Focused - 78: Changing Defaults with John Zeratsky

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

John Zeratsky had the dream job at Google but left it all to write a book, Make Time, and reset his defaults. Learn about John's journey and how resetting your own defaults can make all the difference.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm your host, Mike Schmitz, and I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. How's it going today, David? Great, Mike. And yourself? Doing really well. I'm excited to have a very special guest on this episode. We're joined by John Zorotsky, author of Make Time. How's it going, John? It's going well. Thanks for having me. How's it going, John? It's going well. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So a little bit of backstory here. I first heard about the Make Time book when we recorded episode 70 with Shahid, and he mentioned it. He mentioned the idea of the infinity pools. That got me interested in this. I've read it actually twice since then, even though that was

only eight episodes ago. I really enjoyed the book. I know, David, you've read it too. And kind of when we read this, we're like, we got to get John on here because he's perfectly aligned with everything that we talk about here on Focus. So thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, it's really a pleasure. And I really like the book because it's got a lot of bite-sized bits and ideas to help people maintain focus and stay on target. I was telling you before we started recording,

my wife is starting to show some interest in these types of books. And yours is very high on my list of things I want her to read because there's something there for everyone. And it's not too deep in a good way, if that makes sense. Yeah, totally. Jake Knapp, my good friend, totally. Jake Knapp, my good friend, my co-author, and I, we're kind of recovering productivity nerds. And so we've read a lot about this stuff and we've tried a lot of different systems to see how they work. And we kind of, in our own journeys, we sort of felt like a lot of the things that you read out there, a lot of the suggestions are very intimidating and they come across as kind of all or nothing. Either you're, you're on board with the system or you're not. And so we kind of wanted to write the book that we wished we had 10 years ago,

um, that sort of would, would meet people where they are. And like you said, just give them something, uh, that they can try that, try, that they can immediately see benefits from, because that's the secret to making change is not these grand transformations, but one thing at a time, one day at a time, making things a little bit better than they were before. I want to talk about some of your favorite tips and ideas that you have in the book, but I think the backstory is really interesting too. Tell us just a little bit about you guys and how you came up with the idea. And what was the laboratory that this all grew out of? Yeah, Jake and I are both, like I said, both for a long time have been very interested in

how we spend our time, how we make good use of our time for various reasons. And we can dive into those if you'd like. But we met working at Google Ventures, which is the venture capital firm that's funded by Google. And we had this really unique job. We were design partners, meaning that, so we both had a background in user experience design, software product design, that type of thing. And we had this really cool job where after an investment was made in one of these startups that Google was investing in, we would get to go into that startup sort of like a consultant as part

of the investment package and help them. So we'd bring our skills as designers and writers and whatever else we knew about from all our years working in tech, and we'd help these companies work toward whatever goals they had. But we were always surprised at how they seemed to have – every company seemed to struggle with the same things when it came to their time, when it came to how they worked together as a team.

as a team. And, you know, and I can totally, you know, I recognize these symptoms because I saw them too when I was working inside of Google and when I was working at a startup myself. You know, it's like you spend so much time dealing with email and going to meetings and, you know, particularly at bigger companies, you're kind of going through processes of filling out docs and writing things up and sort of the bureaucracy that sometimes you get to the end of the day and you're like, okay, now, all right, now I'm ready to like do my work. You know, now it's like the end of the workday and I finally have time to do my work. And especially for startups where they only have this like limited period of time before they run out of money, literally, you know, it's do or die. They have to prove that they're on the right track

before they run out of money. This is a really big problem. So Jake and I started doing these things called design sprints, which Jake had started kind of experimenting with at Google. And then he came to our team, Google Ventures. And the idea with the design sprint was to clear away kind of the defaults of how a team would spend their time normally, doing all the things I said, relying on email and chat and sitting in lots of meetings. And they would work together face-to-face for a week following a very structured series of steps

that would get them to, by the end of the week, a testable prototype. So something they could actually go and put in front of their customers and see if they were on the right track. And this totally sped people up. It would save them months of time. It would sometimes keep them from driving into the ditch

because they would find out very early that they were not on the right track. But it was also kind of this laboratory for Jake and I to experiment with defaults about time and how people work. And we ran about 150 of these design sprints. And so we would go into all these different companies. And every time we ran a sprint, we would tweak the formula a little bit. We would experiment with things.

We would try things. And it really taught us a lot about what works in terms of helping people focus on the things that really matter to them. It's just such a great idea. And I love the idea that you had this mobile lab that you tried in all these different companies. And I feel a little bad for your guinea pigs, you know. But at the same time for the rest of us, and it really resulted in this book, it gave you so many great solid ideas to help people get their work done faster. Yeah. I mean, I think even like even, you know, maybe I'm giving myself too much credit, but I think even the first take, even the first sprints were better than what people were used to.

It's not like we subjected them to go through these things or tricked them. Because Jake and I had been thinking about this stuff so much and we had been such nerds about time and about productivity, we already had a bunch of ideas that I think were beneficial. Like this idea of very rapidly prototyping something and testing it. You know, the idea of sort of clearing the calendar of the normal meetings to focus on whatever the most important problem or risk was for a business. Those were things that were a part of the very first design sprints, and it only got better from there. So it sounds like you're pretty comfortable talking about this from a business perspective with the design sprints. But the subtitle for the book, Make Time, is how to focus on what matters every day.

