Modern Wisdom - #441 - Anna Codrea-Rado - The Danger Of Obsessing Over Productivity

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Anna Codrea-Rado is a productivity journalist, author and a podcaster. Productivity Dysmorphia is the persistent feeling of dissatisfaction after working, no matter how much you've got done. It's the inability to see your own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. And it's everywhere. I wanted to ask Anna how we can deal with this modern malady. Expect to learn why you can't hack creativity, how Anna deals with her workaholism, what the AntiWork subreddit has got right, whether any social movement can avoid being coopted by communists, the dangers of admiring productivity gurus online, how to take pride in the work you've done and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a free v60 brewing kit and 40 filters from Pact Coffee at https://www.pactcoffee.com/ (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Anna's Substack - https://annacodrearado.substack.com/  Follow Anna on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/annacod Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Anna Codriarado. She's a productivity journalist, an author and a podcaster. Productivity dysmorphia is the persistent feeling of dissatisfaction after working. No matter how much you've got done, it's the inability to see your own success, to acknowledge the volume of your own output. And it's everywhere. I wanted to ask Anna how we can deal with this

very modern melody. I expect to learn why you can't hack creativity, how Anna deals with her workaholism, what the anti-work subreddit has got right, whether any social movement can avoid being co-opted by communists, the danger of admiring productivity gurus online, how to take pride in the work you've done, and much more. I feel like Anna's writing is hitting on something that a lot of people in the knowledge, work, world feel very acutely, which is this sort of pervasive, ambient sense that I could have done more, and I probably should have done more,

and other people might be doing more, and that makes me feel bad, no matter how much I could have done more and I probably should have done more and other people might be doing more and that makes me feel bad, no matter how much I've actually done. So if you like what she talks about today, she's going to subscribe to her sub-stack because her writing is very, very good. But now, please welcome Anna Cordray Arado. Hanukodri Arado, book of this show. Thanks so much for having me. You were just telling me that you have de-optimized your week, the anti-productivity week. Yeah, I have.

So normally, I'm all for any productivity hack. I'm signed up to Pomodoro Technique, Bullet journaling, calendar blocking, making sure I've got a really solid morning routine. But I thought as an experiment, I would see what would happen if I threw all of that out and basically did the opposite of what I would normally do and actively try to de-optimize my week. I've been super interesting because it's really shown to me the stuff that does really work and also the stuff that is kind of a waste of time. And the biggest takeaway for me or the

biggest surprise, the biggest thing I was not expecting to happen is I had so much more spontaneity in my week and so many things happened that I don't think would have had, would have otherwise happened had I been just bumbling about doing my normal very rigid stuff. So for example, on Wednesday morning, I woke up and in the absence of normally going about my kind of set list of things that I do in the morning, I was like, what should I do? And I thought, you know what, I've been really wanting to go to the, there's a new leisure center that's open to where I live,

and they do yoga classes, and I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna go and try one, and there's a library right next door, so I'm gonna work from the library, which is something that I never do. I just, I'm always in my home office. So I went to the yoga class,

okay, the yoga class itself, not that great, but still, you know, it's good to move your body first thing in the morning. But then in the library, I found a copy of my own book, which I was just really not expecting, because I live in a small town. The library is really tiny, and it's mainly kind of just kids books, but they had a really small section on jobs and I think it was called Jobs in Business, and there I found my book on the shelf, which was just so joyful, and something that just gave me this kind of boost that I didn't even know that I needed, and it's honestly something I just, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have had that, And it's honestly something I wouldn't have had that. It's one of those sort of small moments of enjoyment in my week.

I just otherwise wouldn't have had because I normally am so rigid and so kind of must be focused on getting as much out of my day as possible. So yeah, it's been great. It's been really, really interesting. There's a tension between serendipity and productivity, right? The fact that we do try and control our days, we try and make them predictable, we try and find out, okay, what works? But this is the essence of productivity.

I'm going to do a bunch of different things to try and get something out of my day. And over time, the things that seem to help me get more out of my day are things that I'm going to repeat to do. But as you said, you know, if you're time-blocking, the opportunity for you to go to the new library, you go, I haven't been to a library and worked effectively before. Why am I going to go and try and do that now? And the same thing happens. I'm out here in New York, so my entire schedule is upside down.

So for me, everything that I do is brand new. And there's so many more opportunities for serendipity. I went to a sports bar last night to watch some basketball game. And this rapper that was sat next, didn't know his rapper, this dude from Barcelona sat next to me that a rapper starts telling me about his tour.

That's a cool story that I've got. So there is this tension oddly between sort of living life and having variable high intensity, enjoyable serendipitous moments and drilling productivity and continuing to iterate on the stuff that you know works. 100% which thinking about that just today and it's interesting you're describing it as serendipity and productivity and I think that's totally true. But I think for me, what I've realized is, somewhere along the line, I confused productivity with creativity and they are not the same thing.

And similarly, productivity is a thing that you can measure. It's quantifiable. It's about, as you say, doing something in the most efficient or the quickest way possible, whereas more often than not with creativity, you don't know how long something's going to take. There is no clear end destination. The way I've been thinking about it is, it's the difference between when you take a walk,

you can take a walk in different ways. So you can walk to the local post office in order to get your steps in for that day and then also run that errand and take that off your list. Or you can just take a walk for no reason and just walk aimlessly around either a new area, you know, maybe you're visiting New York or wherever it might be, or just your own area and your own neighborhood and just take a walk for no reason, and then come across some amazing discovery or kind of just and just have that enjoyment, just have that experience of exploration. And that's kind of how I've been thinking about the two. And it is attention because at least for me, I am someone who I actually like order and I like planning and scheduling it.

I enjoy putting things on my calendar. But too much of it as I have realized through this experiment does really hinder my creativity. And equally, I don't think I could, you know, I think I'm a freelancer. So in theory, I could be a digital nomad and travel the world and, you know, have serendipitous moments every day, but I know myself and I know that I would feel very overwhelmed by that. And actually I used to live in New York and it was a very overwhelming city for me to be in. That kind of constant not knowing of how long am I going to be here for? Or what's, you know,

what chaos is this next day going to bring? It's too much. So there is something about, there is a kind of Goldilocks element to both productivity and creativity of, you don't, you know, we're not robots, we can't, there is a limit to how much we can optimize ourselves. And then for me, at least, my goal with productivity is to enable my creativity. And so I think that's for me where this tension really plays up and where it comes in and just making sure, or at least what I've become really well of at the moment, is finding that balance where I'm getting the most out of the hacks that do work, but not kind of co-opting my ability to actually be creative.

What were the hacks that your unproductive week told you were the most effective ones? So anything where I'm making a decision, batching my decision-making, I think, works for me, or also kind of just batch tasking. And so what I did is I kind of applied this, I de-optimized everything, including the stuff outside of work, so not just the things I actually did in my working hours, but also outside. Okay, so this is a kind of a dumb example, but one that for me really kind of came up, I started putting courgettes, or as Americans call them, zucchini's, in my porridge in the morning.

