The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - Are we too busy to pay attention to life?

Episode Date: March 30, 2016

An inbetweenisode of sorts where Jeff Annello and I discuss whether we're too busy to pay attention to life - on whether we're too busy to live. If you want more of these let me know #tkp on twitter.   Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a special edition of the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. I'm the curator behind Farnham Street, which is an online intellectual hub of interestingness covering topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, and philosophy. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do. It's more conversation than prescription. And this is a special episode. Call it an in-between a episode.

On this episode, Jaffanello and I, who started writing for Farnham Street last November, have a fascinating conversation around a piece of content on Farnham Street recently discussing whether we're too busy to pay attention to life, whether we're too busy to live. To find the piece of content, just Google Farnham Street and too busy to live.

Because this is a bit of an experiment, I want to know your feedback. Do you want to see more of these? Tweet out with hashtag TKP and let me know what you think. Peace. Before I get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor. This podcast is supported by Slack, a messaging app bringing all your team's communications into one place. Slack integrates with other tools and services you already use like

Google Drive, Dropbox, and more. Visit Slack.com slash Farnham to create your team and get $100 in credits you can use if you decide to switch to a paid plan. One of the most recent popular posts on Farnham Street was talking about Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman and the concept of whether we're too busy to pay attention to life. What did you think? I liked it a lot. I thought that, you know, it's a very interesting concept because modern life is very different than probably the world that we evolved in. And, you know, I have found myself thinking about it a lot because what we have now that you probably never had in the past in the distant enough past is that you could keep your brain engaged consistently

throughout the whole day with no breaks if you wanted to and most people and a lot of people do you know you can start your day and literally I think this is that a lot of people construct their day is that they wake up the phone the phone wakes them up uh you know you have an alarm on your phone first thing you do is check your email first thing you do is check your email your text messages you take your text messages I don't really use social media very much I mean we have a you know we have our Twitter accounts and and I do some stuff with that but though I'm pretty infrequent on it and I only follow like 20 people on Twitter and who are pretty well curated to people I'm interested to hear from but I don't use Facebook and I don't use Instagram and stuff but I know

people who you know the first thing that they do when they wake up is they check their email they check their tax messages they check their Instagram account they check their Facebook like they literally go from A to Z on all the social media just to get caught up on I don't know what happen overnight and then then they get their day started where does that need come from do you think like this need to be up to date on everything that happened i think that the success of these companies is because we have a biological need to stay in touch um where it wouldn't be unoriginal for me to say that we're a social species so those things are deeply part of us and i think that most of these services have evolved in a very natural selection type of way so that the only ones

that are left and that are thriving are the most addictive ones that play on some of our deepest desires and provide our brain with the most you know and I don't know how much I trust brain studies I mean I think that science has a long way to go but I think it would be I think it's probably true that when you check your Facebook account regularly that you're getting a hit of whatever drug yeah that is comparable to a dopamine you know again I don't want to I think some of that stuff gets a little sciencey where it's not real but but I believe it enough to say that I understand that it's like a drug like a like an actual drug um for the brain we can't even stand in line anymore like even at the coffee shop well I would give you a good example so um

We're recording this in Austin, Texas, and we both flew in here. And one thing that I make a point of noticing now is when the plane touches down, you just look around immediately, literally, before you even taxi up to the gate, people will have their phones out. And I was sitting next to this girl on the way in here. And, you know, I think within a minute or two, she had checked her text messages. I wasn't like reading them but I kind of I could notice what she was doing basically she was sitting right next to me her text messages her email her Instagram account our

