The Liz Moody Podcast - Productivity Secrets—How To Conquer Procrastination, Build a Better Morning Routine, and Get More Done In Less Time with Chris Bailey

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

My guest today is the incredible Chris Bailey, the best-selling author of The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus, and the host of the Time & Attention podcast. On this episode, he shares: a simple trick to decide what to be productive about and prioritize every day how to balance prioritizing what you WANT to do every day and what you HAVE to do every day how to build a better morning routine how your self talk is hurting your productivity—and how to change it the best time of day to wake up for optimal productivity the number one habit you should incorporate to be more productive the secret to getting MORE work done in way LESS time the 7 causes of procrastination and how to overcome each of them why a weekly review will change your life (and exactly how to do it) his thoughts on time blocking and other popular productivity hacks his top app picks for productivity how to have restorative relaxation time and enjoy NOT being productive I would love to hear from you as you listen to this episode so definitely tag @lizmoody and @chrisbaileyauth with any thoughts, feelings, or reactions as you’re listening! I would also appreciate if you shared this episode or any favorite episodes from the year! PS: My very first product is live!!! Go to htdeck.com to snag your Healthier Together Deck, which has 150 conversation starters in 6 categories! Find out more at htdeck.com—this is a self-funded limited run and these will sell out!! PS: My Patreon is live! You can join Green Smoothie Society and get access to ALL of my green smoothie recipes and advice! Get all the deets at patreon.com/lizmoody. This episode is sponsored by AG1 by Athletic Greens. Visit athleticgreens.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today. This episode is sponsored by Nuzest. You can use the code “LizHT” for 20% off your order on http://nuzest.us/LizHT. This episode is sponsored by Seed. You can get 15% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01™ Daily Synbiotic by going to https://seed.com/daily-synbiotic and using the code LIZMOODY. This episode is sponsored by Paleovalley. Head over to paleovalley.com and use the code LIZM for 15% off. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a cookbook author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether that's through mindset shifts or gut health hacks or products to make your skin glow or advice to build better friendships or bigger bank accounts. We cover it all. I am so excited to be kicking up 2022 with a topic that's relevant no matter what your goals for the year are, productivity.

I am literally obsessed with this conversation. It's filled with the actionable hacks and super pragmatic advice that I know that we all love, but it's also a broader, more philosophical take on what the point of productivity actually is, what we're trying to achieve by being productive and what a good life looks like. My guest today is the incredible Chris Bailey, the best-selling author of the Productivity Project and Hyperfocus, and the host of the Time and Attention podcast. I personally picked up the productivity project like a year or so ago after a CEO that I admire

recommended it and it is truly one of the best productivity books that I have ever read. And I know that it's a go-to for many of the most successful people that I know. Chris is also just an incredibly thoughtful and kind and lovely human to talk to. On this episode, he shares how to build a better morning routine, how to balance prioritizing what you want to do every day with what you have to do every day, how your self-talk is hurting your productivity and how to change it, the best time of day to wake up for optimal productivity, the number one habit you should incorporate to be more productive, the seven causes of procrastination and how to overcome each of them, his thoughts on time blocking and other popular

productivity hacks, and so much more. I love this conversation so much. I love this conversation so much. I promise that it won't make you feel pressured to like get more done or stress out. It's actually incredibly calming and clarifying and filled with tools and approaches that you can use right now to create exactly the life that you want. I would love to hear what's resonating as you're listening. What are you going to try out? What did you learn? So screenshot and tag me.

I am at Liz Moody. And Chris is at Chris Bailey off, like author, like at C-H-R-I-S-B-B-B-A-I-E. I-L-E-Y-A-U-T-H. And if you are new here, welcome. I am so glad to have you as part of the family. Be sure to subscribe on whatever podcast app that you're listening on so you don't miss any future episodes because we have such good ones coming up, including an Ask the Doctor Burnout Edition and an amazing episode all about hacking your blood sugar to optimize your

gut and hormone health, energy, and more. All right. Without further ado, here is Chris, all about product. All right, Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. I was already complimenting you on your amazing singing voice, but I'm excited to hear it speaking as well. Oh, should we do a sing-song interview or would we lose absolutely everybody? I think if I sang we would lose everybody, but your voice sounded so lovely. Soaparific, dulcet tones. Are you a singer? Do you sing in the chat? No. I sing in the, I love. I, I love. love singing. I think it's one of, I actually think that it's hard to be unhappy while you're

singing. Like I've said, if you're having, I struggle with anxiety and if you're having like a panic attack or something like that. Honestly, if you put on a song you love and sing to it, it helps so much. But it doesn't help those around me, I would say. No, it makes them more anxious because you're singing. More anxious, yes. Can you start us off just by giving a quick introduction and to kind of like who you are. I'll obviously introduce you, but I love hearing from people in their own words. Yeah. I always, I always struggle to explain what I do, but I write books on productivity. There are some people who have normal interests like, I don't know, being a nomad, cooking and doing all this stuff. My interest that's always followed me wherever I've gone has been

that of productivity, which a lot of people hear the word productivity and what comes to mind is something cold and corporate and all about efficiency and effectiveness, whatever those terms actually mean, you ask everybody and they say something different. But I just see it as living with intention and working with intention and having intention drive the lives that we live, regardless of the context that we're in. And when you define productivity is just accomplishing what we set out to, it works at every context of our life. It works if we're trying to work, And it works if we're, you know, on a beach sipping a couple pinia collates. If that's our intention for the day and then we do so, I would argue that we're perfectly productive.

But I guess you could say I study the science of productivity and intention and try to bridge that science with how we can act and work and live a bit differently each and every day to get more done of what we want. I love that take, and I was going to ask what you thought the point of productivity was, because it does feel like we live in a society that sort of worships productivity for the sake of itself. And I think that we're almost like productivity obsessed, but I love the idea that productivity is living out any part of your life in the way that you want living with intention in that. Did it take some work to be able to shift from just seeing productivity as like accomplishing tasks for work to having that beach sipping thing be part of productivity? Yeah, absolutely, 100%. And this, I kind of started on the opposite side of things. I started from the corporate world and I worked at, you know, Nokia for a number of years, the government for a number of years, seeing what productivity looked like in those kind of contexts. And I thought, where's the meaning in just getting more things done as opposed to the right things done?

