The One You Feed - John Zeratsky on How to Make Time for What Matters

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

John Zeratsky was a designer in the tech industry and became obsessed with the idea of re-designing time. He’s also the author of multiple books and his work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many others. In this episode, Eric and John discuss his book, Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day If you'd like to make 2022 a better year for you, bring clarity to what matters most, and discover the tools to help you become the person you really want to be, Eric can help you! To book a FREE, no-pressure 30-minute Discovery call to see if working with Eric is right for you, click here.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!John Zeratsky and I Discuss How to Make Time for What Matters and…His book, Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every DayUnderstanding the limits of will-powerSetting up our environment so it’s easier to make the right decisionsThe two powerful forces that compete every day for our time“The Busy Bandwagon” and the feeling you’re not in control of our time“The Infinity Pools” of neverending options of distractions Questioning the “defaults” in our lives and finding ways to change our behaviorCreating a highlight for everydayStructuring your day around your “highlight” Finding more meaningful momentsTaking back control of your time and energyCreating barriers to distractionThe fundamentals of managing your energyThe importance of focusing on the process, not the outcomeBecoming aware of how our interaction with technology makes us feelJohn Zeratsky Links:John’s WebsiteTwitterIf you enjoyed this conversation with John Zeratsky, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Time Management for Mortals with Oliver BurkemanBeing a Procrastinator with Tim PychylSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As the new year approaches, many people start reflecting on the year that has passed and start thinking about how they want the next year to be. Imagine if in 2022 you were able to have clarity on what matters to you and then have the tools to live that out. Imagine if you were able to be the person you really want to be. That's where I come in. I've helped hundreds of people from around the world become who they deeply want to be. If you're feeling frustrated or disappointed in your ability to make changes in your life, then having someone in your corner to support and advise you is critical. Look, there's a lot of general advice out there, but figuring out which of it applies to you is difficult.

You are different than other people, and your life looks different than other people, so you need solutions that make sense for you. Knowing how to apply certain tactics and tools to your specific life is my specialty. If you'd like to make 2022 a better year for you, then book a 30-minute discovery call with me. It's a no-pressure, no-sales call where we determine if working together might make sense. And if it doesn't, I'll give you some ideas to take with you. So you win either way, go to one, you feed.net slash coaching to book your free discovery session. That's one, you feed.net slash coaching to book a free discovery session. And I look forward to meeting

you. Happy holidays, everybody. In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize that we have many years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick some of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, they are definitely worth another listen. So we're re-releasing a few of these during the holiday. In this episode is with John Zeratsky. The expectation that when we receive an email, we're going to see it right away,

we're going to respond to it right away, we're going to stay on top of things. That level of responsiveness doesn't really fit with the way that humans evolved. in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, just about thinking our actions matter it takes conscious consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living this podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction how they feed their good wolf

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love.

Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is John Zeratsky. He was a designer

in the tech industry who became obsessed with the idea of redesigning time. He's also the author of multiple books. John's writing has been published by the Wall Street Journal, Time, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many others. His new book is Make Time, How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. Hi, John. Welcome to the show. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called Make Time, How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. And I think there's so much to learn in this book about creating a life worth living. So I'm excited to get into it. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are

two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. When I think about that parable, I immediately think about how I'm going to choose to feed the good wolf, right? So the choice is clear, but the question then is, how do you do it? And I think that the initial temptation is to focus on willpower and self-control and discipline and have this attitude that with constant vigilance,

you can make sure that you're feeding the good wolf and you're doing the things that you want to do. You're becoming the person that you want to become. But one of the things that really has been an important lesson for me is understanding the limits of willpower and understanding that if we want to make decisions that we feel good about, if we want to feed that good wolf, we need to change our environment. We need to adopt habits. We need to kind of set up our world around us so that it's easier to make the right decisions. That's a great point. And a lot of what you cover in the book is how to do that. So let's just jump in. Let's first talk about, the title is called Make Time, how to focus on what matters every day. And you say that it was you and a co author, Jake is his name, right? Yeah, that's right.

