. Well, is that good or not good?” But if you have the data, then you can make a decision about adjusting it up or down. So, color coding sounds a little bit trivial, I mean, almost absurd, but there’s actually a very good reason for doing it.

I also, Pete, use emojis in my timeboxes. Why do I do that? I mean, probably not for a very good reason. It just gives me, I see timeboxing as sending your future self a message, a little bit of guidance, so that when that future self is distracted and stressed by the inevitable difficulties of a working day, you have that line back to, when you were in a calmer moment, when you were a bit wiser, when things were more still, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing that I should do.”

How’s that relevant to emojis? Well, it’s a little bit tongue in cheek. It’s a little bit, like, I don’t know, like a wink or a hug. It’s an affectionate message from my former less-stressed self to my later more-stressed self. And so, I put them in. That it definitely is an optional feature of timeboxing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And what’s cool about emojis is they can be right in the line of the text as opposed to a separate image thing, which is all weird and complicated and hard to shove into a calendar software.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, definitely. And it is for me. It’s right before the text that I put it. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also a fan of the Unicode symbol for a checkbox in the calendar. That feels nice. I just have that copy-pasted like, “Oh, and then that happened. Mission accomplished,” because that’s one of the most satisfying things about a to-do list is the checking them off. I can still have that in my calendar too.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, exactly. So, it sounds, Pete, like you timebox and you are using some of the higher arts of timeboxing, as we speak, as you live.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, higher arts. Well, Marc, tell me, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Sure. I mean, well, okay, a couple of things that occurred to me. One is just the word time itself. So, this is a not very well-known fact, but time is the most commonly used noun in the whole of the English language, but not just the English language. If you look at Spanish, if you look at German, if you look at Chinese, I think, as well, and many others.

So, it’s super, super common. And it’s not like I was saying at the top, at the start of our conversation. It is surprising that people don’t give it even more time and attention than they do. So, that is just a factor I’ll sort of park with people. The other one I want to say is there’s a, yeah, sometimes you’ve got a plan with someone, like a dinner, and then the dinner gets cancelled.

And there’s nothing nicer than that feeling when you suddenly have some time in your calendar, but it’s very easy to waste, especially with your social media and our phones and what have you. There’s a mnemonic which has really gone down. Well, actually since the book came out. This isn’t even in the book, but it’s Mr. Elf.

So, the M is for meditation, R is for reading, E for exercise, L for learning, F for friends and family. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a very, very useful list to just run through. If I’ve got a bit of time and I want to use it well, here’s a reminder of some of the things that are probably going to be important, could well be important to me. And why not do that with your time rather than Netflix or Instagram or Snap or whatever it is? So, yeah, I want to get Mr. Elf into the ears of the people that are listening and watching.

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

Marc Zao-Sanders
There’s one from Lady Gaga that I really like and speaks to, I think, what’s the most important about, one of the most important things about life and about this system.

So, the quote is, “I am my own sanctuary and can be reborn as many times as I choose throughout my life.” To me, it’s about agency and hope and truth. And while it’s nice to be quoting Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche in the book, too, it’s also nice to give Lady Gaga some extra attention, too.

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

Marc Zao-Sanders
There was a study into what’s called implementation intentions. If you just Google implementation intentions, you’ll see. What these basically said was that if you decide when you’re going to do something, what you’re going to do, and when you do it, you’re two and half times more likely to get something done. You’re something like 90% likely to get it done versus 30-something percent.

It’s been replicated more recently in studies. And, of course, that kind of encapsulates exactly what I’m trying to get at with timeboxing. And, actually, when you were asking me earlier, “Well, what about the people that are just aren’t going to do it?” Well, the studies say that you really are two and a half times more likely. So, I probably should have said that back then. It basically says that timeboxing works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marc Zao-Sanders
I mean, the book I’ve read the most frequently is Lord of the Rings because it’s just enjoyable. A book that moved me more recently was The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand. I enjoyed that very much. That felt a lot about freedom and, again, agency. So, that resonated and was enjoyable as well, and it’s quite a different style to Tolkien’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Marc Zao-Sanders
Well, I mean, in making decisions in business, or in life, actually, the two-by-two matrix is one that I default to pretty frequently. You’ve got an issue, you don’t know how you’re going to resolve it, think about two of the factors involved that are distinct, and then you look at high, low, or yes, no for each of them. You put that onto a two-by-two and, just almost immediately, almost every time, things clarify somewhat. So, yeah, the two-by-two matrix is a really useful one for me. I love the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks, a Marc-original soundbite?

