Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 207: A Radical Approach to Productivity, Self-Compassion Series, Jocelyn K. Glei

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

We are all guilty at times of taking on too much. Our guest this week, Jocelyn K. Glei, explains some of the benefits of taking a step back. She discusses the importance of slowing things down to prevent burnout and boost creativity. She’s written about maximizing potential and managing each day. Her most recent book is Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. Plug Zone Website: https://jkglei.com/ Hurry Slowly Podcast: https://hurryslowly.co/ Course: https://reset-course.com/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/Jocelyn-K-Glei/e/B00BSX6EJE/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1 Twitter: @jkglei ***VOICEMAILS*** Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, I'm excited. This is the first time we're doing this. We are launching a series.

So for this pod and the two episodes that follow, it's all going to have a theme. And the theme is, I hesitate a little bit to say this because I don't really love this term, but the theme is self-compassion. I don't like that term, it sounds vaguely auto-erotic or just really schmoopy and lame, but it's an incredibly useful concept. We've been trying to figure out new ways to talk about it, like self-care without being selfish or going easy without going soft or go easy with the internal cattle prod,

which is the way I talked about it, and 10% happier. Nonetheless, as I say, it's an incredibly useful, I have found it to be an incredibly useful concept because we, especially here in the West, many of us do an enormous amount of self-laceration, self-judgment. And I am, of course, as a type A ambitious person of the view that a certain amount of dry

eyeed self-analysis makes sense. You know, taking a good look at where you've made suboptimal decisions or areas where you can do makes them improvements. All of that makes a lot of sense. So I'm not of the view that we shouldn't be evaluating our work critically. It's just that we add layers and layers of shame and self-hatred, which I think, which I think we think, or I have historically thought, made me better, boosted my edge, but I, there's a significant amount of evidence now that it actually reduces your ability to focus and be resilient and it ends up in

many ways hurting your relationships with other people, which of course you need in order to be successful. So guess number one is Jocelyn Gly. I heard about her courtesy of past guests on the show, Seven A. Celassie, who's also one of the most popular teachers in the 10% happier app. Seb recommended I check out Jocelyn's podcast,

which is called Hari Slowly. She describes it as a podcast about how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down. Has that podcast, she's also written books about, you know, doing creative work in the age of distraction. And the first thing I listened to from Jocelyn was a, a short podcast about a term she invented

called Productivity Shame, which totally landed for me because I spend an enormous amount of time feeling shame for not getting everything done that I need to get done. And she had an enormous amount of time feeling shame for not getting everything done that I need to get done. And she had an enormous number of useful, insightful, and helpful things to say on the subject. You will hear them now for yourself. We also talk about, this is another term she invented. I don't love it just because you'll hear why because of my personal tastes. But I don't

love the term itself, but I love the idea. She calls it heart-centered productivity. So yeah. She also to another term that falls in the same bucket, great idea. I might quibble with the languaging a little bit given my idiosyncrasies, tender discipline. That's another term she coined, the idea that we can be,

we can have discipline, we can work toward deadlines, but we can do it in a way that isn't so self-lacerating. We talk about how to set realistic deadlines, we talk about actually enjoying the process of doing your work, and we talk about sane email practices. So a lot here before we dive in, I just want to say that if you are interested in issues relating to focus, we have two courses, excellent courses with the eminent meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg up on the 10% happier app. And if you're new to the app, don't forget you can always check it out with a seven day free trial.

Enough from me. Here we go. Jocelyn K. Gly. So cool to meet you. I said to you when I walked in the room, I feel like I know you because I've been listening to your podcast so much. Don't feel like, well, maybe I don't feel like I know you, but I feel like you're been in my head. A lot of people have that feeling. It's kind of funny having a podcast and maybe you've experienced this. Some friends of mine feel like we're in touch when I haven't spoken to them for months because they listen to the podcast. It's really good stuff. I would love to hear a little bit of your background. How did you get so interested in issues related to, I don't know if this is the right word to use, productivity and how we work. Why is this such a huge focus for you? Well, so prior to doing the podcast hurry slowly, I was working on, it was essentially at the time sort of a startup

inside another startup called 99U, which is part of this larger company called Behance, which is kind of the LinkedIn of the creative world. And I ran the smaller part of it, which is called 99U, which was a website that had interviews and articles and tips, it was a book series that I created, and it was also a big conference that happens actually

across the street here at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. And it was all about how people make ideas happen. So the name 99e actually comes from that Thomas Edison quote, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. And so the sort of mission of the entire brand was really to not explore inspiration, like how people get ideas, because we felt like there's so much content around that, and that's not the part that's really hard. The hard part is kind of seeing something through, right, executing on an idea. And so in the process of editing this website

and curating speakers for this conference and creating this book series, I interviewed hundreds of creatives and designers and entrepreneurs about how they make ideas happen, how they organize their days, how they build their careers. And so that really kind of led me down this path of really looking pretty deeply at productivity and also creativity.

Why do you think it's such a big issue right now? Productivity? Yeah. It feels to me like people are, I mean, I think the answer, I shouldn't have asked this question like the answer isn't super obvious. But it feels to me like, I hear about this a lot now. People having trouble getting stuff done now because we're so bombarded by technology. Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's a number of causes. But I think one of the biggest ones is, you know, you mentioned technology, but so much of this shift in technology has been about shifting the onus

specifically onto the individual. So if you think about you know, sort of the flattening of the workplace you know, and of course developments like email and Slack and all of these things they sort of bring more and more work specifically on to the individual and there things, they sort of bring more and more work specifically onto the individual. And there's also been sort of, I think, a little bit of maybe a fragmentation of the traditional job. So it's not just like you're doing kind of one task. Many people are juggling a lot of different projects. And there's other things as well, but kind of that's

the overarching idea. And so I think all of those factors mean that there's this onus of self management that we have that has really emerged in the past 10 or 20 years, which is really new and is really difficult and really demands a lot of that sort of like frontal lobe executive functioning to really switch between tasks and manage multiple projects and track how you're doing in a way that is pretty new.

You know, you used to have more support, I think, more managing, more mentoring. And also, of course, you know, there's so many new freedoms, right? You can work for yourself, you can work from anywhere, but all that means that there's a lot more responsibility on you. And so I think that's kind of why we're thinking individually and reflecting internally like so much more about productivity. A lot of your work is kind of a reaction against what you call fake productivity or sort of the toxicity of some of the self-help around in this area.

So what's your beef with the way this subject is most often discussed? Well, I think fake productivity is less about how other people talk about productivity and more about what we get sucked into feeling as productive or what we get sucked into doing with our time. And a huge part of that is the technology piece that you referred to.

So if you look at things like I mentioned email, I mentioned Slack, I mentioned, you know, social media. These things really, you know, the way that they're engineered by these technologists that kind of tap into some key behaviors that we as humans find rewarding. So if you think about, there's a concept called completion bias, right? The humans like to recognize a task as complete. And when we recognize a task as complete, we get a little hit of dopamine that makes us want to sort of repeat those behaviors.

But what it means is it also makes us sort of predisposed to like to do quick, easy to finish tasks. And it also means that we really like to see progress. Right? And so if you think about something like email or checking your Slack notifications or checking your social media notifications, those are really quick, easy to finish tasks. And there are also tasks where you get to see progress, right? You kind of get a whittle down that notification count or that message count. These are really quick, easy to finish tasks, and there are also tasks where you get to see progress, right? You kind of get a whittle down that notification count or that message count. And those features of those technologies, I think, really pull us into doing that kind

of work that feels in a surface-y way productive, right? Like I had 50 unread messages, and now I got to inbox zero. Like it sort of feels good in the short term. But you know, then you kind of look up at the end of the day and you've been busy all day and yet you feel like you did nothing that was meaningful. You responded to other people's priorities, not your own. That's the lot of the frustration I have. Is I spend so much time yanked around by other people's demands just dealing with the incoming as opposed to doing proactive work. Yeah, well, and I think there's this, there's this other concept that I talk about which is the rule of reciprocation, which is this idea that we as another sort of human behavior thing,

right? And this idea that as humans were raised to be social animals, and we want to return a positive action with another action. If you give me a birthday present, then when it's your birthday, I feel like I should give you a birthday present. For the most part, that's good. It encourages the social contract. I'm encouraged to fluid human relations. But one of the interesting things about that

is that I want to reciprocate, even if I didn't want you to do the thing that you did for me. So if you think about this fire hose of, as you say, emails or demands and requests that we receive, there's this sort of core human part of us that wants to reciprocate. But the problem is in this digital space, there's no boundaries, right? Your inbox never shuts down. It's never like, Dan is busy. Like he cannot manage, you know, he only has 24 hours in a day, he's exhausted and he can't

handle any more emails, so we're not accepting it, right? The digital world is like just bringing in, bringing in no boundaries, you know. And so that kind of leads us into this, you know, we're now in the space where you could run your entire life based on other people's requests and demands, right? And so there's this, we talked about kind of the onus of self-management a minute ago, and so there's a huge part of that now is really about setting boundaries and saying no in a way that I feel like is fairly unprecedented and it's quite difficult. I want to highlight that I conflated two concepts earlier. One was fake productivity and the other is kind of your critique of self-help.

