Afford Anything - How to Make Time for Things That Matter, with John Zeratsky

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

#226: Feeling time-crunched? Today’s episode is for you. Today’s episode features productivity expert John Zeratsky, who shares specific, action-packed time management strategies, with a focus on email management. If the term inbox zero sounds laughable, these strategies are up your alley. John’s interest in productivity began one winter morning in 2008, when he realized that the past few months had been an eerie blur. He realized that time was slipping away. He knew he needed to figure out a better way to manage his time - and his life. He started deep-diving into time management strategies and eventually co-authored a book, Make Time. If you want to learn how to redesign your daily schedule, you’ll enjoy this episode. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode226 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. And time, by the way, that piece of it is what we're going to talk about in today's episode. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast.

And today I'm speaking with productivity expert, John Zoratsky. He's going to share specific action-packed time management strategies with a focus on email management. So if the term inbox zero sounds laughable, then the strategies that he's going to talk about today are right up your alley. John is the co-author of a book called Make Time. His ideas about time management have been published by the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Harvard Business Review, Wired Magazine, Fast Company. He's been on stage at South by Southwest at Harvard. He's worked with Google Ventures to develop a process for testing new ideas in five days. And he's run this process with a huge number of startups, including Uber, Slack, Pocket, Nest, Medium, 23 and Me, just a massive number of startups.

So he's very steeped in time management. And we're going to talk right now about how you as an individual can apply a lot of these ideas into your own life. Here he is, John Zeradsky. Hi, John. How's it going? Good. How are you? I am doing well. John, I wanted to talk to you about time management, which is your area of expertise, and you got acquainted with this field after a particularly bleak winter in which you woke up one day and realized you couldn't remember the last few months. Tell us about that. I had already been sort of interested in time management, but in the context of productivity optimization, I was working as a designer in the tech industry. I had been at this startup, and then we had been acquired by Google.

And so in a period of just a couple of years, I found myself spending more and more of my time on meetings and email and administrative work and less of my time on the work that really mattered, the design work that I was doing, the writing that I was doing. And I responded to that by trying to optimize my productivity. I became really obsessed with getting things done, you know, the system and the book by David Allen. And I set up all the systems. I had like a stack of note cards I carried in my pocket. And I did invite. box zero, so I cleared my inbox every day, and I had this filing system that was made up of 43 different date-based folders so that I would never miss anything. And so I felt like I was kind of on top of my work. I was on top of my game. But then, as you mentioned, I had this moment where I woke up in the middle of a cold and snowy winter in Chicago, and I just had this eerie feeling that I couldn't remember what I had been doing with all my time. I knew I was busy. I knew I was supposedly being productive, but I couldn't point back to really any accomplishments or anything that I was proud of. And so, you know, even though on the surface, my life was really very good,

you know, it was happily married and, you know, things were good. But at the same time, I kind of just had this feeling that that time was slipping away. And that forced me to confront all this work I had been doing to be efficient and to be productive and wonder whether there was a better way to start looking at my time. It sounds as though you were at that time focused on efficiency but not effectiveness. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, perhaps effectiveness in some very narrow way. You know, I was very effective at doing email, but I was not effective at making time for the work that really mattered. And I certainly wasn't effective at spending time outside of work on on projects and on relationships and on being a part of my community, things that I would later

learn were really important to me. But at the time, yeah, I just saw everything through this lens of efficiency. How long ago was this? This was in 2008. Because Feedburner, that was the startup I worked at, was acquired by Google in 2007. And so then this was like, this was like nine months into it during the first winter of me as a, as a big company, productivity person. Let's talk about making time for the things that matter. In order to do that, you first have to identify what matters. So let's stay here in 2007, 2008. You're still at your job. You wake up and realize that you need to start looking at your life from the 30,000 foot level. What did you do next? What are the next steps once you have that realization? I didn't have any great revelations in terms of, you know, you know, my life's purpose or my mission or anything as grand as that, I started by just taking a look at how I was spending my days. And I had been sort of reading about minimalism and things like that. I started just sort of looking at my calendar. And on a typical day, I would wake up early and I would

get into the office quickly and then efficiently cranked through everything I had to do. Most of my day was filled with meetings. And then in the time left over, between meetings, I would respond to email. I would sort of deal with administrative things. Of course, I still had work to do, so I would squeeze that work in whenever possible, but I often found that I had to wait until the end of the day to do the work that was important to my job, which was creating mockups and prototypes of new product designs

that we were going to be launching. I worked on Google's advertising tools at the time. So these were like back-end management interfaces for advertising, But that stuff often had to wait till the end of the day. So as an experiment, I tried flipping that around. And I tried putting the most important work of the day first, putting that in the morning. And then another experiment that I tried was instead of like grabbing a quick lunch or eating at my desk, you know, in the name of efficiency, instead of that, I tried to take a real lunch break, which I know doesn't seem like a big thing. but it was a departure from what I was doing.

And then after I tried it, I realized that it actually was a big thing, taking a break, stepping away from my desk, disconnecting even for like half an hour. But maybe more so than all of that, spending time face to face with other people, my colleagues, friends, whoever, that was really energizing. And even though I wasn't as efficient, technically, I found that taking that break allowed me to do a better job at the rest of my work. And then in the afternoon, I would kind of shift a lot of the administrative type work, email, and meetings to the extent that I could. I would shift that stuff to the afternoon when I didn't have as good of energy and I didn't require as good of energy. And that reframing was kind of my first big step toward just inverting the way that I thought about how I would spend my time.

But we often hear that advice to do the most important work first in the day, while sound for many people, It doesn't seem to be a panacea, because what you're talking about is making time for the things that matter. And that seems to be a much larger task than applying your cognitive bandwidth to deep-focused work that you tackle first. Yeah. Well, I think that this stuff happens in stages. So one of my philosophies with all this work is to start small. When you start to read about time management, you start to read about attention and questions. about what matters to you, I think you can all feel very overwhelming and very intimidating. And so my view is that we should start by making small changes and experience the benefit of those changes and then let those compound into larger changes. So for me, starting by focusing on

the most important work of the day actually did help me feel like I was making time for what mattered because, you know, I liked my job. It was, I felt like it was important and I was good. at it, I enjoyed it. But in my normal sort of default routine, I wasn't able to give it the energy or the attention that it deserved. And so just the simple act of, say, doing that design work or creating a presentation first thing in the day and really building my day around it, that helped me feel like I was making time for what mattered, even in a small way. And then eventually over the years, that grew and grew and grew. And I eventually got to a point where, you know, I was able to write books and to go on extended travel and eventually leave sort of the corporate world and a bunch of things.