Why? in my porridge in the morning. And why? Because I wanted to get more greens into my diet. I actually, so you honestly can't taste it. I actually like quajert, so I'm fine with it. But honestly, yeah, you're great at it. And are you okay? I am, and it's a great way to get more vitamins and you honestly can't taste it. But anyway, so, and like I said,

I actually like the taste of Corsair, so it's fine, but you cannot taste it anyway. So you've got to grate that in, like I'm not chopping, you have to grate it. So at some point I realized what is a lot more efficient is if at the beginning of the week, I just stick my Corsair in the blender and like zap it up, put it in a top layer

and then just put a couple of spoonfuls in every morning. This week, I was grading the stupid closure every single morning. What happened? By the end of the week, there's a half used closure in the fridge that I couldn't, this morning, I looked at it and I was like, you know what, I'm not putting the closure

into the stupid porridge, forget it. And it's also frustrating me a waste of closure because now that's going in the bin. Anyway, but I think also the decisions as well. forget it. And it's also frustrating me a waste of a courgette because now that's going in the bin anyway. But I think also the decisions as well. So stuff like normally I would sit down at the beginning of the week and work out a meal plan for the rest of the week so that it doesn't come to the end of the day. And then my partner and I have that very

frustrating conversation of what's for dinner tonight. I don't know I need to think about it. All of that is done in one go. So those were things that really kind of stood out for me as things that actually do help. And it's interesting because calendar blocking is something that I thought used to really work for me. But what I've come to realize is that it's just about having a very vague plan of action. So on the days where I was kind of just going from project to project and not without any direction, I found that quite stressful and quite overwhelming. And I really did miss having just a skeleton

list of things that, you know, in the morning, I'm going to focus on this and the afternoon, I'm going to focus on that. But what I didn't miss is having between 11 and 130, I'm going to work on this very specific task. So yeah, that was, that was really interesting for me. But yeah, like I said, it was the, I do think the decision fatigue, at least for me, is very real. And if you can front-load those decisions and just kind of deal with them in a batch, or anything, sort of, courgette out in one go, anything that you can do in one go, that, for me, does really work. Yeah, that's been one of the biggest things that I've been able to stick to.

My ability to, I swim in these circles, I'm friends with Ali Abdahl, and we talk about the fact that I'm ridiculously inefficient even though I know what I should be doing. But the things that I have managed to stick to that have stayed with me as batching. So every day on a Wednesday is all of the podcasts need to be done planning for the advertisers, blah, blah, blah, once a week. I do my emails once a week. Things that will take sub 30 seconds will just get an email response immediately as and when they come through.

All of the long things, scheduling in guests, stealing with whatever it is for work, stuff like that. Just do that on usually a Friday, Thursday or a Friday. Also doing emails on a Friday is good because it means that you don't get a response until the Monday. So you don't end up having this constant back and forth. A lot of people say, oh, well, if you just schedule the email until so you don't end up having this constant back and forth. A lot of people say, oh, well, if you just schedule the email until when you finish your emails, then your replies will

have come through after you've finished in box zero. You're like, oh, yeah, but just do it at a time when no one else is working, and it's absolutely sweet. So, yeah, batching, batching to a big one. Going back to the creativity conversation, do you think then that creativity can be hacked at all? creativity conversation, do you think then that creativity can be hacked at all? Absolutely not. I actually wrote about this a couple of years ago and the title is Creativity Can't Be Hacked. Because you need that, those messy and uncomfortable parts, they have to exist. Again, I suppose I have to take this back a step. What do we mean when we say creativity be hacked? Are we talking about can we find a shortcut to do creativity faster? Can we avoid the discomfort that comes with creativity? Can we generate ideas exponentially?

Can we make more ideas in a short amount of time? If that's what we mean by hacking creativity, I think no, because I think that discomfort is a critical part of the creative process. Because I just think that's kind of how it just works. I sort of when I'm writing some so my you know my creativity is many around writing and the way I think about it is. I'm writing something and then I inevitably get to this point in the process where. I've lost all faith in the essay or the article or the book or whatever it might be. And just think that's it. This thing is, I'm screwed. Like, this is all fallen apart.

There's no way forward. And then somehow, when I don't even actually really know how, I move something around, I step back from it, stuff happens that I can't explain. And suddenly it works. And the thing has somehow magically come together and the only way what I like in it to is moving house. So whenever you move house, there will always come a point where you are sat on the floor. Either in tears or crying, crying, looking at all of your stuff and all of your boxes and thinking there is no way that that staff is going to fit in those boxes also in time for the move is to come

And then somehow you've turned around you put a few things somewhere and Done that Tetris with the packing and it's all packed and it's done. And that always happens. And there's no way I've never had a moving experience in the same way that I've never had a proper creative experience where that discomfort hasn't existed is just kind of a fact fact of it. I do think there are things you can do to give yourself a better chance and improve your experience or increase the likelihood of creativity being able to happen. Sort of engender or creative

atmosphere. Exactly, but I don't think you can shortcut your way out of the uncomfortable and messy parts of creativity. Do you think that I would definitely say that this is the case, that when I try to hack my way through creativity that it actually works adversarily to the creative process as well, I'm trying to come up with something. So if I try and binoral beats and write, well, I'm going to list YouTube and episode titles is a good example of this. I need to come up with a compelling title that's going to tell people what this episode's about and it's also going to have to be eye catching, but it can't be too click-beddy, but it can't be whatever whatever, right? So there's

all these parameters running around. And if I was to say, right, okay, so I'm gonna write the first thing that comes to mind, then I'm gonna iterate on that ten times, and I'm gonna do whatever whatever, no, just go for a walk and think about it and listen to some music or something and you'll come back and you end up having it. So in a weird way, creativity gets hacked with anti, it can be hacked, but it's the hacks that we think of as hacks usually are the opposite of the things that we do to get creativity. You know, just leave, listen to some music, go to the gym and think about whatever it is that you're doing. And also what I would add to that is it's never the same thing. So maybe you're trying to figure out

the headline for your episode or whatever you might be doing and you went off and had a shower and it came to you in the shower. That doesn't mean that next time you're trying to come up with the episode title, if you take a shower, the answer's going to come to you in the shower, you might need to do something else and sometimes you might have to do 20 things until you finally work it out and sometimes that's the other part of it that hack kind of implies that there is this blueprint and that if someone, either if I did it before or if this thing worked for someone else, then it's gonna work for me. This piece that I wrote about it,

this piece where I kind of explored this and which I wrote about how I don't think it can be hacked, I spoke to a bunch of people for it and I heard from this one guy who was like, yeah, I read somewhere, I probably on Reddit, that if you have more blood to your head, you're more creative. So he hung off the side of his sofa so that the blood would rush to his head. And all that happened is that he got a headache. You know,

there was kind of, because it, you know, maybe someone laid down once with their head upside down and had the idea for the next greatest book book, that doesn't mean it's gonna necessarily work for you. And I do think that we do have this urge to, if someone else has done this, particularly someone, quote unquote successful, has done something that if we too could just replicate what they did, then we'll be golden to.