So we'll get to your critique of self-help for a second and in a second. But let's just stay with fake productivity. I guess the two questions are coming up. You can take them and whatever you want. One is that, so I've kind of de facto designated Saturday, which is a work day for me, because I anchor Good Morning America on the weekends. Saturday after I finish the show,

I usually set aside a few hours to deal with my email backlog. And I feel reasonably good when I finish it, because a lot of it is, it's a lot of work. And if I don't do it, you know, it's, yeah, I feel anti-social. So is that truly fake productivity? So one question. Another question is how do you set boundaries and start saying no? So those are two totally unrelated questions, I think, but they're both in my head, so I'm throwing a match. I'll remind you if you would ever want to. Yeah, I may need to remind her. No, I mean, I don't think that's, I mean, certainly a portion of your emails are valuable

and are related to, you know, things that you need to do that are related, probably, to important goals that are meaningful to you that you want to accomplish, right? Are 100% of those emails related to those types of things most certainly not? I remember looking at, there's a pretty interesting study that was done in the Harvard Business Review a while ago with senior management. So people you think are pretty good at managing their time. They're successful. And they looked at how they used their email, and there were a number of stats, but one of them was that basically about 50% of the emails that those people responded to were emails that had nothing to do with their job

and they didn't really need to respond to. So that's senior managers wasting maybe 50% of their time responding to emails that are not relevant. And I think that's the way that all of us react. There's a lot of, we have that urge to reciprocate And so we end up responding to things that maybe are not that important. And the other thing that I think happens with email is specifically is like, you know, the way that your inbox is organized, everything sort of looks like an equal priority, right? It's not like, I mean, maybe Gmail could

text something a priority sender, but you know, there's not weight given to things that are more important. And so it sort of lures you into this habit of just responding to everything as if we're of equal importance. So like one of my rules for myself is like not to treat emails from strangers

as if they were urgent, you know, just like a tiny little shift to make, right? And I mean, maybe it could be, you know, maybe you might be an important stranger like coming on this podcast is a good and valuable thing for me to do, but that's kind of a rarity in terms of, people you don't know getting in touch with you.

So I would say yes, part of that, of course, is part of that by that. I mean, checking your email is valuable productivity, but I think a huge part of it is not, and I think we kind of get sucked into treating everything almost as if we're equal. To answer your second question, which is about how do we set boundaries and say now? Yes, not totally related, right? Because a lot of the stuff that comes over the Trans-Amon email is, I'll speak for myself, is strangers or people I kind of know, or even

people I know really well, just asking me for something. And I want to do it. But I mean, it takes away from the stuff I'm getting paid to do. You know, I want to be a good citizen and a good friend and all this stuff, but it's just overwhelming. Yeah, well, I think, I mean, we could probably do like a whole podcast on saying no or multiple podcasts on saying no, but a couple of ideas. I mean, I think the first thing is that because it's so easy for us to just swim in the sea of responding to other people's requests,

you know, we have that sort of sense that, you know, maybe at the end of the day, we just kind of did busy work and we didn't do stuff that was that meaningful. But I think because we're so caught up in this emails and going to meetings and kind of running around like chickens with our head cut off from one thing to the next, we don't take time to get really clear on our goals and thinking about what are the things

that I want to do that would be meaningful. You know, what is the stuff that I would find rewarding in the grand scheme of things? And if you don't identify that stuff, how do you know what things to say no to, right? If you're setting boundaries, you kind of have to step those boundaries around something, right? And in this case, right? If you're setting boundaries, you kind of have to set those boundaries around something, right? And in this case, right, the boundaries would go around like, I want to protect these things that I think are meaningful, but I think most of us are so caught up in this rat ways that we don't even take time out to do that. So, you know, of course, making time to do that, which is fairly obvious, sort of the first thing, and yet we don't do it. And the second thing, like a super, super small thing that I think is really interesting

is shifting when you're responding to emails and when you're saying no to things, from saying I can't do that to, I don't do that. So you know, like I rather than saying I can't check emails on Saturdays saying I don't check emails on Saturdays or rather than saying I can't miss my gym workout, I don't miss emails on Saturdays saying, I don't check emails on Saturdays, or rather than saying, I can't miss my gym workout, I don't miss my gym workout. And that comes out of this study that was done, it looked at people,

and I think it was specifically New Year's resolutions, and how to get them to stick to those resolutions. And so the study was really actually about self-talk. How do you talk to yourself internally? And they found that when people would say, I don't miss my gym workout, rather than I can't miss my gym workout, they were more likely to do their gym workout.

But I think it actually carries over to email, for instance, in a really useful way. And for a couple of reasons, one, because I think the thinking behind this is that when you say you can't do something, it sort of implies like, well, I can't do it now under these circumstances, but if the circumstances were different, then I could. So it often leaves the door open for someone to come back at you with that request in a different form.

Whereas when you say you don't do something, it sort of gives a sense of a hard and fast rule or principle. And when you frame it that way, you usually have to come up with a reason why. So if someone was asking me to do a speaking gig, for instance, and I was going to say, I don't do speaking engagements, or I don't do speaking engagements in the summer, they're sort of a natural like why. So it kind of almost asks you to form some principles

around why you're saying now, which is interesting. But the other thing is it depersonalizes it. Right, so it's not, I can't do your speaking engagement. It's like, I don't do speaking engagement, it's just not something that I do. Is that true for you? No, that's not true, that's just an example. But I do them only very rarely.

But so it kind of depersonalizes, well, which I think is one of the things that people find so challenging with saying now is that sort of personal aspect. I like that a lot. Just to go back to another thing that you said about prioritization, I went through a process recently using, there's a website called Trello where they create these kind of boards, Trello boards, you're familiar with it, you're not. I haven't used Trello, but I'm familiar with that. So the CEO of 10% happier was a little concern slash,

frustrated with me for being overwhelmed and complaining about it a lot. And he's like, all right, we're gonna create a board. I don't know if I can describe Trello well enough, but basically you can create a board of your priorities. You can do with anything, but in this case, we were doing my priorities. And I found it really useful.

It was clear that in the highest level priority, there were really only two or three things. And then we graded them mid-low, not now, not ever. And that really gave me a lot of clarity. And then we did it with a little committee that was the CEO, my wife, who was very generous with her time as it pertains to me. And I'm not sure this translates to all relationships with the nature of our relationship. She's very much, you know, very involved in helping me be a better person generally and also just work more efficiently and wisely. And then also another colleague, my colleague Grace

Livingston, who's one of the producers on the show and also works with me on this new book I'm writing. So this little committee of the four of us and we actually are now meeting regularly to go back over the Trello board. Does this all sound like, does this jib with your philosophy about how to work in a more effective way? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we were talking about before we kind of got on the air life here was related

to this podcast. I also created a course, which is called Reset. And the whole first section of that course is about And you know, related to this podcast, I also created a course, which is called Reset. And the whole first section of that course is about intention and motivation. And the first lesson in the course is literally about setting goals. And it's actually also about the psychology of how we think about our goals, which is kind of interesting. But the reason that I have people do that at the outset, which is actually kind of difficult,

it's not like a particularly pleasant way to start the course because it involves like a lot of soul searching. And so some people kind of are like, oh, they find it like a little bit challenging, understandably. But the reason that I do that, and so it starts out with setting goals, and then it talks about how to track and kind of celebrate your progress, which is probably part of sort of an unintentional side effect of having the Trello board as you get to see yourself ticking those priorities off and kind of recognizing as a group and looking at where your progress is and the other thing that's happening for you with that as well, which we talk about in the third lesson

in this Intention and Motivation section is accountability, right? So not relying on your own willpower alone to complete some sort of long-term project. And the reason that we start out with that stuff in goals in particular is what I touched on earlier is that you have to have that framework in order to set boundaries and say now, in order to look at your calendar and say, well, what am I really trying to carve time out for?

