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1024: Crafting your Own Ideal Time Management System with Anna Dearmon Kornick

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Anna Dearmon Kornick shares essential tools and tricks for managing your time and energy well.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most forget when planning out their day
  2. How to keep little tasks from distracting you 
  3. How to arrange your week to maximize energy 

About Anna 

Anna Dearmon Kornick is a highly sought after time management coach and keynote speaker, top 1% globally ranked podcast host of It’s About Time, and founder of the It’s About Time Academy. A true Louisiana firecracker who has become known for making time management fun, Anna helps busy professionals and business owners struggling with overwhelm manage their time using her personality-driven HEART Method.

Building on more than a decade of experience in the fast-moving, high-stakes world of political and crisis communications, it’s no surprise that Anna thrives on creating order out of chaos. Early in her career, she wrangled media for a Lt. Governor and managed the hectic schedule of a U.S. Congressman. Her rapid response background and relentless approach to problem-solving position her as the go-to expert for purpose-driven time management for busy professionals.

Resources Mentioned

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Anna Dearmon Kornick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anna, welcome!

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Hey, Pete, how you doing?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m lovely. How are you doing?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I’m doing great. Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear some of your time management wisdom. You have had some cool experiences from wrangling some hectic schedules in your professional world, so, I’d love to hear any really surprising insights about time management that you know and we don’t, but we should know?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, I’ll tell you an insight that I learned very early in my, I guess you could call it time management career. My first job straight out of college was as a scheduler to a United States Congressman.

And my very first week on the job, I was so excited to dive in and create the most perfect schedule anyone had ever seen. And on day one, mid-morning on Monday, our chief of staff Clayton walks up to me, and he says, “Anna, we have a problem.” And my heart absolutely sank, I had no idea what I could have done wrong. And he points out that I’d forgotten something very important, and it’s something that a lot of us actually tend to forget.

And he shared with me that the boss was not a robot, and that he needed bathroom breaks built into his schedule. And I was absolutely mortified. And it was such an important reminder very early in my career that we are all human, and that taking breaks is just as important as making sure that there’s time allotted to get things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, we are all human, and time needs to be allotted. As we’re having this conversation, this is the day that, well, President Jimmy Carter’s funeral is occurring in the Washington Cathedral. And I caught some of the news showing that live broadcast. And it was sort of a unique moment watching all these presidents.

Just sitting and waiting. Just like the rest of us, like there are times, it was like, “No, a funeral is about to start. We are sitting and we are waiting for things to occur because even though we are super powerful, wealthy, important, that’s just kind of a reality. Like, they, too, need bathroom breaks and need to eat and sleep and do all the things, though that’s not put on the news stations.” So I think that’s a great point right there, is that whether or not you’ve scheduled it, these things must happen.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re in a highly scheduled environment, it sounds like that was your duty to literally put a line item in the calendar, which says, “Restroom.” Or, how is that operationally executed, if I may ask, Anna?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You know, that’s a great question. It really looked like making sure that there was 15 minutes of buffer. Between every two meetings, there needed to be 15 minutes of buffer just in case, so often, when we think about time management, we tend to think about getting as much accomplished as possible and squeezing in as many things as possible into our day. But if that is the only lens through which we look at time management, we’re setting ourselves up for failure because the perfect day, maybe on paper, where you maximize every single minute of your day, it just doesn’t work in real life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, I’m so fascinated by the notion of scheduling every minute of another person’s life and what that experience is like for you when you’re fresh into your first kind of professional role there.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I know it’s a crazy concept to think about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so I guess help me out, literally, in that calendar, you’re having sleeping, waking up, and showering. Like, you have this written in there for every piece?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yes, that was all completely time blocked. So, I know your audience is no stranger to time blocking. It’s creating a block in your calendar that represents how you’ll spend that time, and we essentially knew that in order. So, as a congressman, as anyone in a high-powered, high-responsibility position, you have to divide your time in a lot of different ways. 

And so, without having a minute-by-minute itinerary for the day, it’s nearly impossible to divide your time between all of these different pieces that have to be tended to.

And, of course, it took a really important upfront conversation of, “What do you want your day to look like? What type of breaks do you need?”

But it really had to look at, “Okay, so you want to work out, in the mornings. How long do you need to work out? What does that transition time look like from the gym back to the office? How much time do I need to block out?” I got really acquainted with using Google Maps and traffic projections in order to understand transition time from point A to point B because that was so key in making sure that buffer time was included.

Really, every single thing had to be thought of and accounted for to ensure that the day went smoothly and that we were able to have him show up everywhere that he needed to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I find intriguing about this notion is, I guess maybe I’m just sort of like a creative, free thinking, I like to get into my flow. Like, that’s my favorite is like, “Oh, there’s nothing this afternoon. Let’s just dream up some things.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, you should not be a congressman then. I would not recommend that path for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I think for several reasons, but I guess what’s funny though is if you are proactively taking into account every minute and the travel time, then it doesn’t necessarily follow that having a schedule that looks visually jam packed actually feels emotionally stressed, rushed, hurried, exhausting. It’s like, “What’s on my calendar? Oh, 45 minutes for strolling to the gym, exercising, and strolling back. All right then, I’ll just enjoy doing that now. Cool.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, I mean, what’s so interesting is that. A lot of my work as a time management coach now incorporates your personality and the way that you think, the way you make decisions, the way you approach structure, closure, open-endedness, all of those things, it deeply impacts the way that you spend your time and manage your time.

And for many people, a minute-by-minute planned-out schedule feels freeing because everything has been accounted for, and they’re not having to make minute-by-minute decisions as their day goes on because everything’s been planned. All they have to do is adapt as they need to. But for other people, having a minute-by-minute planned-out schedule is just an opportunity to rebel and do the opposite of what is on the schedule.

Like, “No, nobody is going to tell me what to do, not even me and my calendar.” And so, it’s really important to understand. I mean, you mentioned, “Hey, if I’m a creative type, I want to have time to think.” Having that minute-by-minute schedule probably wouldn’t be the best route for you to take. I would recommend something else for you. But if you have that type of personality where the structure feels like freedom, then time-blocking the heck out of your day or your week is going to feel right for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. Well, I’d love it you could perhaps share with us a cool story of someone who saw a transformation with regard to their relationship to time management, where they were, what they did, and where they landed.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, it really makes me think back to a client that I worked with a few years ago. I’m going to call her Amanda. And when Amanda and I started working together, she was completely overwhelmed to the point where she felt hopeless. She was working in a job that honestly had her working 24/7. She was never putting her laptop away. She was missing out on spending time with her family and friends. She felt like life was completely passing her by and that she was completely just drowning in work, and she didn’t know what to do about it.

She reached out, and she said, “I feel like this is my last hope. Let’s work together, let’s figure this out.” And so, working with Amanda, we started, step by step, sorting out what it is she actually wanted her life to look like. And the thing is that, for so long, she had just been kind of swept up in this wave of everyone else’s expectations, of what her parents wanted for her, of what she thought that she was supposed to be doing.

And she realized that she wasn’t really doing anything that she truly wanted to do. And so, for the first time in her life, she actually started to create a vision for her life and what she wanted. And she started getting really clear about what she wanted for her future. And a lot of times you might think, “Wait, what does this even have to do with time management?” But without a vision for your future, you have no direction, you have no decision points about how to spend your time.

And so, I encouraged Amanda to write a letter to herself from a future version of herself. So, we worked together in 2020, and she wrote a letter to herself from 2025 Amanda. And in this letter, she poured into all of the things that she was currently doing, that she owned a home, that she was in a job that she loved, that she worked in an office with exposed brick and huge windows, that she had time to spend with her family and friends, and that, more than anything, she was happy and proud of herself.

Now, staying in touch with Amanda over the last five years, because it’s 2025 now, I’ve had the opportunity to watch her set boundaries in how much time she spends working. I’ve had the opportunity to watch her take care of herself by leaving work in order to actually go to the gym and work out. I’ve watched her invest in her health. I’ve even seen her, she called me the day that she bought a new car, the car that she had always wanted.