That's what everyone's trying to do, right? That's why Ali Abdals got two and a half million YouTube subs. People look at his content and they go, wow, if I watched his video about typing it 240 words per minute, I can type it. Maybe I will get closer to doing that or the Pomodoro technique or atomic habits or whatever it might be, right? This is what people are doing. They're trying to model off of other successful people who have managed to get the outcomes they want from a process which

they've explained, which this person's now going to begin to try and do. But with creativity, it is so infuriatingly pedestrian and counter and kind of its own animal and the harder that you push. That being said, I'm pretty creative. If I have a bad meditation session, it's almost always because I've had a good creative session when I should have been thinking about my breath. And one of my friends, Johnny, very frequently, he has a note pad and pen next to where he meditates,

because that's how many ideas he has when he's meditating, which obviously isn't the purpose of the meditation, but it's sort of when it comes, it comes, I suppose. ideas he has when he's meditating, which obviously isn't the purpose of the meditation, but it's sort of when it comes, it comes, I suppose. He also has, and this was a life hack that we featured a little while ago, have you seen waterproof paper and pencils? I've heard about them. I'm pretty sure I heard about them from Ali as well. Yeah, they're love notes, they're called or you can get them on Amazon. And they're meant for, I think, they're meant for leaving cute messages to your other half in the shower. And it's like a little note pad and you can tear them off and throw it away. And the pencils were, and it is

pretty spectacular that this paper and this pencil writes and then it gets wet and nothing happens. But Johnny uses that because he says that he has at least 50% of his ideas while he's showering. Johnny uses that because he says that he has at least 50% of his ideas while he's showering. So he's just got that done. So if you can't hack creativity, what are the things that say that you've got a day where you need to be as creative as possible, what are the sort of things that you're going to try and do to engender that environment? I think again, it really varies. It kind of varies on the how critical that creative, that need to be creative is. So, as someone who's job relies on ideas and being creative, something that I try to

separate out are the creative projects that I'm doing for money and the ones that pay my bills and then the ones that I keep back and do for myself. And I think one of the things I do is just trying to find a bit of balance to have space to do both of those things. I mean I do sometimes I will sometimes sit and try to come up with ideas but what I what I tend to do is I also have a place just on my phone in the Notes app where I'm constantly writing down kernels of ideas and then I do sometimes do just development

Like I'll carve out a couple of hours and I'll go through this list a lot of it is garbage And just take those ideas and actually try to develop them and I'll kind of I'll go through this list. A lot of it is garbage. And just take those ideas and actually try to develop them. And I'll kind of, I'll start by googling the idea, has anyone else written anything about this? Maybe poll people on Twitter, see if they've got anything interesting to say. I do a lot of reading. So as a writer, for me, the other half of the writing process is reading. I will just go down so many rabbit holes and just read stuff. Sometimes also do that on YouTube as well and just watch a bunch of YouTube videos. I do find for me, it is kind of, if I'm actively trying to be creative, it is quite a doing

process. I will also just sit and this actually just happens a lot more infrequently than it should, but I will just sit and try to write something. Basically, I think what's really interesting is that sometimes something will have worked and we will just try to keep replicating it and it just, it doesn't. Like, we can't get there again. But yeah, I don't know. It's so hard to pin point exactly what I'm doing because I only realized something has worked after it has, after I've actually had the idea or after I've actually done something that has been, had it has actually kind of made, has had a creative

output, if that makes sense. Definitely having a list each week is a really cool idea. So the newsletter that I write each week, I need to come up with three things that I've learned. I learned tons of things, but if I didn't ever look for them, if I wasn't ever writing them down, then it would be really, really difficult. And then it means that when it comes to writing the newsletter at the end of the week, I've got 10 things to choose from. I could have as the body of it. Is this tweet and this article and this conversation I had with a friend and this story

from whatever might have happened. So yeah, I think purposefully looking for little inspirations of creativity. Because that's kind of how creativity is, right? Creativity isn't a big process. It's the genesis of the process. The process is the work that you do after the creativity. You know, tons of books, almost all of the sort of popular science, pop-psych stuff, is it a core concept fleshed out into 80,000 words. So finding those little bits of inspiration, that's exactly what you're looking for.

And I think spreading that across the week just kind of grazing on little tidbits of creativity. That definitely makes it easier for me. It also means that your research period is going to be much more simple because it's okay, I'm looking at this as opposed to looking for something and then looking at whatever it is. So I think that's good. The article that got me onto your work, which I absolutely love,

and I wrote a newsletter about, was Productivity Disomorphia. So can you take me through that? Yeah. So this is a term I made up to refer to when you can't see your own success where there is a disconnect between feeling successful between being successful and feeling successful. So I have kind of felt this for quite a long time and it really manifested most recently, which is what finally spurred me to write this article when my first book came out. So my book came out, I became a published author and yet I really struggled to identify as an author and also to accept that my book was real. I mean obviously I know it's real but to accept that it was a real achievement so people would say how proud I must be of myself and I was but I couldn't I was not feeling as enthusiastic and as

proud as these people were kind of projecting onto me. And what that all that was going on in my head was, yeah, but the book came out and locked down so I didn't get a proper book launch and it's not, you know, it wasn't at the time. It wasn't in a bookshop because, well, because literally books were not being stocked in any bookshop. And also, it's nonfiction, it's not on novel, so that doesn't count. As I say, these things, I realize how ridiculous it is, but these were the things that are going on in my head,

just all of these things I was telling myself to diminish the achievement. And it's not the first time it's happened, it's happened before. The other time, the other big time that I remember it happening was I had a wrote a story for the New York Times, and it made it onto its front page. And as far as journalists go, getting a front page byline in the New York Times, it's really up there. That was all that kind of achievement was something that I didn't even ever think would be possible. I didn't even have it on the list.

Like, book has always been on the list, but that sort of thing wasn't even on the list because I just did think it was going to happen. And the same thing. Oh, it doesn't count because it was a code byline. There was another reporter's name on it and it wasn't supposed to be on the front page, but some other stuff, you know, all of this stuff that I kind of just told myself to just diminish the achievement. And I, again, do what I do as a journalist, I ask

other people if they've experienced this and then take it to academics and experts to see see their take on it. When I tweeted out asking people if they've also have this disconnect of not being able to see their achievements, I was absolutely inundated with replies. And really interestingly from such a wide range of people, I've heard from women, from men, from other authors, but also from sex workers, from people in all fields, in so many kind of across all industry, okay, fine, fair enough. Of course, it's Twitter, so it's still, you know, take that with a grain of salt, but was overwhelmed by how many people related to this. And then, yeah, so then I went off and spoke to a bunch of experts. And the way I, with the I went off and spoke to a bunch of experts.

The way I sort of think about productivity to small fear is that productivity is the thing that spurs us to try and achieve something, but productivity to small fear robs us from our ability to savor the fruits of that achievement. And I kind of found that it sits somewhere between anxiety burnout and imposter syndrome. It's not, it's a bit of all of them, but not quite fully one of them. The thing that people kind of came back and said first and foremost was, this is just straight up imposter syndrome. And for me, the difference is why I don't think it's in post-acindrom is that whilst I really relate to in post-acindrom and have it in some aspects of my life, at least as far as work is concerned, I don't have this fear of getting found out.