Facebook account and another social media thing that I mean it was like Snapchat and something that I didn't recognize because I've kind of there's so many things now it's hard to keep keep up with all them but I just the point was that she had checked like six different services in a period of like a minute or two and then she just like turned her phone off and put it in her pocket like it was almost in what I thought of immediately was it reminded me of someone who has been stuck in a restaurant all night and as soon as they get outside they pull out a cigarette and smoke because they've just been like cooped up the whole time yeah and then they release that need immediately you know and I think that now I see people do that with their phones or whatever it's just like they

have this pent up connect connect need to connect and when they you know when they're able to they they take it they take a quick hit and in some sense it's not as much anymore because you can get Wi-Fi in a lot of planes but if you don't you know if they're charging for it and you don't pay for or whatever you've been disconnected for a couple couple of hours and so we can't even do that right like a couple hours it's just so much now it's like we're unable to be bored or unable to be bored well I would agree with that totally I mean I think that that's that's kind of what I was saying before was that it's just you can now I don't think that in the even in the recent past you could go through a whole day being with your being engaged the way that you can't

now unless you are an extremely busy person the average person in the world you know and we forget too like the majority of people used to work on farms and you would be you would be sort of your your brain is just doing very different things now than it would have um when we were the world was agricultural and even before that when the world was you know more of a hunter gatherer i think that affects are learning too and our ability to concentrate for long periods of time and all of this stuff is just a byproduct of that like I notice even in line of the supermarket if people don't pull out their phones and distract themselves their immediate response to having more than two people in front of them is like almost disgust oh yeah yeah right yeah yeah and I don't it's you know

there have been a lot of articles written now by people who um you know who basically say I know addicted you know it reminds me of uh alcoholics anonymous or something where the the journalist starts by saying i know i have a problem um this connectivity problem and i'm going to take 30 days to be you know clean and sober basically and it always reminds me of someone who like is like well i know i'm a smoking problem but like i'm going to like try to stop smoking for a month and then and then they write you know this expose about their time without social media or whatever and uh and there's two things things that seem to happen with all these people. One is they find when they detach that they get a lot of those powers back that they missed. So they're like, well, I can focus more and I don't feel

so jittery all day and so on. But the second thing, which is almost, which is maybe even more telling, is that in all cases, they go back to it. They go back to the life. Yeah, why do you think that is? Well, we miss it. I think that people are very unwilling now to dare to be different. So If you are truly disconnect from those things, what you have to understand is there's a, they're network tools. So when you turn your network off, their network has some homeostasis, right?

So if you, and there's going to be a homeostatic response. So if you, let's just say that you're someone who is a very active textor, a very active Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or whatever, and you just decide, I can't do this anymore. I'm destroying my ability to focus.

and be bored and so on well in the first day after you turn those things off immediately people are like well why like i sent you this thing and you didn't respond and like why are you mad at me and you know and what it is is it's just it's just a homeostatic response it's like you've disrupted the the system and the system notices so i think that it's one thing for a journalist to be able to say i'm writing a story about it so that you can tell the network like you know i'm going to be turning it off for a while but on a day-to-day basis you can't get away with that and I think part of that has to do with our ability or a fear of culturally it's almost unacceptable to say I don't know and I don't know can be an answer to a question about what's going on in the world

or it can be a question about deep learning or your job or how to apply something but we just have this inability to appear misinformed and so I think that manifests that itself in these sound bite type opinions where we're reading the Twitter feed and then we talk about it at the water cooler. I'm sure, we're informed because we read the 144 characters and we know exactly what's going on, right? Like we're not doing the deep thinking that we used to do. And these subjects are so transitive.

I mean, they pass so quickly, right? So even though you're getting the headline, you're not getting the information or facts necessarily, you make a judgment and then you're on to the next thing. and then you always have an answer to whatever comes up in whatever situation, no matter how shaky that foundation is. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website

to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit TD.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Yeah, I almost feel like people feel that they don't have an excuse to not know anymore because because the information is so ubiquitous for you to say, well, I don't know anything about that. People are like, do you live under a rock?

