Something You Should Know - How You Perceive the World Isn’t Quite Right & Why Productivity is Very Overrated

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, whether you're left-handed or right-handed has a strong influence on decisions you make. Then, how we humans perceive the world is different than the way a lot of other creatures do. We cannot see ultraviolet light, which actually the vast majority of animals with eyes can see. We see very many fewer colors than almost every bird can perceive. Also, something to consider if you've ever thought of smuggling your own snacks into a movie theater.

Starting point is 00:01:07 And our obsession with productivity and not wasting time. We tend to worry about the time that we're wasting. And the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it. Maybe we can see the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly.

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Starting point is 00:02:32 It's the first place people look if they're right-handed. Left-handed people actually see the left side sooner. Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto says, Our hands and eyes have everything to do with how we interact with the physical world, and our handedness can have a lot to do with the decisions we make. Dr. Casasanto asked participants in a study to decide between two products to buy, two job applicants to hire, or two alien creatures to trust, right-handed participants regularly chose the one on the right side of the page, while lefties chose the one on

Starting point is 00:03:13 the left side of the page. People tend to prefer things they see or experience on the same side as their dominant hand. That's apparently because they're easier to reach, perceive, and interact with. And you can use that phenomenon to your advantage by catering to someone's dominant side in professional or personal situations. And that is something you should know. As you travel through life on this planet, you see the world as it is, right? Well, not exactly. What you see is the world the way humans see the world.

Starting point is 00:03:53 But other creatures on the very same planet see a very different world in very different ways. And so what makes this so interesting to me is that if animals see things so differently than we do, who's right? What is real? And does it even matter? Here to discuss this and give us some understanding of exactly how other creatures perceive their own reality is Ed Yong. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist and staff member at The Atlantic, and he's author of a book called An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. Hey, Ed, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me. So when I look out the window, what I see isn't necessarily all that's there. It's just all that's there that I can

Starting point is 00:04:46 perceive, which is a little hard to get your head around. So help me get my head around that. So I'm sitting here experiencing the world around me, the sights, the sounds, the textures, the smells. And I think you're right that it doesn't occur to most people that that experience is only partial and yet it is there is so much about the world that we are missing there are part there are types of light types of color that we can't sense there are smells that we don't smell there are sounds that are below or above our range of hearing other animals can tap into that. And so each creature is really only perceiving a thin sliver of the fullness of reality. And I find that really fascinating. There's a word for this idea. The word is umwelt. It comes from the German for environment, but it doesn't mean the

Starting point is 00:05:42 physical environment. It means the part of the world that each creature can tap into, that each creature can sense, can perceive. And that part is always limited. I find that idea, the Umwelt concept, to be incredibly humbling. It means that for all our vaunted intelligence, humans really are still only perceiving a small fraction of all there is to perceive, and that our understanding of the world could be greatly expanded by taking into account the senses of other animals. I would imagine that the reason creatures see that little slice that is uniquely theirs of the bigger reality is because that's what they need to see. That's what they need to perceive in order to survive. Yeah, that's right. Evolution tunes an animal's umwelt, an animal's senses,

Starting point is 00:06:37 to its particular needs. We humans have very good eyes. We have decent hearing. But we don't, for example, sense electric fields of the kind that every living thing inevitably produces. There are fish that can sense those electric fields. They tend to live in very, very murky water where vision isn't very useful. But an electric sense is very useful these fish produce their own these um their own electric fields like living batteries and they sense the ways in which objects around them distort and deflect those fields that allows them to navigate through these incredibly murky often dark waters without the need for vision likewise in a similar way animals that tend to navigate over incredibly long distances like songbirds or sea turtles

Starting point is 00:07:34 have the ability to sense the earth's magnetic field so that it's almost as if they have living compasses inside their bodies and that gives them a way of knowing the right heading, knowing where they are on the planet at any given time without the need for senses that could be more easily occluded, again, like vision or smell. So one of the things that interests me about this is if there are other creatures that smell things we can't smell or see things that we can't see how do we know that because if if we can't see them how do we know that they can see them yeah that's a great question um so in a lot of cases scientists do simple experiments where they expose an animal to a particular thing let's's say a sound that is too high-pitched for us to hear or a smell at concentrations below what we can detect. It's easy enough to do that,

Starting point is 00:08:33 and then you can look at the animal's reactions. But then often it's the reverse. The discovery of these incredible senses comes from watching animals behaving in unusual ways and asking, how are they doing that? Bats, for example, can echolocate. That means they produce high-pitched calls and they listen out for the rebounding echoes and they use those to navigate through the dark world around them. Echolocation was discovered when scientists watched bats flying through rooms that were so dark they couldn't possibly be seeing anything. And yet they were swerving around obstacles, they were plucking insects out of the air. How were they doing that?