I'm actually quite confident in my work abilities. I know that I'm good at my job and know that I'm a good reporter, I know that I'm a good writer. I don't have this fear, the kind of hallmark of imposter syndrome is getting found out to be fraudulent and I, I don't have that, at least not in a work context, have it in other areas of my life, but not in a work context. at least not in a work context, to have it in other areas of my life, but not in a work context. So, that for me is why I'm posicindrom never quite fully, it just didn't quite ring true for me. And kind of same with burnout because yes, I've experienced burnout, but I've also had this thing happen to me when I've not been burned out. So, that's kind of where I landed and it's been really interesting. It's been loads of people seem to have taken interest in this term.

It's kind of taken on a life of its own. But it's been really, it's been great to sort of start having all these conversations and kind of connect with people and find out that they also experienced this. The way that I see it, Imposter syndrome is forward looking. Productivity, dismalia is backward looking. So imposter syndrome, for the most part, it is the persistent lack of belief in your ability to get the work done despite the fact that you have continued to get the work done and all of your, that's the retrospective.

Productivity dysmorphia is, by its very nature, I have done some work, but I could have what it should have done more higher. This is you tarnish it and downgrade any of the achievements. There's two elements to it that I think I can't remember whether you went into this in the article. What you've used as examples are large projects, which you have got to, and then something's happened, which has been great, and you've downplayed the how much that should be celebrated or how much that resonates with you and how sort of virtuous you feel, the line between your efforts and the outcomes that you've got. I also think that there's another element of this, which is on a smaller scale and on a daily basis, which is simply, I did a lot of work today, but I should have done more.

That's another element of it, which isn't quite the same, I don a lot of work today, but I should have done more. That's another element of it, which isn't quite the same, I don't think, because it's not necessarily about tarnishing the grandeur of the outcome. This one is more to do with lack of volume or feelings of inefficiency. So for instance, I haven't been in an office for a very long time, and I work from home or sometimes I go out and work in coffee shops with quite rarely. And you see your own inefficiencies from a front row seat. You see every time that cold turkey pops up and blocks you from accessing that website

that you said that you weren't going to use or the YouTube rabbit hole that you go down that you promised yourself that you wouldn't have done or or the lunch that you said was gonna take 20 minutes and took 40, or you see all of these things, right? And you think, oh God, I should be doing more, Alia Bdahl will be doing more. And then I went into an office to go and record a podcast, year ago, something like that. And there were all of these people fucking sat around

doing nothing. I'm like, oh shit, I forgot just how inefficient people in an office actually are. And that really was, it reminded me, look, you probably are still wildly inefficient and you probably do need to spend less time on YouTube. However, it's the work that you've done to get yourself to this stage is really, really good. So yeah, did you look at, or do you see this sort of bifurcation that I'm talking about here? One being, tarnishing large achievements,

the other being an inability to accept that you have done work today. Congratulations, Anna, Pat, yourself on the back. A hundred percent. I mean, part of what we're talking about here, and this is why I did mention that I do think anxiety plays a role in this is because what we're talking about here is a feeling of not being good enough. That, you know, I've not done enough, this achievement isn't big enough, or even if it is, I'm still going to diminish it.

That's a feel that is, that's about these feelings of inadequacy basically and they can happen on small and large scales. As to the point about people who work in offices versus self-employed people, that rings really, really true for me because honestly my whole productivity journey or this whole interest in productivity culture only came about after I started working for myself and it came about because I realized how actually there were so many things I was doing when I worked in an office that just were not working, that were just really inefficient or, I mean, I knew this at the time.

I always used to, I would stand on the subway platform in New York and I would think to myself, how dumb it is that we have evolved so far. And yeah, we have concluded that the best thing to do is for all of us, if you get up and go in the same direction every day with everyone else and then come back at the same time, going in the same direction every day with everyone else, and then come back at the same time, going in the opposite direction with everyone else.

Why can't we stagger the time that we need to be in the office? And I would mention this to people, and they would say, well, that's just the way it is. And like, what would be the alternative? And we had a pandemic, and we saw what the alternative could be. But anyway, this whole journey really was very much triggered

by me starting to work for myself. And I do think on a really basic level, it starts from the fact that I am now fundamentally paid for my output rather than my input. So when you work in an office, of course, of course you have to actually do your job. And if you don in an office, of course, of course, you have to actually do your job. And if you don't eventually, you will get fired, but there is a lot that you can get away with because you are being paid to have your bum on the seat, whereas

I am being paid to deliver something. My editors really don't care how and when to write the... If it takes five minutes or five hours. Yeah, they don't care how long it takes, they don't care where I am, they don't care how I do it, they just want the article. When I worked in house, when I had a full-time job, although I do hate that term because I do have a full-time job now, but when I had an office job, when I was employed for an employer, my bomb had to be on the seat.

And the first time I ever got in serious trouble at work was because I basically left work a few hours early on a Friday afternoon when there was, because there was no work to be done, because the company was going through a restructuring, there was literally no work to be done. And I got in so much trouble. And I remember saying, but there was nothing to be like, there was, you know, there's nothing for me to do. And I was told, you are paid to be here between the hours of whatever, nine and six. And things probably have evolved since then this was. I'm not convinced that they will have evolved. I think that a big part of the way that office work works is that it's a signal to the rest of the crew that if you're suffering, I'm here suffering with you as well.

So I've been a club promoter for a long time and a big part of our job, I don't need to be on the front door of an Eichelub. The boys that I have to work for me, the managers, they understand inside out how to run that front door. They understand how to run the front door, not as well as me, but that would that be difficult, but they understand how to run it nearly as well as I do. So I don't need to be there.

Why am I there? I'm there as a signal to the guy that manages the nightclub to say me, Dick had promote a guy. I am here freezing my tits off on the front door of this nightclub at 1 a.m. in the middle of Newcastle's winter with you as well, because you're here. Big chunk of it is just signaling. And the same thing goes for the people that are in the office. Well, maybe you finished your work early because you were more efficient or something like that. But we're a team here. There's some sort of tribal mentality. And if such and such is lagging and still has graph to do at Friday at 3 p.m. and you still

need to be in the office, despite the fact that you've completed yours because we're a unit. Yeah, and it sucks for that person who is just more efficient. And actually, you're genuinely disincentivized from being efficient. Yeah. Exactly. If doing more work, more intensely and more efficiently results in you just being given more work

or having big laws of time where you don't do work, because those are the only two things that are going to happen. You either sit about and do nothing after you've finished your work or you are given more work to do. And if you're not remunerated for that with either free time or more money, you're actively disincentivized from being productive. 100%. I mean, it just makes me think of that episode of friends when Ross is unemployed because he screamed at his boss and Joey's teaching him how to be better at being unemployed and make stretching out a task, stretching out the tasks of the week over the day, over the week. So he had only five things to do and he said, that's you do that over the course of the week, you

don't do that all of that on a Monday morning. It was funny because that's how people, that's how the office works. But yeah, that has always been my experience. I remember asking also to work from home one day a week to write because, finally enough, it's a lot easier to write in quiet. And was told, no, you can't because there are other members of the team who can't be trusted to work from home.