So it's obviously not just for people who are looking to get their work done faster, more efficiently, or put up barriers around their workday. I would argue that this book applies a lot to your personal life as well. And was that kind of difficult writing it through that lens, like from that perspective? Or was it pretty natural? It was a bit difficult to get there.

I think by the time we wrote the book, we felt like we had a pretty good handle on the tactics that we suggest in the book, we felt like we had a pretty good handle on the tactics that we suggest in the book and the things that we thought would work well for people. But it did take us a while to get there because, you know, like I said, we both had been personally interested in how we spent our time. And then we had done this design sprint thing, which is like a very constrained environment and a business environment, like you said, you know, at work. And there was a big chasm to cross from there to like, okay, how do we apply these philosophies to everybody? You know, probably not literally

everybody, but like, you know, at least a lot of people that we don't have face-to-face, you know, real contact with via the book. And so the way that we did that was with our newsletter, Time Dorks, which is where we would share. And we just for a few years before we wrote the book, we would share experiments that we were running in our own lives. So, for example, like Jake wrote about when he made his iPhone distraction-free back in 2012 or something like that. One of my favorite sections in the book. Yeah. And, I mean, now there's a lot of articles about that type of thing. But at the time, it was pretty radical. that type of thing. But at the time it was pretty radical. I mean, the idea with the distraction free iPhone is to, is not to worry about tinkering with like notifications and moving apps to

different sub folders and making your phone grayscale. And there's like a million tips that people offer. And some of them, you know, I think really work well for people, but the distraction free iPhone is like the best way to avoid distraction is to avoid getting distracted in the first place. And so if you take away the temptation of, oh, I'll just grab my phone and do a quick Twitter check. Like if you take that temptation away by removing the app, that's going to be way more powerful than a lot of the other circuitous tricks. So yeah, no social media, nothing that has an infinite supply of content.

We call them infinity pool apps. So that even applies to like the news and stock market updates and stuff like that. No email, which can be a hard one for some people, but can also be really amazing if you figure out how to make it work. And then the super scary one that I myself don't even do, which is no web browser, to sort of avoid those, gee, I wonder who was the actor in the thing, you know, and look it up. And then 15 minutes later, like, wait a second, what have I been doing? So distraction-free iPhones. So Jake wrote about that.

I wrote about my personal journey of trying to become a morning person and a bunch of other things. So we had this newsletter where we were sharing these things and we were getting enough positive feedback from people that we felt like there was something there. And it wasn't just feedback from other people like us, you know, like 30-something guys working in tech. guys working in tech. We were hearing from a lot of people and it was really, honestly, it was really inspiring because it started to feel like it wasn't really just about us. It was sort of a bit of a movement of people who were starting to think differently about their time. I think that's a really powerful idea that for a long time, it seems to me just as a casual observer and occasional participant in what I'll call the productivity space that casual. Yeah. Well, I would say that I'm pushing back against it in the, in recent history, but I guess my, my observation has been

that there's kind of this echo chamber around the life hacks and the efficiency, which is kind of why David and I wanted to take focus in a little bit different direction. Yeah, totally. Focus on the intentionality. Shahid talked about the infinity pools on his phone, and that kind of blew my mind when I heard about it. I've also eliminated email and social media and it is scary at first, but it's been awesome. Another one that he brought up in that episode, which kind of blew my mind was the Amazon app because he was, he mentioned, he told a story like I went in there to look for screwdrivers and 15 minutes later, I'm scrolling through a bunch

of other stuff that I might want to get off of Amazon. That is super interesting. Yeah. And it's, it's like, you know, I think that, that, that taps into something really important, which is that it's, it's different stuff for each of us, you know, like, uh, you know, some people might find the Amazon app very, uh, distracting. Um, other people, you know, struggle with, with Instagram, other people, you know, one, one app that I do have on my phone that I use a lot, that I really enjoy using is Feedly, which is like a newsreader app. And for the old time super web nerds listening, this all stems from when I worked at FeedBurner, which was an RSS platform startup back in the early 2000s. Anyway, so I'm still like, I still use an RSS

reader. I think I'm one of the only people left, but I use Feedly, which, you know, technically is an infinity pool, you know, like you could spend all day reading stuff in Feedly. But I just have a certain way that I use it that like, I don't feel tempted when I get to the end of my list of new stuff, then that's it. I only follow like 20 feeds or something like that. So I think what's really important is not the absolute rules of like, don't have this app, do have this app, but trying to be thoughtful and self-aware so that you recognize when you have those moments of getting sucked into the black hole of like, wait a second, what have I been doing for the last 15 minutes? Spending your time on purpose instead of on accident. Totally.

Yeah. That's a great way to put it. And just keeping your eyes open. I mean, one of my infinity pools is the Apple News app. I go in there and not only does it waste time, it gets me upset. So I've been making a conscious effort to spend less time with this app.

But then I started sliding. And just yesterday, I got a Siri shortcut notification. Hey, you go to news usually at this time of day. You want us to create a shortcut for you? And I'm like, wait a second, Sparky. No, I do not. It's like now my phone is shaming me. I got to stop this.