If you're trying to kind of fend off all these meetings and other requests, you have to be kind of clear on, okay, what do I need time for? What am I trying to accomplish? Or what meetings do align with my priorities? And if you're not clear on those things, you're just, how are you gonna make any decisions? And then how are you gonna set boundaries

and say no and kind of do all of that stuff? Which as we talk about it, it's kind of obvious, but I think that we're just, there's so many things that are always here to occupy our time that you really have to be intentional about carving out space to think about that stuff. The accountability piece for me has been huge. I'm pretty new to this, to thinking about how to work in a way that isn't so frantic.

And again, I don't want to say, I'm going to talk more about what's going on in me and my wife, but I don't want to say it in a going to talk more about what's going on me and my wife, but I don't want to say it in a way that every, I know plenty of close friends with wonderful marriages where this wouldn't work, right? They just, the nature of their relationship isn't, so I don't want to say that if this doesn't work for your marriages, my higher marriage is jacked up. What I'm saying is in my relationship with my wife, I, she's my number one closest advisor and she has the bandwidth to lean in and advise me.

So we now do this thing after we've created the Trello board that not only do the little committee before get together once every six or so weeks to check in on the Trello board, but Bianca and I every Sunday afternoon get together and just talk about did I, you know, we look back over the calendar for last week, did I do the things I said I was going to do, and what's coming up this week? And, you know, I, big chunks of time carved out for the book, and sometimes that those chunks get whittled down because of other requests that have come over the transom,

and we evaluate together like, did I make the right decision this past week in saying yes to these things that took away from my main priority, which is finishing my book, et cetera, et cetera. And I've just found having someone I really trust who's on my side working through this with me to be incredibly valuable.

Yeah, I mean, I think we all have this sense. And certainly, I used to have this sense that, you know, if you couldn't complete some massive project on Willpower alone, that you're falling short or failing in some way, right? I would frequently take on projects with creating no accountability or having no partner to help me. Now I actually work with a coach, which I found incredibly helpful.

And you can tell me if this is true for you. But I think one of the biggest byproducts of that of having, you know, it could be a collaborator, a coach, an accountability partner, whoever it is for you is if you are like myself a very ambitious, very achievement oriented person, as I believe you are as well. What you tend to do is you tend to never think about what you've accomplished. You're just always looking forward to the next thing, right? Well, we have an accomplished. And when you have that accountability partner, in this case, your wife, and my case, a

coach, I find that I spend a lot more time recognizing what I've accomplished, right? Because when you have that meeting and you get kind of excited, right? You know you're going to have that meeting and so you sort of think about like, oh, have I done that thing and have I done that thing? And yes, I have or no, I haven't done that thing. But for me, taking the dialogue out of just driving myself internally and sharing it with someone else and having an accountability partner means a lot more recognition of progress, which then of course makes you feel good, you know, whereas, you know, when it was all internal, I would never recognize that stuff and only be focused on what I had accomplished yet.

And I think that is a profound shift, you know, and one that really allows you to be more compassionate with yourself. Well, say more about that because I actually have scrolling notes to myself as we're writing here and the thing I had written down that I wanted to get to, I have a long list here, but one of the things I had just written down was celebration, you know, celebrating things you've done. I feel like I do a terrible job at that. Even though I now have this newly minted accountability partner, I don't think we're really celebrating that much. But I notice that in your work.

And I don't fully understand how to do it. And so I thought it might make sense for you to say more about it. Yeah. Well, so the idea of celebrating progress is one that I mentioned that I do teach in this course, because I feel it's incredibly important, and that really originally came to me out of this research of Teresa Amabelle, who is a professor and researcher

at the Harvard Business School. She wrote a really wonderful book called The Progress Principle. And she did a study, she did a fairly long-term study trying to remember how many people it was. It wasn't huge, maybe like 400 people, in any case. She had them keep a daily journal for about six months. These are people at work, So they had to write at the end of the day for about five minutes, what were your major victories and what were your setbacks during the day. And so she then took all the data from these journals, kind of crunch the numbers or crunch the feedback

so to speak and what she found was that what made, what had the biggest impact on people's mood, their sense of well-being and their sense of motivation was making meaningful progress at work. But it wasn't, you know, one thing that she talks about is this concept of small wins. It was sort of these baby steps, right? And acknowledging those baby steps, which is something that I think we really tend not to do. And so for me, that's kind of underpinning this idea of thinking about, okay, well, how do we track our progress and how do we celebrate our progress?

In a sense, you know, you're saying, well, I'm not really celebrating, but I think just the tracking and the recognition of the progress is, in a sense, a celebration in itself because it's something that we normally completely just kind of blow right by as we're, you know, in pursuit of these goals. So I think actually tracking that progress in a very analog way is what I recommend. So when I was working on a book, I had a handwritten calendar and I write down my words written every day as a way of kind of tracking and celebrating my progress. But there's many different things.

If you're a salesperson, it could be like, cold calls made per week. If you're a programmer, it could be lines of code written, it could be anything. But I think that act of tracking the progress and of making it analog because for me, there's something about when it's analog, it's usually visible, right? So however you're tracking this progress,

like creating a system for yourself and literally putting it up like on a wall in your workspace, so you kind of see it in a regular way, literally see yourself making progress. You can of course do this with digital apps for myself personally. I find that there's something much more rewarding about just kind of being confronted with it constantly and just kind of updating it by hand. I'm having a little bit of self criticism because what I really, this is such an important topic to me right now as I struggle to write my current book that I'm getting a little excited and just chasing all the shiny objects and asking you a million questions.

But I don't think I really gave you an opportunity to describe what your core philosophy is. Before we do that, though, let me just go back to one of the questions I asked early on, but I didn't ask in the right way. It seems to me like much of your work is reacting against the way productivity is talked about. And I'd be interested to hear that critique and then move into sort of what you actually stand for. Right. Well, yeah, those two things are completely related. So I think to the way that I kind of to the way that I categorize what I talk about on the podcast and what I teach in the course is this idea of kind of heart centered productivity, which is easiest to talk about by talking about kind of what it's not, which is sort of the critique of what's happening now.

And that's this, I think, really like a sort of speed-obsessed idea of productivity. I think we've gotten to this place really comes out of the way that technology has slowly, and I could even say a little bit insidiously, change our values. I call it digital. We have these digital values. It was absorbed through this 24-7 interaction with technology. I think of those values as being a couple of different things. Instant gratification, focus on instant gratification, focus on short-term rewards, and this feeling of no boundaries or you could say like exponential growth or freedom.

So instant gratification, you look at, we talked about Slack, right? I can instantly message you, I can instantly get in touch with you. You think about Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Uber, right? All of these ways in which you can get music, movies, groceries, a taxi, and other person's attention, completely on demand. You start to have this feeling that maybe you should be able to execute on demand, to kind of seep in. Thinking about this idea of short-term rewards,

obviously that's kind of related to instant gratification, but again, going back to what we touched on, I'm thinking about email or thinking about Slack or just checking your social media notifications. You get these little kind of, we talked about that completion bias, you get that little hit of dopamine when you complete this task, and it kind of reinforces this idea of short-term rewards, right, of getting something really, really quickly. But of course, the work that we do that really has meaning usually is long-term, and it takes

a long time, like writing a book, which you're working on now, right, and so it's challenging, and it's difficult, and it's very opposed to that kind of modality of thinking. and it's very opposed to that kind of modality of thinking. And then this no boundaries piece, you know, I constantly, you know, I think this idea of the digital self, which we a little bit touched on earlier is just, you know, I'm available 24-7, and I'm always on, right? You know, I don't have a door to my office, I don't have an office anymore, I'm working in an open-planed space, you know, you don't leave work at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., right, your email follows you everywhere. And then, you know, there's all these kind of startup stories of like exponential growth and, you know, this feeling that like everything should be able to expand

infinitely. And so there's just really this feeling of kind of no boundaries that we get from our technological interactions. And so all of those things, Instagram gratification short-term rewards, no boundaries, are kind of in service of this idea of speed and efficiency again, over everything else. you know, over everything else, right? And I think the problem with that is that it's fundamentally opposed to how we work as humans, you know, to our well-being.