Marc Zao-Sanders
So, this is about, timeboxing is mostly an in-day activity to help you make the most of that day. But the point is if you keep doing it, that adds up to a whole life of intention and purpose and meaning and what have you.

So, the quote is, “The practice of daily intentional activity will eventually yield what almost every human being wants most – a chosen cherished life.” I think that’s very nice and just touches on, like I said, meaning, something that’s sort of deep. Deep and important.

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

Marc Zao-Sanders
I’m on LinkedIn. You can just put my name in. I accept requests, generally, there. I also have a website, MarcZaoSanders.com, from which there’s a monthly newsletter, and you can email me and get in touch by just answering, that it’s a Substack.

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

Marc Zao-Sanders
Yeah, don’t just let life and your job just happen to you. Rediscover what you want to do, what your intentions are, and find a way to bring them into being, into your work, into your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Marc, thank you.

Marc Zao-Sanders
Pete, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Randy, welcome!

Randall Dean
It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited. We’re talking email. You are the Email Sanity Expert, registered trademark. So, I’d love to start by hearing a little bit in working with so many people and their email, is there anything that’s particularly surprising to you that you’ve learned about us professionals and doing email?

Randall Dean
Well, you know what’s interesting, I’ve been leading programs on this topic for 20 years now, started my company all the way back in 2004, and what I’ve learned over all this time is that not only are people spending, I think, the average that I saw in a published study was a little bit more than two hours per day, but at a lot of the conference events, conventions, places that I speak, I’m getting people answering anywhere from three to six hours a day just on their inbox.

The interesting contrarian fact and statistic that I’ve discovered, I ask people at these programs, I go, “How many of you have had prior training?” And if it’s an audience that I haven’t spoken with before, it’s less than 5%. Less than 5%, not just here in the United States, Canada, Mexico. I’ve spoken in Europe several times on this. And in all of those places almost no one has had strategic or technical training on how to be more efficient with their email on a tool that’s taking 25% to 50% or more of their workday. It’s crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what’s funny is I think we have a sense, or I have a sense, and I think I’m getting the vibe from other professionals, that we’re spending “too much time” on meetings and emails. Well, first, I just want to check that assertion for validity, because I guess it’s conceivably possible that even if you are spending six hours on email a day, if most of these messages are thoughtful works of written craftsmanship in which you are casting a vision and offering clear guidance, and wisdom, and leadership, and insight, and clarification, and coordination that that might be okay.

Like, you’re doing work. You’re doing knowledge work at a high level. You’re spending six hours on email but those six hours are well-spent in these communications. Tell, Randy, how often is that the case? Or, is, in fact, our assertion correct, that that’s too darn much?

Randall Dean
I would actually say for the vast majority of people, they’re not doing what you just described.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Randall Dean
They’re dealing with 200 emails a day, and they’re trying, in a mass flurry, to get through them as fast as they possibly can, and they’re not writing terribly high-quality and high-level communications. They’re just trying to get through the flood of information that’s coming in at them. It’s funny because I actually talk about email etiquette sometimes and I’m actually of the point, like, make the subject line sort of say what is in the email.

If there’s tasks inside the email, make sure people, right up front, know who’s got what tasks. And if you can’t get down to bullet points, it’s almost the exact opposite of what you just said in terms of crafting really nicely crafted communications. And I actually even mentioned that, if you are going to write something that’s sort of wordy and requires extra time and effort to go through it, you should probably turn that into an actual document, like a Word doc or a PDF so that you attach it to the email, so people slow down and read it more carefully.

Because one of the problems that they have is if it’s sort of a long email in terms of message length and density, a lot of people are just scanning over the top of them and not getting into them because they’ve got too many coming in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Randy, you’re bringing back a fun memory of my first kind of grown-up internship was at Eaton Corporation in Pittsburgh, and I was part of this program, and the one coordinating the program, her name was Amber. And it was funny, her email signature had “Thank you for your attention to this communication,” like in all of her emails.