Starting point is 00:09:19 At a point when people managed to create ultrasonic detectors detectors that could recognize the very high pitch calls that bats were producing people realized that they were actually creating and listening to these sounds well above the range of human hearing so that's a great example of how the these sensors tend to be discovered there's it's a mix of curiosity, of careful observation, and of using technology to compensate for our own sensory shortfalls. When you look at our ability to perceive the world compared to, say, any other animal, do we tend to do better than most? Do we see and perceive less than many? Where are we on the scale? You can draw some comparisons.

Starting point is 00:10:12 So vision is a good example. For example, humans have incredibly sharp vision. Our eyes have better resolution than the eyes of almost any other animal except for birds of prey like eagles. So we're very good at seeing things in great detail. A lot of the patterns that we can see on animal bodies aren't actually visible to the animals themselves. A lot of the spots of butterflies or zebra stripes look like they just fade into grey to the eyes of a lion or another zebra. But there are always trade-offs with the

Starting point is 00:10:47 sensors. So eyes can either have exceptional resolution or exceptional sensitivity, and they can never have both at the same time. So the trade-off for our incredibly acute eyes is that they fail very easily when light gets dim. So our night vision is very poor compared to other mammals, but the sharpness of our eyes is excellent. Our hearing is very good, but it's limited in its range. So things like bats and dolphins can produce high-pitched sounds that we can't hear. Even rats and mice,

Starting point is 00:11:21 which humans have studied for centuries, have been having animated ultrasonic conversations that we have been completely oblivious to for most of that time throughout all of that time our sense of touch is very good our fingertips are exquisitely sensitive but there are other animals like sea otters that have hands that are justice sensitive, but are also very, very fast. They not only have incredibly sensitive fingers, but they can use those fingers to detect food that's buried or hidden much more quickly than a human could. And then there are senses that we absolutely do not even have. We cannot sense the Earth's magnetic fields like a humble robin or even some kinds of insects can. We cannot see ultraviolet light, which actually the vast

Starting point is 00:12:15 majority of animals with eyes can see. We see very many fewer colours than almost every bird can perceive. So we are very good in some areas, very, very poor in a lot of areas. And that's kind of the norm for the animal kingdom. You know, nothing can sense everything because as we've said already, nothing needs to. We're talking about how different creatures on this planet see the world differently than we do. And my guest is Pulitzer Prize winning author Ed Yong. His book is called An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there.

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Starting point is 00:13:51 Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. So, Ed, talk a little bit about animals that are maybe closer to home, like dogs and cats. Animals that we see more frequently and we observe their behavior. We're not necessarily sure what we're observing. So might be interesting to find out. So dogs live in a world that's dominated by smell. Smell is a primary sense for them. It's the way they explore. It's the way they socialise. They experience the world.

Starting point is 00:14:28 And I think humans often forget this because certainly those of us who can see are so dominated by vision that we assume that other animals do the same. I have a dog. His name is Typo. He's a corgi. When we go on walks,

Starting point is 00:14:42 I often see other dog owners yanking their dogs along you know to them the walk is a means of exercise or travel from a to b but that's a bit of a shame because if you actually let dogs do their own thing on a walk which i try and do with mine often what they want to do is they want to sniff. They will spend a long time sniffing a random piece of pavement or a random fence post that another dog has just peed upon. You know, all dog owners I'm sure are very familiar with this feeling when you're walking along quite happily and their dog grinds to a halt and just starts very intently exploring something around it and that speaks to how important smell is to them what you know when my dog sniffs a patch of pavement that another dog has peed on

Starting point is 00:15:32 it feels a lot to me like me checking a social media account right that dog starts uh sensing which other dogs have been around in the neighborhood it can tell stuff about uh those dogs uh health um you know maybe but what they've been eating recently um it's a it's a social update from a distance and that's just one of many types of information that dogs are getting by sniffing the world around them i think you know by depriving of that, we're really severing them from a really important part of their life. It would be as if you and I went on a hike and every time I stopped to appreciate a beautiful viewpoint, you clapped your hands over my eyes and dragged me along. You know, I think that dogs, when they are allowed to smell and when they're allowed to have agency over what they choose to sniff, studies have shown that they tend to be happier.