And I think it's also fundamentally opposed to doing anything that's creative, because it's kind of fundamentally opposed to the creative process, which is by nature an inefficient process that cannot be improved and made more efficient in the way that you could make a forward assembly line more efficient. So this idea of heart-centered productivity that I talk about is kind of like, okay, let's discard the super-efficiency speed-focused approach, which is really leading us into burnout. You know, there's a study that's done every year called the General Social Survey, which looks at about, I think they talked about 36,000 people in America, kind of ask them, you know, how they're doing and part

of it is about work. And they asked people, are you regularly exhausted from your work? And they did that study a couple years ago and 50% of people said, I'm regularly exhausted from work, right? So there really is this kind of rising burnout phenomenon. I think it's from this eat obsessed way of working. And so it's leading us into burnout. And it's also as pulling even as we're headed into burnout, we're not really doing work that feels meaningful because you can't do work that's meaningful in this way. So that's kind of the critique.

And then for me, the sort of solution is moving to the sort of more hard-centered way of working. So what does that look like, hard-centered productivity? Yeah. I mean, so I think it's, you know, we've touched on some of it already, right? So we talked about this idea of, you know, let's say, kind of tracking your progress and celebrating your progress. But it really is about moving out of, I mean, that's one aspect of it.

But it's really about a few different things. I mean, really kind of getting back into your body. I think our speed of obsessed approach kind of pulls the super into the head, super into anxiety, super into a really stressed out place. So kind of getting back into the body. So a lot of what I talk about in the course is about your kind of natural circadian rhythm, right? So the 24 hour cycle of energy peaks and dips that we all naturally go through over the

course of a day and kind of learning how to align your work with those natural body rhythms and like what those body rhythms are, what are, you know, when is your kind of cognitive energy peak? Like when is a good time to exercise? When do you need to take a break? How do you figure that out? Well, it's, I mean, there is a, the simplest way, there's kind of three, there's sort of three different archetypes, right? There's the kind of regular bird, early bird, night owl type of archetype.

What about wounded bird? I think that's what you have. Oh wounded bird. One working leg, half a king wing. That's out of alignment with your circadian rhythm. That's trying to do too much. But in terms of, the easiest way to think about it is thinking about when you like to go to sleep and when you like to wake up, when you're kind of in your

most natural kind of modality. I mean, I asked, I remember asking a scientist, well, how can I exactly figure out my circadian rhythm? And in effect, you would literally have to, it's related to core body temperature, and you would literally have to have a thermometer in your butt for like three weeks, monitoring your temperature constantly to figure out your precise circadian rhythm. So it's like a very, it's an evolving science, and there's not like a simple diagnostic questionnaire you can take. But these is things to look at sleep patterns. And early bird is someone who likes to wake up at 5am-ish,

regular bird is someone who likes to wake up, maybe 7, 7, 38-ish, and then night owls, usually more, you know, someone who really doesn't want to get up until 10 a.m., to 11 a.m. and in the course, I kind of go through and break down like, okay, what does that kind of look like for your circadian rhythm throughout the day and in any case, to kind of circle back to kind of answering your question about heart center productivity without getting too lost in the circadian rhythm, you know, there's an aspect of really coming back into the body and figuring out, oh my body and my brain are like a player in this.

And it's actually like a really powerful tool that if rather than kind of running rough shot over my body, if I were to actually think about how I could align with it, then I can work in a way that is actually more productive and much more powerful while doing less time because I'm kind of working within my natural energy peaks. So that's part of it and then again a huge part is about kind of setting boundaries as we talked about. But there's another huge part that's really about shifting the way that we frame our productivity and kind of the way that we talk to ourselves in our head about it. Because I think there's so much, there's just so much self-criticism, right? We've kind of,

as you said at the outset, we've just all sort of like fully implied this notion of like productivity and like being good workers. We have to be productive and that's even how we maybe review our day. Like did I have a productive day? It's like a question we ask ourselves, right? Somehow that's become the yardstick. But I think that leads to a ton of really beating ourselves up because we're getting kind of getting pushed by these tides of other people's requests and demands. Like we talked about to kind of take on too much

and get overwhelmed, and then we end up then we kind of end up beating ourselves up. And so a lot of this shift that I try to affect with the course and this idea of heart center productivity is really about, I mean, it's really about just kind of getting back to sort of a more natural, humane way of working, but also just understanding our limit, like understanding literally, like what are your limitations? And I think people find it a real relief, you know, when I say, you

know, so we talk about like how much good attention can someone exercise in a day? And even if you look at the science of peak performance, it's like four to four and a half hours a day of like really like hard concerted attention, a max that most people can execute. And when you tell people that they're like, oh, it's like a relief. They're like, you know, so then you feel like, oh, if I got, you know, if I was able to write for two hours, three hours, that's a good day. So if I'm carving out, I sometimes will carve out a clear whole day for writing.

But I never use all that time for writing because I just can't do it. And I feel like a failure. But you're saying I probably shouldn't be carving that much time or. Precisely, yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, I think this is, it's completely normal, right?

What you're saying, I think we all have that feeling and particularly with creative projects, I think there's this impetus to like, I can't get anything done unless I have this huge kind of open block of time, right? And then, and then like, I can't get anything done unless I have this huge kind of open block of time, right? And then, and then yeah, I don't know, you read these stories about whatever like Raymond Carver writing for like 14 hours a day and you're like, okay, well, I could probably do eight hours a day, you know? But so it's really about, you know, adjusting those expectations to like

what's realistic to ask of yourself and then working with that and then it really allows you to, you know, you're just being literally realistic about your expectations and so you can feel good about what you've gotten done in a day. And it really is true that most people, if you, you know, you look at one of the examples, I talked to a guy Alex Pang who wrote a really great book called Rest. And he kind of collected a bunch of data and anecdotes about some of the greatest kind of artists and scientists around and how much they kind of worked in a day. And the number that he came to was really like three or four hours. And you're looking at someone like Charles Darwin.

That's how much he was working in a day in terms of concerted effort. What was he doing the rest of the day? Check any mail? He was actually going for very long walks. So, you know, could you use that whole eight hours for something related to writing? Yes, maybe not writing itself, you know, but because there is that whole, and I think this is precisely the problem, right? We just think that we only need time for execution, right? We don't need time for reflection or to figure out

what you're going to write about. Who knows where that's happening, but somehow write. It's happening somewhere. You don't need to carve out time for that. What you need to carve out time for is sitting there and writing. But of course, there's this whole, and that kind of gets back to what we're talking about. This idea of the creative process is something kind of inefficient and organic,

and really where you can create the time and you can show up, but kind of inspiration is a little bit on its own schedule. But it's certainly not going to arrive if there's like no space for it to come in and kind of enter your brain Right as you're running from this engagement to that engagement to this meeting, right? And so I think there is a whole part of Carving out that time that is is carving out time just for You know that reflection and and some of the less tangible parts of the creative process.

Is your work and advice, and, of course, really only direct it to people who are doing creative work? Is it for anybody doing any work of any sort? It is for anybody doing any work of any sort. I think generally speaking, it is for people who have some level of autonomy over their schedule because if you are working within a schedule that you cannot control in any way, you probably couldn't do some of the things that I might recommend doing.

Right, would you assembly line workers can't do this stuff? Right, or let's say you do, you do customer service 95 and you have to be on email constantly and I think you still could take some things away, but you know what, I mean, there's certain roles that are more rigid than others. But in terms of answering your question about creativity, I mean, I think that creativity, it's not about being a designer, a photographer, an artist, I mean, creativity is just about problem-solving. And I think we all do it. I think engineers do it.

I think mothers do it and raising a child. I think that even answering customer service questions requires some level of creativity. So I think that the creativity piece, it's actually at the end of my podcast, I usually ask people five questions. And one of the questions that I always ask them is, how would you define creativity in 10 words or less?

And my favorite answer was from Kim Chambers, who is this amazing marathon swimmer. And she just said self-expression. And I think that's my favorite definition. We all have a self to express. Creativity is merely the process of expressing that self. So I think there's infinite ways in which you could do that. And I think that we all have something creative that we want to do in our working lives.

And that's the stuff that really gives it meaning. More 10% happier after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture

drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. I'm going to ask a question now that Harkensback is something you were talking about already, but you didn't use the phrase. I had this delicious experience listening to your podcast because you coined a phrase to describe a massive component of my internal

life that I had never been able to describe, which is productivity shame. That's your phrase, which I'm going to steal, although I'm going to give you credit for it, but I'm going to start talking about it a lot. Because there's this ambient noise that I'm sometimes aware of and sometimes not in running in the background of my psyche all the time of am I getting my stuff done? Am I letting people down? Am I working on my priorities? Blah, blah, blah all the time. And that's what it is, it's productivity shame.