And it was so funny, I don’t know if this is what she was going for, but it caused me, an insecure 19-, 20- year-old intern to say, “Oh, shucks, I didn’t actually spend much attention on your communication. I better read it again.”

Randall Dean
Yeah, and the thing is, I always tell people, “If somebody’s getting 150-200 emails a day, and you’re barraging them with a 14-paragraph soliloquy, and they miss something, is that really their fault for missing something? Maybe it’s your fault for not getting to the point, you know? So, yeah. Now that doesn’t mean you throw out all rules for appropriate grammar and etiquette.

But I also am a believer that email is best used when communications are simple, obvious, and straightforward. And the minute they start getting complex or confusing, it might be time to pick up the phone or go find the person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or, I guess, we’ll talk alternatives and tools. I personally love the Loom video, if we’re remote and asynchronous, in terms of, “Hey, these are my thoughts on this matter and some detail. So, you can see my face, hear my voice, see the document, or whatever we’re talking about at the same time.” So, okay, understood.

It sounds like it’s quite rare that email time is time brilliantly spent, and we may, even if we do need to craft a beautiful something, it might be better off in a document. And so, the Tim Cook’s up early in the morning, emailing the day’s leadership wisdom for each of his key team members, it sounds like that’s not what most of emailing is.

Randall Dean
That’s really funny because, I mean, if you’re at Tim Cook’s level and his senior leadership team’s level, then maybe what you described at the start of this conversation might work. Most of the people that are coming into my audiences are administrative professionals, mid-level to low-senior level managers and directors, and they’re just dealing with a barrage of messages, and they’re trying to figure out what they need to get done within these messages, who they need to follow up with from these messages, and how to then turn that into a work day.

And so, a big part of what I’m doing is like, “Okay, here’s how you go through this stuff to figure out what’s important, what’s urgent and what’s not.” So, I think that that’s been a big part of the struggle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I hear you. So, that’s kind of the email vibe we’re talking about here is tons of incoming things, kind of unprocessed, unsorted, that need to be gotten through. And I’m thinking we had Cal Newport, we talked about A World Without Email on the show, and he used the phrase, just haunting, “In some corporate environments, we are human network routers.”

Randall Dean
That’s a good way to put it. I like that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of, “Okay, here’s a message that’s coming to me. Okay, I can do this thing. I can forward it. No, it doesn’t belong to me, it belongs over here, forward there.” So, for many of us, it’s about processing large volumes, and having help is awesome. Shout out to my producers. I just forward all my pitches to them and they know what to do. It’s like, “Read all of these thoughtfully and tell me which ones are fantastic finalists.” And so, I don’t read 90% of the pitches in my email, and that’s awesome that they do that for me. I greatly appreciate them.

Randall Dean
And that’s a perfect delegation right there, that not enough people, I think, are doing. And so, I always tell people, “If you’re more of a senior level in your management chain and you feel like you’re spending way too much time, especially on low-level emails, that’s a mismatch because you’re getting paid to do higher-level work than low-level emails.”

So, you got to find a way to sort of fix that a little bit. And it’s probably going to require a reallocation of some of the messaging so that you’ve got somebody else helping you with screening a bit. I think that’s a really good way to put it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I am tempted to jump into tips and tactics, but, first, maybe, can you orient us to, you mentioned, okay, almost none of us get training in this. Can you give us a glimmer of hope or inspiration? What’s on the other side of this? Let’s say we do get some training from this insightful conversation with Randy or more, what’s possible? In terms of when we’ve got our email game optimized, what’s the before-after transformation look like?

Randall Dean
I think email is what you could call a necessary nuisance. It’s something you have to deal with and we’re not going to get rid of it. I don’t see anywhere on the horizon where email is going to completely go away. But when you think about what it is, the vast majority of what’s coming in are what I basically say are a whole bunch of hungry squirrels with the occasional big angry dog, right?

And so, basically, you’re trying to figure out, “Which one of these is the big angry dog that’s barking? And how do I reduce the distraction of all these hungry little squirrels?” And so, when you say “What’s on the other side?” I think having a logical triage mentality with processing your emails that requires some new habits.

But if you get into the habits, and you do it well, you will look at your emails less times per email, you might look at your inbox less times per day in total, you will be able to better identify what’s really important or urgent, and you’ll end up without such a big cluttered mess so that it’s not a distraction in and of itself.