And I love how you're asking that off the top because productivity is kind of a default value almost that we tend to adopt. You know, the world tells us in some way or another, whether it's our upbringing, whether it's through media, whatever, that we need to make more money, that we need to become fitter, that we need to become, that we need to become. more active, that we need to become more productive. And we say, oh, yeah, productivity. That sounds great without thinking, okay, what is actually the point of this endeavor into this realm of productivity? So, yeah, I'm happy you ask that off the top. I personally think that people are the reason for productivity. You know, if you woke up and you were the only person left on the face of the planet tomorrow morning, it wouldn't matter how many things you got done if you had nobody to share the fruits of that productivity with,

we kind of need that North Star, whether that's living a life more full of meaning, whether that's living in a way that we have more freedom to spend our time, our attention, our energy as we please, or whether that's more time for the beach, whatever it happens to be, I think having a point for productivity is so critical. For me, it's people.

And I think for a lot of people, it is too. With productivity being able to apply to anything and you kind of having to get clear every day on what you value and what you want to be productive in terms of, do you have any advice for deciding that and for creating sort of a hierarchy of what you do want to accomplish on any given day? That's a good idea to think about. You know, in terms of prioritizing every day, one of my favorite rituals is called the rule of three. and it goes like this. The wonderful thing, this episode's coming out at the beginning of the year I know,

and the wonderful thing about this rule is it applies across any time scale that you can possibly think of. But essentially on a daily basis, the rule of three goes like this. At the start of the day, you fast forward to the end of the day in your head, and you ask yourself,

by the time this day is done, what three main things will I want to have accomplished? And that's it. You know, you work on other things too, but it's this simple intention-setting ritual to kick off every day. And if you love the rule on a daily basis, you might find that you want to adopt it every week as well. And after that, you might want to adopt it in general. What three things do I want to have accomplished by the end of the year? And the wonderful thing about this rule is it's so hard to remember what's important throughout the day. As we go about our daily lives, you know, it's great to say that product. activity is all about intentionality and living a deliberate life. But then you open up your email and then your email kind of decides where you need to go on a given day. But rules like this, they kind of help tilt the scale a little bit. They help us put pressure on the other side of things to decide what we actually want to do, what we actually want to accomplish and use our time, our attention, our energy for so that we can work more deliberately and consider

our limits every day in terms of how much time and energy we even have. And I love simple rules like this that only take a minute. And it works because it fits with the way that we think. So we used to think that people could hold five, six, seven, eight pieces of information in our mind at once. But the latest research shows that it's around three things. And if you look to the world around us, you see that examples of this just to be. abound. We have sayings like, you know, good things come in threes and the

third time's the charm and blood, sweat, and tears and the good, the bad, the ugly. There's the rule of threes in writing. There's the three little bears, the three blind mice, the three little pigs, the three musketeers. The three wives, the list goes on and on and on.

But I think that's kind of an example of good productivity advice, because it fits with the way that we think, but yet it's this practical thing that we can do every day. I also love that if you extrapolate it out even further, you could be like, what are the three things that I want to accomplish in my life as like on my deathbed? And that can give you a nice sense of perspective overall, you know? Yeah. It helps minimize regret. But I am curious

for anybody listening and who they think, well, I have so many things I have to do every day. And so I have more than three things that I would not choose to do, but I literally have to do. keep my household running because my boss says that I have to to keep my kids alive, anything like that. So how do you balance the get-toes with the half-toes? I like that framing. Yeah, if you did three things all day, every day, you probably wouldn't have a job or a life after a period of time because there is the minutia to keep up with every day. But I think this speaks to the value of a morning intention-setting ritual. I like to sit down with a cup of green tea. And, and a notepad and just write these three things out.

And it really helps you decide what is most important on a given day. There's always the minutia. There's always the little things to keep up with. We have to play the role of the traffic cop, the air traffic controller, the firefighter. Use the analogy that you want. But what I personally do with that, and this is where productivity becomes more of an art than a science. It would be great if we all had total freedom and flexibility every day. with how we spend our time. But productivity, more often than not, is a process of understanding

our constraints. And so that's the wonderful part about this ritual is you can think at the start of the day, okay, how constraint is my time going to be today? How many Zoom meetings I'm going to have to hop on? How constrained is my attention today? You know, am I anxious today? Is that going to take away how much focus I have? How constrained is my energy today? Do I have less energy because I had a bunch of drinks last night, do I have more energy because I haven't had a cup of coffee in a while, but I had one this morning and I'm ready to go. We can kind of account for the constraints. And I think that speaks to another important rule of productivity, which not only is it about intention, but it's also about awareness. I don't know that it is possible to become

more productive without also becoming more aware of the circumstances of our day, the circumstances of our attention, of our life. And we can get there by looking at our constraints. So, you know, no perfect solution, I guess. There's always the minutia, but we can use the minutia to inform the intentions that we set. And by the way, the intentions that we set, if they really were the most important things at the beginning of our day. When those emergencies do arise, when we do open up our email box and find the five emergencies, the fires that we need to put out on a given morning, we can say, wait a second, why don't I just cross-compare those emergencies with the three intentions that I said at the beginning of the day? Maybe I need to swap out one of these

goals for the day with an emergency that arose. Or maybe that emergency that was deemed an emergency as a threat by your mind is less of an emergency and more of just something that that feels more important than it is. Does that make sense? It does make sense. So how to, can you talk me through what an actual like intention setting in the morning? Is that just doing the rule of three and kind of analyzing that or is there something beyond that? Yeah. Okay. You know, and this, yeah, and that's something I think is that's critical to remember about productivity is, you know, it's one thing to, you know, want to become more productive and invest in productivity advice. But for every minute we spend on productivity advice, we have to