Starting point is 00:16:31 They tend to be less anxious, more optimistic. You know, and that's something that dog owners can give to them by thinking about the way they sense the world. And I've also heard that dogs' hearing is very good. It's certainly better, I guess, than human hearing in the sense that they can hear sounds, hear frequencies that we don't hear. But is a dog's hearing spectacularly good, or is it just a little better than ours? Their hearing is very good. They're very good at localizing sound. So it's telling which direction a sound is coming from. But, you know, human hearing is also pretty exceptional. We have very decent hearing, we have good localization, we can hear over a wide range of frequencies. If you want to think about

Starting point is 00:17:21 really incredible hearing, though, there are all kinds of examples around the animal kingdom so most birds have much faster hearing than we do so that is they can resolve very very fast moving changes in pitch or volume that our ears can't pick up so if you've ever listened to a songbird singing and wondered and had this strange feeling that there's probably more in that song than we can hear, then you'd be right. There are a lot of intricacies in the songs of songbirds that humans just can't pick out and that they absolutely can. One easy example of this, there is a bird called the whippoorwill that makes a song that sounds to a human like it's got three syllables it actually has five in it it's just that they happen too

Starting point is 00:18:11 quickly for us to pick out but when a mockingbird mimics the song of a whippoorwill it gets all five syllables because its hearing is that much faster and then there are creatures that have hearing that can hear sounds beyond what we can hear, either ultrasonic calls that are too high pitch for us to hear or infrasonic calls that are too low pitch for us to hear. Ultrasonic calls are really good for sensing the environment. So bats and dolphins use those to navigate with echolocation to an extent in environments that we couldn't navigate in. Infrasonic calls travel over very large distances. So whales, the biggest whales like blue whales, can use infrasound to communicate over distances of kilometers, miles.

Starting point is 00:18:56 Some people argue that they might even be able to hear each other over the span of an entire ocean. When you understand how some of these other creatures perceive their reality, does it give us any real insight in what it's like to be them? You know, let's go back to bats. Bats are a very famous example of this because the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote this essay called What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he argued that even if you imagined yourself using echolocation or flying through the air with leathery wings, you would never really be able to get into the head of a bat to really understand what its subjective experience of echolocation was like. And he's right. You know, echolocation is a strange sense because bats need to produce sound

Starting point is 00:19:50 in order to hear the rebounding echo. So by listening for the sounds that they produce, you can sort of get a sense of what information they're trying to wrest from the world. When a bat is scanning open air, it's producing different kinds of sounds than when it is trying to hunt down a fast-moving insect. So by recording the bat's call,

Starting point is 00:20:12 you can kind of get at its intent. You can almost read its mind. And yet there is still that gulf that Nagel described where you still don't really know what it is like to be a bat, to get inside the head of a bat, to imagine the conscious experience of a bat. So science and technology can certainly take us a long way, but there is this gulf that we will never be able to cross. And the only way to cross it really is by making what one scientist, Alexander Horowitz, described to me as informed imaginative leaps. roll around in the ground and rub her neck on a specific spot. And I have no idea why or what that does for her, what itch that scratches,

Starting point is 00:21:11 but it clearly must be pleasurable and I'll never know. Yes, I think that's right. You know, my dog and I can communicate. We absolutely can. You know, I can tell him things and he doesn't speak English, but he obeys certain commands. He understands certain bits about my mood. I can do the same. I can take guesses about what he wants. I can tell when he's hungry, what he wants to play. And having learned about the senses of animals, I can guess at what he gets when he sniffs as we walk, what he might hear, what he might feel.

Starting point is 00:21:49 But I don't entirely know. And here is an animal that I love very deeply and that I spend every day with. There's always going to be that gap. But even if we'll never fully know the answer, it is glorious and beautiful to try and imagine, to try and cross that gulf, even if we'll never be fully able to. Because trying to do that teaches us so much more about the creatures that we share our lives and our planet with. And it shows our world in a new light. i watch typo sniffing his way along the street it changes my understanding of the blocks that i walk along it changes my sense of how quickly the neighborhood changes what kinds of information are seeded in the very ground that I don't have access to. It makes the world and it makes my dog feel that much more miraculous to me.