You know, I would bet almost every program I’m into, maybe 15-20% of the audience has more than a thousand emails in their inbox that haven’t even been filed or deleted. And I mean that’s common. So, if you’re in that boat, you’ve got a lot of company. But I can also tell you, I know that when you’ve got just got pages and pages and pages of email streaming in your inbox, some marked unread, some flagged, some starred, most of them not, and you don’t know what is most important, that’s stress. I mean, I just think that’s the definition of stress, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. As you described that scene, I could actually feel my heart rate ticking up a bit. So, okay, less stress, fewer times, fewer total minutes there. Could you ballpark it for us? I mean, I’m sure it varies a lot based on roles and responsibilities and email volume. But in terms of untrained to email Jedi Master, what kind of email time savings might we realize?

Randall Dean
Well, it’s interesting. I had one of my university clients at one time, they had to sort of justify the expense of bringing me in to do the program. They did an ROI justification. And what they did was really cool. They actually asked people about a week or two after the program how much time they thought they were saving from the tips they learned in the program, and how confident they were, they were saving that much time.

And, now, the average person was basically saying they were saving more than two hours a week with a good number of them as much as four to six hours per week. Now, I know that may not sound like a lot, but if you could get a half day to three quarters of a day of additional productivity time every week, I think you’d be pretty happy with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And my mind just leaps to running the spreadsheet. So, two hours a week times 50 work weeks a year, 100 hours. What’s that annual rate for those employees? And now that time spent more valuably. So, Randall, unless your workshops cost a quarter million dollars, I’m pretty sure they got their money’s worth.

Randall Dean
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s easy, low-hanging fruit return on investment. I believe that we figured out that if you extrapolate those findings across all users in the room, that the first year ROI in and of itself was over 2,000%.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s what I like to hear.

Randall Dean
Because, like I said, it would be a different math if half the people or more already had this training, but if it’s literally 5% or less, it’s almost impossible not to see a significant productivity improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’re fired up, Randy. Lay it on us, what do we do to realize these gains?

Randall Dean
Well, when I teach my programs, I’m mostly speaking to professionals using tools like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, and one of the first things you have to do is just understand how software works. Most people don’t know what the software can actually do. And one of my first tips to anybody is, if you’re using a piece of software frequently, daily, multiple hours per day, there may be no better use of your time if you want to be more efficient to spend a little bit of time at least every week learning another new tip.

Because, by learning that extra tip or two over time, you’re just going to get so much more efficient and so much more time back just by understanding how the software works.

And the one example, really interesting thing, because most people are self-taught, I’m going to play a scenario out for you that happens super frequently for a lot of people. They get an email, they open it, they read it far enough to go, “I don’t have time for this right now,” and then they mark it unread or they flag it or they star it. Okay, now right there, let me share with you the statistic that I believe comes from that behavior right there.

The average professional email user tends to look at each and every email they receive, on average, three to seven times before they finally take a smart action with that item. And I think a big part of the reason that’s happening is because they read it, they go, “I don’t have time,” they mark it unread, they flag it, they star it. It stays in the inbox. This is where your inbox mess is coming from too. And then what happens is you’ve just guaranteed you’ve got to go back and look at it again later.

And so, you’re not doing anything. I mean, you’re really not doing anything with that input, but you are giving it time that is basically worthless time that you’re throwing away. And so, one of the things that I share with the people is a little triage method, sort of based a little bit on the work of David Allen, who wrote the book Getting Things Done. I took training from him all the way back in the early ‘90s. And one of the things that I learned from him is, if something is quick, you do it right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Two-minute rule.

Randall Dean
Yeah. If it’s quick, you do it right now, and don’t you dare keep it for later. I love this. Somebody said, “Let’s go to Ohio. OHIO, only handle it once,” right? So, that should be your philosophy when you run into something quick. And I always challenge people in my programs, “If you’re looking at an email, you figure out what you need to do, and it’s only going to take you a couple minutes, and you don’t have time to do that? Why are you looking at your email? Shouldn’t you just keep working on what’s on fire? Why are you looking at your messages if you don’t have time to handle a quick little thing?” So, keep your focus.

But then, when I talked about what’s inside the software, both Outlook, classic Outlook, new Outlook, as well as Gmail have internal capabilities to take an email and quickly convert it into a related task or calendar item.

