Focused - 130: Toxic Productivity

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

At what point does your quest for productivity and efficiency become toxic? It's a good question and an easy trap. Mike and David have a few ideas.

Welcome to Focused, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Very good. And today we're talking about a topic that has been on my mind for a while, toxic productivity. So I think this is going to be a good show. Yeah, this is one of those things that is very much in line with focus.

I feel also it is very timely. There seems to be a lot of stuff surfacing. We've got a couple of things we're going to talk about in the outline already. Articles from pretty big publications that are kind of questioning, why do we care so much about this productivity stuff anyways? Yeah, and I agree. And I think that's a question we need to ask. Yeah. are kind of questioning why do we care so much about this productivity stuff anyways no yeah and i agree and i think that's a it's a question we need to ask yeah uh but before we do uh some uh an update announcement for deep focused subscribers for the subscribers to the show

we are now able to provide you an ad free show if you're in the deep focused feed there was some issues with that but we have now got those resolved. So thank you for your patience on that. But now if you're listening to this in the deep focused feed today, you get no ads and forever more. So thanks for holding out with us there. And if you'd like to subscribe to the show, you can do it right on the,

the website for a focus relay. Dot FM slash focused with the focus subscription. You get slash focused, uh, with the focus subscription, you get now the ad free version of the episode. Plus we have an extra segment at the end of each episode called deep focus, which is really fun to record. And we've got some really good content in there over the last year. So we'd appreciate if you came on board. And for those of you that already are on board,

no ads for you. Win-win. Yeah, there you go. The last episode with Colleen Wainwright in the Deep Focus section, we talked about bullet journals and paper planners and fancy pens. And you had your interest piqued, and we are going to talk about some things that maybe you have been experimenting with in the last couple of weeks. So if you subscribe to that, that's an example of the type of stuff that you'll get in Deep Focus is the down the rabbit hole stuff where we go extra nerdy about some things. Yeah. Yeah. But today we're here to talk about toxic productivity. Mike, when's the first time you heard that term?

Toxic productivity? Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that term specifically, I probably heard pretty recently, but this idea is not anything new to me. It's something that we talked about when we made the shift from free agents to focused is we don't want to be a part of the problem and contribute to people's sense of overwhelm and guilt for not getting the million things done that they have on their list to do

today. So I don't know. I feel like this has been simmering for a long time. And as the amount of information that we try to keep up with continues to exponentially increase. It's just becoming more and more of a problem. Yeah, I feel like going back to my origin story and productivity stuff with, you know, reading the Dale Carnegie book and the Stephen Covey books when I was a young attorney, I realized in myself a risk that I would spend more time fiddling with the widget than making things with the widget. And so that's always been on the back of my mind. But I also feel like in this kind of social media economy that we now have, where there's people have platforms and

everybody wants to have a content, you know, a specific content thing, you just need to go on YouTube or TikTok or any of these to find a lot of people peddling a lot of productivity stuff. And, and I do believe it can be unhealthy. Yes. I hear from listeners sometimes that I can tell have kind of fallen down the rabbit hole. And, and that's why Mike and I have a series talk about whether or not to make the show. We, like you said, we didn't want to be part of the problem and you'll, you'll know, we're never going to make a show. That's going to tell you that you just do these three things in your life is simple and everything's going to be easy.

Uh, we both struggle with this stuff and we wanted to talk openly about it with, uh, listeners that are trying to figure it out for themselves as well. But, but, um, that being said, it's always on my mind, and I'm glad it's kind of reaching more of a public, it's more publicly visible, the risk of this toxic productivity. Are you familiar with the Hotels.com commercial with Captain Obvious? Yeah, I am. Okay, so I'm a basketball fan my milwaukee

bucks are in the finals for the first time in like as long as i've been alive so i've been seeing this commercial pop up where captain obvious is at the microphone and he's hosting a press conference and his lawyer is right there he He's like, we are announcing that we are boycotting the NBA because of their stance against traveling. And then the lawyer is like, no, we're not. Well, we are suing the NBA. No, we're not. We're writing a stern letter to the NBA. No, we're not. Well, why are we here? We are the official travel partner of the NBA. He's like, but they don't even allow traveling. So he's like standard captain obvious, has no idea what's going on. And I feel like the productivity conversation that people have with themselves is very similar to that. And it goes something like, we need to take this approach of

productivity outside of just work. Yeah, you're right. So now we're applying this to our entire lives. And we're like, well, no, not exactly because you can't do all of the things in both work and life. Okay. So we'll do most of the things. No, you can't do most of the things. You actually have to pick just a few of the things. And then at that point, people are like, well, what's the point? Because we have this inherent nature that we want to do all of the things. And it feels so contrary. It feels so obvious that, yes, we should do more. And really, the best productivity advice that we can give somebody is do less, but better. Say no to things when every fiber of your being wants to keep saying yes to things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I honestly think, you know, I've said this before that like when it comes

down to all this productivity stuff, the one piece of advice that everybody's going to give you that that has really gone through this is to do less. And we're going to talk about that later in the show today. But just kind of in terms of the trap of toxic productivity, I've been reading a lot lately about magical thinking, which was something that I've always kind of been aware of. But I didn't realize that it was kind of like an intellectual study of humans and our tendency to want to believe in magic. humans and our tendency to want to believe in magic. And it goes way back in as we evolved and we didn't have explanations for a lot of stuff. The easiest way is to come up with some magical thinking for it. And it's really kind of entwined into that space between our ears. And it's very easy even in these modern days for us to want to fall down the trap of magical thinking. And I think that is kind of part of this productivity thing where,

and shame on the people who sell it this way, but there's people out there saying, you do this and that, and all your problems are solved. And because we're, we're magical thinkers, that's exactly what we want to hear, you know? Exactly. You know, and they're like, okay, give me your money. You know, where can I pay you to bring magic to my life? And the fact is, elbow grease is the way you get more productive, you know, and making hard choices is the way you get more productive. There really is no magic.