Starting point is 00:22:51 Lastly, talk about bees because they seem like they're really interesting creatures and we see them all the time and not sure what they do and why they do what they do. But so talk about them. Let me tell you the really cool thing about bees. So bees pollinate flowers, as we know. If you took all the colors of all the flowers in the world, and you did an analysis and asked, what kind of eye would be best at seeing these kinds of colors? What kind of color vision would be best at discriminating all the flowers on the world? What you get is something very much like a bee eye. It is an eye that has three kinds of color-sensing cells, much like humans do, but that, unlike us, are most sensitive to green blue and ultraviolet you would therefore think that maybe

Starting point is 00:23:46 bees have eyes that are really well adapted to seeing flowers but that's actually completely wrong because bees or insects that gave rise to bees came first and then flowers evolved. So what actually happened was that flowers evolved colours that ideally tickle the eyes of bees and other insects. And that's incredible to me because we often think of the senses as these passive receptacles for information, right? Like I'm sitting here, light is entering my eyes, sound is entering my ears. I'm not doing anything. They feel like they receive. But in doing that, the senses also shape the world around us in profound ways. The eyes of bees and other insects determined the kinds of colours that flowers eventually evolved. So beauty, as we know it, is not just in the eye of the beholder. It arises because of that eye.

Starting point is 00:24:53 Well, I love this conversation because it makes you think about something that you never think about. The way other creatures, the way other animals perceive their world, which is also our world, but perceive it in such a different way than we do. I've been talking with Ed Yong. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist, a staff member at The Atlantic, and author of a book called An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Ed. This was a lot of fun. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world,

Starting point is 00:25:34 looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast,

Starting point is 00:26:34 it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and

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Starting point is 00:27:37 The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It seems so many of us are caught up in this endless quest, endless desire to be productive, to get more done, to search for the perfect system or routine that will help us get everything accomplished on our to-do list. And then we feel guilty if we don't get everything on that list accomplished. It's a productivity grind, and it can really wear you down. There's got to be a better way, and here to help you find that better way is Madeline Doerr. She is a writer and podcaster. Her podcast is called Routines and Ruts, and she has a book out called I Didn't Do That Thing Today, Letting Go of Productivity

Starting point is 00:28:26 Guilt. Hey, Madeline, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. So what is that thing? What is that quest? What is that big desire that we all have to want to get more done, get everything accomplished? And then when we do, we want to get more done. It is a curious thing, isn't it, Mike, that we are told to optimize our lives so that we have more time and then we just fill that with more optimizing of our lives. It's an endless game, it seems. And I think that it is a call for pause or a call for thought because isn't it that we should be optimizing our time so that we have more times for the things that are meaningful or important to us?

Starting point is 00:29:08 And productivity, it can be fantastic. We all need to get things done, but it's the never enough, never quite reaching an endpoint that can have us on this hamster wheel in our days. And it can contribute to things like burnout and overwhelm and stress and perhaps take us out of our lives. And doesn't it seem that no matter how productive you get, how many things you get done, you at the end of the day end up focusing on the thing you didn't get done and then that makes you feel guilty. It does. You can really spiral in these feelings of productivity guilt. And you can write off the whole day and deem it a failure because of that one thing that you didn't get done, or perhaps

Starting point is 00:29:57 several things that you didn't get done. And so I think that where that really can stem from is this idea that in our society, we've tied productivity to our sense of self-worth. And when we do that, what we do is never enough. We never quite reach that feeling of being complete. Our to-do list is never complete. And so I think we're set up to fail a little bit here because we're told that productivity is a measure of our worth, but it's never quite enough. And so we never quite get there and we pile on these feelings of guilt and shame at the

Starting point is 00:30:31 end of the day. And so I think it's really about untethering that idea that productivity is the sole measure of our worth and we can find some other things in our days to count amongst the doing. And so it's always curious to me that you can get to that end of the day and have that guilt feeling and focus solely on the thing that you didn't do and overlook all of the treasures and all of the perhaps moments of connection that you had or the moments of kindness or what you learned, even the mistakes you make. Well, I find it interesting that it seems like there's two kinds of time. There's either the time that you're being productive or you're wasting time. I mean, and there aren't a lot of other categories. It seems like just because you're not being