And so, I say take a few more seconds to get to the point where you know what you need to do next and then turn that item into a task or calendar item. And then once you’ve done that, if you haven’t got it done, but you got it on your task list or calendar, get it out of your inbox. Because, I mean, you’re done for now. It’s time to either file it for later reference or delete it if you don’t need it. And if you don’t have a good place to put it, make one and put it there. Not really rocket science.

I, sometimes, am surprised I get away with this as a living because, really, it’s sort of advanced common sense, but people just don’t think it all the way through, and they’re very inconsistent with how they’re triaging these messages.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s interesting is, I think the reason you are getting away with it is because there’s some psychological things at play here.

Randall Dean

Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because whenever you go to the email, it’s like, “Ooh, here’s new interesting things. Oh, and some of it’s really important and urgent. I better handle it right away.” So, we’re almost never in the mind space like, “Okay, fire up Outlook, fire up Gmail. Hey, you know what? I wonder what all this software is capable of?” Like, we’re not in that headspace to do that.

And those functions, I guess, we’re not as accustomed to them, as well as thinking about the GTD, Getting Things Done, David Allen kind of philosophies of the inbox is merely a temporary repository by which it means, “Hey, you haven’t looked at me yet. Process me out of here in one way or another.” As opposed to, “Let me be the long-term storage facility for messaging.”

Randall Dean

Far too many people are using their inbox for three things. One is to receive and process new items. Two, is their de facto, but very dirty and highly disorganized task list. And, three, is their Uber storage for all things that haven’t left that inbox. And my strong belief, especially with my background understanding some of the GTD-type philosophies is the only one of those three that’s valid is processing new items. That’s what your inbox should be for is processing new items.

If you can deal with it quickly, you get it done. If you can’t deal with it quickly, it then becomes part of your task list or calendar because there, in your task list and calendar, once you understand those tools, you’ll be able to say, “What is the best use of my time right now? Where should I be putting my focus?” And you can’t really do that easily in a big messy cluttered inbox with 200 things marked unread and flagged. It’s just not going to work well.

And then, of course, once you’ve either got it done, got it on your task list, got it on your calendar, get it out of there. You don’t need it in there anymore.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. So, help us out, if we’re worried, like, “Okay, I read a message and I realize, hmm, this is going to take some more thought and attention, and it is not to be dealt with now. I’m not leaving it in my inbox. So, what am I doing with it? And how do I make sure I don’t forget about it and lose it if it’s not in my inbox?”

Randall Dean

Now, simultaneously, when I teach the tip about putting it especially into your task list, I also show in both programs how you can turn on reminders. And then, so what will happen is that task will pop back up on your screen at a time when it’s better for you to see it. Not the email, the task, although the email text is typically inside the task that’s been created.

And so, that way you can say, “Okay, I’ve identified what needs to be done. It’s going to come back and find me when I need to see it. I don’t need to leave it where I have it right now. I can put this thing away if I need to keep it for later, or get rid of it if I don’t need it.” And, I think, by utilizing the reminders that are available in both task and calendar, you can relieve some of that stress.

Of course, now I’m going to say this, I regularly get my inbox down to close to zero every day, which makes a lot of sense because I’m teaching people how to work their inbox. But because of that, what I’m trying to teach people is, once you get that inbox down to close to zero, that’s when you shift your focus to your task list and your calendar by habit.”

“If there’s nothing on my calendar right now, no meetings or blocked time for anything, then I work my task list until it’s time to go back and check my email again, or go to my next meeting.” And so, you just sort of get into this habit of where you’re surfing across those three tools throughout the day, balancing your needs to get your critical focused work done with your needs to periodically get back to people.

And I think if you can get yourself into that habit, that flow, you can both reduce the distraction of your email, reduce the time spent on your email, and potentially increase the time you’re spending on your more important stuff, which is the goal of all this anyway.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, let’s say we’ve scheduled a time, we’re going to spend 30 minutes or so processing this email, and just rocking through it. How do you recommend we execute this step by step? You mentioned triage.

Randall Dean

Yeah. Well, like I said, I think if you’re going to open an email, you look at it once. If you look at it, what do I need to do with it? If it’s quick, deal with it now. OHIO, only handle it once. If it’s not quick, it goes on to your task list or calendar, and then you either file it for later reference or you delete it. And if you don’t have a good place to file it, make one and put it there.

