HealthyGamerGG - 5 Habits that Destroy Your Productivity

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Dr. K dives into 5 habits that hinder your ability to do the things that you want to do. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So when I go into a networking situation, I don't go into those situations thinking, okay, what can this person do for me? What I tend to go to networking situations for is trying to help people. So everywhere I go, if I'm sort of in a networking situation, I'll sort of try to help people. And I'll try to think, okay, like, how can I be helpful to this person? Are there opportunities that I know of that could help this kind of person? All right. So today what we're going to talk about are what I call five productivity pitfalls. What I've noticed is that there are a lot of people out there who will give like productivity tips and talk about success and talk about, you know,

know, like, you got to grind and you got to do this. And like, these are all these secrets to success in productivity. But what I've actually found is that if you look at, you know, different kinds of studies on productivity and things like that, as well as like studies on neuroscience and a fair amount of personal experience and working as a psychiatrist, what I've really found is that a lot of the productivity tips that people give, sort of share or actually more pitfalls than tips. And what I'd love to do is share with you all five of those that, in my opinion, are kind of like jabates. Okay. So let's start with number one. Number one is reading a lot of books.

So there's sort of this idea that if you read a lot of books, you will be more successful, right? And that sort of makes sense because we know that books contain knowledge, and like knowledge is sort of a good thing. And the more that we know, doesn't that mean we're going to kind of be more successful? And so there's certainly value in books, like especially if you look at places like, you know, medical school where we do a ton of reading. And I've read a ton of books. And have I learned a lot from them? Absolutely. But I think what people sort of forget about reading a ton of books, is that if you look at the way the science of learning, reading something passively doesn't

actually increase understanding or doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes. What really leads to good outcomes is like practical application of theoretical concepts. So if you look at medical school, for example, we'll read a bunch in the first two years, and then the second two years of medical school, at least in the United States, are in the hospital. And that's when you really start to learn medicine. The whole thing is that even after four years of medical school, then you go into residency, which is anywhere from like three to seven years of practical application and training. And so a lot of people will sort of think, okay, like, I'm going to read books or if I was more

productive, I would read more books, or I shouldn't read more books, or that person over there reads so much, they must be really amazing. But that doesn't actually increase your productivity or make you more successful. So why are we so hung up on reading books? And there's an interesting psychological angle to this. So the first thing to understand is when we, think about reading a book, we imagine that we'll get some kind of benefit by reading the book. Right. So if I look at, let's say, the seven habits, seven habits of highly effective people.

And I think to myself, okay, if I learn those seven habits, then I will be a highly effective person. So we sort of look at a book and we associate that with a potential game. And then if you're like me, sometimes you'll struggle to actually read the book. Because reading books is actually hard. And so since books are hard to read, what ends up happening is, okay, if I read this book, I will get better in this way. But then it's hard for me to read, and so I never really finished the book, and I sort of assume that if I had read the book, I would have gotten better. I would have learned this. And then what happens is we look at someone else who has read the book. And then we kind of make an assumption that, oh, this person

read that book, so they must have gotten better in that way that I was hoping I would get better in. And so as this kind of piles up, if you think to yourself, okay, if I read this book, I would be better at social skills. If I read this book, I would have better sleep hygiene. If I read this book, I would be better at emotional processing. So as you look kind of like pile up all of these potential gains from books, and you never read those books, you think, okay, all of those are unrealized gains. And then you look at someone else who has read all of those books.

And then you're thinking, oh, my God, that person must be amazing at talking to their coworkers, have a good sleep schedule, do all of this amazing stuff. And so it's almost from our own pitfalls of not being able to read books, that we sort of overvalue what books actually bring us. So I'm not saying that reading books is a bad thing. I read a ton. I, you know, very much value reading books. But oftentimes we sort of think about books as like this singular activity that if we did a lot of,

we would magically be better at stuff. And in my experience, books without practical application are actually not that useful. That there's a theoretical understanding there, which you can absolutely get. But the real work is actually internal. So the real value of books is to sort of trigger an introspection. And as you go through that introspection, that's where the real yield comes from. And the other tricky thing is that if the yield comes from the introspection, we don't necessarily have to read the book to go through that process. So the first productivity pitfall is actually reading books because at the end of the day, I don't know that reading 100 books makes you 100 times better at life.