You know, if someone says, what do you think about Trump's X, Y, Z? You know, like, I don't really know much about it. I mean, you probably heard about it, but you just say, I'm not an expert or not. I don't know. I just, you know, I don't, I don't have anything useful to offer on that topic. The people are like, yeah, but the, you know, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like, people almost can't accept that. If you say, I don't know, you get a lot of weird looks because you're expected to know

something about it because it's so, it's there, it's available, it's so easily available. And I think a lot of people have a trouble differentiating between knowing, like, the surface thing and actually knowing, like, in a deep sense. of my, my favorite story about the difference between those two things is from Charlie Munger when he's talking about the physicist Max Planck going around giving this complicated lecture in the, in the early 20th century. And he had given this lecture so many times that he eventually, you know, who knows if this story is apocryphal or not, but he eventually said to his chauffeur, you know, like, I want you to give the speech. And so the chauffeur gives a speech

on this complicated detailed topic and someone in the audience asks him you know hey you know some some complicated tactical question follow-up question on a technical lecture and he said he goes I'm surprised such a smart person like you would ask a question like that and it's so easy in fact that I'm going to pass it over to my chauffeur so munger tells that story as a way to say are you max plank or are you the chauffeur and ever since I heard that story story, I've thought about it very regularly because if you are an introspective person, you will realize, and I certainly did, that a lot of the things that you think you know, you only know at the chauffeur level, you don't know at the max plank level.

Right. We have a post on that called the two types of knowledge, and it actually talks about plank knowledge and chauffeur knowledge and goes into it. It was from Rolf Dobler's book about The Art of Thinking clearly, which you know there's some interesting thoughts in there and there's some interesting you know connotations about where you got the sources and all of that stuff but leaving all that aside I think it's an interesting concept to distinguish between when you know something and when you don't and when you're fooling yourself and Feynman said I mean you know the key is not the easiest person to fool

key is not fooling yourself and you're the easiest person to fool and then mapping that kind of to our concept of circle of concept or circle of competence and how we go about making decisions and operating within those bounds, and then having strategies and ways to overcome. I mean, there's no way that you can live a life in today's day and age and only make decisions in your circle of confidence, only make decisions where you have plank knowledge. You have to go outside of that.

But the strategies you employ when you go outside of that are incredibly important, and those are kind of the tools that we, We want people to build up. But you, I wanted to come back to something you said. Before you joined Farnham Street, you were working in an organization, an office culture. How often did anybody in there actually say the three words? I don't know. Yeah, not that.

I mean, you know, and I think it has a lot to do with the person and their ego in a sense that, like, there are certain topics that everybody feels comfortable saying. Not everybody, but each individual person feels comfortable saying, I don't know. Like if I were to ask you about, you know, gymnastics, you would have no problem saying, I don't know, because none of your ego is wrapped up in gymnastics. But when I was working in finance, you know, if you ask somebody a financial question, their ego is wrapped up in that because that's their profession. So even though they may be at a very narrow, operating in a very narrow area of finance,

let's say you're an analyst focusing on, you know, Canadian. in insurance companies or something, which is a niche. And I ask you about, I know, a Coca-Cola company that may be outside that circle. Well, it's a financial question and you feel like, you know, you work in the finance industry and you are a business person and you understand investments and so on. And so you have, that's in your, that part of your ego is wrapped up and understanding things like that. So you feel like you have to answer that. And so you give me an answer about that. even if you know nothing about it you go oh well coke is that you know and it's not the same as if i asked you about gymnastics because no one expects you to know anything you don't you don't expect that

of yourself so a lot of it in my opinion and people are perfectly willing to say i don't know if it's something that they don't they have no you know no skin in the game on at all but if if they do then you get all these weird nonsensical answers where people it's kind of related to their field of understanding but so do you think we've wrapped up our self-worth then in keeping up to date with our friends on Facebook and world news up to the minute up to almost the second right i mean there's this race to is that because we we have some sort of self-worth in terms of being up-to-date or is it i would i guess i don't want to i don't want to make the stretch the analogy. I think the two things are different. The social media thing,