make that time back and then some. Totally. And so the best rules, you know, they don't involve like organizing things for five or six hours every day and getting two hours of work done after the fact. They're lightweight. They're agile. So for me, it just looks like making a, I, I have this, I won't get into it, I promise. But I have this nice matcha tea ritual where I have a nice matcha tea that's sourced by a local tea simolee. It sounds fancier than it is. I sound like Frazier crane right now, I realize, but I like sift the macha, you know, I get the whisk out. Oh, it's lovely. And I think about the day that lies ahead. This is before I open up my inbox, because if I did that beforehand, I would have no patience or calm left to prioritize. And so I think we need to

start our days in a slow way. Then I mean our work days, kind of the container of time each day within where we work. But I make that cup of matcha. I think about the day a little bit. That takes a few minutes, but I just make sure I don't listen to a podcast or an audiobook at the same time. No offense, maybe somebody's even doing this right now, you know, preparing their coffee or macho with this podcast. So no offense, if that's your ritual. But I find that slow mornings lead to deliberate days. And so I like to start with that cup of macha. Then I sit down with a notepad and a sheet of paper because analog is nice.

Analog is calm. It's friendly. And it can sit on your desk all day as the windows of your computer move around if you happen to do digital work. And I write down my three intentions that day. And I also write below that all the minutia that I have to keep up with. The people I need to get in contact with, the things I need to write, the things I need to ship. The things that are less important, but still have got to get done. And how specific are your intentions? Could you give me an example of like your intentions for today? Yeah. Yeah. So number one is to edit two chapters of a book that I'm working on. Number two is to write. 500 words and number three is to have fun in a few interviews that I happen to be doing today. And so with those intentions is the attitude of the interviews, it's the output of the writing,

and it's the scale and scope of the editing. But by the way, when you start doing this ritual, you're not going to be good at it as I found firsthand. And so don't like, don't beat yourself up or anything like that. At the start, I would set an intention to say, like, write a thousand words, and I'd end up writing 500. And so the next head, I'd set an intention, because it didn't go well the previous day, to write 250 words, and I'd blow past it and write another 500. And it took me a while, because maybe I'm slower the most, I don't know, to realize that I have about 500, maybe a thousand words tops in me every day depending on how many other things I've going on. And so I think that awareness is something that it's not just something we flick on or off when it comes to our productivity.

It's something that we develop as a skill over time to understand our capacity. I love the permission giving to if you're trying anything new, be like, I'm not going to be great at this at first and that's okay. I'm not supposed to. I think a lot of people get really discouraged when they're trying new things when it just, it's not instantly working or instantly making them feel better. Yeah, we have this pattern in our mind where whenever we try something new, we try to talk ourselves out of it almost and pretend that we're not good enough, even though we don't know how good we should be a skill. And I find productivity is the same way. And on some level, and this is something that I found personally the tough way firsthand, is the very idea that you want to become more productive on some

level implies that you're not satisfied with where you're at already. Because if you were satisfied, why would you want to become more productive? And that kind of internal conflict that those ideas created really led to a lot of self-reflection for me of what place does productivity have in my life? What place should it have in my life? And it led to a lot of thinking around just the importance of self-kindness when it comes to productivity. We almost have to, you know, it's the two-scale problem. As we invest in our productivity, we become harder on ourselves. It brings these thought patterns out of our mind that, oh, I should be getting more done than that. Or Or why did I only get two of my three things done today?

Or why do I keep procrastinating on this stuff? And why do I have no energy? And why can't I wake up at 5.30? And why can't I do this or that or the other thing? And it's remarkable. Actually, just how much of our self-talk that goes on in our mind is negative. The best statistics that I've found for this, it's kind of hard to measure what goes on in somebody's head. You have to ask them and do some random sampling and a bunch of research

to jih Tzu to actually uncover this information in the first place. But the best research that I found on internal self-talk negativity shows that it's around 80% negative. That's like holy shit information. Sorry for the cursing. I don't know if you have cursing on their show. We're allowed, especially with information that is this holy shit worthy. Yeah, isn't it? Isn't it? Like 80% is it's like, I can't do this. I shouldn't do this. I won't be able to do this.

And I started getting this internal self-talk after I got my first book deal a long while back. Or at least this is when I became aware of it. I'm sure I was getting it well previous to this point too. But I remember the first thing that crossed my mind. It was after I had embarked on a year-long productivity experimented. get to the bottom of productivity device, try to filter out the stuff that works from the stuff that does not. That's what I do. That's the approach that I take. And I remember collecting all this advice that worked and putting it together into something that vaguely resembled a book. And I got a book deal with the publisher that was on my dream list. It was with Penguin Random House. And I remember the first thing that passed through my mind at the time was, you know, you're a fraud. You have no reason to write this book. Why should people listen to you? Even though I'd kind of done the work up to that

point to collect that advice. And that got me curious, you know, what other pieces of self-talk that's so negative have passed through my mind? And there's constant, constant negative, a chatter that passes through a mind. Things like, why does it take me forever to get stuff like this? Why am I so hard on myself. Just these patterns of negativity in her mind. And the research shows 80% negative. And the place it comes from, I did not expect, but it makes a lot of sense, is our upbringing. So when a parent talks to their kid, it turns out that it's constructive negativity, you know, put that down or stop eating that, Chris, things like that. 80s. 35% of parental self-talk has that negative bent to it, even though it's this constructive

negativity. And so we begin to talk to ourselves that way as well. And I think this is something so critical to keep in mind, especially these days, we tell ourselves stories like, oh, everybody's getting so fit in COVID. Like, have you seen Jack or whatever? Like, oh, they're just like a wall of bustle now. Like, why am I gaining 20 pounds? But, you know, we have this, this internal self-talk that goes on, especially as we compare ourselves to others that I think, again, it goes back to that awareness idea. We just need to bring some attention to it. Yeah, I was going to ask because you are somebody who tests and tries all these different hacks for dealing with stuff if you have something concrete that you found is really useful for dealing with negative self-talk.