Starting point is 00:31:14 productive doesn't mean necessarily that you're wasting time. Yes, I agree. I think that there's many, many categories in between. And even what we deem wasted time, I think is worth getting curious about because we're quick to call ourselves lazy or we're quick to say that we're wasting time. We're quick to say that we're procrastinating. But when we inspect that, we can actually see that sometimes it's those moments that are incredibly valuable. Are we procrastinating or are we actually thinking about the problem in a deeper way? Are we letting ideas sort of roll around in our minds before we take that action? And I think it's an interesting thing because

Starting point is 00:31:56 we tend to worry about the time that we're wasting. And if anything, think that the surest way to waste time is to worry about wasting it so if we take away the worry about wasted time and we get curious about those moments maybe we can see that the time that we enjoy wasting is actually not wasted time or we can see that it's thinking time or we can see that it's a it's an all-important moment of rest and downtime. Well, I love what you said, that there is no bigger waste of time than spending time worrying about wasting time. Yes, exactly. And something that's been really helpful for me is actually returning to one of my favorite books by Arnold Bennett. It's called How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

Starting point is 00:32:45 And it was written in 1908. And so it's always a gem to kind of return to these texts and see that we've been grappling with these quandaries for many decades and centuries even. And what Arnold Bennett points out is that we cannot waste time in advance. So I think sometimes when we're caught in that productivity guilt feeling, or we're worrying about wasting time, we lament the morning that we might have wasted, for instance. And we carry that worry into the afternoon when actually we can't waste time in advance. So instead, we can have this opportunity to turn over a new leaf. And what that means is that we can see that this moment in front of us is so far unspoiled. Instead of falling further down that spiral that we can fall into, we can turn it over and begin afresh. One of the things I think people find frustrating is when you schedule your time, you schedule things to do and how long

Starting point is 00:33:47 it's going to take and however you schedule it. What you can't schedule is what you don't know. You don't know what's going to happen, what's going to come up, what emergency, what thing is going to need your attention that isn't on your list. And that causes frustration in a lot of people is like, oh, now I've got to waste time doing this other thing that wasn't in the plan. It's inevitable. It's life. And so perhaps if we can build in some buffer room in our days and in our plans for those inevitable surprises, distractions and interruptions, perhaps that would be what can lessen that productivity guilt that we experience because we can see, oh, okay, so I didn't get the thing done that I thought that I needed to do

Starting point is 00:34:32 today because of this emergency and interruption, and that's life. And so I'm not solely to blame here. I think there's a fine line in terms of, obviously, there's these things that we want to accomplish in our lives to have a sense of meaning or satisfaction. And in many senses, we do need to find that motivation within ourselves. But I also think that we need to acknowledge when perhaps there's things outside of our control that, you know, knock over our plans for the day. Still, there are people I know that I'm very envious of because they seem to get so much more done in a week or a day or whatever. I'll see them on Facebook or something and, hey, they're over here doing this. And then they did this other thing. And I'm thinking, how do they get it all done?

Starting point is 00:35:21 And is it me and maybe they don't? Or are there just some people who seem to get a lot more done than others? Well, I do have a suspicion that perhaps people aren't able, people aren't getting as much done as they might portray they are on social media. I think that it's so easy to curate our lives. And even when we look on social media, we know that it's curated. We know that we're looking at a highlight reel intellectually, but it can be difficult to untangle that feeling of comparison where we fall short. So I think that there's two things at play here.