But it all started with kind of that small nugget of focusing on the work that was most important to me at the time. What are some other small steps that people can take? So for the people who are listening to this, particularly those who might be thinking, yeah, I already do that. I already have a habit of writing for an hour first thing in the morning. Or I already have a habit of XYZ first thing in the morning. What are other steps that they can take in order to better align their time with their priorities? That concept of focusing on the most important thing that has sort of grown and evolved. And it's now something that I think of as my daily highlight.

Think about yourself at the end of a day and ask yourself, what do I want to be the highlight of my day? What do I want to look back on and be really glad that I made time for? And so one small thing that people can try is to identify that thing each day and to write it down, I know it sounds super simple, but the act of writing something down is amazingly powerful. And then the next simple thing is to actually schedule it, to actually put it on the calendar and sort of build your day around it. And I know you're probably like right now as you're hearing this, you're probably thinking like, there's no way that's going to make a difference. But I've since writing this book, Make Time, which came out in 2018, I've heard from literally

thousands of people who have said that just that one simple tactic has really transformed the way that they think about their time. So that act of capturing and writing and scheduling the daily highlight makes a big difference for a lot of people. And this daily highlight could be in any arena, so it could be a work-related thing, but it strikes me as you talk that it might be a health-related thing. It might be today's daily highlight is go to the gym. Yeah. You know, the way that I use it is rotate through different areas of my life. So there might be a few days a week when I make my highlight something that's related to my work. So writing or creating a new workshop. But then there are other days of the week. when I prioritize things for my health, as you said, things involving doing things with my wife

or hanging out with friends or things in the community. And I feel like using this idea of a highlight to rotate through those different areas that are important to you, kind of just helps keep life in balance. And it can help you frame your day around the thing that you've decided is most important to you. One example of how I've done this in the past was there was this one particular day when I was planning to go to a baseball game in the evening. And it was like a beautiful summer day. And I was going to go to the baseball game with my wife and her family to see the Milwaukee Brewers play. I live in Milwaukee. But I had a bunch of stuff that I needed to do. And so, you know, I could have made my highlight like some important work thing that needed to get done. But instead I made my highlight going to the baseball game. And it gave me permission to say that that's the most important thing. And so I need to structure the rest of my day to make sure that, A, I finish what needs to happen. And B, that I don't sat my energy. by getting sucked into a vortex of endless email and bouncing from thing to thing to thing so that I can't enjoy the baseball game. So it can definitely be used in different arenas of your life.

What are some other small steps that people can take in order to align their time and energy with their priorities? When you talk about the highlight, what strikes me is that by virtue of identifying the most important thing of the day, you are in essence also articulating your priorities. So it helps on two fronts because it also solves the question or helps to solve the question, what do I actually value most? That's right. Just knowing that even at a small level is very clarifying and really gives you a sense of purpose. Part of our philosophy is that much of how we spend our time every day is by default.

It is determined by sort of default settings, norms, and, you know, things that seem regular normal to us. And those things can exist at very small levels. For example, if you get a smartphone, these days pretty much everybody has one, but you might get a smartphone because you want to use it to listen to podcasts or because it has a great camera or because you want to be able to use Uber and Lyft or something like that. But by default, when you set up that phone, one of the first things you do is you sign into your email account and then by default, your phone automatically checks for messages and by default it notifies you every time there's a new message. So you didn't really ask for that. You didn't decide, you know, I would love to know every time I get an email, but by default,

that happened. And there's a ton of other things like this, a ton of these other defaults that exist in our technology and in our cultures, in our routines. And so some of the most useful tactics are to identify those defaults and then to reset them. So something as simple as removing, distracting apps from your phone can actually break the habit loop, sort of that reinforcing loop that sucks us back into things like Instagram or Twitter or even our email. My phone doesn't have any of those things installed on it. I don't even have a way of reading the news on my phone. And that type of change makes it easier for me to stay focused on the things that matter to me. So basically I'm cutting off temptation at the source. I'm not being

tempted to, you know, when I feel a little bit stuck or a little bit bored with what I'm doing, I'm not tempted to grab my phone and do a quick check of Twitter because it's not there. Another example of that kind of concrete example of that philosophy is logging out of distracting websites and changing your passwords to a random string and then putting those passwords into a password manager app. So it's really about creating friction so that when you kind of have that impulse that's like, oh, I'm going to hop on LinkedIn. You're instead confronted with the login screen and you sort of realize, oh, yeah, I set this up for a reason. I created this friction for myself for a reason. Do I really want to be checking LinkedIn right now? Or was it just a impulsive,

mindless thing that I was doing? And so a lot of the suggestions around sort of reframing your use of technology that I have are about creating friction and about changing these environmental cues. that the path of least resistance becomes the path that we want to take, not the path that just kind of is set up for us based on the defaults of our world. Let's go through some other examples. So so far you've talked about changing the environmental cues of notifications on your phone and the apps that exist on your phone. You've also talked about creating friction by logging out of accounts and making the passwords non-intuitive. What are some other ways in which we can either alter our environment or create friction?