And it was such a huge step for her because she was finally doing something for herself that she wanted. And she reached out to me a couple months ago, and she said, “I’m about to step into 2025 Amanda, and almost every single thing that I wrote in my letter five years ago has come true. And it’s come true because of the vision that I created and the way that I shaped my time to match that vision.”

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. All right. Well, I think we’d all love a little more of that going on in our lives. That’s delightful. So, tell us, I think we’ve all heard some tips or tricks, some listicles, maybe we’ve got an app or some tools that we dig, can you share with us perhaps, fundamentally.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, a lot of times when we want to make a change to the way that we’re spending our time, we want to go straight to our calendars or our to-do lists and start rearranging things. We want to download an app or try a habit tracker. But the thing is that, whenever you go straight to trying to rearrange things or add a new hack or an app, you’re starting in the wrong place. The biggest mistake that most of us make when it comes to improving our time management is that we skip the most important first step.

And it’s exactly what I shared about Amanda. It’s creating that vision for your future. And the thing is that, when you have that vision, you have a direction to move in. You know where you’re going because every single decision you make about how you spend your time either gets you closer to or further away from that vision. But let’s say you have that vision, you know what it is that you want, then what? How do you actually make that happen?

So, that’s where I like to share basically my time management Swiss army knife. I really think that there are three core tools that really serve as the foundation for time management once you have that vision in place. And that’s time blocking, task batching, and theme days. Time blocking, task batching and theme days. When you are able to pull one of these tools from that time management Swiss army knife, you’re able to do a couple things.

So, there are two productivity pitfalls that all of us are constantly fighting, whether we realize it or not. One of those is Parkinson’s Law. So, Parkinson’s law tells us that work expands to fill the time available. And you might be like, “No, Anna, I would stop working at some point. Work’s not going to expand all over the place.” But the thing is that it does.

When we don’t have a clear understanding of what done or complete or enough or success looks like, there’s always something else that we can tweak or adjust or edit in order to get ever so much closer to impossible to reach perfection. And so, we just kind of keep going without a limit. But when you use time blocking, you’re able to beat Parkinson’s law because a time block gives you a set start time and a set end time. And it helps you contain that work within a specific timeframe.

Anybody who has ever said, “I am so good at working under pressure. You give me a last-minute deadline and I can crank it out.” That’s Parkinson’s law making that happen. Because when you have that set deadline, you find a way to make it work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, when it comes to the time blocking, I totally hear you that the work will expand to fill the time allotted for it. Although, I don’t think that the reverse quite works, in the sense of, if I say, “I’m going to accomplish this thing in 12 minutes,” but, like, it’s actually impossible. How do you think about setting an appropriate amount of time for a thing?

Because I’ve heard studies show that we humans are not the best at estimating how long something actually takes. But at the same time, I see there is value in having a number there that keeps us from spinning our wheels and going to unnecessary layers of iteration that are really not that helpful. So, I think you can assign too much time, you can assign too little time, and we’re not that good at it. How do you go about blocking an appropriate amount of time?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Okay, I love that because you actually stepped right into the next productivity pitfall, which is the planning fallacy. So, that thing, that study show, it has a name. The planning fallacy states that humans are terrible at estimating how much time things take. And when you know that that exists, then you can do something about it, right? Because it’s kind of like the first step is acknowledging that there’s a problem. Our first step to getting better at estimating how long things take is acknowledging that we’re all naturally pretty terrible at it.

So, I really encourage my clients to kind of create their own formula. My rule of thumb is if you think something is going to take an hour, add an additional 30 minutes. If you think something is going to take 12 minutes, give yourself an additional 12 to 30 minutes, just in case. Because most of the time we are going to underestimate. So, anytime you think, “Hey, I think it’s to take me about this long,” add more time. You’re probably going to need it.

And if you want to take it even a step further, so let’s say that it’s something that you do on a regular basis, maybe it’s submitting invoices, or doing some type of report, or just something that you’re doing on a regular basis, time yourself. Next time you do it, time yourself. See how long it takes because that’s going to give you a much better example to refer to in the future is when you have some actual data to work with.

Me, personally, I am not a huge fan of time tracking for the sake of time tracking. But sometimes one of the most valuable exercises that we can do is a time study where you spend time tracking how you are spending your time for the course of a week in 15-minute increments because it is so telling and it exposes all of those places where we waste time, that we don’t even realize that we’re doing things that we don’t even realize that we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that is handy, yes. And I also like the notion of when you put more time than you estimate is necessary, I think that creates just really nice psychological feedback things going on because sometimes I get frustrated with like, “Ugh, this thing is taking way longer than it ‘should.’” And that makes it more aggravating as opposed to, “Oh, wow, I allocated an hour and a half for this thing. And by good fortune, it only took 52 minutes.” Well, then, one, I feel like a winner, like, yay me. And, two, it feels like there’s a little bit of a present, like, “Ah, well, here we have this extra time right here.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Bonus time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, “What shall I do with this surplus?”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I love that. I love that. You know, that actually reminds me of something that I shared with a client yesterday called the shiny things list. So, we can have the most pristine organized environment to work in, we can turn off all of our notifications, put our phone in airplane mode, but we still have ourselves and we can sometimes be the most distracting thing in the room. We’ll start working on something, like you said, “I gave myself an hour and a half to work on this and it only took 52 minutes.”

And in that 52 minutes, we remember that we need to order toilet paper and have it shipped, and that we need to get a birthday card for our mom, and that we need to follow up with Tony about the Jones report. And so, what we tend to do naturally is we stop what we’re working on to order the toilet paper to have it shipped from Amazon, and we stop what we’re working on to order a birthday card, or to make a note, or to stop what we’re doing and we check in with Tony about that report.

And we end up ping-ponging around to all of these different things, which ends up slowing us down, causing us to make more mistakes on the thing that we’re trying to focus on and just making it take a lot longer. And so, what I encourage people to do is to have a notepad right next to your desk so that, as you are working, let’s say that you have an hour and a half to get something done, so at the top of our notepad, we’re going to write down, “One o’clock to 2:30 because, boom, that’s the time that I’m committing to work.”

And then below that, we’re going to make a list of the three things we’re going to accomplish in that timeframe. Now, you might only set out to do one thing, but what if you finish it in 52 minutes? Then you have this bonus time. And what do most of us do with bonus time, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Social media. News.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You got it. We just kind of flop into default mode when we could transition that focus time into something else useful. So, I love to recommend, “Okay, what are the one, two or three things that you’re going to accomplish during that focus time so that you’re able to go straight into the next thing without having that waffly decision mode?” And then once you have those three things decided, you draw a line underneath it, that’s your line in the sand, and then you write, “Shiny things.” The more scribbly you can write shiny things, the better because it really emphasizes, like, the frivolity of them. And then you get to work.

And every time something pops into your head, instead of acting on it immediately, you write it on your shiny things list. You contain your shiny things instead of chasing them. And so, after you finish this work block, and you have this list of shiny things, now you have some decisions to make. You can decide, “Do I need to do these now? Do I want to defer them to later? Do I want to delegate them to someone or delete them altogether?” But the point is that you didn’t go off on a million different rabbit holes. You stayed focused because you didn’t chase your shiny things.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it’s a good feeling, too, because there’s a little bit, again, psychologically, when I have the idea, it’s like, “Ooh, there’s a thing that I should do,” and it comes into mind, we do tend to do them right away, because there’s a little bit of a tension. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to forget. This is in my mind, and that’s the way to relieve that pressure of it being in my mind.” But you could also just write it down, and then it’s like, “Oh, and here they are all captured here. How handy.” Super. Okay, so we got time blocking, task blocking. And then theme days?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Theme days, yes. So, I love theme days, and theme days are especially a good fit for people who want flexible structure. So, if you’re the kind of person who, having a minute-by-minute time blocked schedule, makes you feel itchy, then a theme day is probably going to be the best bet for you. So, it’s basically choosing a different theme for each day of your week.