So rather than sort that problem out, it's easier to punish the person who we know is a good worker and we'll just figure out a way to do it. Yeah, the optimizing for the worst common denominator for the least effective. Yeah, I mean, you know, the remote work revolution was Yeah, I mean, you know, the remote work revolution was way, way, way over you, I think. And, you know, a lot of bad things came out of the pandemic, but that's one of the definite advantages. Talking about the problems of work, you did a big deep dive into the anti-work subreddit, didn't you? What is that for the people that aren't familiar with it? So the anti-work subreddit was the largest, as fast as growing Reddit from last year.

And it's been around for a really long time, but really blew up during the pandemic. And it's basically a forum for people to talk about these pretty radical ideas of completely abolishing work. And it really blew up because particularly in America there was kind of wave of people who were super frustrated with their working conditions, particularly in the service sectors, and they texted their bosses to say that they quit, so they quit over text. And then they took screenshots of these texts and they put it on the anti-work, subreddit, and those went viral, and the whole thing blew up. And now it's got, I think it's pushing it to million subscribers. What was really fascinating, so I spent a couple of months reporting on this, what was really fascinating is this idea of anti-work, as an anti-work, as a kind of political or sort of political philosophy,

I suppose, is not kind of, it's not new, but it's not that old, but it's not new either. And it has its roots in quite far-left ideologies. So Marxism, anarchism, and even kind of really getting the weeds of it kind of like post-anarchism and all of this kind of stuff. It's quite heavily tied to the idea of there being no state. So to kind of take this back a step, when we say like a bullish work, we think, well, how know that's going to work? If we don't work, how are we going to make money? The point is to think about what would a society that has not centered around money

and not centered around us having to quote unquote, earn a living and exchange our labor for money. What would that look like? So it's not about ending work within the current system that we know it, but it's kind of, I mean, really this is about dismantling the whole system of capitalism. Everything, everything. Everything. Everything. Everything.

Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. Everything. movement, sneaks, Marxism or communism in through the back door. There's these people that thought that they were just leaving a job. They just thought they were leaving a job and texting their boss and telling him that they weren't going to come into work later on. And then three months later, Marxism.

Yeah, and what's been really interesting is that there has been, so when I was reporting on the story and this has kind of got, I think it's got worse in the group since, and there's been, that's even quite a lot of drama since I wrote the piece that I'm not actually fully up today on. But so it's like any big movement, particularly one that starts online and starts to kind of move and spill into the real world. There's a lot of teething problems, because it's

really easy to say behind a computer screen, you know, let's dismantle capitalism and let's do this and do that. It's a lot harder to actually then turn that into actual action. But so to your point, there was quite a split in the group. So there were the people, the kind of let's call them, sort of the OG anti-work, kind of the long- members who they're all about these kind of quite extreme lefty views. And then there are the people who've moved in since the pandemic who basically realized, yeah, work sucks and I hate it. And I need a place to vent about it. But fundamentally, I want to improve work and I want to exist within the system but I just want it

to be better. And to me that was what the really interesting tension is because when you realize the system is broken or isn't working, what do you do? Do you find a way to exist within it or do you try to overturn it and change it? And I think that's something that so many of us kind of do feel that tension because it's really interesting. You know, I've seen a lot of critique in general. There's kind of this trend in internet writing at the moment of pointing out that there are people who have pointed to the failures of capitalism, but they themselves aren't doing enough to tear down the system.

It's not possible for anyone individual to tear down the system. I mean, what does that even actually look like in practice? And I think so many of us are just thinking about, well, you know what? There are so many things that I don't like about this, but also, I'm not sure that I see what the alternative would look like. I'm not sure that, you know, I'm not a Marxist, I'm not a cap, I'm not an anarchist, I'm not a whatever, I'm, you know, none of these labels quite seem to fit quite right. And none of the kind of ideology or the theory seem to look quite right either.

And so really, I mean, the actual heart of the original point of the forum was just to debate and talk, and then there became this pressure of now there are so many people and there's so much media interest, and suddenly it became this pressure of this group somehow, which is just a bunch of regular people talking on the internet, is somehow now supposed to come up with all of the answers for everything that's wrong with our society. So it's been really, really interesting and really, really kind of fascinating to watch unfold. And I just had some really great conversations with so many of the people who are members. And then also kind of lots of academics as well, because there is sort of, there's a dotted line to another movement,

which is called post work, which is very much more in the academic space. And that is also deals in this idea of critiquing work as we know it and thinking about what some alternatives might look like. And to my mind, I just think, you know what, even if it's something like, even if it's like, you know what, some of these ideas are a bit too radical for me or a bit too lefty or whatever

it might be, there's still so much in there that there's actually really, really worth engaging with, and to a large extent, this idea of work and how it doesn't work is actually something that cuts right across the political spectrum, because actually, there are people who they might be on the opposite side of the political scale who still also are sat in offices and really hating their jobs. Lots of people are disgruntled with the work. It's not just a phenomenon from people on the left. Exactly.

Was getting exposed to this one of the reasons that you've decided to try and do less work this year? It definitely was one of the contributing factors. Although I'm also, I wrote a piece recently about how my goal for this year is to do less. And I think there's also, I'm not the first person who has kind of come up with that idea either, sort of since I've seen that piece, I've seen lots of other people, also kind of express similar, similar feelings. And a lot of people have kind

of misunderstood what anti-work is about and people kind of think that it is more about just being fed up with work and they're sort of not aware of these really radical roots. But doing all of that work and kind of thinking about it and particularly reading some of the more measured texts and speaking to some of the kind of really well-researched academics and realising actually how deep this problem of work goes, that definitely was a contributing factor. But, I mean, there's obviously no way for me to av-test this, but I think I probably would have landed there

on my own anyway, because, you know, I really believe that writers, they write what they need to read. It's kind of how you teach what you need to learn. And there is a reason why I was attracted to that anti-work story. And so whether or not I would have written it, I think I probably would have still landed in this place of just re-evaluating my own relationship with my work, my productivity, and my ambition, and all of these things. But it

definitely, I guess it kind of gave me the permission to do it, sort of knowing that there are these sort of, there's this sprawling online community of people who are taking this even more seriously than I am. That I think helped. There's a quote from one of your articles where you said, I've managed to unearth a series of contradictions in myself. Chief among them is that I'd very much like to work less than I currently do. And indeed, it's within my power to do so, but I still don't. And that tension, again, between the

fact that, actually, something else here, I think that there's broadly two types of people that are really, really focused on productivity. One of them, the camp that I think both me and you fall into, which is we take pleasure from doing things well, doing things productively, doing things efficiently, getting worked on, we genuinely do. However, we also see that there's another element of life that we're probably missing out on, that we know that life would be better and that we are built for spending more time in nature, for spending more time away from our screens, for spending less time being worried about the next achievement, whatever

it might be. The other side, I would put Ali into this camp, I have a bunch of other buddies as well, who don't really seem, Douglas Murray is a good example of this, is a writer. He simply won't stop and he simply has no desire to stop either. The idea of a balanced life to him, it's not something that factors into his life. He sees his life as a balanced life working all the time and then picking up his free element, his spare time wherever he can. And I think that there's broadly two of those, and I think that the tension as well with what you're talking about here only really applies to those of us that have a bit of a

desire for something else outside of it. Because if all that you want to do is send it every single day, sat in front of your desk, then crack on. I've managed to an earth a series of contradictions. Chief among them is that I'd like to do less work than I currently do and indeed it's within my power, but I still don't. Why do you think that contradictions there? If I think I think if I knew why it was there, I would be able to solve this problem and kind of be at peace with it. What can I give you a potential reason why I think it might be there?