Meditation, I find is, I would say, almost essential to practice during more anxious times. Because the truth is, you know, when anxiety is kind of in the room, you know, anxiety is definitely permeating its way around the world, especially around news checks and anxiety is socially contagious as well. So if we hang around other people who happen to feel anxious, our odds of becoming more anxious and adopting anxious thought patterns as well goes through the roof. And we can't really change how we think without becoming more aware of the thought patterns taking place in our mind to begin with.

And meditation is a whole process of stepping back from the thought patterns in our mind. You know, you just basically sit somewhere and you focus on your breath. And when your mind wanders to focus on something else, you bring it back to your breath while noticing that it wandered. And that very act of noticing that your mind has wandered makes you aware that your mind has wandered. And in the process, it makes you aware of where your mind has wandered too. And it's this process of bringing intention into the moment. we think we have a lot of control over our mind, right? But like we think we can get it to do stuff, but yet we procrastinate a lot.

And yet when we try to focus on our breath during a meditation session, we become so hard on ourselves when our mind is wandering. We become like so, so negative, like, oh, I can't I even focus on my breath for 30 seconds here. But that process of stepping back from the thoughts in your head and training your mind to notice the patterns of thoughts that just happened automatically in your mind in response to what happens around you, most of which are conditioned from the lives that we've lived and the patterns and routines and habits that we've adopted. Meditation helps us step back from all of those and become aware of them and learn to be able to challenge them on some level and think,

wait, that thought just kind of like came up in my mind. Where did that come from? And it probably came from some external cue. It probably came from some conditioned element of our past that we no longer want to be present in our mind. And so, you know, not to get all hippie-dippy on the podcast here, but I personally love meditation. I've had a 30-minute meditation ritual for a long, for many years now, just because of how much more present and engaged. I think actually also for the topic of the episode, productive it makes me because it leads our mind to wander less. We bring more attention to what's in front of us.

And productivity in the moment is about presence. And nothing makes us more present than meditation. I think a lot of people would love to have a meditation practice. And myself included, I have one. I go in and out of it. And I think that it comes down to some of that stuff we were talking about of the time to do the things that make you more productive. And you're talking about your morning routine. And I'd love to dive into that a little bit more specifically because I think that's where I run into the biggest issues with time. So like I want to put all of these things in my morning routine that I know make me feel really good.

I want to work out. I want to meditate. I want to make myself a really healthy breakfast that will start my day off great. but then by the time I'm done with all my morning routine stuff, it's like, you know, noon. And then I end up working until 9 p.m. because I haven't left myself enough time to do the work I need for the day. But then when I try to flip it and I'm like, oh, I'll work out after work. I'll do these things that make me feel good after work. I'm exhausted and I just never do it. So I'm curious how you balance the fact that all of this stuff to do that makes you feel good, that makes you perhaps more productive, does legitimate. take time and fitting that into your day. Yeah, that's a really good question. I remember one of the experiments I've done. I like doing these productivity experiments to actually try this advice on for size. And one experiment that I conducted a while back was waking up at 5.30 every morning.

And in this experiment, to set the stage, like, I don't wake up at 5.30. I wake up at like 8, maybe sometimes nine, like following kind of your schedule noon to nine working hours. That's my preferred. But I tried to wedge one of these routines into my life. So I woke up at 530. I made and drank a coffee. I went to the gym because this was when they were open. I planned my entire day when I worked out. I made a big healthy breakfast. I meditated. I connected to the internet after all of this at 8.15, I read from 815 to 9, and at 9 I began working. And I realized somewhere along the way in this experiment that I absolutely hated this experiment. Like, I could not stand waking up at 5.30 every morning because I had this like sepia-toned fantasy

of what waking up at 5.30 would be like. But I think I was in a similar situation to the one you were in where, you know, I'd be too tired to socialize because I'd have to go to bed at like 930 when the hockey games were on as I live in Canada and wouldn't have time to hang out with anybody. I'd have to go to bed at like a weird early time and didn't really enjoy it whatsoever. And if anybody out there, anybody is feeling guilt about their wake-up time, you can rest easy. There's been some research, I think it was from Till Ronenberg, who is a chronobiologist, where he found that there's no difference in our socioeconomic standing based on what time we wake up at. It's what we do with the hours of our day after we wake up that make the difference in how much money we make, how successful we are, all that stuff. But my daily routine these days is it's that routine, but like shifted a bit, just a few hours. You know, from, Eight to, I'll just, you know, take yesterday for an example, eight to ten. I think I woke up at eight, had a nice breakfast. I worked out because we got this spin bike during COVID, played the piano, took a shower, did some creative work in the morning before I had any tea because the morning, especially if you're a night owl, or if you're anybody, before you have your morning tea or coffee, that's the best time to do creative work because, uh, caffeine kind of narrows your attention in on specific things, whereas when your mind is a bit

tired and a bit, a bit looser. Like less inhibited almost. Yeah. Yeah, it has a similar effect as, you know, having a drink or something. But actually, having a drink is a bit different because while your mind wanders more when you drink, you become less aware of where it wanders to. So we come up with these ideas. We come up with these plans. But our mind is like running off in a field somewhere and we don't really know where it's going. So yeah, but from 10 to noon yesterday, I worked on my three tasks. I caught up with email, dealt with a few emergencies. I think I had an emergency meeting. And just kind of I tried to do focused work all day long while fielding the calls that came in. Every day, I should say, I do have a disconnection ritual from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.