So, let’s say you’re in a marketing role. And maybe Mondays, you want to make that social media Mondays. And that’s the day that you focus on creating social media content. It doesn’t matter if you write captions in the morning or in the afternoon, as long as it gets done on social media Monday. Maybe on Tuesdays, you call it, “Tell them all about it Tuesdays.” And that’s the day that you put together PR pitches and do media outreach and write your newsletter. Again, it doesn’t matter when it happens during the day, as long as it happens.

Go a step further. Wednesday could be website Wednesday. You can come up with a different theme for each day of the week. And what this does is that it creates some mental consistency for you. It puts you in a consistent mindset all throughout the day so that, even though you’re working on a collection of tasks that are related, you’re not jumping from one moment writing a social media post, to then sending an invoice, to then updating a website. Those are all three very different mental processes and ways of thinking.

And so, it enables you to really streamline your energy, your creativity, and your focus and to basically shape your day around each of these themes. It’s also really cool because it helps you create consistency and set expectations for yourself about when you can accomplish certain things. And it helps you set expectations with your team if you’re collaborating with others. Because if your team knows that, “Hey, every Wednesday is Anna’s website Wednesday,” they know that they’ve got to get any updates to you by Tuesday afternoon so that you can incorporate them on Wednesday, you know?

And so, theme days can be a really great way to introduce some flexible structure that helps you be more efficient with your time, your creativity, and, plus, it’s just fun to use alliteration and come up with fun names for theme days. I mean, to me, that’s like half the fun.

Pete Mockaitis
I was asking if alliteration was required.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I mean, personally, I think it should be, but you do whatever you want.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s nifty about themes is the organizing principle of the theme can be any number of things. Like, when you say website Wednesday, it’s sort of like, “Okay, on website Wednesday, there are a number of,” let’s say, “environmental context things in play.”

Like, “Okay, I’m going to be in an office at a computer with some quiet. I’m going to have a few pages or tools open and at my disposal.” And so, in so doing, there’s time savings that just shows up because I’m not logging into a new thing, and they got the two-factor authentication, you know, blah blah blah blah. It’s like, “I’m doing that once, and then, all right, and then I’m in the thing, and then away we go. Cool.” And, likewise, you are well equipped. It’s like you’ve got all your stuff for doing the thing at hand.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Your mise en place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and you’re in the mental groove, and you have like a bit of expectation and understanding of, like, in a way, you’re almost warmed up. So, I see a lot of value in the themes. And in my experience, sometimes you can even just have like a theme half day in terms of, “Well, hey, before lunch is this theme, and after lunch is that theme.”

Anna Dearmon Kornick
One hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
And in the startup communities, they talk a lot about the maker schedule versus the manager schedule, which I think is fantastic because those feel wildly different. Like, “I’m creating some stuff thinking deeply and I’m not available to anyone, go away,” versus, “I am super responsive. I am your most accessible, friendly, quick manager and collaborator you could dream of because I’ve got the slack. I’ve got the email. I got all the text, window. I got all the things to message and communicate up a storm quickly,” and they do feel totally different.

So, I would love some of your pro tips from your clients in terms of like themes, categories, contexts, mind states. What are some buckets that you find pretty handy for holding a variety of things together in a theme?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, I love this. I love this question so much. And if you have not had a chance to read the book, Mind Management Over Time Management, I think is the name of it. It’s by Dan Kadavy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, David Kadavy. That sounds like David Kadavy.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
David, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he’s been on the show a couple times. He’s a buddy.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, I thought so. I loved that book so much, and I’ve actually taken a lot of what he shared and incorporated that into some of the way that I teach theme days because it’s just so good. But when we think about different ways to approach theme days, we have to think about the way that our mind works. And that Monday morning time block is when we are freshest, typically when we are most energized.

And so, any opportunity that you have to give yourself heads down work on Monday morning is going to be huge. So, that could look like thinking about what is your most important project right now, what is the most important thing that you need to do in order to move your goals forward, and stick that Monday morning, if that’s when you’re going to be at your best.

I’ve had people make that their book writing time. So, Monday is for content. Monday is for marketing. Monday is for really just that heads-down thought work because that’s when we’re at our freshest. And we decline during the course of the day. Our energy gradually drops. We have a little bit of a second wind in the early evening, but, typically, we start fresh. And so, like you mentioned, using the half day theme concept.

It’s also great to think about your day in terms of two parts, “What is your before-lunch theme? What is your after-lunch theme?” I have some clients who arrange their days based on the different industries that they support. So, I have a handful of consultants or PR advertising agency folks, and rather than, in one day working on an industrial client and a health care client and a food and beverage client, instead, they align their days with, “Okay, Monday is my healthcare day. Tuesday is my hospitality and hotel day. Wednesday is my education and nonprofit day.”

And this, again, allows them to align their thinking in a streamlined way. They get into that groove, that flow state, even though they’re performing different tasks, it’s all under that same umbrella. I have different clients who have created research theme days, if part of their work involves research or academic writing so that they’re able to identify when during their week are they at their best for that type of work, and they arrange their theme days accordingly.

I’ll say that the most consistent theme day on Friday is admin and, like, financial catchup because a lot of the time, by the time we reach the end of the week, we’re kind of spent. We need to kind of take it easy. And so, a lot of times my clients choose to make Fridays either a no-meeting day or a light meeting day, and they use it to catch up on tracking metrics or completing reports or updating databases because it’s a light lift before they do an afternoon planning session heading into the weekend.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I also like the notion of when it is, is that groove. Like, sometimes I enjoy, I don’t know what I would call it. I call it in my brain, like, task slaying in that there are many little things.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Pebbles.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go. Pebbles. That’s fun. And, I’m just going to obliterate them. And it feels so good because a lot of them, it’s sort of like they’ve been lingering for a while. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got some laundry there. I should probably handle that.” So, it’s sort of like, it’s surfaced in my consciousness numerous times. And there are things like tidying, replenishing supplies, email. I like the OmniFocus Task Manager. There’s some time management dork-ness for you.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, old voicemail clutter. It’s like there’s lots of little things and they’re kind of weighing on me a little bit, and have been weighing on me a little bit repeatedly, and to decide, “This is the afternoon in which I’m going to annihilate many of these things in quick succession,” feels just phenomenal.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, yes, it does. Pete, you would love a pebble power hour.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
You would love them. So, when I’m working with my clients, we like to break down the things on their to-do list, the things in their life as boulders, big rocks, and pebbles. Boulders being those things that are important and not urgent that help you show up as your best self. Big rocks being your project-oriented tasks, the things that really move the needle in your life and work. But then there are pebbles, and pebbles are everything else. Those are those little tasks and to-dos that weigh on you.

My favorite example of a pebble is filling out a reimbursement form because I can think of a few things that are less mundane than filling out a reimbursement form, and like tidying up your email, and all of those things. And so, I really encourage people, over the course of the week, to put all of those little tiny tasks in a different place. Don’t let them swim alongside your most important tasks.

We want to separate out your pebbles because, let’s say Friday afternoon, you schedule a pebble power hour for yourself. You’ve got just set a timer for an hour and knock out as many of those little bitty insignificant tasks as you can. You’re going to feel amazing heading into the weekend because you’ve just done this total dopamine burst of accomplishing so many little things.

And you’re clearing your plate and you’re lightening your load because individually each one of those tasks is small, but they add up to weigh on you, and they pull you down and they hold you back from really giving your all to what’s most important. So, hey, maybe you need a Pete’s pebble power hour on Friday afternoon to knock out all those little things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, even more alliteration. Okay. And Anna, I’d love your take on what is some common advice that is just wrong or bad or ill-advised and you recommend we disavow entirely?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I’d say that the worst advice that’s out there, really, can be applied to any, so any time management system, okay? If you do not follow it 100 % and correctly and by the book, the way that it is written, then you are failing. And let me make sure that I’m super clear about that. There are so many different ideas and books and thoughts and methods around time management and organization. And what is so disheartening to me is to talk with someone who has tried to follow a system, but it doesn’t work for them. And they think that they are the problem.