I didn't have a name for it until you described it. So can you hold forth on your view on what productivity shame is and how we can deal with it? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny. I actually arrived at that term only after, we've been talking about this course reset that I run and getting feedback from people who have gone through the course

and realizing, and that phrase kind of came to me because so many people had come into the course and we're just talking about, you know, just as you described how much they were beating themselves up, how unsatisfied they were feeling, how unrealistic their expectations were. And that kind of led me to really thinking about this term productivity shame.

And I mean, I simply define it as, you almost set it yourself. You know, this act of setting completely unrealistic goals or schedules for yourself, which you know to be unrealistic as you do it, and then later kind of being yourself up for not being able to meet that schedule. Yeah, but for the missing piece for me is I often don't know my limits. I think I can do all this stuff. Of course, I'm Superman. And then I walk around miserable and make other people miserable. Right. Well, and so that is kind of precisely that recalibration is what hopefully happens with this like the Fart Center productivity, right?

Is understanding that what your limits are, right? How much attention can you exert in a day? Like how many hours of kind of peak cognitive performance? Do you have how much time can you realistically carve out of your maybe already busy schedule to do the work that is meaningful to you? So actually thinking about yourself as a human in a body with limited capacity and like truly recognizing that and let's say accepting that and then making your decisions about what you take on from that place.

Because I think we're all, not all, but many of us are so far removed from that place, like so sucked into this responding to other people's requests, this kind of speed of assessed, efficiency of assessed, I can do everything super packed, calendar type of working, that we have no sense of our own limits. And so that is how we fall into that cycle, right? We're just constantly making really, really, really unrealistic plans and then eating ourselves up about it. So I think that's kind of how we get into that cycle. Not sure if I answer your question.

And how we get out is to make more realistic. Yeah, why things just to begin to kind of come back into the body and understand that we have limits and recognize those limits and accept them and then plan accordingly. So the big question that keeps coming up in my mind as I am exposed to your work is, you know, my first impression is, wow, this just feels like such a merciful like lifeline, given my very inner sort of inner sternness,

self-directed and sometimes externally directed about productivity, recognizing our limits and making sane decisions about what we can and should be doing, allowing ourselves some rest. But then I wonder like how do you draw that line? You know, I had the other day, I was at home, my family, my wife and child were upstate at my wife's mom's house and I had the other day, I was at home, my family, my wife and child were upstate at my wife's mom's house and I had a place to myself and I told myself I was going to work on my book. But I was just so tired that I watched a bunch of TV and then felt horrible about myself. And so like, how do I know the difference between taking the rest that I need and the,

invoke the name of the book that you were talking about before and the idea of Charles Darwin, you know, taking long walks. How do I draw the line between giving myself a break in a way that will improve my productivity in the long run as opposed to just procrastinating? Yeah, now that's a really good question. And I think, you know, you talk about meditation a lot on this show. And I think, you know, what we're talking about in this case is your creative practice, right? You're talking about writing a book. And I think a creative practice is not entirely different from a meditation practice in that it deepens and it becomes much more subtle as you go along. So, you know, for me, the experience is, and you know,

it's most useful probably for me to talk about my personal experience at this point, is that, okay, let me back that a little bit. So I did an episode of the podcast that's called, Who Are You Without the Doing? And. I heard it was really good. Thank you. You'll know one of the things that I talk about is this book, Shambhala, The Path of the Warrior. I quote from that book in that particular episode. The passage that i quote is about

talking about discipline and in that episode in general i talk about this concept is sort of tender discipline and such it as another of your that's that's a phrase you coined right i think so yeah it's a great term uh... another does oxymorons right hurry slowly ten discipline yes i'm still a center productivity rob you blinded intellectually intellectually because this stuff is crap and that.

You can get credit for everything. But it's such good stuff. Anyway, carry on. Yeah, but so it's looking, it's kind of contemplating this idea of tender discipline, which really emerged from reading this particular book or that kind of crystallized the idea. And it's, I don't know if I'm going to say as wrong, but it's Chongyang Trunk Pa. Chongyang Trunk Pa Rinpoche, he's a very popular Tibetan Buddhist teacher. He's also very controversially drank himself to death and like,

slept with his followers and he was an embodiment of an ancient and also quite controversial concept and Buddhism of crazy wisdom. So he acted in ways that were pretty crazy, but he also, as you were about to talk, you were good about to sort of paraphrase, I think some of the things he said about tenderness as it relates to productivity. And seeing he's also capable of real wisdom, but he's a conundrum for me because he did a lot of stuff that I don't approve of. Right, so if we were to strain maybe the good out of the bad or the even the crazy, one of the concepts he talks about in this particular

book is just thinking about this concept of discipline. And this idea that if you are waiting for your discipline to become immaculate, it's never going to happen. And this kind of idea that of your constantly kind of looking back at yourself and monitoring yourself, like am I disciplined enough, am I perfect enough, right? And that at a certain point, you kind of have to let go and just trust, and that's where the real discipline comes from So well, we just want to stop you for a second

Two things that came to mind one is I believe it was my friend Orin Sofur who's been on this podcast before as a popular meditation teacher One of those popular teachers on on the 10% app your app He can tell me a story about being on a meditation retreat where he was doing walking meditation. And he started weeping when he realized that his whole life and his whole meditation practice, he had spent evaluating how well he had done on the last step. And I really, that really resonated with me.

That just came up, it's mine as you were talking. The second thing is you were just talking about letting go and trusting in some way and I'm thinking, all right, sounds good, but how do you do that? Because the only way I know to work is to make liberal use of my internal cattle prod. Mm-hmm. Yes, and I definitely relate to that sentiment as well.

But what I was gonna say, so I was just kind of side digression to this idea of tender discipline and this idea of that in terms of actually becoming more disciplined, I think there is this piece of like trusting yourself, right? So if we come back to what we're talking about about your creative practice and how you know the difference between when you're procrastinating and when you maybe need to just take a break and when you should work. What my own experience has been with my writing practice is that as I kind of sink more into some of these concepts of heart-centered productivity and of thinking about aligning with my body and trusting that I have a limited amount of attention

but aligning with it and using it. As I've gone deeper into that place, it's become easier for me to make that distinction. So it's been come easier for me to make that distinction. So it's been come easier for me to essentially know when I should call bullsh** not myself and when I actually need to take a break, right? Because what you're trying to figure out in those moments is, you know, am I just, you know, is this just resistance? And I should push through it, right, using my internal cattle prod and make myself sit

down and write? Or, you know, is this literally not a moment at which because I need rest or maybe I just need to go for a walk and find some, you know, I'm just not really inspired today because that is a certain factor sometimes. You know, how do you make that distinction? And for me, the more that I've kind of just, to make the meditation comparison, again, just kind of sit in my practice, which is my creative practice, right? Kind of show up and be a bit more trusting and gentle with myself. The easier it's become to make that distinction about when I should kind of call bullshit

or not. But I'll give you one just like actionable tip. Great. Great. Which is because I know you want something more tangible. Which is I think that I think it's useful to think about whatever the creative project is, is having a certain energy to it.

And so when you put the project down and you don't look at it for a day or two or weeks, you've kind of left the energy, you sort of turned it off. And you don't really know what the energy feels like anymore. And so you're not motivated, you don't have that momentum, you don't have that rhythm of having been working on the project. And so once you've kind of broken rhythm and left the energy of that project, I think sometimes it's difficult to know, like, am I, and you're just become disconnected from it.

So I think when you have those moments, too, it's good to just sit down for 15 minutes and kind of feel the energy and maybe start to write a little bit or try to start to write. And a lot of times just by getting back in there, you'll, ah, and the flow comes. But sometimes, you know, you get back in there and you're like, oh, no, like I'm not feeling it today. So I think also acknowledging the role that momentum plays in creative projects, which I think is huge, right? That kind of building, you know, an object in motion wants to stay in motion and object at rest wants to stay at rest.

But rather than eating yourself up about it, if you really don't know, just kind of like dive back into the energy for 15 or 20 minutes, see if it picks up. And if it, you know, doesn't pick up and you just really feel exhausted or you really feel uninspired, then, you know, kind of say, okay, today's not the day.