Please do. Yeah, so I think that you obviously derive satisfaction from doing your work and that you know the grind and iterating on the things that you do are going to continue to get you success. Changing that is a bad idea because you have found a successful solution. Letting go of that, I think is just primarily the problem. I think that the difficulty comes from not doing something which you know brings you success. And I think it's... The urgent will always get in the way of the important, in the same way as the, how do you say, the dopamine system will always overtake the serotonin system. You're always going to chase a goal ahead from finding peace and pleasure because you

know that the goal is, it feels more urgent, it feels more immediate, or at least that's my explanation for why I feel that way. Yeah, I think That does make sense to me. I think that's definitely If not all of it a really big part of it because that's the thing is that as you said like I am someone who likes work and like what I do You know, I I feel so blessed that I get to do stuff like this and call it my job. And that for the large part, I don't really have to answer to anyone. Of course, you

know, I've like, you know, I still have to be polite and I've got clients and I've got deadlines and I've got stuff. But I really am the kind of like master of my destiny and I really do think I've got the greatest job in the world. But then also I do know there is so much more to life than work. And also there's this weird thing at the moment where it's suddenly really unfashionable to be hustling is not, it's not fashionable.

At least not in the sort of circles that I'm swimming in. The garboss is dead. And all of this kind of stuff, so there's that going on, but then there's also, you know, this has really been amplified at least for me with the pandemic because during the pandemic, there was nothing else to do.

I was not baking banana bread, I was working on my book, I was working because that is was something I enjoyed doing and pretty much the only thing I could do. All competition for working had been removed, yeah. Exactly. So it is, it's a really tough one, it's almost like I sometimes have these conversations where I kind of, I do think there are people who just view jobs as jobs, just as paychecks and they're not necessarily interested in careers and they're just interested in exchanging their labor

for money basically so they can do stuff outside of work. I'm just not one of those people and sometimes I do have days where I wish I was, where I could take my work less seriously, where I could teach myself to care less about my work, but I just can't. So yeah, there's all of that kind of swillying around. I think it also, for me, moving... So I've always been a journalist, my whole career, and I've written about lots of different things over the course of my career. And I'm in this space at the moment where I'm writing and thinking a lot about productivity and

work and careers and stuff like that. And it does sometimes this kind of meta element of my job. I think also makes this maybe sometimes a bit worse. It seeps into everything that you do. If you're chilling out by reading all of a Birkman's 4,000 weeks, but then you've also got a podcast with him, but then you were also going to write an article on it. But then would I have read this book? Had I not been well yet? Because it's a pretty good book. And then you start to go, well, hang on, have I managed to, have I got like Stockholm syndrome to my own job here? Where does the line between what I do for fun and what I do for

work? Where does that finish? Well, I get to do something that I love for work. Well, actually, how much would I love it if this wasn't my work? Yeah. Just over and over again. You know what's really interesting, as you say, that it makes me think about, so the last, the actual, the last time I had a, an in-house, a staff job, I was a music journalist and covering the type of music that at the time, I absolutely loved. I still have not recovered from how much that ruined my enjoyment of music. And I don't have that anymore, you know, you're to your point because I read all of a Bertman's book, I interviewed him for my podcast and I loved

reading his book in my free time. I gifted that book to my dad. I've spoken about that. Length of my friends recommended to people. It's a joy for me to talk about that. And it was had a positive impact on me reading that book. I don't know what happened to the music, to the love of music though, but having a job in that space destroyed that love for me. And even now, I don't really, I don't listen to new music anymore. I just, I live in, I mean, I listen to music, I'm not a total freak, but I kind of live in this bubble of, I just prefer to listen to stuff I already know,

But I kind of live in this bubble of, I just prefer to listen to stuff I already know. I have no idea what's going on in those kind of spaces anymore. Again, I've said for ages that if there's one way to turn a love into a labor, it's to commercialize it. As soon as you do what you do for fun, for work, the game has changed. And that's a price that I think far more people need to pay. I need to realise that they're going to pay. I did this video

a while ago about 10 reasons why you shouldn't work for yourself and it was all of the bad things about being self-employed. The fact that you're both the taskmaster, you're the organ grinder and the monkey, you never know when you're done, holidays aren't holidays, you don't get sick pay, you can't get a house, which you need three years of essay, three, oh, two, blah, blah, blah, all of these things, right? All of this stuff that happens that comes through and you can turn the thing that you think, well, if I did my passion for work, then my job would be the thing that I love. Yes, it would.

But you are also going to turn your passion into a job that doesn't mean that your job is going to be your passion. It's the other way around. And there will be times. Inevitably, if you want to be good at the thing that you're going to do, you're going to have to work hard, which means that you're going to have to get your nose to the grindstone, stay up late, get up early, battle through creativity, blocks, and so on and so forth.

And that removes a lot of the joy that you find. One of the reasons that you enjoy doing the things that you do is because they're easy and free and liberating and they don't feel like they have the time, pressure of whatever job it is that you do at the moment. You start to change that and put the same dynamic that you're trying to escape

over the thing that you now do to escape. There's only one outcome from that. There's only one outcome from that. I also wonder about whether you do something, whether you turn that passion into a job and you do it for someone else or whether you do it for yourself. I totally hear you on the reasons not to be freelance. I've written a whole book about freelancing and if there is one piece of advice, I think it's called You're the Business. It's this one right here, this lovely blue one.

And if there's one piece of advice, when people ask me, should I go freelance, I say to them, are you being pushed into freelancing, are you being pulled towards it? Because more often than not, people are being pushed into it because they don't like their current job situation. In which case, don't freelance, just get another job. All of that being said, I do wonder if doing your passion, but for someone else also plays a role in it, because I was a music journalist for working on staff at a really intense publication where there were sort of impossible parameters and eventually that publication got shot down and I got my major and that's how I ended up relaunching, which was the best thing that ever happened to my career but sucked at the time.

And I think that had a role to play because it was still the thing I loved, but not on my own terms. And I think also, to be honest, I think it probably was relevant that it was a music industry and I think I saw a side to it that I was not expecting and was seeing it up, you know, seeing how the sausage is made is kind of a recipe for going vegetarian. So that might have been a part of it as well. But yeah, I think this kind of idea of, find a job you love and you won't work a day in your life is one of the biggest lies that we have been told. And this idea of, oh, if you can just find your passion, your job won't be a job. It's just bullshit.