And if you can get that, you know, if you can wrap your head around that, then you're going to be okay. But so long as you believe there's some system out there that you haven't been exposed to yet, or some, you know, five easy steps that you just haven't, you know, read about yet, as long as you think that that's going to solve your problem, you are susceptible to this toxic productivity. And then you couple that with the fact that there are also people who are very well-meaning, who are just sharing what they have learned, but they're sharing it in a way as a packaged system. And then people try to follow the steps exactly, and they don't get exactly the same results, well, what's

the variable? It's the person. So at that point, it's a shame cycle. You start to feel bad about yourself. Well, it worked for them, but it's not working for me. There must be something wrong with me. So you really have to be careful about how you hear when you are in this world, because we have this belief that we can do all the things. I remember Mike Vardy, when he was on the show, talking about the improv stuff and how when you are improv, about the improv stuff and how when you are improv, uh, improvving with a comedy troupe, you,

you always respond with yes. And right. We've taken that same approach. If I have to do a, or I have to do B, we're trying to figure out how to answer that with yes. And we want a and B, and then we try to find a tool or a system,

which is going to magically make all that stuff work. Whether that be a bullet journal, whether that be a bullet journal, whether that be Notion, or even I would say Obsidian. I've noticed this with all the stuff that I've been doing around Obsidian at the Suite Setup. There are a lot of people who think they can just download the application and then all of their note-taking problems are solved. No, you have to rework the way that you think and you interact with the application. It's that classic tech support thing. We've diagnosed the problem and it's somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. You have to look at yourself and your

approach to using these tools. These tools are amoral. They're not good or bad. And they're also not entirely the solution or not entirely the problem. Yeah, there are tools that are better suited to fit the way that you work, but you have to take the role of the master craftsman and figure out how to use them. And to use them effectively requires that you say, I'm not going to try to do all the things. Instead of being a jack of all trades and a master of none, I'm going to specialize and I'm going to be really focused on these things because these are really important to me and the other stuff. I'm just going to leave that alone for now. All right, let's get into the nitty gritty. And I think it starts with this Vox article, the soothing, slightly sinister world of productivity

hacks. This is a good article. And this is talking kind of specifically about TikTok and somebody specifically on there who is showing their system with all of these fancy colored pens and people going and buying all the exact same stuff. So they have the exact same setup as this quote unquote influencer, and then they don't get the results that the influencer has. And so they get discouraged. And you get more of these people sharing more of these things. And this is not a knock on any one individual person. I think this is more just a commentary on the state of the productivity universe right now, is there's so much of this stuff. And if this one doesn't work, I'm going to try something else. But all of these things collectively, they kind of enforce this belief

that I should constantly be working, I should constantly be building, I should constantly be productive. And even that term productivity, I don't like the dictionary definition of this, which is the state or quality of producing something. You don't always have to be producing something. You don't have to look back at the end of the day and have a big long list of things that you shipped in order for that to be a successful day. Yeah. The author of the article is Beatrice Foreman, and she starts out explaining that she had found this TikToker and it seemed like a good idea to like kind of copy the methods the TikToker was sharing. So she goes in, she buys $50 worth of markers and journals. And then they sat on her desk unused because that really wasn't the right solution

for her. And that, you know, kind of let her down the rabbit hole of this idea of getting into productivity. In my mind, really, it's just a massive form of distraction. I mean, it's like one of the easiest ways to distract yourself because how could you not be wasting time? I'm sorry. How could you be wasting time if you're working on productivity, right? You're thinking, this is self-improvement. I'm making myself better. But what you're really doing is you're running from one shiny object to another, and you never stop to think about, what is it that I want to make, and what am I doing to make it? And that's what she said. There were a couple things in this article that really stood out to me, and I recommend just reading the whole article. But towards the end, she summarizes,

so the goal, it seems, isn't necessarily to be productive, but rather to look productive. And I feel like that really summarizes a lot of problems that people fall into. Yeah, I think that is definitely hitting right between the eyes. And it forces you to take a look at yourself. At least when I read it, that's how I interpret it is. Am I focused on being productive? Am I focused on looking productive? And really, what does productive even mean to me anyways?

Because that definition that I shared, I don't really like that. And I'm not quite sure how to redefine that, or even if you can. But I think that if you are going to follow through with your intention, then that is ultimately a productive use of your time. I remember when Chris Bailey was on the show and he talked about if you intend to watch Netflix all day and you watch Netflix all day, then that is the most productive thing that you can do. But when you don't have that intention and you feel this overwhelming stress and there's always this weight that you're carrying around about all the things that you should be doing and you just lack any sort of motivation to follow through and do any of them

and you end up watching Netflix for eight hours a day as an escape mechanism. That's really where the problem is. Also in this article, I thought this was fascinating. The idea of self-help, the author traces back to 1859 in a book by Samuel Smile called Self-Help, which is available reprinted on Amazon. I bought it. It was launched within months or published within months of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. And this article, I don't think specifically says this, but some other digging I did on this particular self-help book, it actually did much, much better than Darwin's book did. So this has been something people have been trying to solve for over 150 years. The problem now is that there is so much more information that we are trying to keep tabs on that is going into these systems. We don't have a quill and a piece of paper anymore.

We don't have a quill and a piece of paper anymore. We have an application that can filter through hundreds of thousands of tasks and say, these are the five that matter if you've associated the right metadata. So we dump in all of the tasks and all of the things and all of the articles that we want to read someday and all of the videos from the courses that we bought and we never went through. And I'll get to that someday. And my tool is going to be the thing that's going to allow me to do that because it's going to magically show me the right thing to do at the right time. Well, not until you define that. Yeah. You got to decide what the right thing is. Yeah. Yeah. Tools allow

us to exponentially magnify and multiply the problem. And so it's becoming bigger, but really it's always been there. It's just the sheer volume of it makes it easier to see. Yeah. And I feel like a thing that you really need to keep in mind with this is all of these definitions are set by you in respect to yourself. And anytime you go external for those definitions, you are asking for trouble because suddenly you're trying to define what it means to be successful by somebody else's measuring stick. For instance, I get a lot of email and I try to read it all and I reply to a lot of it, but I don't reply to all of it. And sometimes I even may put something aside and reply to it in a week or two. And, and somebody wrote me with a question and I waited