Right. Well, that's so interesting because that's like the net effect for you is that you feel shamed. But your phone is trying to reduce the friction, right? Your phone is trying to make it even easier for you to get sucked in. Which of course is the general direction of movement for a lot of the technologies that we struggle with. Is everything's being continually optimized to be more and more smooth and compelling and delightful. Yeah. Yeah. Eliminate the friction and rewrite the defaults, which is one of the big themes in the book too. Do you want to kind of talk about what you mean

when you say defaults? And we kind of talked about the infinity pools, but maybe you have some other examples. Sure. So I think when people start to think about their time and maybe they feel like they're busy and they're distracted and they don't have time for the things that are important to them,

I think the place that a lot of us go first is to our own willpower, you know, or a discipline or self-control. And we kind of, we say, all right, starting this week, I'm not going to spend as much time on Twitter. You know, we sort of, we make a promise to ourselves. But I don't think that approach really works. In fact, there's more and more evidence that the idea of willpower itself, it might be kind of a myth. Um, there's some really interesting research in the last few years.

And, uh, there, there had been some studies quite a long time ago, kind of establishing this idea of willpower is this, this renewable resource. And a lot of the newer studies that are trying to sort of validate and build upon that are finding that willpower doesn't really work in the way that we thought it did. And so what often looks like willpower is really just an environment, a context, a set of circumstances that enable a person to make what we might consider good decisions, the right decisions, the decisions that they want to be making. And I think that when it comes to how we spend our time, a lot of what we do is because of the default settings that just exist. And they

certainly exist in our technology products, our smartphones, of course, when you pull a brand new smartphone out of the box, by default, one of the very first things you do is you sign into your email provider. And by default, there, of course, is an email app pre-installed. And by default, it's going to check automatically for new messages. And by default, it's going to give you a notification when you have a new message. You know, by default, there's news apps installed.

There's streaming video. There's stock market updates. there's a bunch of stuff. But these defaults also exist in our calendars and in our workplace culture. In a lot of organizations, by default, other people can put stuff on your calendar. And the default response when you're invited to a meeting is, yes, I will attend. And not all of these defaults can necessarily be changed for everybody in all situations. I know that there are certain types of jobs or lines of work where people may not have control over some of those things. But I do think that starting to understand

how powerful these defaults are is really helpful because it lets us know that this is not our fault, right? This is not a weakness of, you know, lack of willpower or whatever. But it also sort of points the way to ways that we might change the default. So we might start to rewire some of those things. So instead of worrying about willpower, maybe you should just buy apples instead of cookies. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. That's a great example. You know, I think there's, we have moments when we feel like we have the energy or let's say the willpower to, to, to make a good call. Right. And, and then there are other moments when we're sort of, we're in the mix of things and, you know, we're kind of, maybe we're, we're, we're feeling busy and we're, and we're in motion and we're sort of, we're in the mix of things and, you know, we're kind of, maybe we're feeling busy and we're in motion

and we're kind of looking for that path of least resistance. And so the way that I think about it is when you've got the, when you've sort of got your idealist, you know, planning for the future hat on, try to make the decisions that set things up so that when you're in that, you know, in the moment doing path of least resistance mode, that the decision you want to be making, that right decision for you is also the easy

one. Yeah. So if you can be, if you can sort of make the call when you're at the grocery store to buy the apples instead of the cookies, if you can take that moment after you've just spent 15 minutes browsing Amazon to be like, oh God, why did I do that? I'm going to uninstall this app. You know, if you can sort of harness some of that feeling at that moment, then it pays dividends long into the future. Yeah. I'm fascinated by this whole idea of like the path of least resistance,

because you can totally look back after something happened. Like you did waste two hours on Twitter or half an hour on Amazon or whatever and say that was the problem. But you don't recognize it often when you're in the moment and you do, like you just said, you seek the path of least resistance. So recognizing that the next time I'm going to be in this situation, what are the boundaries that I can create which will force me to stay on the right path? Your example, David, not having cookies in the house, buying the apples instead. That's such a simple thing to do

if you think about it ahead of time. It's when you don't think about it ahead of time that you get in the moment and then you're like, ah, junk, it happened again. Yeah. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. Squarespace lets you easily create a website for your next big idea with a unique domain,

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Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. I'm also curious, you know, you mentioned willpower and a couple other things like energy and your environment. In your opinion, what sort of role does motivation play in those types of decisions? And I kind of view motivation as a renewable resource because if I have spent all of my willpower for the day and one of my kids runs out into the street and is about to get hit by the car, all of a sudden it doesn't matter. Like I've got the motivation.

So, you know, circumstances have led to the fact that I've manufactured that motivation. And that's, you know, I've been pondering that for a long time. Like how do I manufacture that based on my home office or the environment that I typically do my work, that sort of thing. Sure.

Yeah, I think that shows up in a lot of ways. I think probably the shortest thread from the example you provided to kind of how we're spending our time is this idea of going all in. And we read about this in the book, Make Time. But sometimes if something is uncomfortable and we feel like we should take our foot off the gas pedal and slow down and hold back a little bit, oftentimes a better solution is really to dive forward and to actually go all in to put ourselves fully into whatever that thing is that is making us feel uncomfortable. And we often find that we get, we get better energy. We get more focused when we push through that moment of uncomfort. For me, a really good example of this is when I'm preparing to do a talk, you know, to speak in front of a crowd of people. And I do a lot of speaking. I've, I recently counted this up

because I was updating my website. I've been on stage almost 200 times giving talks. But I still get nervous. I still, before I go on, I feel that little flutter, that little feeling of like, whoa, my body's trying to tell me something here. Maybe I shouldn't do it. Maybe I should conserve my energy. But I learned this trick a number of years ago and I wish I could remember where I learned it. And I should probably just look it up and figure it out because I use this