The second thing that I want to talk a little bit about, which is of growing interests and importance, is multi-touch. So this is where we've got to be super careful because generally speaking, a lot of people will value multitasking. They'll even take pride in sort of being able to do a thousand different things at once. And there's absolutely value to being able to sort of parallel process, maintain multiple workflows. There's no question that being able to juggle a couple of things is useful. The issue, though, is that if you really look at the mind, the mind can literally only focus on one task at a time. So if you think about, let's say, the last time you took an exam, like you weren't working on 15 questions all at once, right? When you take an exam, you look at one question and you can only occupy one thing at a time with your mind.

Even if you're at work, well, people will sort of talk about, okay, I'm multitasking during a meeting. You're kind of half paying attention to the meeting, half doing something else. And there may be like a part of the meeting that's a little bit useless. I'm not saying that it isn't. But even during the meeting, like when you're really focused on a particular task, you're not paying attention to the meeting. and if you're really absorbed in the meeting, you're not really able to work at the same time. So if we look at sort of multitasking, I think that managing parallel workflows is generally speaking, like, an important skill. But there almost seems to be this value judgment on being able to

multitask over being able to single task. And the way that I'd kind of put it is like if you kind of think about it, okay, let's say I'm an emergency room physician, and I've got 15 patients in the emergency room and I'm kind of working on all of them. Is that useful? Sure. But it's not like the emergency room physician who's juggling 15 patients over the course of five hours is better than the neurosurgeon who's in a five-hour surgery focusing on one patient. And even in the case of the emergency room physician, anytime they go in and they're seeing patient number one, they're not actually thinking about patient number 15. In fact, when you look at studies of emergency room physicians who do that, those are the ones that actually make more errors. Right. So I'm not saying that parallel processing

for multiple workflows is a bad thing. But generally speaking, we sort of value being able to juggle a bunch of things over focusing on one task. And if you literally look at the science of cognition, the brain can really only focus on one thing at a time. So I'd be super careful about multitasking and especially prioritizing multitasking over focusing on a single task at a time. The next thing that I want to talk to you all about is where we start to get a little bit tricky.

This is going to sound kind of weird, but the next thing I want to talk to you all about is having a side hustle. So when I hear a lot of these productivity people out there, these. success gurus and stuff like that, they'll talk about having a side hustle. And this is sort of the idea that you've got one particular kind of work that you do and something that you devote yourself to. And then you do something else on the side to bring in extra cash to kind of like, you know, optimize your time throughout the week. And generally speaking, I think side hustles are just a waste of time. And you may say like, wait, wait, why can you say that? Isn't it like good to be

hustling on the side all the time? And I don't really think so. So if you look at actually, you know, what yields better outcomes or what correlates with like median income, it generally speaking is going to be advancement in a particular field. So for example, let's say I go to residency, right? So I'm a medical doctor. So I do advanced education and then I become a psychiatrist. If you look at different kinds of, you know, subspecialties, sub-specialty training, generally speaking, improves your earning power. Right? So I can go to medical school. I can become a general practitioner. And then I can become a cardiologist. And if I become a cardiologist, I'm going to double my income. So what we tend to see is that in any given profession, rather than investing, let's say, 20 hours a week in a

completely different field, what's oftentimes much more useful is investing any extra time that you have in building what you kind of initially have a foundation on. So if, for example, you go back and get an MBA, if you, for example, go get a CFA certification, or I've talked to people who've gotten mediation certifications. I've worked with programmers who've learned additional programming languages as opposed to starting a real estate side hustle. And the key thing to remember is that society tends to value deep expertise in a particular area. It tends to value being an expert or having a particular niche. And if we think about the concept of a side hustle, I've got a foundation already that I'm building up on. And then now I'm going to start real estate over here,

which then I'm going to start building from the ground up. And if you really look at sort of the yields on a given hour of effort, the higher up you go, the more you actually get from investing in that same kind of tower of a career. So I know that a lot of people will sort of emphasize side hustles and doing stuff on the side, but generally speaking, in my experience, it's been a lot better to just invest in what you're already doing and kind of like move from the ninth floor to the 10th floor instead of the first floor to the second floor over here.