There's a quote from Tim Cook at an all hands apple meeting that he did and he takes questions from the staff and someone had asked something to do with the same thing. They'd say if you find something that you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Tim Cook thought about it for a moment and he said, yeah, people do say, if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.

But Apple, I found that to not be true at all, said, you will work harder at this thing than you ever had before, but the tools will feel light in your hands. And I'm like, that's cool. That's a cool way to put it. But you need to know that there's a price that you pay for this.

This isn't going to be your passion anymore. This is going to be a business built around price that you pay for this, this isn't going to be your passion anymore. This is going to be a business built around something that you cared about. And you don't know where that's going to go. It's an unfortunate red pill to drop on people, but you genuinely don't know if commercializing your passion is going to destroy your passion for it and not be a commercial success. That's genuinely a risk. You know what it's like, it's like you and that girl that you live next

door to and you went to school with for ages and ages and you never worked, she was in relationships and you were in relationships and you never went out and you think, right, okay, if we decide to do this, we sacrifice the potential for our friendship, for a relationship which isn't guaranteed to succeed. That's kind of how I see it. Yeah, it's so true. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. And it kind of comes back to what we were saying in the very beginning that there's no blueprint. You're not going to know if something's going to work until you try it. And just because it worked for someone doesn't mean that it's going to work for you just because there is there's a content creator out there, or YouTuber, or whoever, or writer, who's turned their passion into their career and they've made it work and they talk about how brilliant it is that doesn't

mean that that's going to be the same thing for you. And I don't know, it's tough. It's also, I think it comes back to how, at least when I was going through school and university, we weren't taught about thinking about careers in terms of how they fit into our lives. We were just taught you must get a job. And the end goal is job, which back then was in an office. And here is a menu of types of jobs you can do.

And you can do these stupid aptitude tests that always tell you that you're going to be a teacher. And then they roll in, like the lawyers and the accountants and all of these people in these professional fields to show you what the options are. But they don't talk about, okay, if you want to be in the creative field, this is what your life might look like, or if you're thinking about living a certain kind of life, how is your job going to fit into it? And all of these things, and we just, we're not taught about that, even though we center our whole world, our whole society, our whole lives around work, when we're taught about careers, we're

not taught about how they fit in in relation to the rest of our life. But I mean, I do feel somewhat optimistic that some of this stuff is starting to change, and at least from my experience, you know, I'm being asked to come into universities and even kind of like community centres and stuff like that to talk to young people about freelancing and I I never had those kinds of talks when I was When I was those young though that age it was it was just like these are these rigid types of jobs that you're gonna be able to do And I do think the young people are kind of thinking differently about this stuff, so I'm semi hopeful. One thing to consider, but I'm aware that I put a bit of a damp squib on

everyone's dreams of monetizing their passion. One other thing to consider is if you hate what you're doing at the moment, you're not giving anything up. If you don't enjoy the relationship you're in, the place that you live, the job that you do, you're literally risking nothing. What's the worst that happens? You get into another job, you try and make a go of it and you, it fails and then you go back into a job that you don't like. Do you mean like the one that you have now? At the very least, you've closed that open loop

of constantly obsessing over whether or not that's going to be the thing. And then maybe you find out it was never the thing in the first place and you can now think about start thinking about what the actual thing is going to be. Going back to the the beyond work discussion, that's beyond burger isn't it? That's moving past me. And you work. And you work. Going back to that, how do you counteract your desire to constantly get things done with productivity, given the fact that you like getting things done, you take value in it, but also you have this

vision of knowing that not everything you do should be in the service of work. How do you know if you're working hard enough, how do you give yourself a break when you've finished working, how do you counteract this desire to constantly get stuff done? How do you give yourself a break when you've finished working? How do you can't rack this desire to constantly get stuff done? Well, so first of all, I want to say to kind of connect these two things that we've just been talking about is I think it's really important for people to be to realize and something that has been transformative for myself to kind of grapple with is that it is possible to hold to conflicting thoughts in your head and for both of them to be true

and that they can exist at the same time. And so, for example, it is possible to really like what you do and really like your job but also know that maybe you work a bit too much and maybe it's time to kind of think about letting go of this obsession with work or productivity or whatever. I wish I would have come up with this, but unfortunately I can't take credit for it. There is an essay in the New York Times, which has got something, the headline is something to the effect of you can be anti-work and have a dream job at the same time. And I think that's very true. I think you can be really critical of the

way we work, of our working environment, or even maybe go so far as the whole system, but also love your job. That's kind of how I feel. Did you hear a story about second wave feminism and the woman's separatist movement in the 70s? Do you know what this is? No.. Big group of women decided that the patriarchy was causing a lot of problems for them and the solution was to completely recount men. So you had straight women becoming either a celibate or elected elective lesbians in a desperate attempt

to try and sort of stick their middle finger up at the patriarchy and it's kind of what you're talking about here that the binary choice that people see with regards to work is if I think that there are problems with the current system of work, I therefore either need to be unemployed, I hate my job. Yeah, exactly. And it's so much more nuanced than that.

It's possible to hold opposing views and then be true at the same time. And I think that actually, in answer to the actual question you asked me, that to me is a really key element of all of this because once you can accept that and once you can validate your feelings, basically, things become a lot easier from there. So if you just remind yourself of those things, then when you do need to take a break, you can give yourself a break, basically. I mean, for me, this is obviously not practical for everyone to do,

but for me, one of the big things is that I actually moved out of the city. So I used to live in London and I moved out and there's a slower pace of life around me and slowly, slowly, that is filtering to me as well. It's got this kind of trickle-down effect of when I live somewhere that's more chilled. I become more chilled. I kind of also make this say this in a kind of joking way to people when they ask me about, you know, how to get better at having breaks when you're freelance. I tell them to get a dog because the dog needs a walk

and the dog is gonna force you to get out and the dog is going to force you into get out and the dog is going to force you into nature. And just make you have a bit of division between your working life and your free life. So it's kind of stuff like that is kind of, you know, like I said, I'm not saying that the only way to do these things is to either move to the countryside or to or get a dog. But the point is, you kind of have to take some quite intentional and not necessarily drastic action, but intentional action. If you're serious about doing these things, you actually have to put the work in. It's, I guess, it's kind of not dissimilar to this big idea that James Clear talks about, which is that the identity, if you

want to form a habit, you need to form an identity around it. So I want to be a person who works less. So I think to myself, 5pm, what would a person who worked less do at this point, would they continue to send emails or do whatever, or would they maybe close that laptop and go for a walk? It's that kind of thing. It's sort of thinking, like I said, it's being intentional about this stuff. And yeah, for me, it was actually taking some quite drastic changes and making some quite drastic changes in my lifestyle. Yeah, it's a really interesting tension, I think, sort