And I will say this, nobody’s perfect at this. I’m not perfect at this. But the closer I get to following that triage mentality when it comes to processing new inputs, especially at the start of the day, but maybe a few more times throughout the day, the more efficient I feel myself getting at dealing with this, once again, necessary nuisance, and keeping the squirrels under control.

So, that’s sort of the goal is, “I want to keep these squirrels from taking over. I want to be in control of this input stream.” And the way to be in control of that is by having a good consistent strategy, habit, routine on how you deal with them and try to stick as close to it as you possibly can.

How much time would you save over a year if you went from looking at the typical email three to seven times, down to once maybe twice max? How much time would that give you in a year?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds like perhaps 100 plus hours.

Randall Dean

I would think so.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so you mentioned, learn the software. And I remember there was a day, and I was. I was just goofing around in Gmail, and I think in the settings, I saw enable shortcut keys.

Randall Dean

Yeah, yeah, I show that in my Gmail sessions. I actually go in the settings and I click on the link that says keyboard shortcuts. And, I mean, like that’s a classic example. It’s right there in your settings. You click on it, it opens up. It says shortcuts for computer, for Android, for iPad, right? And I’m like, “My gosh.” And then it’s got like 14 categories of ways you can use the shortcuts; each one is its own drop menu with a whole list of potential shortcuts.

And I tell people, I go in there and I show it, and I say, “Now look at this. This is a classic example. Print that. Print it onto a sheet of paper, set it right next to your computer, highlight two, three, four of these things that you want to get really good at, and then practice them for the next week or so. And then once you feel like you got those ones down, cross those out, highlight two, three, four more.

Once you get those done, then go back to the next drop panel and print that one and do the same thing. And if you just did that, picked up two, three of these keyboard shortcuts a week over the next year, you’d be like a maestro. I mean, you would be fantastic and so much more efficient at just doing the normal little stuff on your computer because now you don’t have to move your mouse to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. When I made the discovery, I was astonished at so many levels. One, I thought, “How is it that these have been here the whole time and I was not aware?” Two, “Why were these not just automatically turned on as the default setting?” because I guess it was not at the time. Maybe it still is not. And, three, “How come none of my friends, who know I love productivity, ever felt the need to share this with me,” probably because they assumed I already knew it, and it would be insulting to bring it up to me.

Randall Dean

I’m going to give you a different assumption.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Randall Dean

They don’t know about them either, because nobody has the time to go take a look. That’s why I said, especially if you’re using Gmail, just in the last week, I saw two things that have changed. They’re constantly working on things behind the scenes. One of them was really minor. They moved it from the little three dots at the top of the screen to the little three dots over to the side of the screen.

And so, I was doing a live program, and I go where it’s always been, and I’m like, “Uh-oh, it’s not there anymore.” And then, just out of nature, I went over to the one, “Oh, there it is. They moved it.” And they’re doing that kind of stuff constantly. And so, I think when you’re using a tool like Gmail, as well as maybe the new and Web Outlook because those are sort of Cloud-based, real-time being updated type tools, you want to go in and look into your toolkit quite frequently because there’s new stuff showing up all the time.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s telling. And you’re right, and doesn’t take a lot of shortcut knowledge. The ones I use all the time is J for next message and E for archive message.  And you can do a lot of damage if you just say, that’s how I like to triage, I go, “What are the emails I can archive without even really reading? Like, I can just know these can disappear in under three seconds.”

And I go J-E, J-E, J-J-E, E, J-J-J. And it’s just like, boom, flying through it. And it does feel like you’re a maestro. It’s cool. Can you share with us, what are some other software discoveries that are eye-opening and game-changing for people?

Randall Dean

Well, I think one of the biggest ones that most people don’t realize, both Outlook and Gmail, you can actually utilize the Signatures tool as an automated response template manager. So, basically, like let’s say there are certain messages you’re sending all the time, and the same question keeps coming up over and over again. You go into your Sent folder to find the last time you sent it so you can forward it again until the next time you need to send it again.

And every time you’re doing that, you’re spending, I don’t know, a minute, two, three looking for this thing in your sent folder. You could just copy and paste the text of that message. Go into your Signatures tool in both Outlook and Gmail, create a new signature, give it a name, paste that text into the copy field with your signature at the bottom and hit OK. And now from this point forward, that message reply is push button.