Now, there's an important caveat here, which is that even Healthy Gamer was a side hustle for me. So I'm not saying that side hustles don't have a place, but that once again, I think the real place for a side hustle is that if you've got a particular career and you want to make a transition, this isn't something that's forever going to be a side hustle. The goal is to try to do something that you can transition into. Oftentimes, that's something where you can't really abandon one career

and jump directly from one boat to another. This is where you've got to invest a little bit on the side and start to develop something. And as something grows, you kind of scale back. And this is something that I've tried to do a lot at Healthy Gamer, which is not have a full-time job and then Healthy Gamer on top. So as Healthy Gamer began to grow, I actually cut back on my private practice hours,

like 20 hours a week and then 10 hours a week and then five hours a week. And so I'd be super careful about the idea that a side hustle is better than just investing in what you're already building. That brings us to productivity pitfall number four, which in general is hustle culture. So there's this idea that the more you work, the more successful you will be. And this is a big part of hustle culture, right? It's like every hour of every day, I'm going to maximize my ROI. I'm going to be hustling.

And it's like it's people who put in 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week, 100 hours a week, 120 hours a week. Those are the people who are most successful. I don't know how to say this, but like if you look at the science of performance, that just isn't true. In fact, quite the opposite. So the first thing that I want you all to think about for a second is that there are people who will work 80 hours a week.

And those people who work 80 hours a week can be investment bankers, they can be resident physicians. They can also be fast food workers. I've worked with line cooks who will work 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. And what they have to show for it is so much less than what an investment banker does. Even in terms of investment banking, if you look at things like private equity or venture capital or angel funding, angel investing. Working more hours doesn't necessarily mean that you are more successful or more productive.

Those two don't necessarily correlate. Now, I'm not saying that there isn't any correlation. So generally speaking, you know, you have to put in a certain amount of time to be successful or productive in any field. But there's sort of this idea that working 80 hours, 90 hours, 100 hours, 120 hours is better than working 30 hours, 40 hours or 50 hours. And this is where if you look at the science of performance, we actually discover that that's actually not true. So let's understand that a little bit. So there's, there's,

there's, there been some really interesting studies on this concept of what we call use stress. So we're all familiar with this term distress, which is that when the stress level that we're in gets so high that it actually causes a, a negative impact in our performance. But there's also the science of something called use stress, which is the optimal level of stress for performance. And basically, if you look at the science of you stress, what it shows is that if stress level is too low, we get bored, right? So if I'm like, let's say I'm playing kickball with a bunch of two-year-olds, I'm not going to play the best kickball of my life because I'm playing against two-year-olds and it's just kind of boring and it's kind of completely lopsided and unfair

and things like that, right? It's kind of like playing chess against a three-year-old. Like, you don't have to use all of your faculties. So when our stress level is too low, we actually enter into the boredom state. And as we enter into the boredom state, we're not going to be as productive. As the stress level increases, as we get more engaged, we actually enter this period of use stress, which is this middle zone where we're a certain level of stressed out that we're actually mentally very activated and focused on the task. If we go into, if we pass that you stress zone and enter the distressed zone, that's when we start to feel overwhelmed, overworked, and that negatively impacts our performance. So for example, working 100 hours a week and sleeping four

hours a night is probably going to negatively impact your performance versus working, you know, 40 to 50 hours a week and sleeping eight and a half or nine hours a night. This is something that I learned kind of in a sense the hard way in medical school where I saw a bunch of students who were like studying for 10 hours a day. I tried to do the same thing. And what I sort of found is that my absorption or my recall really started to diminish after hour four, five, six, seven, eight. I was in such a perpetual state of exhaustion that the yields. The yielded, that I was getting from studying was incredibly low. Instead, what I did in med school is studied for just two hours a day, first thing in the morning. And I found that when I studied for two hours

at the beginning of the day, that my mind was so fresh and I was so focused that everything that I studied kind of really sank in. And then I would go to class and go to study groups and other things like that in the afternoon. And that would sort of be my repetition or reinforcement. But essentially, what I discovered in medical school is studying more doesn't actually like correlate with higher test scores. There even, have even been studies on this where if you look at sort of what correlates with the best grades on tests, it actually comes down to organization and sort of blocking off particular periods of time for particular amounts of studying. And the last thing that we're going to talk a little bit about

is also something that I hear a lot from hustle culture, which is putting yourself first. So a lot of people out there will sort of say that, you know, this is a dog eat dog world and that if you want to get ahead in life, you've got to prioritize yourself. No one's going to look out for you, so you've got to look out for yourself. Everywhere you go, you know, it's all about you. It's all about your growth, your success. You know, life is a competition. It's a race, right? I'm behind and someone else's ahead. So there's this very competitive aspect of life where one person comes out on top and everyone else second through 100th place is no good, right? It's like that's sort of this attitude that people have where you got to put yourself first. In my experience, that's actually not the case where

what I've really found is that prioritizing other people in a lot of situations, is actually the best thing in terms of your productivity and success. And I know this may sound kind of weird, but even the people who believe that, I think they believe it for a good reason, which is that it's been their experience. But I want to tunnel down into why people believe that and why that's their experience and why it's actually wrong.