Starting point is 00:35:59 And the first is that there is a level of curation happening, and that can mean that we spiral in comparison and we see our real life and our incomplete to-do list. But really, it might be that other people also have things that are incomplete. It's inevitable as well, where no one is perfect. But the other side of this is that perhaps there are some people that have a greater capacity for productivity and perhaps they do get more done. Perhaps they have higher energy or more attention or more resources. Maybe they've got more assistance in getting things done. Maybe they've got a home gym and they're able to kind of get their 30-minute run in early in the morning because they don't have to sort of commute to a gym or something like that. There's all these different

Starting point is 00:36:50 tweaks in our lives. And I think that when we're comparing, we have to remember that we're comparing apples and oranges because we're all individuals with variances. And I think that that can be really comforting to remember that we live in our day and nobody else's. Still, you must have found in your quest for the perfect productive day, there are some things, I don't know whether they're strategies or hacks or techniques or whatever, that will help you get more done or will help you at least get to the things that you say are important and that some people do seem to do that better than others. Potentially, people do. But I think that there's so many suggestions out there in terms of how to get more done. And there's some really helpful tips. There's some great systems that work for people. I found that when I was in pursuit of being perfectly productive, I found that the hacks and the time management techniques became something that was something that I tripped over or became even further entangled by because here was this promise, this solution, this hack will help you get more done. This hack

Starting point is 00:38:06 will make you more successful and happier. And when I tried that and it still didn't work or I wasn't able to stick to it, I fell further into the productivity spiral because then I sensed that, oh, well now not only am I feeling I'm falling behind, but I'm also failing at this simple hack that's meant to be able to sort of offer this cure and solution. And so I found that, again, this can contribute to the spiral. And so instead of looking for this one-size-fits-all solution, it's about finding what works for you. And it was a very freeing thing I found because

Starting point is 00:38:46 those hacks can work for some people and if it's working for you that's fantastic but it's the issue comes when it doesn't work for you and you feel further entangled perhaps that's a sign that you're looking in the wrong direction for the solution and it really has to come back to finding what works for you talk about distraction because I think, are easily distracted because there are so many. And, you know, you can say, well, I was just being creative when I was looking at Facebook for 25 minutes. But no, maybe. But mostly you were just wasting time looking at Facebook. And maybe that's fine.

Starting point is 00:39:21 But it does seem that we are easily distracted. And then we feel bad about it later 20 minutes scrolling social media mindlessly, I think that it is about asking yourself whether that is a waste of time or whether maybe it is. Sometimes we need those moments of mindlessness and they have their place. And again, acknowledging that we have been set up to fail here and that these platforms and these devices do have a very addictive quality to them. And so they're designed to distract us. But when it comes to tackling those distractions in our days, again, it's acknowledging that there's an inevitability to them. An antidote can actually be to apply attention to things. And so rather than trying to eliminate distractions, I think that we would be chasing our tail all day if we're trying to do

Starting point is 00:40:31 that, we can focus our attention instead. And one suggestion could potentially be to set an attention hour. And so that's where you have this moment to really assess what you've been paying attention to. So if you pay attention to what you're paying attention to, you'll actually really be able to see this inventory of your life. And you'll be able to see whether you're spending your time the way that you wish to. And perhaps instead of saying, okay, well, I'm going to eliminate that distraction of social media, you can say, I'm going to pay my attention to cooking this beautiful meal for somebody or on this creative project that I really want to pursue. So let's talk about the difference between being productive and being busy, because I think there is a big distinction between the two, but because I know a lot of people who are really busy, but they don't necessarily get a lot done.

Starting point is 00:41:26 They're just busy being busy. Yes, there can be a real cult of busyness. And busyness can be worn as this badge of honor. We ask people how they are, and they often say busy. And I think that there's lots of different categories as well of busyness. Sometimes busyness is circumstantial. Sometimes busyness is something that we have put in place because we find that we need the momentum at this point in our life. Or it could be even our natural frequency.

Starting point is 00:41:58 Some people are, they thrive off being busy. It's that sort of adage of ask a busy person to do something um and so but then there's another category of busy where it is this badge of honor and they're busy to prove their sense of worth or to prove that they're in demand or that their lives are uh are full and I think that that can be if it's your natural frequency and if it works for you then that's great I think that you'd find that those types of busy people aren't complaining about being busy it's those that are complaining about being busy and it's by their own design that perhaps is worth inspecting and it it differs from being productive in terms of those moments of true productivity when we're engaged and when we're

Starting point is 00:42:48 perhaps in flow and we have that element of that creative lens applied to it. But when we're just busy for busy's sake, we're crowding our schedules without really thinking about whether these things that we're doing are what we wish to be doing in the limited time that we have. What is the myth of balance? Balance is often portrayed as the cure-all. It's a balance people say, or you just need to find a work-life balance. But when you think about balance, if you think of it as a scale, it's constantly balancing. There's no such thing as a perfect balance because if there were, our lives in many ways would be stagnant.