That's great. I like that. I was very useful, actually. Yeah. What about deadlines? So I'm a journalist, and I've, for 25 years, have worked, and before that, in college, we all had deadlines. And there was, and there was, and is, for me,

a certain adrenaline associated with, like, this is airing tonight, or, you know, 9-11 just happened. You're going to be on the air tonight. You've got to finish writing your script. And so I think about it, as I'm working the book process, and I'm thinking about, okay, I want to get him, I want to have a saner, more self-compassionate workflow. But will I be able to, you know, do I need deadlines and do I need that adrenaline in order to get anything done?

And how do I balance between the two? Do I create artificial deadlines? But then if I do that, am I gonna set them realistically? And is there a way in the midst of all of this that I can, is there any hope that I could actually enjoy the work while I'm doing it? I just said a lot, but you can, is there any hope that I could actually enjoy the work while I'm doing it? I just said a lot, but Kate, you can pick apart anything in there that you think was cogent.

Well, you make me think of, I didn't interview with Oliver Berkman, I don't know. Oh, yes, he's been on the show. Yeah, very funny, sort of anti-self-help writer. Yes. And he's writing a book about productivity right now. Yeah, yeah, he is. And anyway, he's a very thoughtful and also very funny guy. And he introduced me to this idea of Hofstetter's law, I think it's called,

which is basically the idea that everything, so it specifically pertains to creative projects or anytime you're doing something new for the first time. And basically says that more or less if we totally distilled it down, everything takes longer than you think it will, right? And so, and that even if you acknowledge that everything takes longer than you think it will and you project your schedule based on that assertion, it will still take longer than you think it will, and you project your schedule based on that assertion, it'll still take longer than you think it will. I mean, I think it's a little bit of a joke, like principle.

But in any case, right, this idea that, particularly with any project that demands any kind of creativity, is really kind of impossible to know how long it will take, right? So what do you do about deadlines in that scenario and how does that relate to motivation? And I can speak specifically to one of the things that I talk about in the reset course, which is, you know, we talked about goals earlier. I like to set goals in small windows, so maybe three month windows or you would even do half

of that six weeks. And I like to do that specifically because you never know how long something is going to take. And so if you give yourself sort of a smaller range goal, so you know, if you're writing a book, like the goal is not like finished manuscript, you know, the goal is something that you think you could realistically accomplish in maybe six weeks or three months. Finish chapter two. Right, you break it down. And so then, But your publisher needs you to have a finished manuscript

by some point. Right. So that she can plan. Sure. So how do you, okay, so. Well, let's say you have, you know, usually have nine months or a year to write the book typically. You know, so let's say you set a goal for six weeks or something, but the point being setting a small

goal, so then you can assess how long did that take. And then you can make another six week goal and adjust to something more realistic. So the goal isn't something giant, and you work for nine months only to realize, my got my protections were completely off. You set something smaller so you can kind of track your progress and stay motivated over this small portion of time. It also makes it easier to track your progress and stay motivated because the goal is insight.

It's not really far away. But it also gives you that moment to check in and then recalibrate whatever the next kind of baby step goal you set is because you're probably going to be really off in terms of your projections about how much you can accomplish. Why do we work? It's just terrible. My father used to call it the curse of the middle class. I'm going to play the lottery today and never work again. It's the worst. You can actually while engaging in creative work, which again, you very helpfully describe not as just necessarily making paper mishae or doing arts and crafts. It's really like anything that involves problem solving. Do you find that you can actually enjoy it?

Because I have a hard time imagining enjoying writing a book. Yeah. I mean, that's probably one of the core principles of this idea of heart center productivity that we didn't get to is this idea of enjoying the process, which, you know, when I do all of these things, I do this podcast, I explore all these questions because there are challenges that I myself have. I am like an extremely, extremely outcome-oriented person. You know, so I'm always thinking, I'm always thinking about what's next, I'm always thinking about the end goal. But, you know, in the grand scheme of things, right, I mean, how could you

so many times I've arrived at whatever I thought would be the thing that would somehow make me feel great. And you know, I'm sure you know it never does. You know, if I publish this book or if I make this conference or I do this thing, you know, and every time you arrive at that thing, it's always kind of like, well, I don't know. It wasn't as great as I thought it'd be. But they had a word for this, you call it suffering. It's the idea that you, that we're going to get that next thing, that next meal, that next bathroom break, that next vacation, and finally, we'll be happy.

It just doesn't work in sexuality always research itself. Yeah, well, and I think here, so, but here's the twist. Here's the twist that can make you want to get into the process. So I told you at the outset of the course, we talk about goal setting, we talk about how you think about your goals. And one of the things that makes people really not achieve their goals is spending a lot of time thinking about the outcome of the goal and talking to other people about the outcome of the goal and talking to other people

about the outcome of the goal. Because what happens is it makes you feel like you've already achieved the goal, right? It kind of creates this sort of like mind trick where you just, you feel like you've already achieved it because you spent so much time thinking about it. And you know, so when you look at research around that, people who essentially spend more time focused on the process rather than on the outcome means that you're actually more likely to achieve the goal in the end. And of course, you're saying, if I spend a lot of time talking about the outcome, as if it's already

done, I'll be happier or less happy. Well, you'll decrease your motivation. Okay, so that makes sense to me. I thought you were saying the opposite. Yeah, kind of drains the motivation. Yeah, because I feel like I'm never going to finish this book. And so talking about it isn't as something that might actually exist in the world is absolutely deflating.

But talking about finishing a chapter I'm working on or transcribing an interview I did, well that's I can imagine that happening. Well, and here's another thing in terms of enjoying the process that I think has been really a big change for me is shifting to working in a more analog way. I find that whenever I do something in analog, I always enjoy it significantly more than when I do it in digital.

So for instance, specifically talking about writing, talking about transcribing, talking about looking at interviews, I used to edit all of the interviews for my podcast, you know, in a word document on my computer. Now I print them out and, you know, I go, I get up from my desk and I go sit on my couch by the window and I edit it there and then I, you know, whatever and then I come back and I make my changes at my computer. And I find that I enjoy the process significantly more when I'm doing it on paper.

I'm not hunched over my desk. And that applies similarly to, there's a whole section of the course that literally talks about working in analog and creativity. But same thing, like if I'm giving a talk and I have to make a keynote for that talk, what I'll do is I'll get a big sketch pad and I'll go sit down in chair, sit down on my sofa, and I'll really map out, like, okay, what am I really trying to say?

What are the bones of this talk? And I never go to my desk, I never go to the computer until I'm really, really, really clear on what I want to say and ready to execute. At that point, then I'll go to the digital space. I'll go to the computer. Because when you start out in that digital space, there's just too much. You can get really into polishing and tweaking, right? What should the color be?

What should the font size be? What animated gif? I'm not going to get to make this part of the top funny, right? But and so you go through and you do all these things or you get distracted by all these things, but you stop and really, you know you even know what you want to say, right? Because there's just so many distractions available in the digital space. And I also think the digital is really about like executing and polishing and being precise, right?

And when you're in the early stages of a creative project, you're trying to figure out what you want to say, you don't really trying to figure out what you want to say. You don't really want to be precise, you don't want to be messy. And that's really easy to do on a sketchpad or on a whiteboard or in an analog space in a way that's kind of difficult to do in digital. So I think that's a huge shift in terms of enjoying the process. More is moving things out of the digital space into the analog space when you can, just allowing yourself to be away from your desk in a different space, using your hands, doing things in a more natural way. It's interesting. I naturally do this.

I feel a little guilty in terms of my contributions to the environment because I'm constantly printing things out and working on the paper and then going back to the computer and doing the fixes and the polishes there and then printing it out again and I find that stepping away from the computer does make me happy. I wasn't doing it for any. I just sort of intuitively knew this. Nobody ever told me to do it. But I still hate every part of writing. I hate it.

I hate it. And yet I'm compelled to do it. I love coming up with ideas, and I really feel powerfully, I feel very strongly that, at least with this book that I want to write it, but I just hate the doing of the thing. And it reminds me of the cliche about books

is nobody likes writing a book, everybody likes having written a book. And so maybe there's just no way around this, but I keep finding myself thinking, okay, maybe I can use these little hacks, which you're proposing here. I mean, some of them are not just little hacks, they're big structural re-thanks,

philosophical approaches that are different, that are really important, so I'm not devaluing them. But I think there may just be the case for me that the work is always gonna feel a little crappy just because it's hard. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't remember her name, but this is a poor distillation of it,

but a writer that I really like and she says, you know, like, research has happened and writing as hell, you know. Yeah. That's right. Sounds, you know, like, research has happened and writing as hell, you know. That's right. Sounds, you know, sounds about right to me. That's, I definitely, it's always a struggle. And in many ways, you know, you're like, why did I choose? I've seen to continually feel compelled to do this thing.