such that we are more mindful of our use of time. Yeah. One of the areas that I'm a big proponent of is really embracing your calendar and really using your calendar. And it might seem like that's the opposite of being intentional and being present and mindful with your time because calendars are often a source of stress or anxiety because they contain all the stuff we have to do. But we can also use them as tools to plan what we want to do. There's varying degrees of this. One of the simplest is, you know, something I already mentioned, which is that idea of scheduling your highlight. The best way to make sure that something happens is to put it on your calendar as to schedule it. Kind of the step up from there is a tactic

that I call block your calendar. So you can start to, even if you start just an hour or a week, you can identify certain parts of the week or parts of the day that you want to be, you want to schedule with yourself. You want to devote to the things that are important to you, whether they're work or whether they're going to the gym or whether they're making dinner for your family or whatever they might be, if you can start to block those things off and schedule time with yourself for your priorities on a recurring basis, that can build up its own momentum. And over time, you might find that you can essentially start with a full calendar and make deliberate decisions about when you're giving your time away. And that's basically what I do now. I use this tactic that's not in the book,

but I wrote about it recently on our website, and it's called calendar templates. And it's about creating sort of the perfect day for myself in my calendar based on, you know, a lot of the research and things like that, but also based on my own experimentation and what works for me, but sort of building out exactly how I want to be spending my day with time for work and time for meals and time for breaks and time for meetings with other people and all those things. And again, I'm sort of inverting the way that I think about time. So instead of, you know, if somebody asked me if I have time for a meeting, instead of looking at my calendar and thinking, oh, is there a blank space there, I'm looking at my calendar and I'm thinking, well, that's when I was planning to do X. Is that a worthwhile tradeoff to me?

And I realized that I'm in a very privileged position to be able to do that. But I just, I share an example of how these tactics can start very small and they can layer and they can build over time and eventually really transform the way that you're looking. looking at your time. What's interesting about the calendar template model is that you're starting with the end in mind. You're starting with an ideal day, divided up in the way in which you want to spend it, and then rearranging the details of that day based on real life conditions and demands. Yeah. So I worked in the tech industry as a designer for a long time. And when I'm thinking about the stuff or writing about the stuff, I often have ideas or thoughts of, of magical new apps, like calendar apps that would be perfectly suited for me. And I'm never going to

design these things or build these things, but it's a weird and dorky fun thought exercise for me. And one of them that I have about calendars is what if there was a calendar app where it started full, right? So the typical calendar, you open it and it's empty. But what if the calendar started full? Then the decision you're making is not, am I free, but do I want to give up my time? time for this other thing that is being demanded or requested of me. So yeah, like you said, it's really starting with the end in mind, just sort of flipping it on its head. Right. And it makes the opportunity cost a lot more clear. Yeah, totally. That's one of the reasons I'm so enthusiastic about calendars. I know it's such a weird thing to say, but I think that they force people to

confront the tradeoffs, sort of confront the reality of their time and how they're spending their time. because we've all been in situations where we say, you know, next week, I'm going to start going to the gym, three days a week or whatever. But if you don't look at your calendar and find those three times a week when you are going to actually go to the gym, then it's very difficult to do so. So I just think it's really helpful to be realistic and also to think about the tradeoffs that are involved when you're trying to make time for things that are important to you. Now, what if you have the personality type or the temperament or the habit that you just have low calendar compliance? For example, I plan out my whole day in my Google calendar and then immediately ignore it. So if you know that you ignore it, why do you plan it out like that? I think through the most urgent and important tasks.

Typically the most urgent tends to supersede what's actually important. but I think through what's most urgent and then I block off approximately how much time I think it'll take and over the years I've learned to also block off buffer time in between big projects or big tasks. Yeah, total.

So I'll map out my day based on how much I think I can realistically do and I map out a full day I mean down to this is when you make dinner or this is when you pack your suitcase. Yeah. So I'll do all of that But then at the moment, I'm just not in the mood to do the thing the calendar is telling me to do.

I'm in the mood to do something else. Sure. So do you rearrange at that point? Or do you just say, screw it? It depends on the day, but sometimes I will do something different for an hour. And then whatever was supposed to happen during that hour, I will move it to a different day. But sometimes, I mean, this gets pushed so far down the line that I've got stuff actually just this morning. I was like, you know what, I'm going to push this one to January 2020.

I'm going to push this one to, I mean, I've got stuff that just gets chronically moved around. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that, particularly when I'm like super in the zone on something, you know, doing some type of creative work and I don't want to, I don't want to disrupt that flow. One of the tactics that I think helps with this is establishing a routine of daily reflection. and I'm not talking about like some crazy journaling exercise or anything like that, but taking a couple of minutes at the end of the day and looking back at what you wanted to make time for and what you meant to spend your time on and then what actually happened. And that's a good opportunity then to think about what you're going to do differently tomorrow. And that's one of the things that I think is so exciting about this kind of stuff is that

you don't have to wait weeks or months or years to start to see changes. Like every day is a blank canvas to some extent. If you end a day feeling bad because you didn't stick to your calendar, you didn't make time for the things that were important to you, as long as you're taking time to reflect, then the next day you can try again. One of our mutual friends, Tanya Hester, who is a prominent blogger and podcaster in the fire community, she has mentioned that she uses a physical paper calendar rather than a digital one.

Do you think that there's any specific benefit to that or is that just a Tanya thing? No, I definitely think there's benefits to that. In fact, my co-author, Jake Knapp, he actually uses a paper. It's not even really a calendar. He sort of does this thing where he basically, on a piece of paper, he writes out the next, I guess it's a calendar, but it's not like he maps out his whole day. He basically writes out like the next little chunk of his day, like the next couple of hours. And then as he's going, he continually rewrites it.

So he'll sort of like, it'll stop. And then he'll say, okay, what did I actually do? And what do I have to do next? It's interesting because he and I are similar in some ways and that we're both big nerds about time and about a lot of other things. But we're very different in some ways. We have very different tendencies. I'm a morning person. He's a night person.

You know, I'm kind of obsessive about my digital calendar. He does this paper calendaring thing. And so I think it's important to experiment and to find the things that work for you. And I hope that I can at least give people a good starting point and give them kind of the permission and the confidence to start experimenting with this stuff. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. You know, the irony about wanting to read books about time management. is that sometimes it can be easy to feel like you don't have time to learn about how to have more time. When are you going to find the time to read a book about managing time?