But what’s really happening here is that the system as written is not a match for the way that they think. It’s not a match for their lifestyle. It’s not a match for who they are. And I hate to see people think that there’s something wrong or broken about them because a system that worked perfectly for someone else didn’t work for them. And so, the flip side of that advice is, adapt. Take what’s out there and use what works for you.

If you find an amazing book on time management and you try some things, but maybe part of it doesn’t work for you, it’s not a you-problem. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with you. Just adapt it, treat it like an experiment, keep trying. The more self-awareness that you have and the better you’re able to understand yourself and how you think.

I mean, this is exactly why I have my clients take the Myers-Briggs as soon as we start working together because it’s so incredibly revealing, and it’s such a boost to their self-awareness, which helps them take what they need and leave what they don’t to create a system that works for them instead of trying to copy and paste something else that’s out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Anna, I love that a lot. It reminds me, we had a conversation with BJ Fogg from Stanford, who’s fantastic, and he wrote the book Tiny Habits, in terms of he likes to think about it as, I believe he calls it behavior design, which is just fun because design conjures images of whiteboards and Post-it notes and Sharpies. And it’s, like, we’re trying to design something that works. And if what we have done hasn’t worked, it doesn’t mean it’s a moral failure, “Oh, I’m lazy. I’m insufficiently committed. I have an addiction to social media,” or whatever, and, hey, maybe we do.

But it’s not like, “Through my fault, my own grievous fault, I’m bad and evil.” It’s just that, “No, this design isn’t quite fitting. It’s not quite working.” And I like to think about it sort of like when you’re organizing a space, if an item does not fit on a shelf, it’s not because the item is bad or the shelf is bad. It’s just that these shapes and sizes of these things are not compatible with each other. There’s no value judgment. It just means that shelf is not the ideal place for this item and we have to figure out where is a better fitting place.

And, likewise, with some of this tiny habit stuff or these systems, I likewise feel that satisfaction just as it is, at least I find it, and I’m not that organized of a person, it is delightful when you have an item that fits perfectly into a place. 

So, too, I think about that when you’ve got a real great lock for an activity and a schedule. It’s, like, “Oh, this matches my groove and my mode and my flow and my energy and the time available. Like, this activity matches this space in my calendar, oh, so just right and it feels delightful.” But the flip side, I’m thinking also about David Allen, Getting Things Done, and he’s been on the show, and I think he’s phenomenal.

But he will mention, and I think it’s kind of a tough reality that the mind-like-water mental clarity amazing space is primarily achieved when, in fact, you have completely absolved your brain from the task of remembering things. And so, if you do not have a system that you sufficiently trust and have sufficiently downloaded all of the stuff from your brain into that system, then you will not experience the peace and freedom that comes from exercising the Getting Things Done, GTD system.

So, it’s a little bit tricky because it’s almost like, “If you’re not doing it perfectly, you’re not reaping the benefits.” And yet, I think it’s semi-true that there are tremendous diminishing returns from being able to completely trust your system and having all contents downloaded out of your brain than being able to 92% trust your system and have 92% of the contents downloaded out of your brain.

But at the same time, it’s not like a shame-on-me value judgment thing. The answer is more of a, “Okay, how could I tweak my system to get that lingering 8% out of there and experience all the wonders that can be enjoyed?” What’s your hot take on all this distinguishing, Anna?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Well, I’ll never forget, I was listening to an episode of Beyond the To-Do List podcast. Love that one. And David Allen himself said that he does not follow GTD 100% all the time. And hearing him say that felt like such a wave of relief washed over me because, to that point, I was struggling because I’d implemented a lot of what was in GTD, and it was before I’d become fully confident in taking what worked and leaving what didn’t.

And it almost felt like permission to customize it to the way that it worked for my life. And I’ve had so many clients come to me feeling like failures because they were unable to use another system 100% copy and pasted. And so, I aim, instead of for, “Hey, let’s go all in on whatever this is.” Let’s not focus on all or nothing behavior, or all or nothing implementation. Let’s look at all or something. What’s the good, better, best?

You know, like you said, the 92%. What if I trusted 92%, and I have 92% of my things downloaded? Sure, there’s still that 8% there, but, like, is it even worth it to struggle and push to get that remaining 8% out of your head when 92% is really freaking good? That’s nice. That’s awesome. And so, like, let’s celebrate getting really far, and let’s celebrate the progress, and let’s be really happy with how far we’ve come instead of how we’re not doing it perfectly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, sounds good. Well, Anna, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Oh, my favorite quote of all time is “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” by Albert Einstein.

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

Anna Dearmon Kornick
So, actually, I think that instead of jumping straight to something that a scientist has done, I just want to give a shout out to Laura Vanderkam and the work that she has done with collecting time studies and what she has learned about the way that women, professionals, people actually spend their time during the course of a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
The One Thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And a favorite tool?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
I can’t live without Asana.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Every Sunday evening, I like to refill all of my supplements while doing a face mask. And I like to pair those, like do some habit stacking, habit pairing, and it’s such a really nice way to take care of myself heading into the week. You should try it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Anna Dearmon Kornick
It’s that time management doesn’t start on the pages of our planners. It starts by getting to the heart of what matters most.

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

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah, so I would love for you to head over to check out my podcast. It’s called It’s About Time. It’s a podcast about work, life, and balance, with new episodes that go live every single Monday. You can find it in your favorite podcast app. So, that’s where I would love to keep in touch with you.

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

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Yeah. So, if you’re looking to be awesome at your job, my challenge to you is to think about what do you want your life to look like five years from now? What’s that vision that you have for your life, and not just at the job description level? What do you want your house to look like, your relationships, your family, your fitness, your wellbeing, what’s going on inside of your head? All of that is what adds up to create your vision. And when you’re clear on your vision, every single decision you make about how to manage your time becomes so much easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anna, thank you. This is fun. I wish you many beautiful days.

Anna Dearmon Kornick
Thank you, Pete. This has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you having me.

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Cal Newport shows how to achieve more by doing less.

You’ll Learn:

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

About Cal

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

Resources Mentioned

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Cal Newport Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Cal, welcome back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Getting Things Done, yeah.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that was 2000, okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cal Newport
“Get out of my face.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cal Newport
Yeah, for major projects. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds tricky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
You live it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 GREATS: 935: The Five Steps to Winning Every Week with Demir Bentley

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Demir Bentley reveals the five simple steps to successfully plan and execute vastly more satisfying and productive weeks.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why nobody really plans their week—and how to fix it
  2. The master key to getting ahead of your to-do list
  3. How to transform your calendar into a power tool  

About Demir

Demir Bentley is an executive productivity coach, co-founder of Lifehack Method and WSJ Bestselling author of Winning The Week: How To Plan A Successful Week, Every Week.

He teaches hard-hitting efficiency techniques and proven accountability strategies that have helped clients generate millions in revenue while saving thousands of hours.

In the past eight years, he’s helped more than 70,000 professionals, including executives from Facebook, Google, Uber and PepsiCo, to prevent burnout and create more freedom in their lives.

Resources Mentioned

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Demir Bentley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Demir, welcome.

Demir Bentley

Good to see you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

I am so excited to learn all about Winning the Week and your flavor of productive goodness. And I think I’d like to start with your origin story.

Demir Bentley

Like a comic book.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, very much, maybe as a radioactive spider but, in your case…

Demir Bentley

It’s close.

Pete Mockaitis

…you’re working at Wall Street, not loving it so much. Take us into the scene.

Demir Bentley

Like a lot of people, I learned to perform for love when I was really young, and I don’t want to get too deep, but I think a lot of people just realized that they just get a little bit more love and attention if they can get those A’s, and if they can exceed. And so, I figured out young, I was like, “Oh, I can do this stuff. I can perform. I can get grades. I can write papers. I can produce things.” And so, I became one of those insecure overachievers who’s really developed a strong juicy core of, “I’m only valuable by what I can do and what I can produce.”

So, obviously, I ended up on Wall Street because that’s where all of the insecure overachievers, the most insecure overachievers go when they really want to prove to themselves that they are somebody. And I really was that “If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere” dreamer. I really felt, “If I could hack it in finance, then maybe that deep hole inside of me would finally truly be filled and I would be somebody.