example a lot. But I learned this trick, which is to basically in that moment, tell myself that my body is trying to tell me something and it's that it's getting ready for action. It's like, it's not, you know, it's not nervousness, it's excitedness. You know, it's like, you know, my body is, is priming itself. You know, the blood is flowing to my, to my brain to like, get me ready to, to deliver this, this message. And so I kind of, kind of go all in. But this idea of motivation also shows up, I think, in a, in much smaller ways. When we are thinking about our days, how we want to spend our days, what we want to make time for. I think a lot of stuff that we read about productivity and distraction, it kind of falls into that same camp as advice about dieting and health and weight loss and stuff where, and money too, you know, like personal finance, saving and investing where it's, it falls into the should camp. You know,

it's like, well, you really should be setting aside 20% of your income. You really shouldn't be eating any processed sugar, whatever it might be. And we all know these things, or we know, like, at least we know most of them, we know enough of them to like, to, to make the right call. Um, but, but it can feel, it can feel like a chore, you know, it can feel very, um, I guess it's hard to get excited about it. And so, um, one thing that really helps me and I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on from others is the idea of being intentional and proactive about what you

want to make time for. And I call it a daily highlight. So it's the idea of just for each day kind of asking yourself, what do I want to be the highlight of my day? What's the thing where I want to bring my greatest focus and energy? And when you've made that decision and you've identified that for yourself, it's almost magical the way that that cascades into a bunch of other smaller decisions that you make throughout the day. Definitely. That's one of the things I stole from the book

the last time I went through it is I've got this sheet that I've created, a PDF template that I use GoodNotes to plan my day the night before. And I added that highlight section at the top. And it has made a world of difference. David and I are both kind of nerds about that type of stuff. He sends me pictures all the time about moving the needle.

And do you have a highlight on your sheet now, David? I actually use a paper book for my kind of daily log thing. And the top of it is what's my daily intention. I adjusted it slightly. But this is one of my biggest takeaways from your book is I love the idea of starting the day and saying, what's the one thing today? And I like the idea of the term priority or highlight.

It's not plural, it's singular. So in my head, I have a rule that it can only be one thing. I can't say like, today I'm going to, because I have several podcasts I'm recording today. So my highlight or my intention today is to make excellent podcasts, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that governs everything. So now, like if an email comes in and somebody wants me to do something else, that I understand that where that fits in relation to my daily intention. You know,

my daily intention is to make great podcasts. Does this help that? No, it doesn't. Okay. Well, maybe I will get to that, but that's not the thing I'm going to do today. And I'm a person who has two careers because I'm a lawyer as well as a nerd. And so I have days where it's like my daily intention is certain client work. And then the podcasting stuff would fall in second chair. But taking the time in the morning, I think, I actually do it the night before, but taking the time at some point to say, okay, you get one thing every day and that's what you're going to judge yourself by at the end of the day. So pick one thing, choose wisely, and then get through it. And I'll tell you, some days I fail. I get through the day and I look at the top of the sheet and I didn't hit that.

But most days I don't. And I think that was one of my favorite things that you guys talked about in the book. It's at the beginning of the book and it just smacks you just smacks you right in the face and it's a great idea. Cool. Yeah. I'm really glad that, that, that, that has been helpful. I love the, as you mentioned, sometimes you fail, you know, sometimes you don't do the thing that you said you were going to do. Sometimes you don't make time for that, that highlight or bring your best energy to it. And, and one of the things, one of the beautiful things, in my opinion, about taking this one day at a time is that you always have a fresh slate

tomorrow. You know, you always have a chance to do something different, to make some tweaks, to try some different things. And that was something that really came from the design sprint process too, as we would be focused on these five days working with a team. And sometimes teams would get very concerned. You're like, wow, we've got the whole team here spending five days. That's a lot of time. But in the bigger picture of the lifespan of their company, that's a relatively short amount of time. And so no matter what happens in that week, and no matter what happens in the day for you as an individual, you're going to learn something from it. And as long as you pay attention to what that is, and you use what you've learned to do something differently next time, then I think you're moving

in the right direction. Yeah. You have in the book, a tracking sheet at the end, which I really liked. And you talk about fine tuning your days using the scientific method where you observe what's going on. You guess why things are happening the way they are. You experiment to test your hypothesis. Then you measure the results to decide if you were right. And that's one of the things that's unique about the book is you've got, I forget, there's like 86 different tactics in here. is you've got, I forget, there's like 86 different tactics in here. 87. All right.

Yeah. And you've got some that work for you. Jake has some that work for him. Like you mentioned, even in this recording, that you did the experiment of becoming a morning person. I believe Jake is the one who prefers to work at night. That's right. Yep. Yeah.

So you have like conflicting advice almost, but it's all about finding the thing that works for you. I'm kind of curious, as you were going through and creating these 87 different tactics, was there one in particular that kind of blew your socks off and you're like, I'd never thought that would work, but it did? Or one that kind of you were surprised by the results from it? Like kind of, you were surprised by the results from it? Well, I already mentioned the distraction-free phone. And that one, I mean, at this point, I've been doing it for so long that it almost feels like it's normal. I mean, it is normal. It doesn't seem outrageous anymore. Yeah, exactly, right.