It doesn't really matter in the morning because I wake up. I wake up when I'm allowed to connect. But in the evening, it's a lovely way of easing out of one day and into the next one. And in the morning routine that I have, you know, it's very much energy rituals. Because I live in Canada, as I think I've mentioned a few times already. and my mood always dips in the winter, so I need to adjust by working out a bit, sitting in front of my happy light,

which is always a good time, and doing a bit more meditation. And I think that golden rule of productivity advice, where we got to make the time that we spend on it back and then some, I think that really does apply to meditation. It might not apply to working out, even though exercise does provide us with energy, clean burning foods,

You know, healthy food, as you know, is a wonderful way to more energy. But meditation, I think, is one of these rituals where we really do earn back the time that we spend on it. Up to a point, obviously, you know, if you're on a meditation retreat or something and you do a half an hour of work every day after meditating for seven and a half hours. Oh, it's going to be glorious work. It'll probably be the best work you've ever done in your life. Yeah, because you will have reached enlightenment in your work life. So you'll have nothing to worry about. You'll be super per-d- but like obviously that ratio won't work but in terms of meditation i think we tend to discount the role that attention has over our productivity if you're on a deadline and you have somebody

breathing down your metaphorical neck you're going to get so much more done in that context versus some other contexts where you just kind of like you don't really have a lot of zoom meetings one day and you have a few loose things that are due next to No, no. If you have a deadline, nothing will make you more motivated or productive than a deadline. But I think meditation actually comes close because it leads to the set of conditions that are similar to a deadline. You know, we are able to eschew distractions because we are aware of what's important every moment. We have more focus to bring to what's in front of us because we don't have any patience of mind for these distractions. Our mind wanders a bit less as well. During the day, our mind wanders about 47% of the time. That includes when we're trying to work. That includes when we're having conversations. That includes when we're listening to podcasts. And so by lowering that percentage, we become more present. We become more engaged. And of course, presence and engagement create productivity. We become more aware that our mind is going to wander. We become more aware that we're craving a distract.

as well. So I think meditate, you know, I wrote something called an Audible original a little while back called How to Train Your Mind. It's free if you're on Audible. I promise not to plug my stuff too much. But it's all about the productivity benefits of meditation. And in that, I make this pretty casual calculation, casual and conservative calculation, that for every minute we spend meditating, we make back nine minutes in how much more productive we can become. for these benefits and so much more as well. So it is one of those, sorry, long, winding answer. Maybe I need to meditate a bit more to give more succinct ones.

But that's my morning ritual. Do you meditate in the morning always? Yeah. That's the time of day that you do it and you find it's the best to do in the morning? For me. Yeah. And, you know, I would encourage people to kind of take the advice that works for them and leave the rest.

But I like doing it in the morning. Yeah. It reminds me what you said reminds me of that one experiment you did where you put like artificial time constraints on yourself and then you got way more done because you were artificially like condensing your time. Yeah. The 90 hour a week one. Yeah. I think can you speak to that a little bit because I do find that that's interesting. It's almost like when parents say to people are like, oh, how do you fit it all in? And they're like, I don't know. I just like use you fit your stuff in the time that you have. And if you. have forever time, something takes forever. But if you have a very small amount of time, somehow you still manage to fit it in. And I think that's a fascinating concept. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. So that experiment was, so for one month, I kind of alternated between working 90 hours one week and then 20 hours the next, then 90, then 20 to see the effect that work in

these just nasty hours, these 90 hour weeks out of my productivity, punctuated by these luxurious 20-hour weeks. And I found, you know, productivity, we should say, is not about how much we produce. It's not about how busy we are, but it's about how much we are able to accomplish at the end of the day. And more than that, it's about whether or not we're able to accomplish our intentions. And so I found, looking through the logs of this experiment, First of all, I felt so much more productive during the 90-hour weeks, as you would expect, because I worked more. And I felt less guilty because I wasn't slacking off, like, during these 20-hour weeks. But when I was looking through the logs, I realized that I accomplished only a little bit more during the 90-hour weeks than I did during the 20-hour weeks.

And I thought, like, wait, really? And I kind of went back through the month in my mind. I realized that, yeah, it really is true. Time is less important than we think it is when it comes to our productivity. Like just the example you were giving with the busy parent. And if you're a busy parent and the water heater breaks in your house, you're going to find a way to fit that in. It just needs to get done in addition to the other things that you have going on.

And there's this phenomenon called Parkinson's Law that's often talked about in productivity circles where it states that our work tends to expand to fit how much time we have available for its completion. And I think this rule perfectly sums up this particular experiment where I didn't have 90 hours of work to do. And very few of us do. And we tend to overestimate just how much we have on our plate. If somebody says they work 75 hours, usually they actually work about 55 hours. And if somebody says they work 85 hours, usually I think that translates to less than 55 hours. So we tend to overestimate how long we work. But not only that, but our work tends to expand to fit how much time we have for it.

And this is one of the first experiments that illustrated the importance of not just time with productivity. Like, we've always had to manage our time around the schedules of other people, but the importance of energy and productivity, right? Because if you give yourself a deadline for something, like, let's say I came up to you and it's a Monday and I said, Liz, you won this all expenses paid spa vacation, but it leaves on Wednesday. So you have to get all of this week's work done in Monday and Tuesday. You would probably feel, stressed for those two days, but you'd probably also find a way to get most of the week's worth of work done in those first two days of the week so you can relax for the rest of the week. And that 20-hour week kind of had that artificial deadline effect in a certain way, where the work could no longer expand to fit how much time I had for it. And I think this speaks again to having awareness when it comes to our work, awareness for how much time, attention, and energy we have, but also for how much we're able to accomplish so we can adjust the tactics that we use on the fly.

Just to put a pin in the morning routine conversation, would you say then that it's worth including things in your morning routine that either give you back that greater amount of time, like you said, when we're trying to do something productive before taking time away, we need to get more time back. So something like meditation or things that contribute to your energy because that's another big thing for productivity or things that line up with those values and intentions. And if it doesn't fit with one of those categories, then that's probably a good sign. It doesn't belong in your morning routine. I think that's a good way of framing it. Yeah. And as it relates to our productivity, I kind of zoom out to the productivity landscape.