a couple of weeks before I got around to answering it. Cause it was something I had to think about. And then they wrote me back and he said, basically called me a fraud. He's like, you say you're so productive. It took you two weeks to answer my email. And I was thinking, well, you know, aren't you, aren't you special? And then, you know, but then I go and look and I spent 90 hours working on the next field guide over the last, you know, several months. And I'm like, actually, I feel like I am pretty productive. So maybe this guy's definition is different than mine. And then of course, I just archived and deleted the email. But it really is, I think, a challenge as you go through this stuff to kind of keep your own sense of identity about it. And that's another thing where these all-in-one systems work. I mean, we talk about so many great books on this show. James Clear show uh james clear is a good example we talk

about that habits book almost like every month it seems like it comes up but i don't use everything he talked about in his book i took the pieces of it that work for me and i left the rest adrift same thing with getting things done and every other system that's ever come up i mean i have cobbled together something that works for me, but there's no single place in the world where you're going to go find it written down. Yeah, let's get into that after this break. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focused and get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post.

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Once again, get that $75 credit at Indeed.com slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D. This offer is valid through September 30. Terms and conditions do apply. Our thanks to Indeed for the support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So before the break, you mentioned GTD, and there is another article here that I read a while back, but as we were prepping for this episode, resurfaced again and it came to mind, and that is the rise and fall

of getting things done in The New Yorker. This is an episode that caused quite a stir. It was written by Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and a bunch of other great books. And it was talking about Merlin Mann and his productivity journey and how he gave this talk at Google, famous talk about Inbox Zero. And shortly after that, he kind of was questioning what he was doing. These are Cal's words in terms of promoting these productivity ideas. And he wrote this post for his site, 43 Folders, which was kind of the last thing that he officially wrote about this, saying this whole idea of cranking, this is not something I'm willing to support anymore. Paraphrasing, he had a book deal, which he even said in the article, I'm probably going to lose

my book deal because of this. And then he kind of shifted and now he's doing these podcasts. then he kind of shifted and now he's doing these podcasts. And because his work has shifted, this GTD system that he used to be a big proponent of, now he doesn't really need it. And I have felt this myself and felt a little bit bad about it. And I think this is worth unpacking. You may find something that works for a period of time. That does not mean that it's going to work forever. And then also, you may find something that maybe is close to the right thing for you. But I think you always have to be asking yourself, what is the correct implementation of whatever philosophy or method or system that you are attracted to? What is the right way to do this for me? Yeah. I mean, I remember when Merlin was going through that. I mean, him and I are friends. We're not best friends, but I remember his concern that, you know, he felt like he may be adding to the problem, you know, with 43 folders that people would read that and, and get lost in these toxic productivity rabbit holes.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I feel like that was a real concern he had. And I think that's a lot of the reason why he, he walked away from it. You can't blame somebody for something like that. And I think that's a lot of the reason why he walked away from it. buzzwords that comes up all the time. And the people who use that word, they really don't apply it the way that Merlin had taught it in that famous Google talk. Maybe we can put a link to that in the show notes. I have felt that frustration myself when you're trying to communicate something and it's just not landing and everybody else is taking it a different way and they're morphing it into something that you never intended, I don't know what you can do at that point other than to just kind of disappear for a little while.

And I can see how that could be really, really frustrating. And I don't know what I would do if I was in that specific situation, but I think we're kind of dangerously close to it too, where we always have to be asking ourselves as, I don't want to use the word influencer, but as voices in this space, what are we contributing here? Which message are we amplifying? Are we amplifying the message that this thing right here, this is going to solve all the problems? Or are we helping people to discover this stuff for themselves? really big difference there. People want the quick solution, right? The life hack that's going to save them an hour a day every day for the rest of their life. But that really doesn't exist. And so you have to talk to people in a way that gives them hope that their situation can get better. I do believe in the whole idea of self-help and constant progress. can get better. I do believe in the whole idea of self-help and constant progress.

And habits are a big piece of that for us. We've talked about that before. But I do think you do have to force people to discover this for themselves. They have to find their own way and have their own wins. I taught my 13-year-old son how to time block. And I had to do it in a way where it wasn't just like, okay, follow my method, because his schedule is very, very different than mine. And even if he understood the basic principles, if he tried to do it the way that I do it, this is just going to be something that doesn't work for him. It's going to leave a bad taste in his mouth. And maybe if I follow this negative rabbit hole all the way, he questions every other productive piece of advice that I try to give him in the future. So I want to set him up for success. And I had

to do it in a way that was uncomfortable to me because I had to put it in a language that he would understand and he would be able to apply for himself. And that is really hard to do if you're not sitting down one-on-one with somebody. Agreed. You know, I think that, I mean, in terms of our show, I think you and I do a very good job of walking that line because we were so concerned with it with the inception of the show. In fact, the subtitle of our show is about productivity being more than just cranking widgets. And that really kind of gets to the heart of the problem. We don't want to be a show that teaches you how to crank widgets. We want to teach you a show that makes you think about focus and

priorities. So it really goes, and I can assure you, if you're listening, that Mike and I are constantly thinking about this with what shows we bring on, what people we choose to allow on as guests. This is a constant thing for us, because I really feel like you and I are against the tide on this. I feel like this show is never going to be as popular as it could be if we just told people there were five easy steps, because those shows are praying on this magical thinking. They're really being unfair to their audience. And I don't want to say every show

that has a topic that has five easy steps is bad. But I do think that it's really kind of appealing to the worst instincts about this stuff and does make people feel worse about themselves and doesn't really help in the end. So I think that's a bad idea. It's very much like the late night infomercials where if you sit and think about it rationally for a while, you kind of know there's more than meets the eye, but you don't ever stop to think about it. At the late night infomercial, you're too tired probably to think clearly about it. But with a lot of this productivity stuff, we just want to believe that there's a magic bullet solution here. So how did it go with your son? Is he enjoying the block scheduling? Is it working for him?