So if I prioritize myself, right? If I put myself first, what do you think the people around me, how will they respond? Right? So if I'm like, if I'm a gunner and I'm going to be at the top of the class, I'm going to get straight A's, I'm going to get promoted. How will the people around me start treating me?

How will they behave towards me? So as I very, very, you know, in a, not a vocal, but even in a behavior kind of way, as people sort of figure out that I really am putting myself first, people are going to stop looking out for me, right? People are going to stop caring about me as much. They're not going to prioritize me. And so the interesting thing about putting yourself first in this idea that no one is going to look out for you, so you've got to look out for yourself, is that a lot of that

actually comes from them looking out for themselves. So when I put myself first and I put everyone else second, they're going to actually do the same thing. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where I sort of, this has been my experience that no one's been looking out for me, but that's because very vocally, I've only been looking out for myself. So why on earth would anyone look out for me when I make it very clear that I don't give a shit about that? So in my experience, actually, this is a huge productivity pitfall, that if you're always looking out for yourself and you're kind of number one in every situation, then other people are going to stop looking out for you. And if other people stop looking out for you, that's going to create all kinds of problems in terms

of lack of professional opportunities, in terms of people not asking you for help, in terms of all kinds of things. And in my experience, sort of prioritizing other people can actually lead to a lot of good outcomes. So when I care about the people around me and when I'm sort of willing to make sacrifices for the benefit of people around me, people appreciate that. You know, in some way may want to repay you. People may start looking out for you. People maybe have, maybe have access to opportunities that you may be a good fit for, that they're not a good fit for, and they'll pass those kinds of opportunities along. I think a good example of this is networking. So everyone's like, oh, you've got a network to get ahead. You've got a network to get ahead.

And there's absolutely a lot of value to networking. But I think the attitude when you go into a networking situation can drastically alter what outcomes you get. So when I go into a networking situation, I don't go into those situations thinking, okay, what can this person do for me? What I tend to go to networking situations for is trying to help people. So everywhere I go, if I'm sort of in a networking situation, I'll sort of try to help people. And I'll try to think, okay, like, how can I be helpful to this person? Or there are opportunities that I know of that could help this kind of person. And I will actually sometimes prioritize people ahead of myself.

And in my experience, that actually works really well. So you've got to be really careful about people who sort of talk about, okay, you've got to put yourself first because ain't no one going to watch out for you. Now, I don't think that you should always put other people ahead of yourself. I think you should look out for your own opportunities and take opportunities. And when other people offer you opportunities, you should accept them with gratitude if they're aligned with what you want to do. So we're not saying be a doormat. We're not saying always put yourself last or always put yourself second.

But I definitely think it's incorrect to always put yourself first. So just to kind of summarize, I think there's a lot of information out there about productivity pitfalls. There are a lot of people out there who will say a lot of things about productivity and success. success. And you got to do this and you got to do this and you got to do this and you got to do this. If you do these kinds of things, then you will be productive. You will be successful. And in my experience, a lot of that stuff just isn't accurate. And the science really doesn't support it. The first on the list is reading books. And so I'm a huge fan of reading books. I have a gigantic bookshelf with probably, you all can see in the back. Like, I've got probably 200 to 300 books in my office

and I've read most of them. And there's a lot of value to it. But the key thing is that reading a book in and of itself does not actually lead to behavioral change or any kind of concrete improvement. The other thing to remember is that there are oftentimes many alternatives to reading books that will allow you to better apply those principles. A simple example of that is you can read a book about trauma or you can go see a therapist who focuses on trauma. And those two things will yield very, very different outcomes. The second thing that we want to watch out a little bit for is multitasking. So it's absolutely important to sometimes be able to juggle parallel work. workflows or to be able to, on a macro level, work on multiple tasks at a time. The key thing to

remember, though, is that your brain can really only focus on one thing at a time. And in fact, the more split your focus is, the worse your performance is going to be. So we understand this in terms of surgical outcomes. And you can sort of understand it yourself where like, I don't know if you all have ever watched a TV show or movie while you're on your phone. And if you're on your phone, you're going to enjoy the movie or TV show less and you're going to enjoy whatever you're doing on your phone less. So we tell you. tend to find is that distracting the mind actually leads to poorer outcomes. The third thing to think a little bit about is having a side hustle. And this is where a lot of people will talk about, you know,