Starting point is 00:43:29 They'd be unmoving. And we're constantly balancing. And I think that in many ways I like to think of it as a wobble that we have in daily life. We wobble towards different priorities. Again, we might wobble towards different emergencies or interruptions that might occur in our day. And sometimes there's moments in our lives where different things take the priority. And so instead of finding this perfect balance where we're unmoving, if we

Starting point is 00:43:58 embrace the fact that we're constantly in flux and we do wobble within our days, again, maybe we could find some more kindness towards those wobbles rather than judging them. And we could see that it's just part of the living. And so we can sort of take this idea of balance off its pedestal because we will never really arrive. And if we did, maybe we'd find it's kind of dull anyway. Well, so much of what you've been talking about is how we feel about our productivity, not so much the productivity itself, but on those days where you really nail it,

Starting point is 00:44:36 you just get everything done and everything goes well, and that feels great. So you kind of want more of those days, but I don't know that those days are anything other than just freak accidents, that maybe that's not the goal. But those days sure do feel good. Yes, it can feel electric, can't it, those days, Mike, where you do somehow manage to check it all off or the day unfolded in the order that you thought it would.

Starting point is 00:45:03 And you feel like you're firing on all cylinders. It's a wonderful feeling. And I think that's perhaps why we chase productivity, because it does feel good on the days that we do the thing. But I think that it feels so good because in many ways, it's a small miracle of those days that they feel more enlivening because it doesn't happen every day. And so when they do happen, I think there should be a wonderful appreciation for them,

Starting point is 00:45:30 but it's acknowledging that not every day is the same. And in many ways, we don't necessarily want the, that would become a groundhog day. If what was once electric, if it happened day after day after day, it would lose its shimmer. And so I think we do want the variance. And perhaps it's about finding what works for you to set up the day in a way that might put you in a position to have one of those days. But acknowledge that we also have days that are littered with distractions. And sometimes the day is just not our day. But that doesn't mean that we are a failure and we need to spoil it completely.

Starting point is 00:46:09 We can still find the small good things within days like that as well. Well, it's good to hear, I think for a lot of us, a lot of people that that uneasy guilt feeling of not getting enough done or that feeling that I'm wasting time if I'm not like on task all the time, that we all feel that at some time. And maybe we just need to be a little kinder to ourselves. I've been talking with Madeline Doerr. She is a writer and podcaster.

Starting point is 00:46:38 Her podcast is called Routines and Ruts. And you can find that wherever you listen to podcasts. And her book is called I Didn't Do That Thing Today, Letting Go of Productivity Guilt. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for being here, Madeline. Thanks, Mike. It's been a delight to speak with you. As I'm sure you know, movie theaters don't want you to bring in your own snacks. Many theaters forbid it. They all frown upon it.

Starting point is 00:47:13 You probably could get away with it, but according to David Callahan, who's the author of a book called The Cheating Culture, doing so is really wrong. As a guest, you should obey the rules of the establishment, just like you would at any other business that serves food. Movie theaters make about 40% of their revenue from the sale of food and drinks. There's no doubt that the markups are sky high, but keep in mind that theaters have to share ticket sale revenue with film distributors and studios. In the old days, snacks and drinks were not allowed in most carpeted,

Starting point is 00:47:46 plush theaters. Then once TV came along, the theater industry had to pull out all the stops and allow people to have snacks. But you really should buy the ones they offer. And that is something you should know. Your rating and review would really help us if you could find the time to just take a moment, write a few words about this podcast and post it wherever you listen. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa D. Montz for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice

Starting point is 00:48:46 and want to know if they are the villains in the situation. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events and present situations that we might even be wrong in our lives. Spoiler alert, we are actually quite literally never wrong. But wait, there's more. Check out See You Next Tuesday, where we reveal the juicy results

Starting point is 00:49:03 from our listener polls from But Am I Wrong. And don't miss Fisting Friday where we catch up, chat about pop culture, TV and movies. It's the perfect way to kick off your weekend. So if you're looking for a podcast that feels like a chat with your besties, listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen,

Starting point is 00:49:40 of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers.

Starting point is 00:50:02 It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes.

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Something You Should Know - How You Perceive the World Isn’t Quite Right & Why Productivity is Very Overrated

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