I don't, I don't think is an ego thing so much as we're wired to want to know things about other people in our network where we've been gossiping since we developed language. And it's no surprise that the most valuable social media tools are basically tools in which we gossip about one another. And the problem that I have seen beyond, beyond the concept of being busy all the time and connected all the time is that the tools we have now are also the biggest envy generators that have ever been invented so something like facebook you know i think it's destructive to happiness in a big way because people are unable to see those things and not feel tremendously envious and envy has been part of the human DNA for as long as we've been human i mean it's just that's part

of who we are. And I'm sure there is a evolutionary reason why that's true. I wouldn't pretend to be able to give you a good answer on that. But, you know, it was in the, you know, the old religious text for a reason and so on. So, and I think as much as there's value in the connectivity it gives us, that's a huge downside. And so, you know, when you combine the effect of being constantly connected and unable to be bored and struggling with focus with the envy generation, I think. I don't know. I just question whether the tools have been weighed. We've weighed the pros and cons of the tools. What do you think the solution is? I mean, we both heavily curate and reduce the influence others have on our lives. Yeah, it's hard for me to say

in this because I don't have any problem. I didn't have any problem disconnecting from all of that. So I had a Facebook account just I'm using, I'm picking on Facebook and I, you know, I mean, if anybody from Facebook ever listens to this, it's, I'm just using it as an example because you're the most popular. So you won the game. But, you know, I got rid of, I had my Facebook account when I was in high school and in college. And then, you know, when I probably like right after I left college, I got rid of it. And at the time, there was that homeostatic response. People are like, I don't know how to invite you to things. like we use Facebook to organize things and I, you know, I'm like you don't, I remember missing out early on on a few important events that people assumed I knew through Facebook, like people getting engaged or having kids and announcing they were pregnant or whatever, that the way that they would tell people is to put on Facebook. So there were a couple of those things early on that I missed out on because people didn't realize or forgot that I wouldn't find out through Facebook. But then what I noticed in a pretty short term, pretty short period of time is that, you know,

When there was an event, a person would let me know directly. It was like a little bit of resentment. They'd be like, you're not on Facebook, so I have to tell you this directly. But eventually everybody got used to it, you know. And I haven't looked back. And it's, you know, whatever, seven years later. And I have, I haven't looked back at it. So, and then as for the other networking tools, social media tools, I just didn't.

I was early enough that I just didn't pick them up, you know. But you use Twitter to get information. You filter it. But so these tools can be valuable then. not that they don't have value is just the person who put this well was cal cal newport wrote in his new book um about deep work he has something in there about that resonated with me that he put in words better than i had been able to myself before which is that it's not that the tools don't have value it's just that we're not weighing the pros and the cons as we would with any other tool right

and he's i think cal's exactly 100% right on this notion that it would be a mistake to say the tools have no value it would also be a mistake to say that the tools have are perfect and that on balance some of the tools may be worth less than zero that they may be and on average a detractor so I think it was impossible I found for me personally it's impossible to use something like Facebook in a balanced way like I just wasn't it was detracting so much you're all in or all it yeah I couldn't just use it in like a judicious way so I had to get rid of it and I didn't pick up Instagram or Snapchat any of those I don't I can't say but I suspect that I probably wouldn't get a whole lot out of those either Twitter is I can use Twitter in a very targeted way, which is I can follow exactly how I want to follow and click the links I want to click and save them to read them later or whatever. And then if I have any things I want to tweet out

on behalf of us for Farnham Street and stuff through, you know, I'll do that. But then I just turn it off. Like I don't, I resist the temp. I don't have, like I don't have Twitter, the app installed on my phone. So I don't go through it on my phone. I don't have it on my iPad.

The only time I really use Twitter on my actual on my computer. And so I'm limiting myself to when I'm able to access the tool. I'm trying to control my own impulses. And so we take this to a different degree too because we try to have an incredibly high signal to noise ratio on the stuff we do disseminate on all of these channels, including Facebook and Twitter.

A lot of that, I think, comes from our natural respect for readers. And we want people to have Farnham Street as part of their lives and not encroached too much on the nonsense aspect of it. But I think these tools, for me personally, I use them differently than you do. I think that they're useful for me to receive information, for me to curate. I don't read the newspapers anymore.