And when you look at the helpful strategies out there, the ones that actually allow us to earn back our time, they usually fall into three categories. Out of all the different stuff we can do, these are the most helpful three. They either fall into how well we can manage our time, how well we can manage our attention, or how well we can manage our energy. And so for energy, you know, working out, making a healthy breakfast, getting a proper amount of sleep, having good wind down and start up rituals each day, starting our days slow so we can think more deliberately on a given day. Those are wonderful rituals that help our energy. For focus, rituals like meditation or going on a morning walk or just doing something to let our mind wander so we can unearth some of the ideas that are floating around. inside of our mind or work wonders for managing our time, blocking off certain parts of our day or prioritizing things with the rule of three. Many days, I choose to set three personal intentions

on top of the three work intentions because then that way we can decide just how balanced we want to be. And on top of that, this is obviously all in a work context, but I totally agree with the word that you used, values. What is productivity advice, but guidance, to how we can live a life true to who we are and what we value over time. And so reflecting on how what we do in the morning contributes to what we deeply value, I think is a critical component, too. Okay. Let's talk about procrastination because I would be remiss if we did not. For me, personally, I think that my biggest reason for procrastination is my perfectionism. Like, I think it's a hundred percent related to the fact that when I am thinking about starting,

a task, I don't know if I can live up to my own standards with what I complete it as. And so then I just get so in my head about starting it at all. Do you think that's common? And is there an easy solution for that? You would be surprised. The research that I've shown or that I've seen on procrastination and perfectionism has actually shown little relationship between the two ideas. Whenever I encounter studies like that. I make sure to dig into them a little bit and say, okay, is this really as it sounds? And multiple studies have shown that there's not much of a correlation between perfectionism and procrastination, but there are, I think, seven attributes that a task can have that make us more likely to put it off. And usually those task attributes relate to things that we want to do well

and that are challenging. So I'll try to remember them now live on the podcast. But those are whether a task is boring. So if a task is boring, you're more likely to put it off. If a task is frustrating, you're more likely to put it off. If a task is difficult, you're more likely to put it off. If it lacks personal meaning, and so there's no deep connection that you have with it, you're more likely to put it off. That goes back to the values, in the morning. If it lacks intrinsic rewards, so the process of doing something is not rewarding or gratifying in and of itself, if it's ambiguous, so it's not really clear how you can do something, or if it's unstructured. So there's no clear path to doing a thing, you're more

likely to put it off. And so you can look at a task, like, what's something you've put off recently? So like a regular thing that I put off. I mean, I mean, honestly, I think all of those apply to a lot of the things I put off because my day doesn't have a lot of structure because I work for myself. So I have to wake up every day and define what my tasks are for the day. I don't know if I make a video for Instagram. If it's going to perform, I don't have really guidelines on what makes people love it versus not love it. So like all of those things sort of universally apply. Yeah.

Oh, that's funny. Yeah. The example that's coming up in my own life right now is bookkeeping. So I have all these receipts from the last year and my accountant keeps bugging me to get on labeling them and stuff. But like a task like that, like if you're self-employed, the work by its very nature is more lacking in structure and is definitely more ambiguous. But something like gathering receipts, man, that's boring, frustrating. It's so boring. It's the worst.

So the more of these things that a task has, the more likely we are. to put something off. But there is a bit of science behind how we can flip these things. One way is to just think, okay, how can I make this enjoyable for myself? So if structuring your day is not an enjoyable thing, can you do it in an analog way with a sheet of paper and a pen and maybe writing the times of the day down on the left-hand column and drawing a big grid or something, would that make it more enjoyable? If you're struggling doing bookkeeping, what if you poured yourself a lovely glass of wine in the evening and

that could kind of smooth the edges of the task and maybe just check your work the next morning? What can you do to make something more fun and the process more engaging and rewarding? Because that, you know, something that we're putting off, that's usually a sign that something isn't rewarding or fun. And so if you can find a way to make it rewarding or fun, something I like to do with my taxes every year, because I hate financial things in case you can't tell. What I do is for every minute I spend on my taxes,

I put $1 in a frivolous spending account where, and I usually just blow it on takeout, because that's my biggest weakness in the world, especially over the last two years or so. And that by itself, as long as I'm focused, I get that dollar and it's not a ton of money. And it's probably, let's be honest, take out I would have bought anyway. But it's a nice motivator to have that structure around the activity. You know, it doesn't matter if an activity is unstructured in and of itself.

If you can superimpose a different structure such as that onto it, it serves as another motivator. Another one is to shrink resistance, which eliminates a lot of these triggers at once. And so meditation, I feel I've talked about meditation like half this episode. So please excuse another example that involves meditation. But let's say you want to get into meditation and you set some goal of meditating half an hour every day. There will come a time where you do not want to meditate for half an hour on a given day. anything else, screw it, like, I'll do it tomorrow. Well, an alternative to that is shrinking your resistance or uncovering, discovering, finding your resistance to a task. And so you might think,

okay, do I feel like meditating for half an hour today? No way in hell. Okay, what about 20 minutes? No, no. What about 15? No, the thought of it puts me out. Okay, what about 10? No. Five? I could do five. And so that's kind of your resistance level to a different, to a certain task. And so you meditate for five minutes and you can keep going past that point if you want, but you don't have to. And this works across anything that you might be procrastinating on or simply defining the very next thing for doing that after you find your resistance level. Like can I just clean my house for five minutes? Can I just work out for five minutes? making it really simple and tangible and then, you know, we'll likely continue going. But if we don't, that's fine too. Yeah. Yeah. You can do anything for five minutes. You could probably do a plank for, well, maybe not. No, I don't think I could. So that was a few of the things. What about things like the ambiguity? Is that just a matter of defining the thing that you're supposed to be doing so that you know very clearly what that is? Yeah. It's often more a process of

looking at the process instead of the execution of doing something. And so often we need to find the approach to a project before we execute on a project. And so we sit down in front of our email, typing up some draft to somebody without really having a broader framework for a project that that email can fit inside of. And if you find that you're just executing all day long and feeling like you're not making progress, you might have to zoom out a little bit and look at the context that those tasks fit inside of. And so something that's ambiguous just probably hasn't been defined yet. Or maybe you haven't done enough research. Maybe you haven't talked to enough people. Maybe you haven't brainstormed