So, as soon as somebody sends you the message, you just copy their email address, you go up to your signature, you pop that into the message, put their name in the Send field, personalize the “Hi, Joe” and then, boom, in like five seconds, you’re sending that message. Not two minutes. Five seconds. And so, that’s like a great example of a way that once you learn the way the software works and what it can do. I always tell people get the word signatures out of your head, replace it with automated email sender, and use that three to five times a day, that you just got half an hour right there.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, boy, there is so much we could cover. So, Randy, I’ll just leave it to you to curate. Could you give us maybe the top three transformational tips or practices in terms of this takes very few minutes but it will yield you very many hours?

Randall Dean

One of the things, and this is a little bit of a technical tip, so I’ll describe it, but it always gets the oohs and aahs when I’m doing my program. Did you know that you can just highlight a piece of text in Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs? You can highlight it, release the click, then pick it up and move it to a different place.

And here’s the thing, it’s like almost like a shortcut to copy and paste, cut and paste. And the thing is that it works on all of these tools – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs, Google Slides, even on a lot of web forms it works. And if you can get really good at this, it’s like this quick little thing that you can do to allow you to take a piece of information that’s in the wrong place in your document or file, and quickly move it to the right place in your document or file.

And little tips like that, I think, can, you know, I will say, you know, when I show that to people and they’re all going like, “I didn’t know that I could do that.” I go, “Ah, I just gave you three days this year. There’s your three days.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I guess we’re saving the Command X and the Command V steps in doing that. Okay.

Randall Dean

And, I mean, it’s literally going to save you a second or two every time, but that second or two, multiplied by 40,000 times a year, it’s going to add up. The other one that I love is that a lot of people don’t realize this. When you’re creating folders, that you can use a special character, like an exclamation point, or even a number, and that will allow your folders to supersede alphabetization. So, what you can do is identify the folders you use the most or that are most important, and move them to the top of your folders list.

And that’s another one that is just like a no-brainer, super time saver, because now, instead of having to go all the way through the alphabet, you’re truncating that, and you can get to the folders you use most frequently right there at the top of your list. And that works not just in your email. It works in both Outlook and Gmail, but it also works in tools like OneDrive and Google Drive with your folders for your documents and files. You can actually move up your most used folders to the top and save a ton of time there, too.

Pete Mockaitis

Nifty. Okay. What else have you got?

Randall Dean

The other one that I really love is to get into the settings, you might need to go into rules in Outlook. You can also do this in New Outlook. You might have to go into Settings, Mail, Notifications. So, they’ve sort of moved it just a little bit. And in Gmail, you might have to go in and set up a filter to do this to make it all work.

But the basic tip is this, identify who your most important senders are. You know how I talked about the big angry dog? You want to identify, “Who sends me emails that are my big angry dogs?” Because what you can do in these tools is you can then go in and tell Outlook and Gmail, “These are my most important people. So, when they send me a message, I would like a pop-up or I would like a unique sound.”

And that means that you don’t necessarily have to get distracted by every squirrel, but when it’s one of those most important people, you certainly can. You can be, “Okay, boom! You know what? I’ll make a different sound, ‘Dun-da-dun-dun’ instead of ‘Doo-doo-doo-doon,’” you’ve been here for years and years, you’ll hear the “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” “Oh, I got to stop for a second, I got to see what this one is.”

And so, that way you don’t feel like you have to look at everything coming in right now because you know that the really important things are going to probably jump up and get you, which means that actually, you might feel a little bit more comfortable keeping your focus on things, knowing that it’s going to tell you when the big angry dogs bark.

And I’ll even add one little micro thing about this. That same capability of setting up those rules can also allow you to set rules to auto-delete things that you don’t want to see at all. So, not only can it help you know when your most important people are trying to get a hold of you. It can also get rid of a bunch of the junk and spam automatically so it’s not even taking two seconds of your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Randall Dean

So, it’s both sides. It helps on both sides of this. One last thing I’ll say is Outlook, specifically, will even allow you to set a priority level. So, like, I want to know when I get an email from my boss that is marked important. See, and it will only make the special sound when it’s from my boss marked important.