It's a good way that information gets filtered, and I don't follow a lot of people on Twitter. I think I have like 60, and not a lot of them are repeating the news, but when anything big happens, it always finds its way to me, no matter how much I try to avoid the news, or I don't follow any of the news channels on Twitter. And then the other thing is just using it

and knowing why you're using it and cutting it off, right? So I follow the number of people on Twitter that I can go through in about 10 minutes, the day's feed. That's kind of the way that I do it, and it gives me ideas for posts and cross-connections. But what I find the biggest problem for me personally is the multitasking aspect of it. I'll be learning something.

and then my inclination when I'm learning or reading is like oh that's really cool I should tweet that out or I should and that immediately takes me from the moment where I'm focusing and concentrating and then it puts me in another space and then that's as we know the internet is this big rabbit hole so it's so easy so on that topic something that I did recently that I recommend that everyone go through this exercise to see so the next time that you're working on something or reading something have a pad next to you but don't don't give yourself the ability to connect to the internet and as you're reading that thing or working on that thing doesn't matter whether you're writing something doing a presentation doing a piece of work reading a book reading

a man it doesn't really matter anytime you're you need to be engaged when you think of something that you would do on the internet for example you're doing a research project and you're like oh I want to look up this guy on Wikipedia or something or like you said I want to tweet that out or I want to send an email to somebody instead of doing the thing write it down on the pad and do that for a couple of hours or whatever how long it takes you and then and then when you're done look at the pad I guarantee you you will be you will look at the pad and be like holy shit I would have been distracted 20 times at least yeah at least I found that I would literally fill like a piece of a yellow legal pad like from top to bottom with stuff it would be like

look up x look up y send chain email on this like all these things one after another and if i had indulged on each one of those things i can't imagine that i would ever gotten the thing done it would have taken me at least twice as long to actually finish even if i'm just working on a post for farm straight or whatever you know like so something that I do now is I'll write I'll write out the whole post without any links without any um anything I would need to look up or need to link to or whatever I do it all at once at the end and I download all my thoughts first because what I've found is that if I do all of that stuff while I'm writing it it just delays me so long because the internet is just this mission is hyperlinking machine the whole the internet is built on the idea of hyperlinking

That's the core of the ideas that everything links to each other and then Google built their search algorithm originally on these things that are being linked to. If it's something that has a lot of inbound links, it's going to end up at the top of the search ranking. And they've refined it since then, but they had this major insight about what a popular website was is something that had been, you know, basically it was linked to most frequently.

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The new outlander. Bring out your adventurous side. Mitsubishi Motors. Drive your ambition. Which is a great insight and made them a lot of money. and obviously I'm ridiculously oversimplifying Google but the problem with that is that when you log on it you can never it's like you know we like we have posts about it's on farm street garret hard and said you can never merely do one thing that's his first law of ecology and I think that's like the first law of the internet at this point which is that you can never merely do one

thing you can't use it like a saw or a hammer or some tool that in the past where you pick it up and you use the hammer and then you put it back down you have to to you go on and you link and you link and you link and it just goes it it literally is infinite yeah you can go forever if you want to you could die linking so that that's a hard habit to break and and the only way i found that i can do it for me i'm not some people are probably much better at this than i am but i definitely have a monkey brain when it comes to this well do you think we can actually multitask that do you think anybody can multitask well i think they've pretty well proven that you can't multitask that there's really no such thing as doing really

doing two, I mean, in some point there comes a problem of definition what multitasking is, because what the, you know, the neuroscientists are saying, well, you're not actually doing two things at once. And I can kind of see a response where people are like, well, I'm not saying literally doing two things at once, like, in an existential sense. I just mean that I can watch TV and, you know, like, you know, hang out with my kids at the same time. Yeah. You could say that's multitasking. So I think it would, you don't want to necessarily take the idea too far that multitasking is not real. But I do believe the idea that if you are trying to watch TV and write a paper at the same time, the paper probably is being sacrificed

compared to what it would be otherwise where you were totally focused. And it's also popular now to listen to music or something while you work. And the most amusing one I had, I heard about that was from Ryan Holiday where he's like, he would listen to the same song like a hundred times in a row while he was writing, which I would never do to myself because I love music to me. He's like, I can't even listen to music anymore because I've ruined it, which is I thought was amusing. And it works for him. That's fine. I just, I would never want to do that to myself. But basically, the way most people do it is not like that. There's more novelty. Like, they're just, you know, if your brain is hearing the music and in processing it and enjoying it,