He is. He's time blocking blocking he's starting to get into to sketchnoting and a lot of that is just because he sees me model it you know this is stuff that i i do and that's when we talk about things we we try to share just our experience but i would throw out a caveat here i think this applies to any sort of system that anybody would teach is you cannot just copy paste. And I know I've talked to individuals who have done that very thing with success with the GTD system. So I know there's at least a small body of evidence that can work for at least a period of time. But for me personally, I've seen the stuff that really sticks has to be made your own. You have to look at this and you have to ask, what does this mean for me?

So he'll watch me doing my sketchnotes and he'll see me time blocking and he'll ask questions and then he'll translate that into the benefit that he can get from it, which is what provides the motivation to keep going with it. I had a similar predicament with my daughter. She was a really great student all through high school. She got into UCLA, which is a competitive university here in Southern California. And I knew that the tricks she used in high school were no longer going to you'll be a high flyer in college because suddenly you're in a room full of high flyers, you know, and some people aren't going to do as well. And I wanted to give her some tools, but I didn't really think she was going to be receptive to me saying, okay, you need to do this kind of journaling or you need to do this kind of block scheduling. But so what I decided to do was I, I went to Cal Newport. He has a book called, you know, like how to get straight A's in college or what, I forget what the exact title is.

Now I got to look it up. How to become a straight A student. And I gave her the book and I gave her the book and I said, Hey, here's something I think you should read. This was the summer before she started her freshman year. I said, just read the book, but understand that this is a starting point and you need to make it work for you. You know, nothing in here is in stone. And that's all I told her. And she read the book and she put together a system and she finished her freshman year with straight A's, you know, at a good university. And it's fun to kind of like check in on her and like every quarter she has a paper journal she puts together and she plans out each week and she knows when she's, I mean, she, I know she took a bunch out of that book, but I know she's also done her own thing. And the difference is she doesn't have the magical thinking productivity gene, right? I gave her some good resources.

She sucked out of them what she needed, and she got on with work. I think the whole productivity, toxic productivity, comes from the people like you and me, frankly, that are always like, well, what else is there? How can I make this system better? What can I do better? What's the other system that's going to work? And how come I shouldn't try that one instead this week?

And that's the stuff that gets you in trouble but I do think a lot of this is just becoming aware and I think one of the goals for this show is to be aware to always share that with the audience that we are self-aware on this stuff and you should be too and to recognize that any single resource whether that be a book whether that that be a video, a course, a podcast, an article, whatever, is not going to be the be-all, end-all solution because this is not, if you've been in this space for any amount of time, a knowledge problem. space for any amount of time, a knowledge problem. It's a motivation, it's an energy, it's an attention problem. And the time management aspect of this is kind of level one, I would argue. You can have the time to do something, but if you don't have the energy, you don't have the

motivation to follow through and do something during the time that you've set aside for it, then it's not going to happen. So what ultimately you need to do is you need to look at these things and you need to ask yourself, so what? What does this mean to me? I remember a while back, Joe and I covered the book How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler for Bookworm. And when Joe picked this book, I thought, this is the dumbest thing ever. We've read 42 of these books already. Why do we need to read a book on how to read a book? But this is one of those influential books that I can point to as a turning point in my self-development learning journey because that book talked about when you,

and it was written, it's one of those classic books, so it's written a long time ago. It talks about how when you read a book, you are engaging in a conversation with the author. And most of us don't approach self-help productivity type material that way. We approach it as, I'm the learner, they're the expert, I'm going to let them talk, and I'm going to do everything that they say.

But how to read a book basically encourages you to understand the arguments that the author is making and then respond and basically judge them for yourself. And then later on in the book, it talks about syntopical reading, which is, okay, you've read this book, but you've also read a bunch of other books. So assuming that any one of these books doesn't have the complete solution, how do you reconcile all of these different contrary pieces of information? And maybe they're complementary, maybe they're contrary, but basically, you've got to synthesize all this stuff in your head and you have to formulate

what you believe about these things that you are learning and this approach is very very different than what we kind of naturally fall into with this shiny new object stuff it's like oh hey there's a new thing that looks really nice i. I bet if I tried that, everything's going to get easier. No, that's just one more data point. And it may actually help things, but you have to decide that for yourself and you have to decide how it's going to help you. So synthesize all this stuff, take what you want and leave the rest. I really like the idea that this is a conversation with the book the uh you know the youtuber podcaster tiktoker whatever and not like more of a lecture or and you're not sitting on your hands when you engage with this material and i think that kind of combines with another point that i'd like to

make in this regard that there's very little of this stuff that is new. Yeah. We're learning more about the human brain and what motivates it. And I think that really helps figuring out, you know, what the better solutions are. That's something new, but, you know, what was it? 1500 that you found a productivity book. You know, I'm sure that if there was the resources and you could go back to ancient Rome, that there would be somebody peddling productivity stuff back then, too. You know, it's just I think this has been going on. And a lot of the advice through these books is the same.

You know, I mean, a lot of stuff is kind of common sense, but you need to hear it. I think the trick for a person who wants to make something work for this is making their own soup. Learn about all the various methods and ideas, and then put together a recipe that works for the unique combination of cells that is you. Yeah, and don't ever assume that you're going to get to the point where there I am now productive and everything is solved and everything is great. There's this phrase that I really like, permanent beta. And I try to take this approach to my own life where I am never going to be finished. never going to be finished with in terms of of an app you know an app is in beta until the the day that it is released to the public the day that it is shipped and i kind of view my life as being shipped on the day that i die yeah and until that point i am going to try to do the best that i can with everything that I have, whether that be time, money, resources,

whatever. We were talking the other day and a mutual friend had asked us, what is your biggest fear? And I mentioned it is living a life of insignificance. So I want to do everything that I can to help people, but I also have to recognize that the best way that I can help people sometimes is to admit that I don't have it all figured out. Here's my learnings. You can use this as another data point on the graph that is your brain, but recognize that some stuff is going to work, some stuff won't. There's nothing wrong with you as a person. It's not a judgment on your character if you try something and it doesn't work.

But constantly be tinkering. Constantly be challenging your maybe limiting beliefs. Just because you've done something one way for a while doesn't mean that that's the best way. Be willing to try something different. And this is where collecting dots, I find it helpful to find dots that are outside of your current bubble of belief. I think we're going to talk about that in a whole other episode, this whole idea of liminal thinking. But we have all of these preconceived notions about reality and the way things are based on our experience.