No, I jest a little bit, but, seriously, there was that juicy core of, “I’ve got to make it in finance.” And I did, I got to a really high level of finance but I did it by working 80 to 100 hours. And my secret sort of sin, or my secret, like, hidden behind-the-scenes was that I was actually really massively unproductive. I just masked that lack of productivity with brute force work and just the deep guilt and shame that kept me coming back to the trough.

And so, I remember thinking, there was an episode where I remember thinking that I was so proud that my boss had come in on the weekend and had seen me there all alone, there was nobody else on the floor, and I was just there. And right after that weekend, he called me, and he said, “You know, this is actually not a good thing. Everybody else can get their work done in 40-50 hours, and you seem to be needing 80 to 90 hours of work to produce what other people are producing in 40-50 hours.”

So, that was my big wakeup call of, like, “Oh, I’ve been wearing this like a badge of pride, like a badge of honor,” the busy badge, I call it. I’ve been awarding myself the busy badge, thinking that I’m just inherently, intrinsically more valuable than other people because I have this ability and this desire to outwork everybody else and come in on nights and weekends, and just realizing that, “Actually, other people saw that as sad and pathetic.”

That didn’t stop me. I wish I could’ve said that that was the moment when I stopped but, actually, I had a health implosion. I was overweight, I was overstressed, I wasn’t sleeping, and I got, like, a mystery illness. After much testing and three surgeries, I was diagnosed with something called salary man sudden death syndrome. It’s not very common in the United States but it’s extremely common in Asia where, otherwise, healthy young person dies from extreme overworking.

And so, although there was no definitive, “You’ve got this condition,” there was a general recognition among my three doctors that if I kept working this hard, I would probably, at some point in the future, die, and that I needed to immediately cut my hours down to 40 hours a week. Now, mind you, I’m doing everything I can to keep my head above water, working 80-100 hours a week, and they’re telling me, “As of next week, you need to bring it down to 40 hours a week.”

And so, that weekend, I talk about a lot in our book, that weekend was this like crisis moment. I felt like my whole world was crashing in. I thought I was going to have to quit my work or I’d certainly get fired. It just felt like there’s just no way that it’s going to happen.

And, yet, there was a series of events that happened over the course of that weekend. I walked in next week, I worked 40 hours, I got everything done in 40 hours, and that was the beginning of this sort of rebirth, this, like, religious awakening that I had, realizing that I suck at this productivity thing, and I realized that so much more was possible. And that was the beginning of my journey in my personal productivity work, and also the beginning of my journey as, ultimately, which is hilariously becoming a productivity coach for other people and showing other people how to have that same transition.

Pete Mockaitis

Wow, this is powerful. You have a chat about productivity, you don’t think it’s going to be life or death but, for you, it literally was.

Demir Bentley

It actually was.

Pete Mockaitis

“Become more productive or die or lose your job.” Like, high stakes stuff. So, I want to dig deep for a moment. You mentioned deep shame there. What were you ashamed of?

Demir Bentley

So, like many people who are unproductive, I’m a very emotional worker. And emotional worker isn’t defined by crying in the corner. That’s not what I’m talking about. Emotional workers are the kind of people that, if they’re feeling it, they can show up in two incredible acts of productivity, incredible feats of productivity, but they can also have incredibly long periods where they can’t motivate themselves, and they’re not feeling it. And in those periods, they can barely bring themselves to lift a pencil. And in those moments, they just feel incredible self-lacerating shame and unworthiness. And they know and think that somebody is going to find them out.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Demir, lay it on us the way. What were the initial steps you took when you were in the I-can’t-lift-a-pencil mode? And, ultimately, how did you survive by doubling your output per hour, I guess, like cutting your hours in half?

Demir Bentley

The funny thing is what really solved my first tranche of the problem was something that everybody thinks that they know that they should be doing. And I’m going to come back to the word “thinks that they know.” And it’s just planning your week. The problem with this is there’s nothing more dangerous than somebody who thinks that they know something because, then, they approach it with zero curiosity, zero sense that they have anything to learn or anything that they might be doing wrong, and way too much confidence.

And so, we actually ran a survey of 5,000 people, and the survey was only people who manage between five and 50 people, so managers, people who are already very successful, earning a lot. We asked them, “What are the top five things that you can do to be highly productive?” And almost everybody in the top three put, somewhere in the top three put planning their week. So, duh, that’s a duh moment. Almost everybody knows it. Out of 5,000 people, it is common knowledge that you should plan your week.

Then we followed up with the same 5,000 respondents. We said, “Have you planned the last, the four out of the last four weeks?” And out of 5,000 people who had said very confidently, these were people who manage between five and 50 people, making over $100,000, out of those people who confidently said, “Yes, you have to plan your week,” less than 1% of the people had planned their week in the last four weeks.

So, there’s something odd about planning your week. It is something we all know that we should be doing, and less than 1% of us have a consistent practice in doing it. That kicked us off on a sort of curious exploration around why that is. But let me just say, coming back to my story, that borne out of sheer desperation, I looked at my calendar and I did what I call the first planning session of my life, the first real planning session where I took all 40 hours, and I took every task that I needed to get done, and I allocated it a spot in that 40 hours.

And every single 30-minute increment had to fight for its life to be on my calendar. That was the very first real planning session I had. And, lo, and behold, it went from spinning my wheels at 80 hours a week to actually getting everything done 40 hours a week. And so, I will say that my rebirth, my sort of aha moment came a lot earlier than the framework that I built around it. I think I spent a lot of years trying to understand, “What happened to me? What went right? What was the difference? What changed?”

When I finally got that through the course of my coaching, I was able to sort of boil it down into the winning-week method. And now we have a framework where we can explain to people. But, at the time I realized that it was just me being desperate. And in my desperation, I realized “I’ve only got so much time. I need to be excellent with that time.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so then, you were putting individual tasks onto specific pieces of time, like, “Thursday 4:00 p.m., I answer my emails,” or whatever the thing is. So, it went there, scheduled, appointment style.

Demir Bentley

It’s called calendarization. It’s the idea that you take all of your tasks and actually put it on the calendar. And most people stop short of this. I almost say it, like, calendarization is when Pinocchio becomes a real boy, that’s the magic moment. If you’ve done all of your planning, meaning you’ve reviewed your calendar, and looked at your priorities, and looked at your task list, but you do not take your task and put them in a specific slot in the calendar, what’s happened is you’ve done all of the necessary work but Pinocchio cannot become a real boy now.

It is when you take your tasks and put them on your calendar that you truly become a plan because, now you’re actually allocating. By stopping short, we stay in the realm of wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is sort of we’ve got all of the things that I want to do over here in this bucket, and I’ve got my available time in this bucket, and I’m just sort of vaguely in a wishful thinking way, hoping that by the end of the week they’ll match up.

But by not actualizing them, by not marrying those two markets together, then we never really meet base reality. And this is where a lot of people’s plans fail, and that’s why a lot of people say, “Oh, planning doesn’t work for me,” and that’s why a lot of people stop planning after initial tentative events to plan. It’s because, the truth is, is that the way most people plan doesn’t result in a holy-crap moment where they just kill it in their week, and so they stop doing it because they didn’t feel that magic, they didn’t feel the lift.

You know, the moment in the Tesla when somebody hits the accelerator, and your face sort of gets plastered to the back, and you go, “Oh, that’s power.” That’s what you want to feel in a productivity technique when you try it, to be like, “Oh, this works.”

Pete Mockaitis

I love that, the planning gives you a holy-crap moment, like, “Whoa, this works.” And I feel that way about most interventions that I assess. It’s like, “Hey, is that supplement doing anything for you?” “Well, I mean, I think it might potentially be making a little bit of a difference.” More and more, I don’t really want to mess with much of that in my life. It’s like I want to be like, “Holy schmokes, I feel the difference with fish oil and saffron.” And the rest, I’m like, “Meh, maybe.”