and you're also trying to focus on whatever the work is. And I think that one of those things is probably being sacrificed. So, you know, basically what I find from my myself is I have to, in order for me to do my best work by far, I have to do one thing at a time, pretty much. And I've learned to batch things into groups. Like, so in the next hour, I will do all the stuff I need to get done on the internet, you know, all the linking, all the emails I need to send and respond to and all that, or whatever, which is going to vary by person. Some people have a lot of email and a lot of networking to do, and depending on your job. And I'm fortunate enough that I can, you know, put that into certain parts of the day and leave

it there. So outside of multitasking, though, in the sense of it's hit on productivity and our ability to learn, there's also kind of the thing that we come back to in the original post, which is that we're missing out on life through all of this busyness. And a perfect example is when you walk into the lobby of a famous hotel, instead of admiring it, people immediately pull out their cameras and they start taking pictures instead of being in the moment they want to take a picture of the moment and share the moment with somebody else like look i was here it's it's not quite like a one-upmanship sort of thing but it's like oh i was here that's great but you're not actually experiencing yeah it's an interesting question i mean some people would

argue that you know i i don't know i i just i have this i have this pet peeve about that where it's like if you get so busy documenting everything that how could that be how could that be the same as experiencing it and and obviously like the textbook example right now it seems to piss everybody off and yet everybody keeps doing it is when they go to concerts they take out their phone and they're recording the concert and literally you go to a you know i went to see pearl jam last year and like you know a hundred a hundred thousand people all with their phones that recording the thing and it's just like I don't understand how that's compatible with optimally enjoying the thing

but I guess I understand this point is that some people just don't feel that they feel that I haven't experienced the thing until they've documented it. But we're not recording it for ourselves, are we? How often do you think those people go back and then watch the video themselves? What I've noticed is people will do that

and then they want to watch it with someone else. Like, hey, watch this video with this. So sharing an experience. Yeah, so it's just sharing the experience. And so some of it, I think, is what you're saying, where, like, you're trying to impress other people. And basically, it's the flip side where I was talking about before, where Facebook being this huge envy generator, people know that they're generating envy and others. And they feel that they have to keep up with that cycle. Like, if I'm on Facebook and I'm constantly seeing things posted by other people about the vacations they've been on and whatever, well, then I feel like, in order for me to keep up with that and feel good about myself, I have to also do that.

So it's another way of keeping up with the Jones. kind of thing like when one car on the street is new everybody gets a new car within a certain period of time you have to document your trip to you know barbadoes because you've seen your friends documenting their trips to macho pichu and to whatever and i think it would be it's almost like your trip didn't happen if you don't do if you don't dock that's my point i think that there's like an almost gotten to the point for a lot of people where they don't feel that the experience has happened unless it's been documented and i'm and that's not a totally brand new thing i mean that's been around at least as long as photography has been around and people you know showing each other

pictures of their their trips or writing each other letters about their so i'm not i'm not necessarily throwing out the whole idea i've just it's just you know i love i love the concept that that bad ideas are good ideas born bad and i think that we're at that point with a lot of this stuff where what it started as a cool idea which is being able to document something and show it to other people later has gone to this fever pitch element where you can no longer experience it without documenting it. And that leads to these absurdities, like people taking pictures of all their food and ridiculous stuff that most people, I think even if you're listening to it, I'm guaranteeing a lot of people who would be nodding their heads like, yeah, that is ridiculous. And then they'll do

it. You know, like they'll go ahead and do it. This is funny because wait for dinner tonight. Jeff and I are going to do dinner and I'm going to take a picture of every course there comes. There you go. So if you're sincere about trying to detach from it, you'd have to come up with some sort of strategy to mentally come to terms with the fact that you don't need to do a lot of people do this stuff, but that you don't need to and that you don't need to get fulfillment from other people. You can enjoy things without other people sort of. But how do you go cold turkey? Like how do you go from somebody who's doing this and do you scale back? Do you stop? Well, that's like asking how to like quit smoking.