Until I talked to other people about it and they're like, I could never do that. But yeah, that one, just kind of thinking back to when I tried it, I think when I tried it, I think when I tried it, Jake had already been doing it for a little bit. And this was sort of early on in our time working together. And we had just realized that we were both nerds about this stuff. And so we were talking about different things that we do. And I remember having a number of emotions or reactions to this suggestion. One was like,

oh, that sounds kind of scary. And the other one being like, oh, I don't think I need that. Like, I don't have that problem. But I tried it anyway, because, you know, like I, you know, Jake's a good friend and I really, you know, I'm really interested and, and oftentimes very inspired by the things that he does. And so I tried it and it was actually amazing. You know, I, I think for me, it maybe wasn't so much about reclaiming time, but it was more about reclaiming my, my brain, my attention. my brain, my attention. I had not been aware of all the, all the tiny in-between moments where I was using my phone as kind of a, a crutch to avoid boredom. And the result I think was that I didn't have, uh, I didn't have enough quiet in my life and I didn't have space to do sort of passive thinking about things. And so that was really, that was really amazing. I'm trying to think of another one that like was, well, actually I know one that that's like sort of a different vein than what we have been talking about, but there was a period when Jake and I were working with Blue Bottle Coffee, which is this San Francisco-based coffee company, kind of real high-end specialty.

They import and roast their own beans, and then they have cafes in a few different cities, and they sell coffee online. And Google Ventures actually invested in them, so we were working with them. And during that period, we started to learn more about coffee and about caffeine. And we started to experiment with some different ways of, like basically the different times of day in which we had caffeine and how much we had. And that was really, really interesting, especially learning about the duration of time that caffeine remains in your system, remains in your bloodstream. And I had always just assumed like, you know, as long as I'm not drinking coffee after four o'clock or whatever,

like I'm going to be fine. Yeah, the half-life kills you. Yeah, coffee stays in your system for like, I think after, I forget if, it's in the book, I forget if it's seven hours or six hours is the half-life. So after six hours, half of it is still there. And so, you know, I started giving myself like a 130 cutoff for caffeine and that made a huge difference in my ability to sleep at night, which of course tied into the morning person thing. Now that I'm getting a little bit older than I was when we first started working on this stuff, I even, I can still do the after lunch caffeine, but I can't, it can't be like a big coffee. It has to be like either an espresso or like a green tea

or something that has a lower dose of caffeine. So that was something that had not been on my radar at all. But once I learned about it, I was like, oh, this is super interesting and actually really has an effect on how I spend my time. You mentioned the distraction-free iPhone and how when you first heard about it, you kind of thought, I don't really need to do this. Have you gotten that response from other people when you presented the idea or has it just become such a big problem? People feel like they're so connected that generally speaking, they're like, yeah, let me try anything. Surprisingly, I don't get the response of, I don't have that problem. I usually get the response of, I can't do that because of blank. Um, and blank is usually either something about their personal

life. Like I wouldn't be able to stay in touch with my friends or I wouldn't know what's going on with my sister who lives across the country or whatever. Or, of course, it's about work. And email is a real sharp point on this stuff because there are people, and I think this is legitimate. Because there are people, and I think this is legitimate, there are people for whom their job relies much more on email. And I think a real and genuine part of the value that they bring to their work is being responsive. And David, I don't know maybe if you've run into this at all in your work as a lawyer, because I've actually heard that from a few lawyers. They're like, part of what my clients are paying me for is to get back to them really quickly when they have an issue. And so whether it's email or whether it's social media, responding to customers, a lot of people feel like they cannot remove these things from their phone because it would, it would cause them some, some real harm. I have a theory on that. I think that is something a lot of people say.

I think it's true a lot less often than people think. Yeah. You know, it's just, it's really easy to say that. To give you an example, I mean, I, I check email twice a day. I mean, I, I don't, I don't, I don't have notifications turned on. I do a shallow dive in the morning and a deep dive in the afternoon. And that's it. And I've had people do that where they call me like, hey, I emailed you and you didn't write me back. I'm like, you emailed me a half hour ago. Do you think I sit around waiting for your email?

And I just shame. Well, everybody else does. And I shame them a little bit, you know, and, and, and when a client gives me that, I say, you know, if it's, if, you know, if something is on fire, you have my cell phone number, call me, you know, right. But I'm going to treat email. I check it twice a day. And that the reason you get such good service for me is because I'm not constantly looking at email. And I've said that to judges.

I've said it to clients. And most people are like, huh, okay. And then a couple people don't like that. And honestly, the personality type that wants me to check email every five minutes isn't a good fit for me as a client anyway. So I think that's an easy thing to assume. It's not necessarily always true. And I get it. I've talked to assume. It's not necessarily always true. And I get it. I've talked to people.