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visit awaytravel.com slash Paula and use promo code Paula during checkout. Again, for $20, off of any suitcase or bag, visit awaytravel.com slash Paula and use promo code Paula. That's awaytravel.com slash Paula. What are some other specific, actionable things that people can do? One of the things that we talk about a lot is the idea of distraction kryptonite. For most people, there is one thing that they simply cannot resist. You know, on their phone, there might be a million distracting things, but there's probably one thing that they find themselves turning to again and again.

And really just focus on kind of creating barriers around that and making that inaccessible. And for a lot of people, that might be the breaking news. And so one of the tactics that people can try is to ignore the breaking news, to shift to some type of either sort of daily or weekly recap of what happened instead of following things in real time as they develop. there are sort of defensive sides to that, implementing that, and there are also proactive side. So on the defensive side, you know, turning off notifications, removing apps, logging out of news websites, but then on the proactive side, you know, subscribing to a actual physical

newspaper, I personally, I read the news once a week. I get the economist, which is a magazine that kind of summarizes the major world events every week, figuring out what you want to turn off and then figuring out what you want to put in and do its place to make sure that you, you you're not completely isolated from the world. So that's a couple more. We've touched a little bit on email, but there's a lot of tactics about email. So Jake, my co-author, Jake, he actually helped design Gmail. So he's been really into email for a very long time. You know, we talked about this idea of doing email in the afternoon, sort of a mindset shift or a reframing that I find to be very helpful for email, which is basically to pretend that they are letters.

And to think about the way that mail used to work before it became electronic. It would get delivered once a day. And then sometimes you'd deal with it that day, but oftentimes not. And for the most part, everything was fine. That's really the case with most emails, too. Just because the technology is built around instant delivery and instant notification doesn't mean that the message is urgent. And so I think reframing that can be very helpful.

While we're on the topic of email, let's dive more into that. Because I think email is a pain point for a lot of people. We've talked about checking email in the afternoon. We've talked about reframing the way that you think of email such that you don't internalize the sense of urgency. How else can you have a more sane relationship with your inbox? Yeah. I think probably the single most important thing is not to check email on your phone. which probably sounds crazy to some people. And the reason is that almost nobody writes email on their phone. Very few people respond to emails on their phone, but a lot of people check email. And so what happens is you sort of get this, over time, your brain kind of gets loaded up with this sense that there's a bunch of unfinished stuff that you have to deal with. And that can sort of crowd out the space that you need for other things, for other work

or for just being present and spending time with people that you care about. But yeah, not checking email on your phone makes a huge difference. So there's this really interesting study from a few years ago at the University of British Columbia where they had two groups. They had one group that was the control group that was left to sort of do email their normal way. And then there was this experimental group who was restricted to only checking email three times a day. and then they measured their stress level, and they also measured basically how effective people were at email,

how long it took them and the quality of their responses. And they found that the people who checked email less often, not only were less stressed, that doesn't seem crazy, but they were less stressed, but they were also better at email. I think there's often this narrative, and this is a sort of a response that I get from people that's like, oh, well, my job requires me to be on email all the time. I have to be good at email, but this particular study anyway shows that you actually become better at email when you check it less often.

So we were talking about obsessive calendars. I actually schedule in email time for myself. So I have a couple points throughout the day that I check email. And because I don't have it on my phone, those are the only times that I look at it, you know, unless I know that there's something time sensitive or I'm heading out to meet somebody and I need to pull up an email to see where we're meeting or whatever, obviously there are, there are, except. but I only check email a few times a day, which for me has been super helpful. I will also add that related to email specifically, but I think this can be used for any type of app or website that you find distracting, there are applications that will block parts of your phone or your computer. The one that I use is called Freedom. And it's much more effective than like the screen time features that are built into the iPhone, for example, because it physically blocks your access and makes you jump through a bunch of hoops

to be able to get back to that thing. And so you can sort of set up your daily schedule and you can tell it, only let me access email during these times of the day. And then it will sort of turn itself on and off. And it's quite a lot of work to disable it. They even have a mode where you can set it up so that the only way to disable it is by calling a phone number. Oh, nobody's going to do that. Exactly, yeah, like at the Freedom Support line and saying, sorry, will you please give me access to my email?

It's an interesting tool that allows you to create really rigid barriers around this stuff. For me, anyway, it's particularly useful for email. I once had a Google Chrome extension installed that blocked Facebook from me. It gave me a five-minute limitation per day. Yeah. And for the first week, I found that my fingers just muscle memory kept typing in the URL. And after about a week, that habit disappeared. Yeah, and that is such a good point.

So for me, my distraction kryptonite is Twitter. And I have this exactly, like you said, I've got this muscle memory for typing Twitter.com into my browser. And so I use that tactic of changing my password and logging out and putting my password in a password manager app to create all this extra friction. And I really go through these rhythms of letting these tactics fall by the wayside and being very distracted and sort of twitchy and spending lots of time on Twitter. And then I will slowly put those things back into place. And at first, like you said, it feels uncomfortable, you know, because you are, your body is trying to sort of enact this, this routine, this habit loop that you've created for yourself. But over time, having the website blocked or having it

be very inconvenient to access it, it starts to break that habit loop. You know, it sort of busting one of the links in that chain, and eventually you just find that you, not only are you not spending tons of time on some website you don't want to be, you no longer have the desire because that sort of routine that is prompted by a certain cue in your day, it just doesn't work anymore. Then eventually it kind of becomes self-reinforcing where for a lot of stuff, for me, Twitter is the one that I always struggle with, but for a lot of other apps, like I have no compulsion to check Facebook anymore. I have no compulsion to check Instagram. I don't even have an account on Instagram anymore. But that feeling may be very strong and very difficult at first

of wanting to check something, but then eventually it goes away. We had the author Cal Newport on this show twice. And the most recent time, he had just published his book, Digital Minimalism, which advocates a minimalist approach to the apps that you use. And so he described coaching somebody through a digital detox in which he had her delete all the apps off of her phone and go cold turkey and then slowly reintroduce them after a week. And he said that for that first week, she reported that she just compulsively checked the weather app all the time. She needed something to check. So she just kept checking the weather. That's really funny.