I'll reference you for the rest of it. But listeners will know it's the two of you. You say make time is not about productivity. It's not about getting more done, finishing your to do's faster or outsourcing your life. Instead, it's a framework designed to help you actually create more time in your day for the things you care about. And I think that's such an important distinction. So you then go on to say that in the 21st century, we all have two very powerful forces that compete for every minute of our time. Can you tell us what those are? And maybe we can talk a little bit more about them. Sure. The first one of those forces is what we call the busy bandwagon. And that is our culture of constant busyness, the expectation that when

we receive an email or a message, we're going to see it right away, we're going to respond to it right away, we're going to stay on top of things. And that level of busyness, of connectedness, of responsiveness is quite exhausting. It's quite draining. It doesn't really fit with the way that humans evolved. We evolved in a world where most of the time nothing happened. And if something distracted us or grabbed our attention, it was usually for a good reason. So we're kind of being wound up by the busy bandwagon. And so when we have a break, when we're looking to unwind, we turn to all the amazing sources of entertainment that exist in our world, things like Instagram and YouTube and Netflix and video games.

And we call those the infinity pools. There's always more water in the pool. You can always dive in for a nice, refreshing swim. But they never stop. You could spend every minute of every day pulling to refresh, streaming, diving back in. And they're sort of positioned as being a source of entertainment. They're positioned as a break oftentimes. But the mechanisms behind them, the ways that they work

are really the same as the tools that cause us so much stress and anxiety in our work lives, those busy bandwagon tools. And so as humans, we kind of feel ourselves just torn between these two forces with this feeling that we of, I guess, a little bit of pride and a little bit of like weariness, busy, busy. And it was really helpful for me to realize, like, I was choosing that. I was choosing to be busy. to be busy. But that leads me to the next point that you talk about, which is so important, is because even though everything we do is a choice, you say that the busy bandwagon infinity pools are so powerful because they've become the default for us. So a default is kind of what's already set. When you open up your phone, it has certain defaults on it, right? When you plug in your TV, it has certain defaults. And so instead of these being things that we consciously choose to opt into, they're pretty much the default for everybody in today's world. And we have to actually make very conscious choice to opt out of the busy bandwagon and

the infinity pools. That's right. You touched on some of the technological defaults. For example, when you get a brand new smartphone, the first time you take it out of the box, it's going to ask you to sign in to an account, a Google account, an Apple account, something like that. By default, it has an email app installed. And by default, that email app is going to check for new messages all the time. By default, the phone is going to let you know when there's a new message. It's going to make a noise or it's going to buzz and it's going to show one of those little red badges on the corner

so that you know you have a new message. It's all the stuff that you mentioned, the technology products that we use have defaults that if we don't consider them, they tend to suck away our time. They tend to eat up a lot of our time. But it's not just technology defaults that we're dealing with here. There's also sort of cultural defaults. For example, in the office, every meeting is either 60 minutes or 30 minutes long, even if really you only need a quick chat. By default, these meetings are just sort of scattered about

our calendar. They're not clumped together at times of day that might be best for us or best for our team and our ability to do work that matters. And the expectations that you're going to be constantly online and responsive, Those things are defaults too. And these weren't put into place by some genius who made a master plan for exactly what's the best way for us to spend our time and energy. They just kind of collected over the years. And so a lot of what make time is about is questioning those defaults and finding concrete ways that we can change our behavior or our technology so that we're putting ourselves first. Exactly. And I want to get into the specifics of make time,

but I first wanted to have you tell a story about, you know, you start off by saying it was early 2008, the beginning of one of the snowiest winters in Chicago history. And I think it's a great way to lead us into particularly the first point of Make Time, which is to create a highlight. But I just thought you could walk us through that because I think it's a really good story that sets up that first point. Sure. I was living in Chicago and I had been working at a tech startup. It was a great opportunity for me. There was an amazing team, experienced team, very competent, talented people. And I was basically just a kid right out of college. This was sort of my first real job. And so I wanted to make the most of that opportunity. I wanted to really be able to thrive in that