And so experience some new things. Yeah, just don't put your whole life on pause to dump everything into that shiny new tool, expecting that as soon as I do this, everything is going to click because most likely it's not. But there's going to be something there if you're going to experiment with stuff and you're going to try some new things. You'll be able to figure out little pieces, little learnings that you can glean and you can meld together into your own method, your own system, your own way of doing things and living your life to accomplish the bigger purpose, the bigger mission that really drives and motivates you. absolutely, that is a valid approach. But just don't copy and paste something that you see somebody else doing. Try to make it

your own. Yeah, I would say even further on that point that anytime you find yourself feeling that you are done at some piece of your life or some position, that's where the dragons are because that's when you get in the most trouble. You know, when you, you believe, Oh, I get, I understand this. I don't need to think about this anymore. It's solved. And I mean, some of my biggest failures in my life have been, have come from that mindset. Yeah. I like that. There's a really good book that I've recommended to a lot of people by Carl Pillemer. It's called 30 Lessons for Living. And it's by this guy who went into nursing homes and interviewed a bunch of people who just, they were the diamonds that stood out in the places that he visited. A lot of nursing homes are very sad places because they have people there who they don't get to see their family and they're in a

lot of pain. And he would always find like the one or two people that are there who are just loving life. And he would ask them basically, what's your secret? So he did thousands of these interviews and he kind of boiled it down to these 30 different lessons that they taught. And that's the kind of approach that I want to have. These people that he interviewed, I want that to be me at the end of my life. I don't want to be frustrated because I didn't achieve a goal that I thought I should have gotten to. I just want to constantly be experimenting and constantly be growing and asking myself,

well, what's the next thing? Yeah, I just read a book called Ikigai, where they went interviewed a bunch of very old people in Japan. And that was another very common trait that they all had like an inquisitive nature. But as they got older, they were still learning. And I think that's a big deal. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focus for high speed, secure and anonymous VPN services and an extra three months for free. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but when you open an incognito window, there's a little note that tells you that your activity could still be visible to your employer,

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F-O-C-U-S-E-D. Go to expressvpn.com slash focus to get that three extra months for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash focus to learn more. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. So we've been talking about avoiding toxic productivity, but we're also talking about keeping an inquisitive nature. And I do think there is a slippery slope there. I think you can use the idea of an inquisitive nature to bring yourself to places that you probably shouldn't be going. Agreed. I think the best thing that I do to fight against that with mixed success, I will say, is like a little kid, always be asking why. When I see stuff like the TikTok

When I see stuff like the TikTok productivity stuff, and I see what they are doing, and I'll ask myself, well, why are they doing it that way instead of whatever their way? And remember, this is a conversation that I can't really have with them one-on-one. So I have to answer that question to make a judgment about it for myself. And I give myself permission to disagree with these so-called experts. And that is very freeing, but it also can be very intimidating because there's also the imposter syndrome that kicks in. It's like, well, who do you think you are? These people have written books and they're New York Times bestsellers and they've published these things and they run these companies much, much more successful than you've ever been. Right. But I have to recognize that they're not me and the things that I've defined as important

in my life are not the things that they've defined as important in their life. So I can look at what they do and say, oh, that's cool. So I can look at what they do and say, oh, that's cool. But then my default is going to just be to discard that because I know that they're coming from a different place. Unless something jumps out to me and I'm like, hey, totally selfish with ideas and concepts and be willing to fire them, be willing to give them a trial period. It's all good. But I also think that, you know, that slippery slope can be avoided if you just bring some mindfulness to this whole process. I mean, I think one of the biggest ways to avoid toxic productivity is to be aware of the existence of toxic productivity. You know, I mean, I think a lot of people just don't realize that this is just a very, very fancy method to avoid doing work, you know, and you've got to keep yourself accountable. I mean, we talked, I don't know, a couple of years ago about the idea that I have of moving the needle. And to this day, I track time every day, not only at the

time I spend and where I spend it, but how much time did I spend moving the needle? And for me, that's like making a product, making a podcast, you know, doing actual work for clients. And every day I have to face that number at the end of the day. And that really is the easiest way for me to avoid toxic productivity. Because if I get to the end of the day, I'm like, well, today I tried out seven different kinds of paper to make the perfect journal. And I didn't move the needle on any of my projects. that is the cold water in the face you need, right? Yeah. And so I just really think a lot of this is be inquisitive, but be aware. And I know it sounds like we're giving you two messages, but I think they fit really nicely together if you bring awareness, if you bring that mindfulness to bear.

I think another piece of this is recognizing what impact this stuff actually has on you. I remember Jim Rohn saying at one point, three key questions to ask about every person that is in your life. Basically, who am I allowing to speak into my life? What impact is that having? into my life, what impact is that having? And is that okay? And when you think about your relationships, your physical relationships, I mean, you can't necessarily fire your family members from being a voice that is speaking into your life. Even if they are a source of limiting beliefs and stress and anxiety, you got to figure out a way maybe to make some of that stuff work. But there are also voices that we subscribe to that are having a negative impact on us. And we just continue to go drink from that toxic well over and over and over again. and over and over again. And if you are going to a source of productivity advice and you're hearing people talk about how awesome it is and you get excited and keep trying this stuff and you keep getting discouraged and you every time you do that, you're adding more weight to the backpack

that you are that burden that you're carrying around with you all the time. So recognizing is kind of like listening to the news, you know, is this producing anxiety in me? And if it is like, that's not okay. There's enough of that going around. I don't need another toxic source of information in my life. I don't need somebody else continuing to put, put bricks in my backpack and just turn that off. Well, and that kind of gets back to the conversation element. If you're not getting anything out of the conversation, then stop the conversation and go talk to somebody else. Yep. Yep. And then also when you're in a conversation

with somebody, you don't have to make a judgment on the entire message. That's another big thing I got from reading How to Read a Book. It totally changed the way that I take book notes because I am a completionist. And prior to reading that book, I would try to jot down every single big idea from every book that I read. And I would end up with these notes from a single book that were pages and pages long, just bullet outlines, and I'm basically recreating the entire book. I had shifted from that, though, and I now create these mind maps, which start off with the basic structure. So I've got the book in the middle, and I've got major nodes for the major sections, and different nodes for the different chapters,

but I'm now only jotting down the things that are important to me. Sometimes I go through a whole book and I only jot down a couple of things in that mind node file. I give myself permission to say, you know what? This just isn't a very good book for me. Maybe this is a great book for somebody else. I'm not really getting anything out of it. It doesn't mean there's nothing valuable there, though. With Bookworm, I have to finish some of these books. And so I'm not going to waste all that time and effort that I'm putting into reading this. I'm going to find the one or two things in there that can benefit me in my situation. So I'm going to take that and I'm going to just leave everything else.