And so, that’s that. Likewise, I think it was Taylor Jacobson, shoutout to Taylor, over at Focusmate.com, which is awesome, who put us in touch, and that’s how I felt about that tool, which is online accountability partners on demand. Very cool. It’s like, “Holy crap, this is making it happen. Wow!” And there’s no maybe squinting about it.

And you’re telling me we can have that experience from the act of planning our week, and if we haven’t felt it, we ain’t been doing it right. Is that fair to say, Demir?

Demir Bentley

Absolutely. People say, “How do you know you’re in love?” It’s like, you know because it hits you like a sledgehammer. “How do I know that my planning worked?” You know because it hits you like a sledgehammer. You have no doubt in your mind that that week, out of 100,000 variations of that week, different alternate realities, imagine 100,000 different realities of the last past week where there were 100,000 versions of you playing out the same scenario, you can look at yourself in the mirror, and say, “That was the best that I could’ve done. In any alternate reality, this one was the best that I could’ve done. I met my challenges with as much resourcefulness and willpower and ingenuity and leverage as I possibly could,” and you just know it.

Pete Mockaitis

Love it. I love it. All right. Well, Demir, lay it on us, calendarization is important. How do we pull this off? How do we, in fact, win the week?

Demir Bentley

So, I’m just going to start with just a tiny bit of setup, which is that a lot of people assume, and I think I totally understand why they would, that if you’re doing a technique right, that it’s going to feel good. Let me just start by foregrounding this that when you’re doing planning right, there is a base amount of fear, anxiety, and stress that is just table stakes.

If you’re doing any planning, and you’re feeling fear, stress, anxiety, you’re doing it right because the essence of planning is pulling forward all of the unmade decisions, worries, potential things that could go wrong in the next seven or 30 days, and you’re pulling that into a 30-minute moment. How do you think that 30 minutes is going to feel? Not amazing.

So, first, let’s let go when we’re going into planning, this idea that it needs to feel good, or that, “I’m doing it wrong if I’m feeling fear, stress, or anxiety.” No, that is the tradeoff. You’re taking a slap in the face on Friday instead of a punch in the teeth on Wednesday.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, Demir, it’s not going to be one of those Instagram-worthy situations where I’ve got my latte and my multicolored Post-Its, and I’m crafting a beautiful visual of what’s going to happen in my week or month. That’s not what it’s like?

Demir Bentley

So, what we did was we condensed it down into five simple steps. So, step one, actually, I’ll get a little clever. In our book, we talk about step zero. The reason we called it step zero, not to annoy people, is because you only have to do this step once and you’ll never have to do it again. And that is create an environment for your planning that is a reward in and of itself.

My wife and I, we go to a little brunch place, a little like French café experience. It’s like our date. Call us a nerd if you want because we probably deserve it, but this is like our date afternoon. We have babysitting, we go down to this French café, we spend 30 minutes planning, and then we’ll spend the rest of the time, two and a half hours, just connecting because there’s no better way to connect with your spouse than to get resolution on the unresolved things in your relationship.

So, step zero, do this once, you’ll never have to do it again.

On Friday night, go to a wine bar. Saturday morning, go to a café. Create an environment for your planning that you actually look forward to, that’s a reward in and of itself, and that will have help tamp down on that avoidance that people get around planning because you’ll think to yourself, “Oh, this is a treat. I’m making it a treat for myself.” Okay, that’s step zero.

Step one, and this is something you do every single week, learn a lesson from the past week, five minutes. Take five minutes, don’t learn five lessons, not 500 lessons, just skim the cherry right off the top of the cake, “If I had to find one lesson that I could derive from the past week, something that I did really well, something that I didn’t do well, what would that be?” And fold that into the next week, “How can I apply that in the next week?”

This is what we call a learning loop, and this is how people get better, whether it comes to flying an airplane, or playing sports, or playing music. They all have positive learning loops built into their practice where they’re not just practicing, they’re doing what we call positive intentional practice, where they’re focused on, “What did I do well?” or, “What did I do wrong? And how can I use that to get better?” And just five minutes, that’s it. Not 50, not two hours.

Take five minutes and just observe to yourself, one thing you did right that you want to keep doing, that you should do more this week; one thing that you did wrong that you should maybe correct and learn from this week, and then move on, and roll that into your planning. And that might sound small but do that 100 times, 200 times, and, all of a sudden, you’re getting 1% better in an accumulated sort of exponential way.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, the learning could be anything from, “Hey, when I worked in the morning, I felt very energized. Maybe I should try that again.” Like, that kind of a thing?

Demir Bentley

Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis

So, that’s our first step. What’s number two?

Demir Bentley

Step two, choose a leveraged priority, because the number one mistake people make is they’ll either choose too many priorities, which is an oxymoron because the word priority literally means the one thing above all other things. So, when somebody says to you, “I have five priorities.” It’s like you’re misunderstanding what the word priority means. Priority means the order: one, two, three, four, five. So, people tend to conflate multiple priorities instead of having one. Or, they choose a priority that has no leverage in it.

So, I just want to talk about that for a moment. When we choose something that has no leverage, it means that we have to expend a lot of effort to do that thing but it is no easier to do it the next time that we do it. And when we apply leverage to something, we’re doing it in such a way that every time we come back to do that thing, we have made it at least 1% easier to do it the next time, sometimes 50%, sometimes 80%.

And so, leverage is just walking through your world in such a way as you can say, “How do I choose a priority such that the thing that I do this week does not just benefit me this week but it makes every week in the future easier?” This comes from the book The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

Pete Mockaitis
I was going to say, that rings a bell.

Demir Bentley

Yeah, shoutout to Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. I’ve read that book 12 times. It’s a productivity bible for me. If you haven’t read it, and you’re out there listening, it’s a must read.

Pete Mockaitis

It is amazing. Jay has been on the show, and it’s one of my all-time faves.

Demir Bentley

It’s the ultimate. So, ultimately, it’s really just about as you’re going through your planning, let’s choose a leveraged priority for the week, because, ultimately, you don’t have to be perfect. I know this sounds crazy, people think, “I can only be great at productivity if I’m perfect.” No, if you are in there doing things with leverage every single week, everybody else is going linear and you’re going exponential.

And all it takes, and I’ve seen those with clients again and again and again, is when I get them doing that for six weeks, there’s something magic that happens between week four and week six, where the cumulative effect of four weeks of doing something that makes the future easy, by the time they get to week four, five, or six, they start seeing that loop coming back around, and start saying, “Wow, there’s something different about my life now. Things are feeling easier.”

Pete Mockaitis

And can you give us a couple examples of the sorts of things that have reverberating echoing effects for many weeks to come?

Demir Bentley

Yes, so it could be really anything but I’ll just give you a stupid example. So, when we first had our first kid, I had one of those overly-fancy coffee machines where it took, like, 30 minutes to make a cup of coffee, but now we have a newborn, and I just realized, “This is crazy. It’s taking me 30 minutes to make a cup of coffee. If I make two cups of coffee a day, that’s effectively an hour a day that I’m losing to simply getting caffeine into my system.”

So, I basically said, like, “No matter how much I love this coffee, it’s not worth an hour of my day.” I went ahead and created the simplest coffee station. I consolidated everything down. That whole moment, that aha moment, took me 15 minutes. Now, today, it takes me 10 minutes from the moment I walk into the kitchen, to the moment I walk out, it’s 10 minutes to make a cup of coffee. So, what does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now, Demir, if I may. What are we talking? Are we talking about a drip? Are we talking about an AeroPress? How was this done?

Demir Bentley

It’s just a button. Slide the thing in.

Pete Mockaitis

Coffee maker button?

Demir Bentley

Like a Nespresso.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, a Nespresso machine.

Demir Bentley

An espresso, slide in the pod, hit the button. There’s a little time for warmup, I’ve got the coffee foamer, and it’s just 10 minutes, in and out, and I’ve got a delicious-tasting coffee that’s 90% as good as the one I made in half an hour but it comes out in 10 minutes or less. And I’m talking about I could really, if I was rushing to it in five or seven minutes, but I’m being generous saying it was 10.