having a side hustle because that's where you make that extra money. It's sort of like on the side. It's extra. It's great. But oftentimes if you look at what actually correlates with the best median income, it's usually investing in your primary professional foundation. So whether that's sort of getting an advanced degree, whether that's something like doing a fellowship or additional trainings, there's a lot of stuff that if you've already built a foundation, moving from floor five to floor six and floor seven is going to be worth more. Investing 20 hours and sort of moving up two floors is going to be worth more than a side hustle where you're kind of starting at the bottom and building from the ground up. There are absolutely situations where side hustles can be useful and good.

So I myself started Healthy Gamer as a side hustle. But at some point, you know, you want to make that transition. And the goal of a side hustle, I really think the ideal situation for side hustle is when you're sort of trying to experiment with something, but you don't want to kind of give something up over here. The next thing to talk about in general is hustle culture, and this core idea that to be more productive and more successful, you've got to put in more time. Whereas in my experience, it's just not like that. So if you look at something like the science of use stress, what we sort of discover is that happy, healthy, well-rested, focused, appropriately challenged individuals are the ones that sort of yield the best performance. And I've even done corporate consulting at major

companies where we sort of try to emphasize this, right? So why do places like investment banks, you know, why do they call me in? It's to help them sort of adapt their culture to actually having like happy, healthy, appropriately challenged employees. It's not trying to get people to work 80 hours, 90 hours, 100 hours a week. What are the carrots or incentives that we can use to get people to work more and burn out? I've done a lot of work, especially with things like job turnover, where in the financial industry, sometimes like there's some investment banks that have very high turnover. They work people to the ground

and those people end up leaving because they get good opportunities elsewhere. They're high performers. And since they're high performers and they're being treated like crap, they're going to move somewhere else where they'll be treated a little bit better. And once that person leaves,

you're sort of left with this issue of having to train up an entirely new person, which costs you a ton. So working harder isn't necessarily better. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that working a decent amount is actually the best way to get optimal performance. The last thing to think a little bit

about is that a lot of people who are sort of productivity, success gurus will sort of talk a little bit about you got to put yourself first. No one else is going to look out for you and it's a dog eat dog world and you got to look out for yourself. And while I think that you should prioritize yourself at times, I think you've got to be super careful because they sort of are engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy whereas if I'm if I'm looking out only for myself and I always come number one in my book, other people will stop caring about me. Other people will stop trying to help me because if I'm only looking out for myself, there's going to be no reciprocity. So oddly enough, in my experience, if you actually try to help the people around you and you sometimes, you know,

go out of your way to help someone, and even if you don't get anything for it, like if you helps another human being out and they're never able to return the favor and you spend five hours of your life trying to guide someone who's 10 years younger than you, and you get no compensation for it, oh my God, it's what's the ROI on that investment? It's nothing. You didn't get any ROI from helping out another human being. Oh my God. Turns out that sometimes helping human beings is just like okay to do. And you don't need to optimize your ROI. You can actually make the world a better place. You can actually try to help someone else out and make life a little bit easier because Lord knows it ain't too, it ain't easy enough. So these are common things that I think I would

encourage you all to be a little bit more critical about some of these truisms of productivity or success, which in my experience aren't, they're just not that true. So think a little bit critically about it, and let's like take a look at some questions. Swemini is saying, helping others out without gains? No, absolutely. Yeah, this altruism crap is really lowering the ROI on the stream for me. Yeah, so LJDude 516 is if you need to justify it with an ROI, someone else being better off automatically applies to the overall average and will eventually increase overall

happiness. That's a great insight, right? So that's like, that's the key thing about trying to help out other people is that if you think about it, the total ROI is probably positive and probably overwhelmingly so. It's like if I know how to change a tire and someone else doesn't know how to change a tire and I teach them how to change a tire, it turns their time investment from five hours into one hour. It costs me one hour. So we're spending two hours for a five hour investment. They just see the lion's share of that. And this is the whole thing about being a little bit altruistic is like once people recognize that, they're going to try to help you out too.

And that's where like things just get better. So Hobday Train is saying mentor. others is the best way to cement your own skills. Bettering skills leads to more money, better offers, more PTO, et cetera. That's the other thing. I mean, I tend to agree with that, right? So even in teaching and helping other people out, you're probably getting something out of it as well.