And yet, but the other thing, I think, if you, one thing that I am, that I recommend, if you do print everything out, is save your copies and let them stack up on your desk. You have a little testament of progress to all of their revisions and different things. How far you've progressed through the writing of the book, because that's kind of satisfying to do. That's what I did with my last book. I let all of the edits just acc crew and a huge stack on my desk.

So, you know, when I would get to a difficult point and be really frustrated, I'm kind of be like, I don't know how I'm gonna get through this, I don't know how I'm gonna figure out this chapter. I would kind of look back at that and be like, okay, well, you know, you went through this before, you made it through the other side,

and you figured it out again. I'm mindful of your time, but I have a few more questions if that's okay. Yeah. Say more about tender discipline. Are you able to, are you really able to motivate yourself in a way that is tender as opposed to self-critical? Well, I mean, it's an ongoing challenge. I'm significantly better at it than I used to be, I will say. I think that, you know, here's the thing.

Let me give you an example of this. There's this really amazing book called Scarcity. I don't know if you're familiar with it. No. By Elder Shafir and I think a Sendal Molinathin, I might be mispronouncing his name, but it looks at two types of scarcity, scarcity of money and scarcity of time. I imagine most of your listeners are probably more afflicted with scarcity of time. So they really looked at from an analytical

from a research perspective, what happens when you work in this over-scheduled, over-busy, overstimulated way that most of us are working in. And what they found was that it creates a kind of tunnel vision for people, where you're really only able to think about the next thing, right? The next meeting you have to get to, the next meeting you have to respond to.

And what that tunnel vision does is it makes you less controlled, it makes you less insightful, and it makes you less forward thinking. And so if you think about those qualities, less controlled, less insightful, less forward thinking, you think about what you need to complete, any type of creative project or anything with meaning those are the things that you need, right? And so what they talk about as the solution is not working in this super jam packed time constrained, you know, kind of way, right? Creating, they use the term slack, actually.

I use the term white space, so creating kind of white space, inner schedule. And I use the term white space because thinking about like design, right? So if you know any designers that are looking at a graphic design, they talk about white design, right? So if you know any designers, they're looking at a graphic design, they talk about white space, right? And white space is, you know, what kind of helps you the blank space, but it's not negative space in a design, it's a space that allows you to kind of understand what you should be focusing on your attention on, right? What's in the positive space? And it creates what's in the positive space, and it creates, you know, kind of an uncluttered environment, right? And essentially, white space is what sort of brings harmony to the overall design. But if you take that concept, you think about white space, and you look at the way, like, let's say you look at your calendar, your daily calendar, right? Most of us have like zero white space in our calendar. Like we were looking in our calendar as a design,

it would be like a disgusting cluttered, awful, busy design, right? And so I think about this concept of white space as you know that's the thing that gives harmony and balance to your day. That's what most of us are missing. I am going to answer your question. This is the long route. I don't trust myself, but I trust you. But so you think about how we're working this really jam packed way. I don't know, like it's like if you could create a visual embodiment of self criticism,

it would kind of look like this jam-packed schedule, right? Like, how could you be gentle with yourself in that scenario, right? There's just, there's no room. There's no time, right? There's no time to just even reflect and kind of be like, oh, hey, wait, no, you're being too harsh. Like, let's think about this different, you don't have time for that, right? So I think, my answer to your question is, you don't have time for that. So I think my answer to your question is we're able to pull back from this over-scheduled overwhelmed way of working and create even little pockets of white space to go for a walk or to just contemplate

your creative project or to do nothing at all or to meditate. That space itself creates the opportunity for this kind of tenderness, right? And if you think about, I mean, even if you just think about, you know, like a very literal representation of space, right? Like if you were in a small closet, you know, and like how you would kind of feel about like what kind of mindset that would create and what kind of level of comfortability that would create

and what kind of even maybe like voice that would create if you're in this tiny, tiny, constrained space versus if you're in, say like a cathedral, right? You have more white space. You have more space around you, right? There's this opportunity for opening and for tenderness and for compassion that feels super different, you know? And so I think when you think about your schedule, you know, you wanna start to open up those pockets of space

and that creates a little bit of space where you can be more generous with yourself. You can be more tender with yourself. You can be more tender with yourself. Penultimate question. You don't have a meditation practice, although as I understand it, there are some meditations involved in the reset course, so I don't quite understand that,

and maybe you can explain it, but it seems to me like a, when I kept asking you how to do these various things, you know, your various precepts, how can we operationalize them. One of the things I kind of have expect you to save, and though I know you don't meditate, was, well, actually, meditation can be really useful in these because it boosts yourself awareness, it can boost your ability to be self-compassionate, et cetera, et cetera. Do you agree with that?

Do you agree that meditation could be a useful component to what you're describing and if so, why aren't you doing it? By the way, that wasn't meant to endewish shame. I actually think you're doing fine without it, but I'm just curious. No, it is absolute, I mean, of course meditation can be incredibly useful for all of these things. And as I just said, we're thinking about opening up space, time, and space, and as a way

of being more gentle with yourself. And of course, I think that's precisely what meditation does. I... Hasn't worked for me. Maybe I'm more gentle than I used to be, that I'm a hard-paced. Anyway. I do meditate. I just, I don't have, I would say like, to me, I don't have a formal meditation practice.

To me, when I say that, what I mean is kind of doing it with some regularity and having really kind of thought about it. But I do have a raky practice, I practice raky, which I've been doing for a little over a year, so not very long. But to me, you can practice raky on yourself, of course. Well, I don't even really know what it is. I have one friend as a raky master and she described it to me, but it's like a massage

kind of. It's a form of energy healing and it has to do with the sort of seven chakras of the body. And the idea is scientific evidence, I think, is, you know, spotty, perhaps. But the idea of raky is that you as a raky practitioner are sort of a vessel for this universal healing energy, not that you yourself are doing something, which of course can sound very out there.

I find it's much better to experience raky, so we can do a raky session, sometimes if you like. Okay. That is much more likely to convert someone than describing it, which I find even when I've had Ricky describe to me intellectually, I'm like, I don't know, is that really a thing? But in any case, what it feels like to me

practicing Ricky on someone is very similar to I think a loving kindness meditation. We don't have very many opportunities in our culture to touch someone in a gentle and loving and also non-sexual way. When you do reggae with someone, you really tap into their energy. You really feel their energy, which means you also maybe really feel their hopes or their sadness or their grief or whatever those things are, they're inside of them, which of course I think inspires a lot of compassion.

So to me, that's been, and then you can also practice it on yourself, June's Health Healing. So to me, that actually feels a bit like meditation, and that's kind of been my exploration over the past year. But I think that the reason, so and as I just told you, I've actually been doing a little bit, I literally just went on a mindful self-compassion retreat, in which there was quite a bit of meditation, although it wasn't a meditation retreat. So I'm actually just moving into meditation a little bit more. And I think for me, the reason I'm moving into it more is purely for like spiritual reasons. And I think that I didn't approach it before because I wasn't maybe in that place.

But I think a lot of people initially come to meditation because they want to create what we are talking about, a little more space, a little more time, a little less anxiety, a little less stress. And I dealt with all of those things through sort of these other, you know, all the stuff that we've been talking about. So I think I didn't need to come to meditation for those, those reasons. And so I think I probably am kind of coming to it now, probably for more spiritual reasons. Final question. I want to get coming to it now probably for more spiritual reasons. Final question.

I want to get you to plug everything. You've talked about the course you mentioned that you wrote a book. Maybe you've written others. Where can we find you on social media, website, everything. Give us everything. Yeah. Well, my personal website is jkgei.com. Jocelynkagly.com.

And then there's the podcast, Hurry Slowly, which we talked about. We talked about the productivity shame episode, the Who Are You Without The Doing, which is about 50 episodes now. That's at Hurry Slowly.co, Hurry Slowly.co. And then there's the related course, which is reset, which I call a cosmic tune up for your workday, which is at reset hyphen course.com. Are you on social media or do you avoid that? I am only on Twitter at JKGLEI.