So, think about this in terms of leverage. I did something once that cost me 15 minutes to do in terms of setup. Then every single day now, instead of spending an hour, I’m spending 20 minutes. That means there’s 40 minutes a day, ad infinitum, that I get back into my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. So, we have steps one and two. What’s three?

Demir Bentley

So, three is interrogate your calendar. Have you ever heard the term review your calendar? “Oh, do a calendar review.” I find that to be so gutless and passive. Review, like, “Oh, okay, I glanced at it, right?” The truth is your calendar is a slippery bastard. There’s so much in there that could screw you up but it doesn’t jump out at you, and say, “Hey, give me a watchout for this, a watchout for this.” It’s there but it’s just sort of buried.

So, I like to think about your calendar, you need to put on the witness stand, and, like one of those procedural shows, or a witness in a movie, you got to sweat your calendar. You got to get in there. You got to hit it from the left, hit it from the right, try to trick it, try to catch it. And so, a lot of people will do a passive calendar review and there are still a lot of landmines hidden in their calendar. It could be that meeting that got rescheduled from noon to 9:00 and you just missed it, but now it’s going to blow you up next week, you’re going to forget it, it’s going to make you look bad.

It could be that you volunteer to take your kids and drive your kids and their friends to a volleyball game, but you forgot about it, you didn’t put in your calendar, another landmine. And when these landmines blow up, it costs us huge amounts of stress and anxiety, you lose social credibility and capital, and you end paying a higher price in terms of your cognitive energy and your actual time to try to fix it in the moment. That’s what I call a landmine.

So, you need to get into your calendar and sweat out those landmines. You need to pour it out and really find them. And the reason why is you need a calendar that you trust more than your instinct. To me, when I look at my calendar now, a lot of people will say, “Well, Demir, you’re supposed to be here next week.” I’m like, “I don’t think so.” And they’ll say, “Your calendar says so.” And I’ll say, “Then you’re absolutely right,” because that’s the kind of effort and attention I give to my calendar. I want my calendar to be the single source of truth in my life when it comes to my time availability and my time supply.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Noted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, when we interrogate it, we’re really looking at each thing and ensuring that it’s true, that it’s accurate, it belongs there, and it’s worth the time that you have put for it to be there. That’s what you mean by interrogate?

Demir Bentley

Yeah, I have a series of like nine questions, “What should be there that isn’t? What’s there that shouldn’t be?” because a lot of times people will decide they’re not going to go to that party but they don’t get it off their calendar. It’s like, “Get it off your calendar.” If it’s not actually going to happen, get it off. They also forget the things around the calendar appointment, like if you’re going to go to the dentist, you need to get out the door, get prepared, drive, anticipate traffic. Then you need to get back.

So, typically, people’s calendar is more of a sketch of their time supply than it is a detailed accounting of exactly where their time is going to need to get allocated. I’m not saying there’s no place for blanks in your calendar. In fact, that’s where we’re going to go next when we actually look at our task list, that’s our time demands. So, once we do this, you should end with a calendar that still has some open spots but you feel very confident, “These are the hard-edge commitments that I have in my calendar, and here’s the time that I have available.” This is what I call your time supply.

If you’re running a basic business, if you don’t have a really good sense of supply and demand, like, “How much inventory do I have to sell this week?” If you don’t know how much inventory, you’re liable to oversell your inventory, which is what people do all the time with their time. They commit to too many things and think that they’ve got more time to get thing done, which means they overcommit to doing to many things, which means that they’re either going to have to work nights or weekends to get it all done, or they’re going to suffer a loss of credibility when they invariably have to come back to people, and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you.”

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Demir Bentley

Got it. So, time supply and time demand. So, we just took care of time supply. Go over to the demands. Where do your time-demands live? Look at your task list. And that was weird, like when I call your calendar your time supply, and I call your task list time demands, people have to sort of scratch their head, and be like, “Oh, yeah, I guess I’ve never really thought about it that way.”

Your calendar is not just your calendar. It is a tool to help you understand your supply of time, and your task list is really there to help you understand the demands on your time. These are the bids for your time. And the problem is you don’t have enough supply to meet all the demand. So, what you’re really doing when you’re going with your task list is you’re saying, “What are the best highest quality bids?”

So, if I was selling truffles, I used this example in my book, if you’re selling truffles, there’s always fewer truffles in the world than there are demand for truffles. There’s only the small finite supply. And so, this is really elaborate system for allocating truffles in a way where the highest bidder always gets the truffle. And so, that’s what we need to see our time as, as this highly perishable, incredibly finite thing that needs to go only to the highest bidder. And if you don’t send it to the highest bidder, what’s happening is you’re leaving money on the table and under-utilizing that precious resource.

So, we go to your task list for five minutes, and what I really want you to do is the same thing that you did on your calendar, get rid of the stupid stuff. Come on now. Let’s get rid of all that stuff that you know doesn’t really need to happen. Let’s identify that really high-value leveraged stuff. Let’s get into places where something might be urgent but not important, and let’s start to put it in an order where it’s going from the order of most leverage to least leverage, or at least most urgent to least urgent so that we can really understand and look at that top 20% which is our highest-value bids for our time.

I’ll say one more thing here, if I can plug it in. The nature of the modern world is that you will never, from now on to the day that you die, ever finish the weekend that we can get everything done that you planned for the week. I defy you to have a week, because human nature is that, even if you had one week where you got it all done, next week you would increase the amount that you thought you could get done, and you would, thereby, get back into the cycle.

We are greedy and lusty for life. We want more. We want to do more. We want to live more. We want to be more. It’s great. There’s nothing wrong with it, but you need to understand that the definition of winning your week is not that everything got done this week. The definition of winning your week is that, “I did the right things at the right time in the order of leverage and the right level of completion.” That, my friends, is what David Allen calls the martial art of getting things done.

Let me say it one more time because I said it really quick. It’s doing the right thing at the right time to the right level of completion with the right degree of leverage. If you can get those things right, you can look back and say to that bottom 80% of your task list that didn’t get done, “I’m fine with that. I can live with it because I know I did the right things in the right order to the right level of completion.”

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. And the next step?

Demir Bentley

Yeah, and that’s the final step, which is marry the two together. You’ve got this beautiful market, you’ve got time supply, you’ve got time demands, but if you don’t actually marry them together on your calendar, you’ve stopped before Pinocchio becomes a real boy. So, the idea now is to take that top 20% on your task list and actually take it over onto your calendar and give everything a specific time that you’re going to do it. Does that mean it’s written in stone, like the tablets from Moses of old, and God Himself cannot change it? No, it’s just an initial sketch of a plan.

But here’s what happens, and here’s what’s so beautiful. When you start pulling things over, I don’t have one client who will not come back to me after pulling things over and calendarizing, and saying, “Wow, I really don’t have as much time as I thought I had.” But we tend to live in this world of wishful thinking, and there’s nothing that will banish wishful thinking around your calendar and around your capabilities quicker than actually saying, like, “How much of this will fit?” Right?

My grandma used to have a saying, a very religious woman, very pious, so this is the only cussing she ever did, she said, “It’s like 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.” She had this analogy, “That’s like 10 pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.” And what I thought was funny of that was this idea that it’s just you’re trying to put more in here than can possibly fit, and it’s just exploding out. And this is the case with a lot of people’s week, is that by not marrying the two together, they have this idea that they’re going to fit more in than they can. And what ends up happening is that they got a lot of you-know-what sitting all over the place.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s graphic, and it makes the point because you are. You’re going to have a big old mess on your hands and it will be…and something is going to get hurt. Maybe it’s your credibility, maybe it’s your sleep, maybe it is your patience with your loved ones. Something is going to get damaged when you have too much stuff that just doesn’t fit with your time supply available.

Demir Bentley

We’re in a crisis right now of commitment debt. This is something people don’t think about. We know about financial debt. We know about the crisis of financial where people are borrowing against their credit card, they’re not really living within their means, but it’s happening so slowly and so insidiously that it’s just building and building, and for a while they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and everything is fine, until it’s not fine.