enough on a project because you don't yet have clarity. And so however you can get clarity into the broader scope and scale of a project, that's a great way around ambiguity. Well, and that might be a good moment, I'd think, for a broader rule of three, like not a daily one, but maybe a weekly or monthly or annual one. Yeah, yeah. And also a list of projects. So not to give people too many tactics and homework and all that stuff. But one of my favorite things is the weekly review where I have two, I'll open them now, I have two lists kind of all the projects that are going on in my personal life and in my work life. And so for personal ones, they include, you know, ongoing things like building a body that I'm proud of, getting to a plant-based diet, saving up for a rental property, getting my V-O-2 max up to a certain level. These are projects that have kind of in the middle of right now in that context of my life. And there's a bunch of them, but having a weekly review to remind yourself of the projects that you're in the middle of is immensely, immensely helpful. And of course, there's a bunch of them. There's the work ones like, you know, write the book, do different speaking engagements, record podcasts, all that different stuff. And so having that 10,000 foot view of everything that's going on in your life, it might

sound daunting. And maybe at the beginning when you capture all the different projects that you have going on, a project being anything that has an end deliverable, where it becomes obvious that the project is completed, that might sound daunting to review, but it's actually quite refreshing because you review it every week. And if you don't have time for something on a given week, you'll review it at the end of the week. So you can define what you work on the next week while looking at your three yearly goals as well. Well, and it's daunting, but it's even more, I think, daunting or scary to picture, you know, I've had those years of my life go by where I'm just like, what did I do this

year? Like, how did this contribute to my overall larger vision of my own life, whether it was in my relationships or my personal goals or my career or any of that. And I think that's an even scarier prospect than kind of checking in with yourself on a regular basis. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And one tactic for that that I personally love to do is keep an accomplishments list. So throughout the, there's kind of two levels that I found that an accomplishments list works on. There's the weekly level where if you feel like you're treading water and you're not making any progress all. Just write down everything you accomplish. If you want, you can break it down by context of your life, work, home, family. You can break it down by the different roles you have, employee,

mother, father, daughter, you know, however you want to think about this. And just write down everything you accomplish. All the milestones you hit, all the things you ship, all the people you help, you will be surprised. You know, there's this part of this, our, our mind that leads us to forget about all the things that we've accomplished. And it's because we focus on the unresolved things. We have this threat mentality where we look around for threats in our environment. And when we find them, we, you know, we try to deal with them and we kind of on some level worry them out of existence entirely. But that's not really healthy, you know, when we live such big, busy lives. The first level of the accomplishments list is the weekly one. The second one is the

general one where you capture 10, 15, 20 things throughout the year that you're able to accomplish. And it's such a wonderful, wonderful reminder that we're usually more productive than we think we are. There's this, I heard it called productivity dysmorphia, where some people have, some of us have body dysmorphia where we have this mental image of ourselves that isn't true to who we are physically. There's, I've heard it called this body or productivity dysmorphia where we think we accomplish less than we do. I don't know if the two ideas can even be compared, but it's worth reflecting on the fact that you might be more productive than you think you are. I love, I love that. I'm going to start doing that for sure. I also think there's, we have such

negativity bias in so many ways in our lives. We, like you said, from childhood, we're almost trained to accept the more negative comments, both intrinsically and extrinsically. And I think that's a really beautiful way to just fight that, to build a ritual, to fight that. Yeah. You're doing okay. You need to remind yourself. Unfortunately, I know, I know. It's not, I mean, I think there can be something really beautiful about being your own biggest cheerleader. Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. I'd love to speed round a little bit. you've tried so many productivity hacks. I would love to hear like maybe two or three that have stuck and that you actually do in your daily life that we haven't talked about yet.

That's a good one. I would say resetting my caffeine tolerance on a regular basis. We kind of get used to how much caffeine we consume and sometimes that makes us more anxious than we give it credit for. And so resetting my caffeine tolerance on a regular basis, whether it's alternating days without it, is really helpful. And mind wandering, you know, our best ideas come to us when our mind is wandering, whether we're in the shower, taking a bath, walking through nature, going for a run, working out, meditating when our mind is thinking, when we want to be focusing on our breath. They rarely come when we're focused. And so mind wandering would be another thing that's worked well. Oh, it hasn't stuck, right? Was that the other part? No, that has. I'd actually be curious

which ones haven't stuck, like which ones you tried. And you even thought at the time, like, this is a good idea, but then over time, you're just like, I'm not going to really do this. Yeah. Well, one of them was waking up early. I think I already talked about that. So I don't know if it counts. But I am not a morning person. I will wake up at like eight, nine. If I can, That's the perks of being self-employable. I'm basically unemployable because I wake up so late. But I get my best work done at night. Don't let anybody tell you when or how to work if it works well for you.

Take the advice that works for you and leave the rest. One thing that I will also mention a constant struggle for me with productivity is food. Food gives us energy, gives us life. It really makes a big difference in how calm we feel as well. when we eat a whole food, diet, eat real, you know, food that we cook and not just order from Uber eats, that's advice that I need to take more often that I sometimes give to eat better in a way that's conducive to strong thinking. Well, and to apply your own hacks to that, you could, you know, make it fun. You could put on a podcast you love, have a glass of wine on a Sunday

and make yourself a big batch of healthy, delicious food that you can have ready to go all week long. I will commit to doing that right here, right now. Amazing. What about time blocking? Do you believe in time blocking? Do you think that's effective? And do you think there's a way that we should be doing it that maybe we're not? I think it depends how creative your work is. So my work is quite creative. and so I don't time block because I find that creativity happens in the moments between focus. And scheduling time and trying to focus all day long is a recipe to create work that isn't creative. I do think that there is some modicum of a healthy balance that can be attained through time blocking,

where you time block in the morning or the afternoon or for a few days throughout the week. But I personally don't do it. I like to keep my schedule as loose as humanly possible. That's not always possible in the era of Zoom calls and virtual things all day long. But I find that white space is quite beautiful when it comes to doing work that is creative. But I do recommend it if you have a lot of focus work to do. Do you, does that include things like Pomodoro? Like I know a lot of people when they're writing,

or doing creative work, they like to do the 20 minutes on, I think, in 10 minutes off. Do you not do that as well? I usually don't. No. My piece of advice, if you want to write something, is to get a deadline, however you possibly can. Because there's all these hacks out there. There's all this advice. There's all these. But the best thing that is possible if you want to write something or if you want to ship something is to get a deadline.