I mean, I think everybody, the answer when it comes to smoking is probably going to be the same answer when it comes to social media, which is that a lot of people will fail and won't be able to do it, even with sincere intentions. Some people will be able to quit cold turkey and some people will be able to, you know, sort of back off slowly with the nicotine patch. And I would almost guarantee that social media and networking tools are going to, an email included, are going to fall into that same bucket. So you have to start by being honest with yourself, like, how bad is my problem and how much, you know, again, it's very, it's very AA, but like, how much help do I need, you know, and coming up with a strategy that's going to, but I think the first thing is, like, you have to understand that it's okay to detach a little bit, you know, like it's not, and that expect the response to come from the network or whatever and just prepare for it. And it's doable. I think it's doable. I'm not, I still live a healthy social life and everything, even though I don't use all this stuff. It's worked out completely fine for me.

People started telling me when they had babies and stuff. So you can, and no one expects me to post a picture of my vacations online. So I think you realize it's an illusion at some point. These are tough questions that we're grappling with in terms of busyness and its impact on learning, its impact on productivity, its impact on your life. I think the answers. and, you know, what we buy is we buy the solution to this problem, and we buy that through self-help books,

and we buy that through everything else, which are very prescriptive. What we don't buy are this is a tough issue, this is grappling for people to deal with, and each person has to deal with it in a slightly different way. There's no formula that you can just follow and get the right answer, and it has to relate to the context of your life, and that's part of the work about thinking, right,

is taking the ideas from other people, learning them and understanding them and understanding that when they apply and when they don't apply, and then further understanding when they apply to your life and how they impact your life. And it comes down to things like weighing the pros and cons to using these tools and just being aware of those cons, because we don't think about them. We just think about the pros or the ability to share and disseminate. And I don't have to call somebody I can just tweet somebody out. You know, I don't have to email somebody.

all of these things where we can do massive communications instead of one-on-one communications make it easier on ourselves but we also communicate more we also share so there's a cost to this right we're constantly on our phones our devices can I give a little analogy that it came to me recently which is that you know there's this well-known thing where people think that building a bigger wider highway is going to alleviate traffic and then what happens is they build the the highway and they realize that the traffic is the same because people start taking more trips. So this was a huge problem in New York City for a long time.

They would think that when they built the Henry Hudson Bridge or whatever, that it was going to alleviate traffic from the existing bridge, and it turned out that they had way more traffic afterwards. Both bridges were known. So I think when it comes to communications, there's something similar happening where people think that it makes communication easier and thus I can, you know, I can make it even simpler. I don't have to write these letters and it's so much easier or whatever.

but what happened is that that's the opposite the traffic problem happened where communication just exploded yeah you almost want some friction right like there's a natural you know stoppage i guess to like i used to have the farm street email address up on the website and i had to take it down because it was just getting so many it was so easy for people to email me and it's not like you're emailing me one or two sentences like these are seven eight paragraphs or 30 pages documents or so what I've started asking people to do to add friction is oh well why don't you print that and mail it to me and if it's worth your time to print mail it to me it's something I'll look at and if it's not worth your time to print mail it to me you were probably just communicating with me not because you wanted to communicate with me per se but because it was easy for you to do and the cost on you was really low but the cost on me is really high so I can almost put those costs on somebody else it's it's almost like a modern bureaucracy right you think about how the office culture works it's not about doing the work it's about

forwarding an email and shifting it to somebody else and we spend all of this time you know just basically passing around emails and we think that that is a proxy for work right but it makes me wonder like who's actually doing work in a lot of these organizations yeah and that's that was my experience you know you asked me before like you know I was working in the real world or whatever is that what people call work was like not really work it was sometimes it was but of the 10 hours a day that we would spend in the office you know maybe two of them would be what you would call work like actual writing a report or doing research or whatever and the rest of the time would be chatting and emailing and walking around the office and things and and then you know

the personal will report that they're working 60 hours a week or whatever and then and I and I want to say like well you're at the office 60 hours a week but are you actually working six hours and i'm not blaming any of the individuals it's just that's the culture now just the way it is and you know it just like expands and expands and it time is not work right yeah time is not what's the principle that like uh i don't know it was named after but like the the work will expand to fit the time allotted parkinson wasn't it yeah yeah so and that's kind of how it is and now with the communications infrastructure being what it is it's like i think there's like a subversion of that where it's like communications will expand to fill the time allotted.