I wrote a book on email. So I've heard from people saying, no, my boss is really the type of person who, if I don't respond in five minutes, it's going to get me in trouble. And I'm just thinking, well, you should talk to your boss about how unproductive you are because of that. And you should probably polish off your resume because that company's not going to survive. But the, um, but the, uh, I don't think that's as true as people think it is. It's easy to say that, but no, I, I, I'm glad that that's your, that, that that's your, your take on it as well. Cause I, I tend to feel the same way. I think, I think whatever job you do, um, the part of it that really matters is not, it's, it's best done when you have time, you know, when you have time to, to think. And, uh, and I, and I also think, you know, you mentioned if it's truly an emergency call,

just call or even text. Um, and I think part of one of my of my theories on why this is becoming such a big topic, such an important topic, is that we're going through a really period of incredible change, incredibly rapid change. And we're all trying to figure out how best to live with and to use a set of technologies that are really quite new. If you think about smartphones being, you know, really just over 10 years old. If you think about social media being maybe just a little bit older than that, but not by much and certainly not in the present form of what we think of as social media, you know, with a feed, kind of an infinitely updating feed. Yeah. social media, you know, with a feed, kind of an infinitely updating feed. And I think that, so one of the ways that that manifests is this uncertainty or this confusion about what's the right way to use this technology. And so just because an email, just because the way that email

is engineered to make it pop up on the other person's screen virtually immediately does not mean that it should be used for immediate communications. And we have other technologies that are really good for immediate real-time communication. And so I think a big, you know, one of the important parts about this conversation is like, is just all of us collectively trying to figure out, you know, how can we thrive with this stuff? How can we make the best use of this stuff? And another question to ask is how much of it needs to be real-time communication? Yeah. I feel like we've just jumped into the assumption that because everything can be real-time, it should be.

Yeah. And that's not really the way to do it. I mean, just like Mike and I, we plan this show. We have a channel that we talk to each other. we have a channel that we talk to each other. The assumption, at least on my end, I think on Mike's end, I guess I'll find out, is that when we send each other a message, we don't expect the other person to respond necessarily even within 24 hours unless it's something that's an emergency.

And both of us find time at the designated time of day that we deal with this stuff to get back with each other. And it works fine. But so often, I think in the workplace these days, people assume, well, we can immediately communicate. So if you're not immediately communicating, you're somehow letting the other person down. I think a piece of that too maybe stems from the belief that more communication always equals better, which isn't necessarily true. It kind of depends on the problem that you're trying to solve. Collaboration is great when you're trying to brainstorm something at

the beginning of a project, but when it's time for everybody to just go work on their tasks and build the thing, maybe y'all being in the same room and overhearing all the other conversations, maybe that's not the right environment. Yeah, and we've actually found, particularly in our design sprints, we've actually found that real-time communication isn't even as beneficial to collaboration as you might otherwise think. the kind of typical traditional brainstorm of people sitting in a room and bouncing ideas off of each other and shouting out loud does not produce ideas that are as valuable or as high quality as when people work on their own. And so one of the really important patterns from the design sprint that I also use in all my work, and I encourage people to use it as sort of a, you know, a tool in the toolkit, is whenever you're trying to come up with an idea or solve a problem as a group, to work alone together. So to, you know, to be together and to say, we've gathered everybody

together to focus on this thing for this period of time. But when it actually comes to thinking up new ideas, do that individually. So sit quietly by yourself and come up with ideas and then share those back to the group because what the group is good at is bringing everybody's knowledge and expertise to bear on making a decision and filtering down and editing. And then that's the time to have the group discussion, but when it comes to actually the sort of generative part of it, um, you know, even there, we assume that, oh yeah, communication, we need to be all together. Um, but, but even that is, is sometimes, uh, not the case. is brought to you by Blinkist. Read 3,000 plus books in 15 minutes or fewer. Start out your seven-day free trial at Blinkist.com slash focused. So here's the deal.

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That URL one more time is Blinkist.com slash focused. Our thanks to Blinkist for their support of Focused and all of RelayFM. So you were on the Google startup, I forget what they call it, the Google startup division. Yeah, Google Ventures. Google Ventures, sorry. You've got this great job working for a company. I mean, Google's not going anywhere soon, right? Probably not. And you are getting to scratch your itch about trying to work on this stuff and help people get their work done. But then you leave, you become an author, and you're out of the Bay Area now, I understand. Yeah, that's right.

You've got a sailboat, you disappear on. How do you turn your life upside down like that? That is a really good question. I've had a number of, I've made a number of decisions in my life that whatever my reasons were in the moment, I tend to look back and question those reasons or wonder or sort of reassess, revisit, why did I do that? Why did I want to do that?

So this is something that I've been thinking a lot about because my wife and I, we spent about 18 months traveling. We were on our sailboats. We were living on our boat and sort of slowly traveling from place to place throughout Central America. And we've recently moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. and sort of slowly traveling from place to place throughout Central America. And we've recently moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We both grew up in Wisconsin. So we're kind of coming home in a certain way. I'm a fellow cheesehead. Well, I was going to ask you about that.

Yeah. Cause I noticed you have a, you have a nine to oh phone number. I'm in Appleton. So about an hour and a half North. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we could have definitely something I wanted to talk to you about is why you made that, that move to Milwaukee. Cause I really liked the area, but it seems like not a whole lot of people generally have a positive

impression of Wisconsin. Yeah. And I, and who knows, like if, if I wasn't from here, I don't know if I, I mean, I'm not from Milwaukee, but if I wasn't from Wisconsin, I don't know if I, if I would be living here, but to get back to sort of the decision, like, like you alluded to, I, you know, things were really good in San Francisco. I had a great job. Um, San Francisco is really a wonderful city. If you can put up with some of the difficulties of living there. Um was getting to focus on work that I really liked and had great friends and interesting hobbies and all that stuff. But, you know, we talked about defaults

and the idea that a lot of the things that determine how we spend our time weren't necessarily put into place, you know, as some intentional master plan. They just kind into place, you know, as some intentional master plan. They just kind of collect, you know, sort of the things that we do at work or the default behaviors about meetings or whatever. These things just kind of like they pile up over the years. And that certainly happened for us in our lifestyle as well, for my wife and me.