of playing with all of these different things, definitely getting yourself into the environment where you are around things that are happening that you want to do. So, for instance, I actually found not the opposite, but kind of a little bit the opposite that the pace of life in New Castle is too slow for me. So I'm going to Austin, where it's super social, there's things happening all the time, there's events on, everybody's training, or going shooting, or going south by Southwest, or some sort of meditation retreat,

there's always things to do. So again, I'm in a house surrounded by the type of food that I want to eat. I'm in a city surrounded by the type of food that I want to eat. I'm in a city surrounded by the type of activities that I want to do. It's very difficult to do the sort of thing that you want to do if there's no one around you doing it. So yeah, I think in basically environment design, but just on an entire lifestyle scale, socially, what are the sort of people that you're around doing. Yeah, that's, it'll

be interesting. It'll be interesting to see what happens. The progressive remote work, this increasing dissatisfaction with living for work. I think for some people, the realization that you can get to your freedom number, whatever you feel like in terms of your annual income, and then stopping as opposed to being the boss bitch or the Gary V. Hustle and Grind guy, and this is something I really need to read a little bit more about it, but it's something I'm really passionate about saying, look, if you have a low level of materialism, if you can be optimally happy at a hundred grand a year, you have a competitive advantage over people who can't get to that level of happiness until they hit 10 mil. Like

that is genuinely the same as having a fast metabolism. Look, that person needs to be on 1800 calories a day in order to cut. You can cut on 2400 calories. You can do less work and get the same outcome that you want. But culture at the moment, it's so uncool to talk about rest when you're done. You know, rest when you're done. You don't need to push yourself beyond where you need to go. I think in the micro, that makes a ton of sense. You want to be competitive. You want to get as much out of yourself as you can. But when it comes to doing things that are in service of other things like working in service of money or working in service of freedom,

I don't think that that's true. I think that you get yourself to the stage where you're comfortable and then you start to lean further and further and further into what would I do with my time if I had as much time as I could. And that's Morgan Housel's psychology of money. Says, having wealth is the ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, and no one can tell you otherwise. That's it. So, yeah, I'm hoping its philosophy actually comes out a little bit more, just, sand Marxism. Yeah, I mean, that's always the sticking point, right? Is that? But it's not. I mean, there's so much to kind of unpack there.

It's really interesting. So a couple of things I'll just say quickly is, first of all, you know, I want to be a person who just only is intrinsically motivated. And I have my own definition of success and I want to tune out everything else, but I can't. I do also like being able to, I don't, I want to be able to go to the party and say, oh, I do, I do X and people instantly understand what that is. It's quite tautidious and quite frustrating when you go somewhere and you're talking to someone and you're explaining to them

They've got this newsletter and it's got you know 15,000 subscribers or whatever um, and they're just looking at you and that you know like I'm I um I have a I have a membership on my newsletter or subscription thing like I actually make money directly through the newsletter And people are people eyes are kind of the either glazing over or they just can't compute and they don't understand what it is. And it's, I do sometimes have those moments where I wish I could just say, you know, I'm a lawyer or I am a journalist who has a staff job at the New York Times or whatever. Because actually having those traditional external markets and success is just easier to

talk about. So it would be, I would be lying if I said that I've got this whole thing licked and that I do my own thing and I don't care what anyone thinks and all of that because of course I do I'm human. So there's kind of that element to it and then there's another element to it, which is specifically on the money side. And as you say, kind of talking about wealth, is that so many of us don't know because again, it's not something that was, you know, financial literacy and kind of even sort of financial education is something that is just not taught as standard in schools and even just this kind of understanding the difference between wealth and income and that your salary,

how much your paid as a salary isn't actually that's not, there's obviously a part of, but it's not the whole indicator of your wealth. And all of these kind of concepts, which you know, the difference between net wealth, net worth and income and all of these things is just stuff that not enough of us talk about or know about. And so when we're thinking of, when we talk about building wealth, there's this kind of, like it's,

it's not okay to say that, that you know, I'm out here trying to build my wealth because that just, what people here is, I'm out here just trying to make as much money as possible and I just, I just want to be rich. And that has, you know, has its own kind of, has a certain, has a negative connotation, but actually wealth building can be, it can be really powerful. It's freedom building. Yeah. It's freedom building. Yeah.

So it's one of those things that it's, there's not enough nuance to the conversation around these things and it's hard to kind of have the conversation around these things. Again, going back to this anti-work thing. One of the rules in the forum is you just cannot talk about CEOs because more so from this kind of original core group of people, again, because it's rooted in Marxism and anarchism, there is this fundamental belief that any CEO is still profiting off the labor of the workers. And so therefore, it's just not possible for them. You know, there's no such thing as benevolent capitalism.

There's no such thing as benevolent capitalism, which is I can totally see where that view comes from. And what we're talking about in that respect is on a such a massive level. But when we're talking about, you know, CEOs of tiny companies or CEOs of companies of one, building wealth and redistributing it, that's, you know, it's possible. It's something that I kind of, I even think about just for my own, for just second, in my own little world is, so, if when I work with other creatives, when I collaborate on projects, increasingly I'm trying to do so on a profit-sharing basis rather than paying another, if I'm working with another freelancer, increasingly I try to avoid just paying them

a flat fee and just share the profit because that to me sounds seems fairer and wouldn't it be great if that worked on a macro level, a doubt that me doing that is going to influence that, but at least in my own little orbit, that's my little action. So this is just a really long winded way of saying that when there is a big element to all of the productivity discussion which centers around wealth and money and not enough of that is talked about and it's a really important conversation to have and a really big part of it because to a large extent the more resources you have and the The wealthier you are the more productive you can be Because just for simple reasons of you can either outsource stuff or you're not worrying about that financial burden

One of your early questions when you're asking me you know kind of like how to how do you you know about being more creative? Something that I think there is a direct correlation between is when my finances are in a good place, I feel I can I get more done I can I feel more creative I feel more productive because I'm not I don't have that there's no worry at the back of my head of like oh my God how my you know I need to come up with an idea so that I can pay my bills. That heat gets taken off. So anyway, so very potted kind of take on it, but I do think there's a really big chunk of this productivity conversation that directly relates to money. I agree.

I think that's the, how would you say, negative view of wealth acquisition isn't really helping anybody. What the beyond burger work crowd want to do is they want people to be able to live the sort of life that they want, an incumbent from the vicissitudes of doing work, but they don't realize that you can actually achieve that through work. And there will inevitably be a little bit of resentment towards the people that do. Now, if you're able to find your freedom number by going freelance or by working within a company and doing whatever investing smartly, that's the same outcome. You've managed to get the same outcome. But anyway,

people need to go and subscribe to your substack. You're news like this dope. I really like it. It's at the intersection of all of the things that bounce around inside of my head to do with modern productivity and stuff like that. Where should people go? They want to sign up to that or check out the other things that you do. So my substack is at, is such a long, I've got such a long name because I have a long, long, my name is long, but it's anacodeurododosobstark.com, but the best place people can find me is on Twitter, it's at anacode and everything basically is linked from there, so, but there is no other anacodeurododod in the world. So if you google me, you find all my stuff. Nice. Thanks, Anna. Thanks very much. This has been great. you