The apps that always have an infinite source of content, we call those infinity pools. You can always jump back in at any time. So anything that you can pull to refresh, anything that streams where there is truly an infinite source of content, those are the ones that are so hard to resist. But I think it's important to hold on to the things that are really valuable and really cool and kind of really magical about technology. and I'm a technology enthusiast and I'm fundamentally optimistic about it. And so, you know, there's a lot of stuff on my phone that I really love and there's a lot of technology tools that I really love, including being able to check the weather. But as this person found, it doesn't change when you refresh it. You know, it's not an infinity pool.

And there's something fundamentally very, very different about apps that are useful, their utilities. they are designed for specific purposes and infinity pool apps that are basically designed to hook you in. And as for the woman who kept compulsively checking the weather, she went wide. She could tell you the weather in Moscow, in Abu Dhabi, in Cape Town. She made the weather app into an infinity pool by refreshing random cities weather. That's impressive. And that actually leads, I mean, it's a humorous anecdote, but it leads to a fairly good follow-up question, which is what do we do when we are smart enough to circumvent the friction that we intentionally

place in our environment? We are smart enough to circumvent the environmental cues that we are trying to design for ourselves. Yeah. How do we protect us from ourselves, basically? Yeah, totally. I don't have a great answer for that. I have some thoughts. I mean, one is to continue to escalate and, you know, create more and more kind of strict barriers around things. There's a great new book that just came out called Good Habits, Bad Habits. There's a lot of books about habits lately, and rightfully so. It's a really important area of study. But this particular book is written by Wendy Wood, who is the world's foremost researcher

on habits. She's in the psychology department at the University of Southern California. She actually advocates turning your phone off when you want to be in the zone, which is sort of like that or sort of locking it away, physically removing it from yourself, is kind of, you know, you can kind of escalate up to that point. But I think beyond that, there's a few other things that pop to mind for me. One is to seek sort of accountability and reinforcement from other people. Making plans to spend time with people that you care about not only can give you energy and, you know, just make your day better overall. But I think that in many cases,

it can it can help create some external reinforcement to not be on. on your phone to not be refreshing infinity pools because you know that you are there to spend time with people. And then the other thing that comes to mind is getting back to kind of where we started about purpose. And I won't claim to have sort of a formula for discovering your purpose, although it's something that I've been thinking more and more about. But I think that if you're able to cultivate a sense of purpose, not at the micro level,

but at the macro level about what is important to you in your life. life, then I think it helps to put a lot of other things into balance. And I think if you have a clear sense of why you are making these changes and what you're trying to make time for, then the actual mechanics of the tactics themselves and sort of this feeling that we, that maybe we're outsmarting ourselves by working around the barriers that we've created, I think a lot of that stuff can become less and less necessary over time as you move more. more toward what's truly important to you, what your purpose is. How do you translate from the macro goal to the micro daily action?

Because it can be one thing to think, all right, at the macro level, I would like to retire by the age of 50 so that I can spend more time with my kids and grandkids. At a macro level, that's a wonderful thought. But, of course, when it comes to daily action, the steps necessary to review. your budget or to spend less or to start a side hustle. There's often a disconnect between the immediate action and this broad overarching goal. How can you bridge that gap? There's a bunch of things that come to mind here. Obviously, you've talked about this a ton on your show and written about this, but when it comes to some things like money, finding ways to automate, you know, to make things happen automatically so that you don't have to think

about them. You don't have to apply willpower every single day or every single month. That is really effective. And so you can start from a high-level long-term goal and you can say, all right, what are the components of this that I can systematize or that I can automate? And then those become the raw material or the fodder for one day's highlight or a few days highlight of getting some systems set up for yourself. And then you don't have to really think about them too much again. There's a tactic that we described in the book called Explode Your Highlight, which is about starting from a very large project. that feels overwhelming and really just exploding it into tiny little bits. And this is something that we learned from reading, getting things done by David Allen back in the day.

And big part of his advice is to break projects down into very specific, small, actionable steps. And going through that exercise and then having a list of those small things instead of a list of the big things. And then using the idea of the highlight, using the idea of scheduling, during your day, you can start to put those little pieces into place and kind of build out a plan for yourself. I use that approach a lot when I have speaking events or workshops coming up in the future. Right now, I'm in the middle of a period where I'm doing one or two speaking events or workshops every week and they're in all different cities. So there's travel and my routine is disrupted. And when I was approaching this period, I felt very overwhelmed thinking about preparing for all

of those events. And so what I did is I took each one and I said, all right, I'll give you a concrete example. I was in Australia and I was going to be teaching a workshop at a law firm about generating ideas and making decisions. And this is based on the work that I did with the design sprint process, which I helped develop when I was working at Google Ventures. So this is a process for startups. But they were very interested in parts of it. And so I exploded that thing. And I said, all right, what are the specific concrete pieces of that that need to happen? So there was outlining the workshop, there was sending it to the clients so that they could give me feedback.

There was creating the slides. There was rehearsing it. And I took all those pieces and I actually scheduled them out. And I did that for all of my events. So I had in the weeks leading up to and then throughout this period, which is still ongoing, basically I knew that I had planned to had. I could sort of trust my past self. I had made a plan that there was actually time for all the work that I had to do.

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and won't affect your credit. That's upstart.com slash Paula. You've commented before that this framework of taking something big and chunking it down into small pieces, the ideas from it kind of came from the Industrial Revolution in the assembly line days, where each worker was responsible for a specific component of a much bigger project. If you're building a car, but each worker is responsible for one piece of that. Yeah, and one of the things that I think is so challenging about life in the 21st century is that we are, okay, so if we think back, we use the factory example, there was somebody who was in charge of breaking the big pieces into the little.

pieces and assigning them out and doing the planning. And then there were other people who were in charge of doing the little pieces. And now in the 21st century, we all have to do both of those jobs. For every single thing that is in our life, we have to be the factory. I don't even know what the job description is, but we have to be the manager, you know, who's sort of planning out the assembly line, but we also have to be working on the assembly line. And we have to switch back and forth between these two jobs and these two mindsets. And so it's a helpful construct, but I think it also is very challenging for us to do. And I think in some ways, it's at odds with our DNA and how we evolved as humans. And so I think that's why people struggle with it so much. Right. We have to be both

the maker and the manager. Yeah. And so when we are in that manager role, and in this context, of course, we're both talking about management in the broadest sense of the term, and to the extent that we manage our lives and we manage our careers. Yeah. When we are in that role, we need unstructured, unscheduled time for reading, thinking, reflecting, abstract, high-level thinking. To make time for that, I mean, is that something that gets reduced to a block of time on a calendar? Is that the solution? Well, I think that that is a solution. And for some people, people who, you know, have a very, a busy calendar, they have a busy life. Maybe they have a job that involves a lot of meetings. That might be what's necessary. You know, it might be necessary to draw in on your calendar time to go for a walk. And when you go on that walk, don't put headphones in, just walk and just use the time to think or reflect or whatever. There are different ways of solving for that. And, you know, in my mind, life, I try to build a lot of space around the edges into my daily routine.