And so, you know, we had, I think in many ways, a very typical sort of yuppie lifestyle where we were both working. We don't have kids. Um, or we were, we were always busy. We had, we always had social plans. You know, we were, um, we were using all of the, the convenient app based services that, that most of which start seemed to start out in San Francisco or New York, ordering everything from our phones and Amazon one-day shipping. Sometimes we'd take three or four Ubers in a single day, just getting around to stuff. We had talked about trying to slow things down, trying to build a life that was based more around the

things that we wanted to be spending our time on instead of feeling like we were part of a rat race. You know, we're part of a package of what it means to live in a major city. But we didn't know quite what that was going to look like. So we decided to do something kind of crazy and just leave and just like sort of wipe away a lot of those defaults all at once. And then use that space to rebuild, you know, to put the pieces back together in a more intentional way. I love that idea of just blowing up all the defaults and building it again from scratch. just blowing up all the defaults and building it again from scratch. Although there's probably a lot of people listening to this who are like, well, that's great, but there's no way I can take 18 months off to go sail around Central America. Yeah. Yeah, of course. And I definitely realize how lucky we are to have been able to do that. And I wouldn't even necessarily,

even if you did have the means, I wouldn't necessarily advise that anybody do this necessarily. I mean, it worked well for us, but like, I don't, in general, my philosophy is not that you should blow things up and, and see where the pieces fall. But that, for a number of reasons, that was the thing that made sense to us. And one of the, one of the reasons really is just that like, we just thought it sounded cool. You know, we just, we were, we had been sailing together for a long time. I grew up sailing. I grew up on a small lake in Wisconsin, a town called Green Lake. And so I grew up sailing and I like boats. I like being on the water. And while we lived in San Francisco, we had a, we had a boat and we would take little trips.

We'd go sail down to Southern California or there's some rivers that go up inland from San Francisco out kind of into the more rural part of Central California. And so we would do that. And so we just like, we liked this idea and we thought this traveling, we this traveling, um, we'd never really done any extended travel. We hadn't done the sort of backpacking thing or the gap year thing or any of that study abroad or any of that kind of stuff. So we just thought like, okay, this, you know, like this could, this would be a really fun and really cool adventure for us to go on together. And by the way, it would, um, it would give us, uh, sort of an easy out and say, all right, we're going to like, and say, all right, we're just going to back away. We're just going to step away from this life and see what we want to do for the next chapter.

I want to get back to the idea of resetting defaults, though, for a minute, because I understand, I mean, you had like the master reset button with what you did. But I do think everybody listening has an opportunity to occasionally reset defaults in a part of their life. I mean, when I left a firm that I was at for many, many years and went out on my own, one of the best pieces of advice I got was, oh, this is a chance you get to start anew. This is a chance where you can rethink all of your default behavior and change it. And whether you're making a job change or, you know, or you just want to force it anyway and start changing default behavior. This is something that I don't think people are attentive enough to when those opportunities arise. And I think it's a, it's,

it is a fantastic opportunity to, to change the way you live your life. And, um, first of all, I have a lot of admiration for you for doing that because you did give up some very, you know, secure, you know, you gave up the dream that a lot of people have and, and, but you gave up the dream that a lot of people have. But you gave yourself this freedom with it. It's very impressive that you did that. But I would say to anybody listening, think about your defaults and where do you have a chance to reset them and try it because, man,

it always turns out for the best for me when I do that. And don't assume that you don't have the options. I mean, maybe people do have the opportunity to take 18 months off and sail around, but they don't think they do. So they just dismiss the idea as soon as they have it instead of looking for a way, like, is that actually possible?

Could I pull that off? Right, yeah. And there are lots of, one of the cool things about doing this trip is that we would read about and we would meet people who were doing different flavors of these types of things. And so we met people who had, you know, done three-month RV trips and people who had moved, you know, people who had like professional, you know, sort of corporate

office, white collar type of jobs, but they would get an arrangement to go and like work in a, you know, work in a service industry type job overseas somewhere and just do that for like a year, you know, and just kind of use that as their reset. So there are a lot of creative ways to approach it. I really liked, David, what you said about the, you know, sort of looking for these transitional points. And I think, you know, you mentioned switching jobs. I think when you move physically, that's a really prime opportunity. We recently, so we moved off of the boat and into our place here in Milwaukee. And that was a great chance for us to change some of the defaults.