In that way if you’ve got an enlightened boss, who’s also taken my program, they’re going to learn that they should only mark emails important when they want faster action. Everything else can just be processed in normal strategy. And I always make the joke, “If every email you send is marked urgent or important, none of your emails are truly urgent or important.”

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Well, tell me, Randy, any final things you want to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Randall Dean

Once you get this efficiency regained, then you can actually take advantage of some of the other tools in in the suite – calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, maybe tools like OneNote or Google Keep, Teams, Drive, Planner – to get significantly more prioritized and strategic with that extra time you’ve now created.

And if you can get to where, you know, you get that email under control, it’s not taking quite as much of your day, you’re getting some of these efficiencies in time, then maybe you can actually step your game up to be a little bit more prioritized, more strategic, more effective, because now you’ve got this new necessary nuisance under control a bit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Randall Dean

Well, it’s funny. I put it in my book. The quote is from Gandhi. It’s, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” But I then put right under it, “Be the change you wish to see in your inbox.” 

Pete Mockaitis

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

Randall Dean

It’s more than 20 years old now, it was by the group called Basics. And they actually did a study where they got permission to go into a whole bunch of different organizations, have their researchers stand around just waiting and watching for people getting unexpectedly interrupted, and they tracked what happened.

And they found an interesting thing, that people that get unexpectedly interrupted in the workplace, after that interruption has been handled, they answered the question, they had the conversation, they get off the phone call. The interruption is now over. If they’re not ready for that interruption when it first occurred, they will then spend an additional four to 15 minutes each and every time before they get back to what they were working on, because they lost their place and they forgot what they were doing.

And so, the little micro tip that I share is, if somebody interrupts you, you can just go, “One second, please,” grab a sticky note and write down exactly what it is you need to do next on whatever you’re working on, put that right on your computer screen. And the goal of that is so that you’re basically leaving yourself bookmarks throughout the day, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I was doing.”

So, the interruptions can still happen, and I even say, I think it will help your communication quality because if you don’t do that, what are you very often doing the whole time you’re talking to that person?

Pete Mockaitis

To remember you’re still doing the thing, yeah.

Randall Dean

Trying to remember where you’re at, which means what are you not doing, listening? And that is where mistakes and errors of omission creep in, too. So, I think that’s just a classic little study that can then morph into it. And I always conflate that, you know, four to fifteen minutes per, and then I will ask my audience, I’ll go, “What do you think, 10 to 25 a day, 10 to 25 unexpected phone calls, stop-bys, interruptions, text messages?” And people give me the head nod.

I go, “If I’m right on this, that means you’re losing 45 minutes to as much as two hours a day just because you’re getting distracted that many times per day. And if you can get it down to where you have a strategy for that, that could create another hour or two, daily.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. And a favorite book?

Randall Dean

It’s called Clutter’s Last Stand by Don Aslett.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Randall Dean

Don’t start your day in your inbox. Start your day in your calendar for a few minutes. Not just looking at today, but looking forward to see if there’s anything coming you need to get ready for. Are there any blocks of time that you could block for more strategic use on your key projects or activities? And then build a short, focused task list for today that matches your key projects and responsibilities, but also your available time.

If you’re doing that right, that should only take you three to five minutes at the start of the day. But you want to do that before you even dare open your inbox. Because if you open your inbox first, it’s basically like going over the door of the office, opening the door, and saying, “Come on in, squirrels! Take over,” right?

So, I want you to get into your time, your projects, and your tasks for a few minutes before opening your email so that you put that email into perspective. And then if the email fully takes over, it probably should. It probably is the most important thing. But if you’re not looking at your calendar and your projects and tasks first, how do you know? You’re just guessing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Randall Dean

I would just say go out and check out my website, RandallDean.com, pretty easy. That’s Randall, R-A-N-D-A-L-L. And if you go out to RandallDean.com, I’m also on LinkedIn. I would say search “Randy Dean” to find me. And I have a popular and growing YouTube channel too, and I think you could just type in Randy Dean, email, and it’ll probably, something of mine’s going to pop up right near the top of the list, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Randall Dean

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Pick two, three, four pieces of low-hanging fruit, do those first, baby steps. You don’t have to become an expert overnight, but find those really good nuggets wherever you find them and try to integrate those right away, and then build your system from there.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Randy, this is fun. Thank you.

Randall Dean

Yeah, I had a good time.