It might sound weird, but I like to do chores. I like to straighten up around the apartment and do the laundry and stuff like that because it's sort of this partial attention state where I kind of need to be paying attention to what I'm doing, but I also can't be doing anything else. And so my brain is free to do the passive thinking that is so, so necessary. But then there are also bigger approaches. is, you know, I think in theory, a vacation is a way to have space that is not just one hour at a time, but one week or one or two weeks at a time. And I've done a bit of traveling recently.

My wife and I spent about 18 months living on our sailboat and sailing through Central America. You know, that was sort of an extreme way of creating space because oftentimes we were in places where we were disconnected. There was no internet service. There was no cell service. And we were sort of in that partial attention state all the time where there was work we had to do to take care of the boat and to stay safe. But it wasn't so much that it was taking up all of our time, but it didn't leave enough left over that we could take on other big projects. So it gave me a lot of time to sort of meditate with a little, not like formal meditation, but sort of just think about what was important and let sort of feelings of purpose and meaning start to emerge very organically.

And so, you know, I'm not suggesting that everybody could or should take that kind of time off. And I realize how lucky and how privileged I am to have been able to do that. But there are these kind of sliding scales of, you know, depending on where you're at in life and what you feel like you need. You can sort of make that space for passive thinking and meditation in very small ways, but also in very big ways. One of the things that I'm hearing you say within that answer is that moderate physical activities, which could be operating a sailboat or folding laundry or washing the dishes, those types of

physical activities occupy your mind just enough while still giving you space to reflect. But how do you separate reflection from rumination? I assume when you say rumination, you mean sort of an unproductive kind of turning over and over of the same thoughts. Exactly. Yeah. This is a place where individual differences come into play. I sort of used this phrase little meditation. It might be the case that more formal or structured forms of meditation or reflection are helpful for people who are kind of prone to rumination.

Actually, in Cal Newport's previous book, Deep Work, I think, is where I read about his idea of productive meditation. And he describes it being something you can do while you're walking, where you are using that time to sort of productively and intentionally think about something. And so you are, and if I'm remembering correctly, part of the strategy is that you don't allow yourself to go backwards. So you don't replay thoughts that you've already had. You're sort of moving forward and you're continuing to think through whatever it is. But that's a strategy that I use a lot, particularly when I'm thinking about writing something, as I'll try to use this idea of productive meditation. And this, I think, is kind of getting into some very kind of real, you know, psychology and mental health stuff that I'm not an expert on. But I think that a more formal, more structured form of reflection

or meditation could probably act as an antidote to that kind of rumination. And so all of this, kind of taking it back to the origin of this conversation, was around bridging the gap between your daily actions and your macro life goals, your purpose, even the purpose is such a loaded word. Yeah. So all of this is in service of this question of how do you align your day-to-day life with the idea of the life that you want to create. to that end, we've talked a lot about tactics that can help you manage your time and eliminate external distractions.

How do you manage your energy? Because certainly, you have varying levels of emotional energy throughout the day. And sometimes that, more so than time, can be the limiting factor. Are there any tactics that you have or actions that we can take to be better managers of this? Yeah. I think this is really important because when we talk about productivity and we talk about time management and that kind of stuff. It's all very much focused on our brains. You know, we think about the decisions that we're making and the habits that we're forming and all that stuff, but our brains can't function properly if our bodies aren't well, you know, aren't healthy. Our brains and bodies are connected. And, and, you know, at the same time, you know, our bodies don't work right if our brains aren't well. So there's this very important relationship between these two parts of our being that we often think of as separate. And so,

Part of the philosophy behind make time is that you need to take care of your body to provide energy for your brain. And that translates into cognitive energy. It translates into emotional energy. And it's really about building energy so that you can enjoy those things that matter. And you can make the most of the things that are important to you. And so some of the tactics, some of my suggestions, we've actually touched on a little bit, things like walking, trying to build as much movement into your day as possible, that moderate activity, as you described it, that is good for your brain in the sense that it creates opportunities to passively think is also really good for your body. There was an interesting study earlier this year about

how certain types of day-to-day strenuous activities like carrying a suitcase up, a flight of stairs, can be almost a substitute for like going to the gym and doing sort of like official proper exercise. the sort of building block of human energy that I think people don't think about a lot is the personal and social side of it. You know, there are certain people in our lives who give us energy and there are certain people in our lives, unfortunately, who zap our energy. And I think the more that we can spend time face to face with people who make us feel good and people who give us energy, you know, that's something that we enjoy on its own merits, but that can also give us energy that then provides benefits for all the other things that we're trying to do in life.

So again, this is, in essence, it's changing your environment, but in this regard, it has a social aspect as well. Right. Yeah, totally. You can also create routines and habits around this stuff. So I mentioned, when we first started talking, I mentioned that new default that I adopted back in the Chicago winter of taking a real lunch break and eating face to face with people. and that became my routine

and that was something that I had on my calendar every day which was to like take a lunch break having rituals with certain groups of friends where you meet up

a certain night a week or I live in Wisconsin where there's a lot of seasonal rituals certain types of festivals that go on in the summer or in the winter and when we build those things

into our routines and we make them kind of semi-automatic in a sense that we just that's just what we do we have a habit around them then we are, as you said, changing our environment, crafting our environment to put us into contact with those people that are going to give us energy. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us, John. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you?