Agreed. We talked a little bit earlier about the ultimate productivity hack, you know, and the idea of doing less. And I think that is an underlying issue that people need to take into account. I mean, I think one of the reasons for toxic productivity is the false belief that the magical thinking principle is going to lead you to the state of affairs where you've got some combination of app and fancy paper and artisanal writing instrument, and suddenly you are going to be able to put 20 gallons of water in your 10 gallon tank. And you need to accept going in that that will never happen. Yes. You know, I just read, it's not a brand new book, but procrastinate on purpose by Rory

Vaden. And he talks in that book about this analogy, which you have probably heard hundreds of times if you're familiar with a lot of these self-help productivity type books of the jar with the big rocks, right? And the traditional way that this story goes is you have to put the big rocks in the jar if you're going to get them in at all. And the question that Rory asks in Procrastinate on Purpose is, well, that's fine, but what if you've got more big rocks than will fit in the jar? At some point, you have to choose what is actually going to go into the jar, right? Because we can't do it all. I guess to beat this analogy to death, you could get a bigger jar,

yada, yada, yada. But assuming that we've all got the same 24 hours in a day, we've got the same seven days in a week, you have to recognize these are the confines of the space that I am playing in. These are my limitations. And within this defined space, these defined limitations, these constraints, I'm going to do the very best that I can. And recognize also that that does not mean, going back to the definition of productivity, that you are producing every single moment that you have. You can't constantly have an output. You've got to have an input. You have to take care of yourself. You got to put your own oxygen mask on first before you attempt to help somebody else. But come to terms with the fact that it's not all

going to fit. Yeah. Well, let's just, I want to stop for a minute and talk about the size of the jar, because I think that is a part of toxic productivity is the idea that it's possible to make the jar bigger. And the jar in this tortured analogy is your time. And I got news for you, you know, um, with Jeff Bezos has a gazillion dollars or something. I don't know how much money he has, but he has as many hours in a day as you and I do. And no amount of money he spends is going to give him 25 hours. So the jar is never getting bigger. That is not what productivity is about. If that's what you think it's about, you are going to be unhappy. Really what I think this is all about is figuring out what are the big rocks, you know, and putting those in the jar. And, you know, the assumption that you always thought, you know, the assumption that came with the analogy was, well, the big rocks, you're never going to have more big rocks than you have room in the jar. But no, that's a great question. Because if you do, you've got a serious problem.

And the follow-up from that, which is, I've seen people try to talk about this analogy and sometimes it goes awry and they ask people, like, what's the point of the story? And it's like, you can always squeeze in one more thing. No, no, you cannot. Maybe at the moment, the first time you hear this, the first time you understand this idea of putting in the big rocks first, that is true, that you can squeeze in a couple more things. But you've talked about how when you do that, it's like running downhill and you're always on the verge of falling on your face. You don't want to do that. You want to have some margin because things are never going to go according to plan. And the question that I always try to ask myself is, what would it look

like if I did less, but I did it better? Yep. Ladies and gentlemen, here's the one productivity hack that's going to change your life. Do less. Just do less. Nobody likes that one, though. But it's all about obligation elimination. I really feel like the more I think about this, the more I see examples in my own life. If you do too many things, your work becomes crap. And the counterintuitive truth is that you can get more done if you do less. You feel like, well, the more I take on, that means the more I'm going to do. No, that's not true. Because you're going to spend a bunch of time managing all that stuff and

worrying about it and not actually doing it. If you take on less, you can do more. Yeah. And less but better is an uncomfortable choice to make for anyone who works with other people, which is everybody. Because what you have to do is you have to say, this is the most important thing to me. And when you say that, you feel selfish. And so whether it be a boss, a manager, or a customer who sends you an email, they will insidiously behind the scenes make these demands of your time. And it is very easy to say, well, yes, this one thing that I defined as the most important to me, that's still the case. But I think I can probably squeeze in this other thing too. And then you squeeze in that thing, and then you squeeze in another thing, and then you squeeze in another thing, and then your jar is full, and you haven't paid attention to the thing that you've defined as really, really important to you for a long time. You've neglected it. You feel resentful that it got to this point. And you maybe feel stuck like, well, I've made all these obligations to all these other people. I can't let them down now. And you feel like there's nothing you can do to change your situation to get it back where you wanted it to be. And both of those beliefs, you know, that I have to stake my claim here and I have to fight off everybody else's

attempts to take my time, energy, and attention, and the fact that I just have to figure out a way to make all this stuff work. And if my stuff has to suffer, so be it. Both of those, I think, are wrong. It's been a struggle for me personally to give myself permission to stick up for myself. But I've also noticed that when I do that, most of the time, people are fine with it. It's just this implicit thing with the way that work gets done that it's one of those things you don't really talk about it. But the moment that you talk about it and you confront it, it's one of those things that you don't really talk about it. But the moment that you talk about it and you confront it, it's really not as bad or as scary as maybe you thought it was. Yeah. And I think just like going back to that earlier email where the guy was kind of a jerk

to me because I didn't respond within 10 hours or whatever, you got to not get invested in stuff like that. You know, that's just not, you know, it's your story. It's your journey. It's not somebody else's journey. And you can't let external people define what is productive to you kind of

to get back to the beginning of this. But I really do think, you know, we can't emphasize it enough. I mean, if you feel like you're running downhill if you feel like you've got a lot of big rocks that haven't made it into your jar yet then you have too many you have too many things on your plate and you've got to make tough decisions and that's another

kind of failing of the productivity space that leads to terms like toxic productivity is they spend all the time talking about tactics but not enough time talking about you know overall strategy and um like the analogy i use with people is like look if you're on a sailboat there's two things you can do you can either decide where you want to go you can point your boat in the right direction or you can learn how to get really good at tying knots. And learning to tie knots is very satisfying and it's great. But if you're sailing in the wrong direction, having the best knots in the ocean isn't going to help you. And you've got to think about that stuff.