and get that deadline from somebody that you do not want to let down. For me, it's my book editor. I work with him to just define deadlines for every single chapter. How many words I'm writing, I submit progress reports to him and an accountability group that I'm a part of that I don't want to let down. Find a deadline. Go deadline hunting however you possibly can. You don't need hacks often.

You just need a deadline. Do you have any favorite apps for helping with productivity? Yeah. Yeah, I love the app things for managing tasks. I love fantastical for managing all my calendar events. I love the, I'm just poking around my phone right now. I love the app drafts for capturing ideas throughout the day. I love the app streaks, which is if you want to find people in your area to go streaking.

No, it's for tracking, it's a habit tracker so you can like keep a tally on all your habits. Mine right now are take the probiotics every day, vitamin B, D, sit in front of my happy lamp, eat some barberries, one of the most underrated berries in my opinion, and get exercise. I love the idea, too, with habits, and I think you exemplified that really nicely with yours. Sometimes people only do these big, hard-to-accomplish habits, and I think it's equally important to have those very low-hanging fruit habits on there so that you can have that feeling of accomplishing stuff. Because like you said, we are accomplishing stuff all day long, but it's about flipping how we're defining accomplishment.

Yeah. Oh, totally, totally. And then I would love to end on how do you stop being productive? I think that you've devoted, you know, so much of your life to focusing and productivity and all of that. And you still seem to be amazing at like turning off and letting yourself actually relax and not feeling guilty about it. And I think that's a huge thing that I know I personally struggle with and a lot of my listeners do too. So I would love your thoughts on letting go of productivity, particularly in a work sense. Yeah. I think you need things that you're really into. If you don't have hobbies, what are you going to do outside of work? Are you just going to watch TV or like poker? Like I'm really into Animal Crossing. Are you into Animal Crossing?

I am not. It's a great video. It's like the most calming video game. in the world. I love playing the piano. You know, knitting is a good time. I'm always down to knit. So, like, having things to turn to that aren't just about output or some end result. You know, we're always trying to think about the opportunity cost of our time and everything that we could be doing instead of what we're currently doing. But I think having things outside of work that aren't just about accomplishment is really critical. One way that I like to do this is at the beginning of the day, I define what I call my productivity hours. And so today, I don't have the

app in front of me, but today they're my normal working hours and one or two hours this evening to do a few things around the house. And outside of that, I don't have to worry about productivity. I don't have to worry about what I have to get done. I don't have to worry about email. I don't have some end goal insight. I just can savor and enjoy things as they unfold. It's a good time. Yeah. It's just interesting. When you say opportunity cost that's so resonant with me though, because it just feels like I want to do that so badly. But I feel the strong sense of like, well, somebody else out there is doing something that gets them ahead more. You could be using this time more efficiently and future you will appreciate now, Ewan, I don't know,

the missed opportunity cost is hard for me to psychologically come to terms with. Yeah, and that's where the guilt comes from. We don't feel guilty when we're present. Because the guilt that arises with how we spend our time is kind of this uncertainty, almost, of how we've spent our time in the past. And it's very, related to, I think, doubt and worry, where when we feel doubt, we're kind of questioning how we're spending our time in the present. And worry, of course, is this feeling of discomfort that comes from the future. And I think all of these feelings fill the vacuum that a lack of intentionality leaves when there is an intention behind what we do. And this is something that I've

found firsthand, when we decide ahead of time, A, what we're going to work on, B, when we're going to work on it, like by defining those productivity hours, we know that productivity hours will come again the next day. There will be time to work. There will be time to get things done in our personal lives, too. And we can capture that for later on, but we can rest today. So yeah, guilt, doubt, and worry are really informative emotions and they usually connect with that opportunity cost of our time. That's, yeah, that resonates with me a lot. Thank you so much.

This conversation, honestly, like, I was expecting some good productivity hacks and I definitely got those, but it was a lot more philosophical and about, like, I don't know, like what we're on this planet to do than I even expected. And it was really beautiful. Oh, I'm happy. Thank you so much for having me on. Where could people find you if they want to, you know, find your books, find your journey? Yeah. So my books, the first one is called The Productivity Project. My second one is called Hyperfocus. My third one is the Audible original that I already plugged and at the risk of being overly self-promotional.

I'll say the name is How to Train Your Mind. Again, my podcast is called, time and attention. All those are available wherever books and podcasts can be downloaded and my website is a life of productivity.com. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. You're listening to the Healthier Together podcast. I hope you love this episode with Chris. I hope there were lots of little takeaways and tips and tricks that you want to try out in your own life. Please tell me what you're doing. I would love to hear from you and cheer you on so you can tag me on Instagram. I'm at Liz Moody. Chris is at Chris Bailey, off, like author. Also, if you did love this podcast, I would so appreciate a quick rating or review on whatever podcast platform

that you listen on. Spotify actually just added ratings and reviews. So you can do little stars on there. So if you listen on Spotify, I would love a quick rating or review on Spotify. And if you listen on Apple Podcasts, I would love a quick rating or review over there. It is one of the best ways to help other people find the podcast. And I so appreciate your support. Of course, if there's anybody in your real life, I feel like we're always focused on like the online and the rating and the review and sharing on Instagram. But if there's anybody in your real life that you think would benefit from the information that we talked about in this podcast today, please share it with them.

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