Like we, for example, we no longer have a television in our living room. We have it in like a back sort of a den. So if we want to watch TV, it's not this thing that's just like right there. We have to like in our living room. We have it in like a back sort of a den. So if we want to watch TV, it's not this thing that's just like right there. We have to like make an intentional decision. We keep our phones and computers, we charge them like inside of a cabinet. So again, you know, in the morning, wake up, you have to make that intentional decision about like, all right, am I going to open the cabinet and get out my phone? It's not just right there. I also think there's seasonal opportunities. I think summer, you know, in some offices,

in some industries, summer can be a slower time. So that can be a time to look at some of your habits, look at your defaults and make some changes. Coming back from vacations, coming back from, you know, January is always sort of classic, you know, everybody's talking about New Year's resolutions. So that is almost, you know, too many people are trying to do new things. So maybe that's not the greatest time, but coming back from summer vacation to even just coming back from a one week vacation that you just randomly took can be a great opportunity to try some new things. What has been the biggest surprise to you moving from San Francisco to Milwaukee? What is there that you can't do there? Or what kind of things have you implemented to

make up for the lifestyle that you used to have? Although I know you kind of redefined a lot of the defaults and rules around your technology. But I guess I guess a lot of people, I think they would say in your position, consider a move from San Francisco to Milwaukee. There's no way I could do that. How did you make that work for you? So there are some very concrete things that we don't have in Milwaukee that we did in San Francisco. The weather is not nearly as good. San Francisco has really weird weather because of just the geography of it. But basically, it's about 55 to 65 almost every day. So it's not hot.

And I'm talking about in the city. It's not hot, but it's never cold. It's a very comfortable, livable temperature. So the weather, the food, sort of the access to amazing food of all different kinds. And then I think just the physical surroundings of being able to jump in the car and be in wine country in an hour or be hiking in mountains, on in mountains, you know, on beaches, you know, it's just really, it's an amazing place physically. And so, you know, we don't have those things in Milwaukee, but a lot of what appealed to us about moving here were things that sort of were aligned with the changes we wanted to make, the defaults we wanted to change. So it doesn't matter as much to us anymore that there aren't the most amazing restaurants

because we're much more interested in cooking for ourselves now. And that's part of kind of our slower way of life that we are putting together. We don't care as much about having these amazing destinations within reach because we're no longer working super busy professional schedules where we need, you know, we only have like the weekend to go and do something fun. You know, we can, we have a lot more flexibility in terms of our time, how we spend our time. time, how we spend our time. And I think that, that, you know, that's kind of the bottom line for us is that, um, in Milwaukee, you know, the cost of living is way, way lower. Um, everything's easier. It's easier to get around. It's easier to park. It's easier to, to get things done. And, you know, I think that, I think that the pursuit of convenience can sometimes actually lead us, lead us in the wrong direction. But I think in

this case, turning down the volume on just the basic challenges of everyday life have allowed us to spend more of our time focused on the things that we want to be doing. So now that you've hit the reset button, what are you focusing on? You've hit the reset button. What are you focusing on? Yeah, so I am, for the first time since college, I am building a business. And I believe it will be a business of one for as long as I can see into the future.

And I'm actually reading this super cool book right now called Company of One that I highly recommend. Okay, so yeah, you've heard of it. It's super cool. It's like, uh, it's, it's like a lot of the philosophies in, in make time, you know, it's sort of like that same approach, but applied to your business, like kind of questioning, do you have to do this thing just because every business does it this way? And you know, how can you focus on the parts of your business that really are important? So,'m doing that. And my mission is really to

help people make good use of their time. And so I'm writing and doing a lot of speaking and I'm teaching workshops and I've got a bunch of other ideas for projects that I want to tackle. But we've only been here really officially, we've only been here for just a couple of months. We got here in early May and now, you know, I don't know how quickly this will come up, but we're talking in mid-July. So I'm just really at the beginning of that process, but I'm super excited about being able to pour my energy and focus my time on building something of my own. That's super cool. And I love how basically everything you've talked about in this episode, from writing the book, Make Time, to redefining what a successful business looks like by doing

it for yourself, to moving to Milwaukee. Really, it's all about defining what is really important to you. And I think a lot of people don't take the time to do that because they feel that there are certain aspects of the situation they happen to be in that they just have to accept. They never really consider, you know, if I could do this from scratch and design my ideal life, what does that actually look like? What are the things that are really important to me? What could I go without, you know, just because we've come so accustomed to the conveniences and the notifications and the nice restaurants and all that type of stuff. So, yeah, I don't know. This is really encouraging to me to hear you share the story. I hope everybody's listening to this. This is encouraged

as well. Cool. Yeah, I hope so too. Well, congratulations on all of your success and thank you for sharing this book. Gang, I really enjoy this book. Like I said at the top of the show, if you've got someone in your life who's interested in productivity or getting better at some of this stuff, not only is this good book for you,

it's good for them too. Because I feel like it's just so accessible. It's one of my favorite books kind of in that category, if that makes sense. And thank you so much for making it. Oh, yeah, my pleasure. And I don't just mean that as a sort of standard response, but it really has been a pleasure. I really like writing books and I really like, um, you know, this kind of, uh, synthesis, I guess, you know, it's probably my, that's probably my, my superpower.

If I have one, it's kind of stitching things together and combining ideas and to, to create something new. And so, yeah, not to get all cheesy, but it really has been sort of a, um, you know, passion project. And so it's, it's just really gratifying and really exciting to see, see people who are, who are benefiting from it. Now, John, if folks want to keep up with your company one and the things you're doing next, where should they go?

The best place is probably the, the website for make time, which is make time.blog. And, you know, if for all the talk about social media distraction-free and all that stuff, I am a pretty enthusiastic Twitter user. So that's kind of my distraction kryptonite I'm always having to like to sort of wrestle with changing my defaults and finding ways of keeping that under control. But I do really enjoy hearing from people on Twitter. I probably won't reply immediately because I try to just do a daily Twitter check in the afternoon, but my handle is Jazzer, J-A-Z-E-R. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast today, John. Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much for having me.

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