Yeah, thank you for having me. This was super interesting for me. Despite all the talk about Twitter, people can find me on Twitter. So my username is Jazzer, J-A-Z-E-R. Because I don't have it on my phone, I probably won't respond right away. But I will see it eventually. And then if you want to learn more about make time, the website is maketime. Thank you, John, for spending this time with us. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from today's conversation? Here are seven. Number one, focus on one or two things that you can do right now. There are a lot of time management strategies out there and you're already crunched for time. You don't have the mental bandwidth to try to do everything all at once.

So pick one thing, start small. When you start to read about time management, you start to read about time management, you start to read about attention and questions about what matters to you, I think you can all feel very overwhelming and very intimidating. And so my view is that we should start by making small changes and experience the benefit of those changes and then let those compound into larger changes. So make one small change. And maybe that's something as small as tackling the most important task that you have to do at the beginning of the day. Or it might be deleting one app from your phone. one thing and start with that one thing because that's how you get the initial momentum.

So I just mentioned tackling the most important task at the beginning of your workday. How do you know what's most important? Well, the answer to this question leads to the second key takeaway. Choose a daily highlight. John suggests asking yourself what you want the one single highlight of your day to be and then structuring your entire day around this. So for example, once he wanted to go to a baseball game with his family, But he had a bunch of work that he needed to do.

So he structured his day around being able to make it to the baseball game. And so that baseball game became that one highlight and everything else was structured around this. Think about yourself at the end of a day and ask yourself, what do I want to be the highlight of my day? What do I want to look back on and be really glad that I made time for? And so one small thing that people can try is to identify that thing each day and to write it down. I know it sounds super simple, but the act of writing something down, is amazingly powerful. And then the next simple thing is to actually schedule it,

to actually put it on the calendar and sort of build your day around it. You can even rotate your highlights so you can choose some days of the week in which you dedicate that highlight to personal things like health and family, while other days of the week feature highlights dedicated to work or business or entrepreneurship or investing. So that is key takeaway number two. Choose your daily highlight. Key takeaway number three.

Embrace your calendar. The best way to make sure that something happens is to schedule it. And the way that you can do this is by blocking your calendar. So rather than thinking of your calendar as something that starts empty that you then fill, instead flip that, invert it, think of your calendar as something that starts full. And any new event that you add on your calendar comes at the expense of something that's already on there that you have to take off. Over time, you might find that you can essentially start with a full calendar and make deliberate decisions about when you're giving your time away. If somebody asked me,

if I have time for a meeting, instead of looking at my calendar and thinking, oh, is there a blank space there, I'm looking at my calendar and I'm thinking, well, that's when I was planning to do X. Is that a worthwhile tradeoff to me? So this tactic starts with the end in mind, because first, you're crafting the perfect day. What would you be doing every hour? And this, Then, after you've crafted that perfect day, then you make tradeoffs based on those demands. And so by thinking of your calendar starting as full, thinking of your calendar is filled up with gym time and family time and working on your most important work-related and money and investing-related tasks, you bring home the ways in which you are forced to make trade-offs. In other words, you don't just think, well, I've got nothing else going on. I'll take that meeting.

Instead, you look at your calendar and you say, well, I was going to spend that time reading or I was going to spend that time catching up on the phone with one of my oldest friends. Do I really want to replace that with this meeting? And so that is key takeaway number three. Embrace your calendar and think of it as full. Key takeaway number four. Put friction or barriers between yourself and your most distracting apps. Think about some of the most distracting apps that are on your phone.

Twitter, Facebook, daily news, even email if it sends you notifications. The more difficulty that you create around accessing those distracting apps, the less likely you are to go into a time vortex and get sucked in by them. One of the things that we talk about a lot is the idea of distraction kryptonite. For most people, there is one thing that they simply cannot resist. On their phone, there might be a million distracting things, but there's probably one thing that they find themselves turning to again and again, and really just focus on kind of creating barriers around that and making that inaccessible.

So some of John's tips include figuring out where you spend too much time and uninstalling those apps from your phone. Don't check email on your phone, or at least experiment with not checking email on it, or download an app like Freedom, which will block your access to certain apps or features on your phone. That way you can restrict the amount of time that you can access a given app per day, like maybe 15 minutes a day. Or you can restrict the time of day

in which you can access that, like not before 6 p.m. He also suggests logging out of your favorite websites and apps and then changing your password to a random string of numbers and letters and storing that new password in a password manager that's not set to autofill. So that this way, anytime that you want to go to that website

or log in through that app, you have to retrieve your password, and that forces you to pause and check in and not do it mindlessly. So those are all tactics that can create friction or barriers between you and some of the distracting apps that are on your phone. And finally, before we wrap up this fourth key takeaway, beware of infinity pools. And I'm going to let John describe exactly what those are. The apps that always have an infinite source of content, we call those infinity pools. You can always jump back in at any time. So anything that you, You can pull to refresh, anything that streams, where there is truly an infinite source of content.

Those are the ones that are so hard to resist. So that is the fourth key takeaway. Create friction around your access to your most distracting apps. Key takeaway number five. Spend time with people in real life. Fill your calendar with face-to-face time with people so that you won't be as tempted to constantly be on your phone. or on your laptop. Making plans to spend time with people that you care about

not only can give you energy and just make your day better overall, but I think that in many cases, it can help create some external reinforcement to not be on your phone, to not be refreshing infinity pools because you know that you are there to spend time with people. Spending time with other people

creates this instant accountability. But in this instance, accountability, quote unquote, that doesn't mean that you're telling people that you have a goal and you're asking them to hold you to it. No, in this context, accountability means that you're making a commitment to hang out with somebody face to face and to give them your undivided attention. And when you do that, you're less likely to get distracted by your phone. And that is a form of accountability. And while you're spending time with these people, be careful, curate the people whom you spend time with, because if you're spending time with people who drain your energy or who are