This has been really helpful. Your podcast is great and I'm going to look into all this other stuff. You wrote a book called Managing Your Day-to-Day, right? Yeah, that was part of the 99U series. Managing Your Day-to-Day and there's a couple other books in the series as well, which you can find on Amazon. I know that our mutual friend, Sevene Selassie, who is a meditation teacher and also a coach, gives that book to her clients. So that in and of itself is a massive endorsement in my little world.

Yeah, for me too. I was very excited about that. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun. Okay, thanks again to Jocelyn K. Glye really enjoyed that conversation. And I have been integrating her recommendations into my work to the best of my ability since we recorded that.

If you enjoyed this episode or if you particularly love any other episode that we've done, it'd be awesome if you could share it either directly with a friend or group of friends or on social media that I think is a great way to help us grow the show. As I've said before, every podcast hope host makes these requests. There's a reason we do it because it actually really helps to grow the show. Let's do some voicemails. Here's number one. Hey, Dan, It's Jeff. I'm calling from a flop house in Duluth, not really,

but I'm calling from Duluth here a flop house. And I'm having a hard time finding the motivation to get started again. And I think that the whole problem with getting going has a lot to do with self-worthiness issues. And again, I just, like any ideas you might have and self-worthworthiness, worthiness issues. And again, I just like any ideas you might have about getting a good meditation practice

and overcoming the initial inertia. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff. I love that. You're joke about the flop house in Duluth. When I wrote that in my first book, and I kept, that was like kind of a repeated, it was a refrain that I kept coming back to.

I've heard from a lot of people, like, why do you hate Duluth so much? And the good news is there are so many Duluths, there are several around the country. I don't know which one you're calling from, but I'm sure there's not a flop house there, but I appreciate the call. I've been thinking about your question

because I wish I had more specificity on what you mean by self-worthiness or self-worth and how exactly that is hindering you. But I had a couple thoughts and Ray Houseman, our ace head of coaching, the head of coaching on the 10% happier app. She's in charge of all the coaches we have who interact with the users. She's weighed in as well. So the one thought for me was that maybe a good practice for you to start would be, and here I go again with this term, self-compassion.

We have guided self-compassion practices up on the 10% happier app. You could probably also, if you don't want to subscribe, you want to just search for them on Google. I'm sure you could probably also, if you don't want to subscribe, you want to just search for them on Google I'm sure you could find a few that that might be a good way to start if if self-worthiness if this Inter if you've got this inter dialogue around you know criticizing yourself Maybe that's a good place to start the other thing is if you are running this storyline in your head of you know I know meditation is good for me, but I'm not worth it.

I'm not worth investing in in that way. If consciously or subconsciously that's going on with you, one way to maybe get over the hump would be to commit to doing it a little bit every day for four to six weeks. Just drop the story for a second and say, you know what, I'm just going to commit for four to six weeks. Just drop the story for a second and say, you know what, I'm just gonna commit for four to six weeks and see what happens. The reason I say that is because I think the way this practice really gets its hooks in you

is when you see the benefits. That's when you move from extrinsic motivation. In other words, I listen to this guy's podcast, I feel guilty than I'm doing the thing or the scientific community is telling me I should meditate and or my wife or whatever and that's other people telling you to doing a thing, to do a thing. You can move from that extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation in other words you do it because you want to do it. That starts to happen when you start to see the benefits in my

experience and what are the benefits and we've talked about it before, but reduced distraction and even more valuable, the mindfulness, the ability not to be so yanked around by all the various story lines you've been running since you were a kid, one of which may be this whole thing around self-worth. Or maybe you notice after six weeks of meditation, of like five minutes a day of meditation,

or five minutes most days, which might give you just might be easy an easier way to do this. Five minutes of most day daily-ish meditation, five weeks, five or five or sorry, five minutes of four to six weeks of daily-ish meditation. You might notice, oh, you anger hits you in the middle of a conversation with somebody, but you see it and you let it pass before you say something incredibly stupid. A moment like that, where you clearly see the benefits, can push you into the range of intrinsic motivation, which really can get the train rolling. This, what I just said, I think, fortunately for me, jibes with what Ray, the aforementioned

Ray husband had to say that she struggled for years to get a regular practice going. And the thing that really got it locked down and locked in for was seeing the benefits that she was more patient and kind to herself and others, and that made a big difference. And she too says, try five to eight minutes a day and see what you notice. Yeah, so I threw a lot at you. Hopefully some of it will stick and stay away from those flop houses.

Thank you. One more. Here we go. Hi, Dan. My name's Natalie. I was listening to one of your podcasts and she was doing an hour meditation a day. And immediately my head started going, well, if I did an hour meditation, I wouldn't have the time to work out. I would also be getting less sleep. And I suffered from some health issues. So it goes deep into my day. And it just aren't enough hours in the day to do all of them. So in my head, and like, well, which one is the most important for my physical, mental,

emotional well-being? Is it, you know, getting less sleep and doing an hour of meditation or is sleep more important or is making sure I can get some physical activity and important. When we aren't able to do all of those, it's hard for me to know where I should be putting my attention rather than scattering it, trying to do everything, you know, five minutes of meditation instead. Yeah, so many help, I thought it would be great. Thank you. It's a great question.

It's an important question. Nobody's asked it before, so I'm would be great. Thank you. It's a great question. It's an important question. Nobody's asked it before, so I'm glad you did. I'll just tell you what I do. And this may be controversial in some circles, I don't know. But for me, I really prioritize sleep and physical exercise over meditation. That doesn't mean I don't meditate,

but my number one priority is sleep. And I especially feel this way after having sat down for quite a while recently with Dr. Matthew Walker. It was an eminent sleep expert at the University of California in Berkeley. We're going to post that in the coming months. Sleep seems to be like the apex predator of habits. It's hard to do anything else if you're tired. And there's just an enormous amount of research

that shows that the whole system, all systems break down, you know, under sleep deprivation. So, I don't, I'm gonna stay away from being too prescriptive. I'm just gonna tell you what I do, which is that I go for sleep first and foremost. Second physical activity, I've had depressions for, I've struggled with it so much over the course of my life. it is the best antidepressant as far as I know. So I really try to be, and I'm vaguely narcissistic and I have to look at my stupid face on

television, so I'm highly motivated to exercise. So I really make sure I do that six days a week. I do try to clear out quite a bit of time for meditation, but if in your schedule you're finding that after having gotten enough sleep and doing a little bit of exercise that you don't have an hour to meditate or something like that, I don't see that as a problem. So do what you can.

Obviously I'm kind of a to a point, I'm of the view that the more the better, but if five minutes is honestly what you can safely fit into your day, then I see nothing to feel badly about there. But you know, you may want to see if there are other areas in the day where, you know, you're just mindlessly checking Facebook that that could be a time where you meditate or like right before bed. I actually really have gotten into doing quite or like right before bed. I actually really have gotten into doing

quite a bit right before bed. In fact, last night, I'm recording the intro and outro to this episode on a Saturday morning, last night, I was having trouble going to bed and I meditated for quite a while, got into bed, was tossing and turning, and per Matthew Walker's advice, instead of tossing and turning too long, which can turn the bed into a kind of, you know, a crucible. I got back out of bed, put my sweatshirt on, went to the corner of the room, and meditated again, and then I, until I got super sleepy, and then I went back to bed and I fell asleep. So that's a place where you could probably fit in quite a bit of meditation. There may be areas where you could sneak it in at lunchtime at the office, maybe areas where in your commute, if you're taking an Uber or a taxi or a subway or a train, or if you drive right before you get out of the car to go into

the house or right before you get out of the car to go into the office, lots of little places I would look for. So that's this is an area where I'm being prescriptive, trying to slide it in throughout the day in strategic ways. I think that is a really good idea. Best of luck with your health issues and really appreciate the call Natalie, thank you. Speaking of thank you, let me just thank everybody

who helps me do this show. And there are a lot of people, Samuel, John's, Grace Livingston, Mike Bususky who is the one who is in the engineering booth running running boards while I record this Lauren Hartzog and the chief the boss Ryan Kessler We'll be back next week with part two of the self-compassion series. I can't believe I'm saying self-compassion the self-compassion series, I can't believe I'm saying self-compassion. Oh, wait. And then part three of the week after that. And one other thing to look out for in just a couple days, we're going to drop a special

self-compassion theme to meditation from Sharon Salzburg. I'll see you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. at Wondery.com slash Survey.