And you've got to make those hard decisions. That's one of the reasons I love that quarterly retreat question you have where you say, what can I stop doing? I think that's a great question that we should constantly be asking ourselves. retreat process, which I do every single quarter. I ask myself, what should I start doing? What should I keep doing? And what should I stop doing? And I force myself every single personal retreat to choose at least one thing to stop doing. And that is because having to put something in that space forces me to re- reevaluate the commitments that I've made and ask myself, is this still important to me? Maybe it was important at one point, but maybe it's not anymore. And at that point, I'm going to let it go because I have to find something. And what that does, the result of that process is it's a system for maintaining this margin or this white space in my life, which actually then

frees me up to engage with new opportunities and new things that I want to do. It's the quarters that I don't pick something for that question that I've gotten in trouble and I've been overextended and things come crashing down. Yeah. I mean, just learning to say no, understanding it's, it's easy to say it's much easier to say no than yes. And I know that's contrary to what most people say, right? Most of us, I'm probably, it's really hard to say no to something. But when you think about what a no encompasses versus what a yes encompasses, it should be much easier to say no. Because a no is the end of the story, whereas a yes is a whole new series of obligations. It's another series of big rocks for your jar.

It's just the beginning. And if you just keep that in mind, I think that can help. That's something that I've gotten much better at, frankly, over the years, you know, and, um, and I can always continue to get better at it, but I think it's just, it's not that I suddenly got this thick skin. It's that I started to understand the stakes more. Yep. I think that's a big part of it is understanding, understanding, having a long-term perspective. Yes is easier in the short term, but no is definitely easier in the long term. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Literati. If you've always said that you want to read more, then this summer is yours for the taking. Empower your inner reader with Literati Book Clubs, where you can read alongside the world's most inspiring authors

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Head to literati.com slash focused to learn more and read more with Literati. That URL, one more time, literati.com slash focused. Our thanks to Literati for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. All right, Mike, we've been talking a lot. What can we do in response to toxic productivity? How can you and me and the listeners avoid that and actually make progress on ourselves at the same time? Great question. One of the things that really spoke to me about this is something that Michael Hyatt posted recently. We've had him on the show, and he posted a picture on Twitter of himself driving his boat and talking about how we are human beings, not human doings. That phrase, when I read that, really hit me.

You are not defined by what you accomplish, what you produce, what you ship. You are, and that is enough. ship. You are, and that is enough. So be okay with not being perfect. Be okay with not executing on your 12-week year or whatever goals you've set. Those deadlines in the big scope of things are all artificial anyways. At the end of your life, hitting or missing a deadline is not going to matter. That was one of the lessons from that book. And this is very obvious, but no one on their deathbed wishes they would have worked more. It's all the other stuff they wish they would have made time for, not the doing, just the being. I wish I would have spent more time with my family, just being in the same place with them. So don't put this pressure on yourself.

Just be okay with the way things are and don't force yourself to constantly try to fix your situation. Yeah. And to pick up on what we were talking about earlier about doing less, I think that really can open up a lot for you because when you start doing less, then you start doing the rocks you keep, you start doing that stuff really well. And there's a massive amount of satisfaction that comes from that. And it's a, you know, to use the term flywheel effect, you know, the better you get at doing the few things, the more you want to do them. And suddenly you are moving the needle. You don't find yourself straining into toxic productivity. Instead, you find yourself straining into useful productivity. Like this is the thing

I really like doing, but can I get 1% better at this with a simple tweak here and there? And suddenly, you know, it becomes like a kind of a, it just, the inertia of the system carries itself. It's, it's really quite an amazing experience. I, I know this because I experienced it. I wasn't getting field guide shipped until the big trigger moment for me was time blocking and hyper scheduling and suddenly saying, the things that are important to me are going in my calendar and the other things may or may not get done. And suddenly everything just kind of came together. That's a great example of making this stuff your own. I mean, hyper scheduling is something that we've

talked about, but it's not a term I really heard before you wrote about it. And you can draw a lot of parallels between that and Cal Newport's time blocking, but it didn't stick until you connected it to some stuff that was important to you and and you did it for yourself another thing i would recommend is if you find yourself as a person who habitually has more rocks than than room in your jar is that you actually find a way to force white space into your life and you know for me that is my know, I mean, that's a big deal to me. And, you know, my wife wants to go to Disneyland every couple of weeks. We're going to find a way to do that. And you know what, that means I get a day off to go play with my wife,

right? You know, we have a dog and I got to take care of the dog. Well, as productive as I want to be, I still need to go for a walk with the dog or I have tomatoes in the backyard I need to take care of. And I think that if you're struggling, a productivity nerd way to tweak with your own software is to take some sort of obligation that is a low stakes obligation and make that an obligation. And suddenly you do have downtime. Does that make sense? I'm kind of rambling a little bit, but that makes sense. Well, I love that definition of thinking of yourself and hacking your own software. I would maybe take that in a little bit different direction. Let's assume that your calendar is your hardware. And just like your hard disk, if it is completely full, everything else is going to be slow. You've got to have that margin. And that just makes everything else easier. Great book titled Margin by Richard Swenson, which I read a couple of years ago. And that was really the inspiration

behind that what should I stop doing question from my personal retreat process. And the more that I have implemented this in my life, the more peace and calm has come about as a result. And you can have margin in a lot of different areas. So you could have margin in your schedule. You could have margin in your emotions. You could have margin in your finances. And really, the goal is to strive for this in every area of your life. That's what Richard Swenson would say. And I think I agree with that. It feels counterintuitive. It feels like if I'm going to embrace margin now instead of working, then down the road, I'm going to have to work even harder. But something magical happens when you have that margin where just the fact that you're a little bit more relaxed, that changes