I mean, you could literally, if you wanted to spend your entire time just communicating. A subtangent on this is I've noticed a trend that probably everybody else has already noticed and I'm slow to this, but it's the person in the office environment that creates a half-ass draft that is not well thought out, attaches it to an email to like 20 or 30 people. and was like, oh, I did all the work on this. What are your thoughts? And then they basically shifted all of that work. So my father runs an accounting firm and does wealth management.

He calls this office tennis where it's like you do it and then you just, you hit it into the other person's court and then they hit it back. And, you know, that's what it is. It's like it's tennis. But it creates an obligation on the receiver's part to do work and a lot of work. And the person who is doing the work all right. ready, like the initial person who did the work, they're basically half-assing it to like some sort of bare minimum because now they're passing their work onto other people.

And some people do this in a really shrewd way, which is like, oh, your experience is so much greater than mine. I think you'd add a lot of value and insight into this particular thing. But at the end of the day, they're not doing the thinking, they're not getting it to the quality it should be before doing that, and then they're not thinking about when they send it out and the impact it has on other people and their jobs and it is kind of like office tennis and it's shifting the burden to somebody else which is so easy to do and that's why we forward emails and we say like you know these quick what do you think or for your situational awareness or

FYI and all of these things we're not actually thinking well what is the cost of the person to read this and understand it can I summarize it for them if you're passing something to your boss which is, you know, something value out is literally just a, you know, a one or two sentence, here's the gist of it. You can get the context below, but if you know that I'm giving you the gist of it, I've just saved you some time and made you aware of the situation. But we don't do that. Well, so it's not natural to do that because, like you said, it costs me nothing.

So my incentive is to just get it off my plate in the most frictionless way possible, and then you deal with it. And so in an organization, it would take someone is going to have to, come down from high and say, look, we're going to improve our email culture and our communications culture. And so far, it's been going the other way where, you know, the companies are just encouraging more and more email and the tools for communication. I mean, you know, anytime, I know a lot of companies are implementing, like, or have already implemented, like, instant messaging capabilities and not, you know, it's come a long way from AOL instant messenger, but they're sophisticated

corporate tools supposedly but you know the people who have to use them or the people who work they are now expected to use them and that intrudes upon any time that they may have spent actually focusing on something and working because when the i.m window pops up it's like it's like email but worse and now it's even more frictionless so it kind of goes back to we were talking about before where it's like the tools have been we've only looked at one side of the ledger which is all the frictionless nature of it, but we've been very hesitant to look at the other side, which is, well, what are we losing? And it goes back to that quote by Herbert Simon, when he said, you know, what does information consume? It consumes the attention of its recipient.

And so in a world rich in information, there's a poverty of attention. I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically what he said. And that was more prophetic than he thought it would be when he said it, you know, 50 years ago or whatever. So I think that's where we're at. And I think that as a person, you have to come up with strategies to fight it. And if you're running an organization, don't expect it to happen on its own. Someone's going to have to kind of come down from high and say, we're going to do this better. And put some carrot and stick into it. Like, you have to punish people who are not following it.

Listen, this has been a fascinating conversation. I think we're going to end it here. This is a bit of an experiment. The first time Jeff and I have done a one-on-one. We'd love to hear your feedback. With some level of irony, you can tweet to us, hashtag the knowledge project, and let us know what you think of this. Thank you. Hey, guys.

This is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at Farnham Street blog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com slash podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnhamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more.

Thank you for listening. Thank you.