toxic, that's only going to lead to more distractions. So make sure that you're spending time with people who enhance your energy rather than take away from it. So that's key takeaway number five. Spend time with people face to face. Key takeaway number six, transition from macro to micro. So take your one big goal. Like let's say your goal is reaching financial independence. It's a huge goal that's going to take for most people a decade or more. Take that giant macro goal and explode it into tiny pieces. There's a tactic that we describe in the book called Explode Your Highlight, which is about starting from a very large project that feels overwhelming and really just exploding it into tiny little bits. And this is something that we learned from reading, getting things done by David Allen back

in the day. And big part of his advice is to break projects down into very specific, small, actionable steps. Track your progress on a micro level, because this gives you the impression that you're making more progress along the way because you're celebrating milestones. So your perception shifts. Suddenly you're not thinking,

oh, I've got 10 more years until I reach financial independence, which is a big, daunting thought. Instead, you're thinking, I have one more year until I save my first $100,000. Or maybe you're thinking, I have two more years until I pay off my student loans, or I've got one more year until I pay off my car.

Or if you want to explode that into something that's even smaller, explode it into, I'm going to pay off an extra thousand dollars on my car loan this month. That goal of $1,000 this month is a subset of the bigger goal of paying off your car loan, which is a subset of the bigger goal of being debt-free, which is a subset of the much bigger goal of one day reaching financial independence. But the way that you get there is by focusing on the micro, on the milestones. And so that is key takeaway number six. Go from macro to micro.

And then finally, key takeaway number seven, make time for reflection. We are in the modern economy, we are both makers and managers. We have to be the worker on the assembly line and also the designer of that assembly line in the information economy. So we have to decide what we want to do and how to best do that thing. So how do you do that? Well, it's going to require reflection, and in order to make time for it, it needs to be on your calendar. Ideally, try to end the day with daily reflection.

What did you want to spend your time on at the beginning of the day? What did you actually end up doing with your day? And how can you adjust this going forward? This can be a five-minute daily reflection at the end of your workday. And you can also look for small ways to make time for reflection throughout your normal course of your day. John gave a great example of how he builds reflection into his normal daily routine. I try to build a lot of space around the edges into my daily routine. It might sound weird, but I like to do chores.

I like to straighten up around the apartment and do the laundry and stuff like that because it's sort of this partial attention state where I kind of need to be paying attention to what I'm doing, but I also can't be doing anything else. And so my brain is free to do the passive thinking that is so nice. necessary. So moderate physical activity, like mobbing the floor, folding laundry, taking a walk, the times that you do that can also be useful times to reflect. And during these reflection moments, think not just about what you're doing, but how you're doing it. Are you making time for the things that matter most? Or are you so busy responding to quote-unquote urgent things and

putting out fires that you're not tending to the things that are your biggest priorities? those are the questions to ask yourself in those moments of reflection. And so those are seven key takeaways from this interview with John Zaratsky, the author of Make Time. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am recording this outro from Ecuador. I am here for a total of three weeks. I've been here for two weeks as of the time that I'm recording this. Two weeks here, one more to go.

And I'm here with a bunch of people from the financial independence community. So I'm here with a bunch of listeners of the Afford Anything podcast, and we're taking part in these events that are referred to as a Chautauqua, which is basically a fancy way of saying a retreat for deep thinking. So speaking of reflection, these weeks that we're spending here are retreats in which we deeply reflect on questions like, what are the next 10 years of your life going to hold? What about the next five years? What about the next five months? Where do you find meaning? Where do you find purpose? both in and out of a traditional work environment.

Those are a lot of the questions that we've been workshopping as we've been here. If you want to check out pictures from Ecuador, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm there at Paula Pant, that's P-A-U-L-A-P-A-N-T, posting photos to Instagram from these three weeks in Ecuador. I want to take a moment to thank the sponsors on this episode, Blinkist, Away Travel, Radius Bank, and Upstart. If you want a complete list of all of the discounts and the deals that all of our our sponsors offer because almost every single one of them have some type of a discount or a deal or some sort of special offer, you can get a comprehensive list of all of those by going to afford anything.com slash sponsors. That's afford anything.com slash sponsors. I also want to thank everybody who left us a

rating or a review. As of the time of this recording, we have more than 1900 ratings on Apple Podcasts, which is formerly known as iTunes, which means we are so close to my goal of getting 2000 by the end of this year, by the end of 2019. If you haven't rated us or left us a review yet, please do so in whatever app you're using to listen to podcast. You can also go to Afford Anything.com slash iTunes. That's going to redirect you to the page on Apple Podcasts where you can leave us a review. Again, that's Afford Anything.com slash iTunes.

And I'd like to give a shout out to KRGO lightly for their awesome review. They said, quote, I've listened to Paula as a panelist on the Stacking Benjamin show for years and thought that I didn't have enough time to fit Afford Anything into my. podcast rotation. This is a deep dive podcast for next level thinking, and I actually learned something frequently. Thank you, Paula, for the wonderful podcast format, and I am so glad I finally added you to my weekly podcast rotation. Awesome. Thank you so much. And I'm glad that you added me in as well to your podcast rotation. For everyone who's listening, please hit subscribe or follow in

whatever app you're using the listener podcast so that I can be part of that rotation. And if you want to discuss today's episode with other people in the Afford Anything community, you can head to afford anything.com slash community, and that's going to take you to our free online community platform. We've just launched this new platform about a month ago, and there are a lot of community members there who are discussing all kinds of things. So I was hanging out on there for about an hour earlier today. We have tribes on there from all over the country, San Francisco, the Midwest, San Diego, Southwest Florida. So you can connect with people who are local to you.

You can discuss some of the featured questions. So right now we've got featured questions. There's a conversation going on about the Southwest Companion Pass. There is another one going on about online banks that have really good bill pay mechanisms. There's a conversation going on about how to fund an early retirement. So how to access money before you reach traditional retirement age. There are conversations going on right now about open and enrollment because it's open enrollment season right now with health insurance. So there are a lot of

great conversations that are happening and you can connect with people in the Afford Anything community to discuss all these types of topics and more. Again, that's free and it's at affordanything.com slash community. That's afford anything.com slash community. Thank you again so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I'll catch you next week.