And we’re actually experiencing the same thing with commitment debt, meaning every week for 10 years, we’re just overcommitting a little bit, and we’re just taking what we didn’t do this week, and we’re trying to push it into next week, and we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, and we’re shifting things around and trying to, oh, apologize here and come up late with some miraculous productivity here.

But you run that for a decade or two decades and there’s a point at which you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul anymore, the whole Ponzi scheme comes falling down, and you realize, “I am way overcommitted,” and that comes from not being clearly anchored in living within your means. And it’s not just that you can live within your means financially, you can live within your means from a commitment perspective, “Am I actually making commitments that I have enough or more than enough time to satisfy?” And I would tell you most of my clients come to me and they’re in severe amounts of commitment debt.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. And what’s our next step?

Demir Bentley

Yeah, that’s it. You allocate time supply to time demand, and you meet those two together. Now you’ve got a plan for the week that actually matches base reality. And I can tell you, do that the first week, you’re going to experience something different. And it’s not because there’s anything so amazing or magical about our coaching. It’s just because you’ve covered every single important base.

You have looked at your time supply, you’ve looked at your time demand, you’ve understood where your leveraged priority is, so you have what I call the holy trinity of planning your week. Look at your time supply, your time demand, and your priorities. You’ve covered off on each of those bases, that is better than 99.9% of people do. Most people don’t plan the week at all. The people who do plan the week, they’ll do maybe one of those of three, two of those three. It’s incredibly rare that you’ll see somebody do all three of those and make sure that it fits into the allocated time in the calendar.

The funny thing is it feels magical when you do it. It feels like one of those aha moments where it becomes advanced common sense where once you do it, you’re like, “Well, I can’t really unthink this, I can’t really unlearn this because it has to be like this. It just makes sense.” But then you look back, and say, “Yeah, well, it can’t have made that much sense because I wasn’t doing it for years.” So, it’s just a simple way to cover off on every base.

When most people can actually just plan their week correctly in the right way, they’re going to see that they’re winning more weeks.

And just like investing, you don’t have to win on every investment. You just have to win more investments than you lose to make money. Well, you don’t have to win every week. You just have to win more than you lose with leverage to see yourself in a much better position next year than you are this year.

Pete Mockaitis

And winning, so we do the planning, what is winning, just like executing most of the plan, or how do we define winning?

Demir Bentley

Well, that’s why I defined the leveraged priority. To me, winning is if I can achieve my leveraged priority, I have won for the week, and most of the time, I can do that by Tuesday. So, if I can do something every single week that has leverage on it, I’ve won because I’ve done something this week that makes next week and every week thereafter easier.

Now, that’s probably 5% of my time. Five percent of my working hours is my leveraged priority, not even close to the majority. Again, perfection not needed, not required here. You don’t need to spend 50% of your time working on a leveraged priority. If you could just allocate 5% of your working hours to do something that has a little bit of leverage in it, that means that you’re planting a seed every single week that’s going to benefit all the weeks thereafter.

So, that, to me, is the definition of winning. If I can get my leveraged priority done every week, I’ve won. And then, thereafter, I’m just scoring extra credit bonus points.

To win the week is not, “I’ve got everything done.” Win the week is, “I’ve got the big thing done and I made the biggest possible dent I could in the rest.”

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Demir, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Demir Bentley

I would just say that I wrote the book Winning the Week because I think that we need to be more humane in our conception of how we treat ourselves in the productivity world. There’s a strong undercurrent right now of, like, “Be more disciplined. Be more excellent. Get up at 4:00. Do all of the things. Do the perfect habits. Do everything right. Don’t lose a day.”

And I just feel like that doesn’t match up with the thousands and thousands and thousands of clients I’ve had. Human beings have good days, we have bad days. It’s a mix. Every day in every week, we’re sort of meeting ourselves at a different level. Sometimes we wake up, we’ve got more energy, more desire to do something. Sometimes a little bit less.

The thing I love about playing the game in a week-long increment is you can have a bad day or two and still win the week. And this is sort of the message I want to get out to people. You can feel that you got your butt kicked five days out of the week, and yet still look back and look at what you did that week, and realize that you won the week.

So, I don’t want people trying to connect themselves to this idea that, “I need to be perfect every day. I need to crush it every day.” Actually, no, you can get your butt kicked five days out of the week. And if you did it with the right level of intention, and you chose the right leveraged points, you can actually look back on a week that you really felt like took you to the cleaners, and realize that you won the week.

Pete Mockaitis

Fantastic. Well, now can you tell us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Demir Bentley

We came up with The ONE Thing when we were talking earlier. I think that book is a productivity bible. There are so many quotes and amazing things from that book. So, although I don’t have a quote, I’ll put in everything in the book The ONE Thing. That book is just amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Demir Bentley

I think the best one, his name is Czechoslovakian. It’s so hard. It’s Czecemensky or Zemensky or something like that.

Pete Mockaitis

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?

Demir Bentley

There we go. Thank you, yeah. He did a study that, basically, said, it proved that when we walk away from a task that’s incomplete, our brain continues trying to problem-solve around it, unless, and this was the important part of the study that really intrigued me, unless you actually gave yourself a breadcrumb trail to come back to it. So, that when we actually terminated something midway, meaning we hadn’t completed it, if we actually created a specific plan for when we were going to come back to it, and what we were going to do when we came back to it, they found that your brain actually didn’t spin around it.

I think the reason I love that so much is because the truth is that we still have to live as human beings in the midst of our productivity journey. There’s always going to be moments where you’re deep in the middle of something, you’re knee-deep in it, and you need to step away, whether that’s the weekend where we all have to step away every five days, or whether it’s a crisis in your personal life and you need to step away from something.

I think there’s something so beautiful about being able to sort of recognize, “If I don’t give myself a specific time and plan when I’m going to come back to this, I’m going to be spinning on it and burning a lot of cognitive energy that’s going to keep me from enjoying my weekend, that’s going to keep me from being present in this moment where I need to be present. But if I actually just say, ‘This is the plan, and this is where I’m coming back to it,’ I can actually put it down and know that my brain isn’t burning and losing cognitive energy as I’m facing this thing that I need to face in my personal life.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite tool?

Demir Bentley

I think my favorite tool is Asana. And the reason my favorite tool is Asana, or choose your flavor, it could be Monday.com, is because I think it represents a paradigm shift in how we think about productivity and communication, and that’s a different podcast. But I think Asana is more than a technology. I think it’s a paradigm shift.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Demir Bentley

I say all the time, I say perfection not required.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Demir Bentley

Yeah, check us out at WinningTheWeek.com or you can check us out at LifeHackMethod.com. That points to over our different socials, and we’re everywhere. We’re on Insta, and we’re on YouTube. It’s got some cool trainings. So, if you want to sample a little of the goods, we’ve got a lot of free trainings on YouTube and different places you can check us out.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Demir Bentley

Yeah, I’ll just say do less than you think. Just like working out, people think, “I got to get in the gym. I’ve got to become this warrior. I’m going to lose all this weight.” And, really, what you should be doing is getting out and getting up to 10,000 steps. The difference between 7,000 steps and 10,000 steps is huge when it comes to your health. And the difference between planning your week for 30 minutes versus not is tremendous in your productivity.

So, stop trying to be a weekend warrior, and get in there, and be Rambo, and just blow the competition away, and start thinking about really, really small things that can have huge disproportion effects for your productivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Fantastic. Demir, this is awesome. I wish you much winning of many weeks.

Demir Bentley

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure, man.

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

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Sam 

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Sam Bennett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sam, welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Bennett
Done. Off the list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sam Bennett
That’s right.

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

Sam Bennett
There you go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the grumpy magic?

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

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

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

Sam Bennett
Do it grumpy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And a favorite book?

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

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

Sam Bennett
Levenger Legal Pads.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the little discs?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By | Podcasts | One Comment

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Michael

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Michael Breus Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

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

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

Michael Breus
Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Breus
Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Breus
That’s not very much.

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

Michael Breus
So, what did you do about it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Breus
Most don’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Breus
You bet.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
My weight in pounds and not kilograms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Breus
Challenge out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Breus
You bet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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