the way that you engage with the people and the projects around you. And it really does just make everything more pleasant and more effective. Yeah. The problem for me was when I put margin in my calendar, when I say, okay, I'm going to work till 2 p.m. and then I'm just going to have empty space in my calendar until for the rest of the day, maybe my brain doesn't stop working at 2 PM. It says, Oh, look, you don't have any other obligations. You can keep going for another three hours. And what changed it for me was not just having that margin, but actually programming in downtime. You know, if you like video games, I'm going to play video games at two o'clock for, you know, an hour, or I'm going to take the dog to the park, or I'm going to take my wife out to Disneyland, you know, whatever it is. I think putting that in the calendar for me actually

was the only way that I ever successfully took advantage of margin. Sure. I think that's a very valid approach. You know, you're going to be spending all 24 hours of your day in some way, shape, or form. Just most of us have a default towards, well, I'm going to spend as many of those hours as I can being, quote unquote, productive and making something and producing something and putting fun stuff on your calendar and carving out the time for that, that's a great way to create more work margin and make sure that you're not neglecting the stuff that you think is important and finding the time for the things that you really want to do. Yeah. The Michael Hyatt quote, the being and doing really resonates with me. I don't know what it is

with my software that makes me want to keep producing things. I should just take it easy, right? But I actually have to plan around it. And I've kind of found a way. And that works for me. It may not work for you. Give yourself permission to take a break and uh kind of a complimentary idea to that is keep things simple i came across this idea the other day of a complexity bias which is simply preferring a complex solution to things and i am totally guilty of this. We've all heard the phrase, keep it simple, stupid, but putting that into practice is something totally different than understanding what that phrase is really talking about. And I find myself having to push back against a complexity bias and embrace the simple solution. When you embrace a simple solution, there's a whole bunch of benefits

that come from that. In a work context, a simple solution probably doesn't take as long. It also is more easily communicated to somebody else if you wanted to delegate something. If you were going to try and automate something, there's less steps that you have to figure out how to automate. So when you think about all the different areas where we would try to create solutions to problems, every single one, I ask myself, why in the world would I just default to this complexity bias? Why would I make this stuff so much harder than it has to be? Yet that's still what I naturally do. so much harder than it has to be yet. That's still what I naturally do. Yeah. I recently caught myself in one of those traps as well. The, um, the team that I have helping me with the, the things I make, we use air table to track projects with like the Kanban style, you know, project tracking, but then we use base camp to communicate. And that was bothering me.

So I got thinking, okay, I spent an entire Saturday setting up the perfect notion system for my little team. And I got to the end of the day and I realized this doesn't fix anything. Not only do we not have a problem with the old system, this doesn't make anything better. And why am I going to make the people that I work with have to learn something new for no reason,

you know? Yeah. You know, and I, so I didn't ship it. That was it. But I wasted a whole day on it and complexity bias, you know,

just, I just, I don't know what was wrong with me. Sometimes you go crazy, you know, we all do that. I think the fact that you didn't ship it is actually a pretty big win because you could also take the approach, even though it's a sunk cost, right? You could say, well,

I put all this work into creating this system. We should at least try it out for a while. But if everybody else is going to be annoyed by it, it's just going to bog everything else down. going to be annoyed by it. It's just going to bog everything else down. It's going to make things harder at Max Sparky Enterprises. And why would you do that when you think about it rationally, right? Yeah. Look, I think we've really covered a lot today, but the underlying topic of this show is toxic productivity. And I think Mike and I are susceptible to it because we do, both of us are super interested in this stuff and always looking for new and shiny. I haven't even, Mike and I even have a better excuse because we want to come to you, dear listener, with good information. So we want to try everything out to see what works and what

doesn't. So that's the ultimate justification, right? But I think we all just need to be self-aware. I feel like that's the one thing you can do to avoid this problem that Merlin worried about and this problem, this trap that frankly a lot of people fall into. I agree with that. I would also just echo the fact that you're a human being, not a human doing. And so your primary reason for existence is not to be productive. And I've heard this phrase before, and it's real subtle, but I think it's pretty profound. You work in order to live. You don't live in order to work.

you work in order to live you don't live in order to work yeah and probably we would all agree with that but does the way that you are investing your time attention and energy back that up or does it tell a different story i am i just wrote a post over at max sparky about the eisenhower matrix and how i had kind of fallen into a trap of thinking that anything that was a, a high priority was, or anything that was a high value project was also an urgent project. And I felt like I was creating this false sense of urgency in my life. I had to,

I turned the Eisenhower matrix into an Eisenhower line. I'll put the post in the show notes, but I do think that to me is part of it. Like when I get like that, I find myself suddenly feeling frantic all the time, stepping back and just kind of looking at, you know, Hey, what's going on? What am I, what, what's the underlying motivations that is causing me to feel this way and pick that apart. That helps too, I think. Agreed. All right.

Well, like I said, we covered a lot today, but if toxic productivity is on your mind, I hope that you're giving it some thought and you don't fall into those traps. If you have fallen into those traps, it's okay. You can pull yourself out. We all do it once in a while. There's a great forum to talk about this stuff over at talk.macpowerusers.com. Uh, we have a little focused room there. And if you're dealing with these issues, if you've struggled with them or found some good way to avoid them, we'd love to hear from you.

Yes. And before we go, uh, let me tell you about another show here on RelayFM, which is Rocket. If you like this show, there's a good chance that you'll like Rocket too. Rocket covers all the hard tech news of the week, but in a extremely fun way from the latest Apple news to scams with fake blood testing companies, Rocket is there. You can be too at relay.fm slash rocket or just search for rocket wherever you get your podcasts we are the focus podcast you can find us at relay.fm slash focused thank you to our sponsors indeed expressvpn and little roddy we are going to be talking about liminal thinking in the next episode in two weeks there's a great book on that uh We'll put a show. Who's the author of that book again, Mike? Dave Gray.

Dave Gray. I just bought the book. I'm going to read it between now and then. Of course, Mike has already read it, but if you want to read it so you've got that before we start, that'd be a good idea. And we'll see you next time.