opportunity, this fast-paced startup, this big opportunity. I wanted to really be able to thrive in that opportunity, this fast-paced startup, this big opportunity. So I became obsessed with productivity. And I pushed myself to make the most of every hour, every minute, and try to fill my time. And after a couple years at that tech startup, we were acquired by Google, which was a great thing. This was exciting. And I kind of felt like, you know, life is good now. I've got this great job. This thing I'd been working on has been sort of validated by this acquisition. I had a great girlfriend. She's now my wife. We were living in this brand new condo together in Chicago. And things were great. together in Chicago and things were great. But like you said, one day in 2008, which I actually looked it up, it was one of the snowiest winters in the history of Chicago, which is saying a lot

for Chicago. I woke up with kind of this feeling that time was just slipping away. It was almost as if I couldn't remember what had been happening for the last couple of months. If you had said, oh, what'd you do over the weekend? Or what'd you do on Thursday? I wouldn't be able to answer that question. It was sort of like a blur. I felt like time was slipping by and I didn't have anything to hold on to. So that was one of the early experiences that really made these decisions about how I spend my time, really drew my attention to those and made those something that I really wanted to focus by trying to get super productive and you thought if I pack more into each day, I'd have more to remember. And you got so focused on the small tasks, but the days slipped by even faster. So that didn't help. Then you decided to overhaul your approach and you said, you know what, instead of managing my minutes, I'm going to turn my attention to the long-term.

I'm going to create, you know, one year, three year, five year, ten year goals. But that didn't work because you were sort of living a someday life. You quote James Clear, who I'm actually interviewing this Friday. Oh, great. Yeah, we both live in Columbus. And he says, I'm not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goals. So you had tried to be super productive, focus on tasks, you tried to sort of look longer term, and still things felt like they were kind of blurring. And what you stumbled upon was this idea of

trying to find more meaningful moments. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how you guys sort of arrived at the first part of how to make time, which is to have a daily highlight. Sure. I had started with trying to maximize my productivity because, like I said, that had been working well for me in the office. And then when that wasn't helping slow down the blur of time, I decided to try to set big goals. And these are, I think, are two very common schools of self-help advice that you might read about. There's a lot of stuff out there about productivity. There's a lot of stuff about goal setting and how important that can be. And so I tried both of those things, but I didn't feel that it really helped with the problem that I was feeling. And you said that I stumbled onto a

solution, which is absolutely right, because it was not on purpose. I didn't have this amazing flash of insight. Instead, what happened is the winter ended and it was spring. And the sun came out and the birds began to sing. And just like we all do in the Midwest when spring arrives, people come out of their houses and they start to get more social and they make plans. And that was the case for me. For example, I had a group of friends and we would meet for lunch every Friday across town. And that would become something that I would look forward to and I would plan my day around it because I didn't want to be late. I wanted to make sure I finished all my work and I could leave on time. I wanted to enjoy that lunch.

I didn't want to have to eat and run, so I'd make sure that I didn't have anything scheduled immediately after the lunch. And I found that I would look forward to that all week. And the same thing happened with sometimes going for a run after work, running along Lake Michigan, downtown Chicago. I noticed that when I had these types of medium-sized activities, not these grand plans, but not these little things on a checklist, they gave my days and my weeks meaning and structure and gave me something to hold on to. So eventually I started doing this at the office too. If I had a presentation that I needed to get done, for example, instead of trying to slice it up and cram it in between all the meetings and work on it a little bit here and a little bit there, I started to think of it as this bigger chunk of work that needed to be done and really plan

my day and plan my time around it. And eventually, that's what I started to call the highlight. And the idea with the highlight is if you look back on the day and you ask yourself, or if somebody asks you, what was the highlight of your day? I want every day to have a really good answer. It doesn't have to be something life-changing, but I want every day to have at least one thing that made me feel like I really, and helping you make time.

Plenty of self-help gurus have offered suggestions for setting goals, and plenty of productivity experts have created systems for getting things done. But the space between has been neglected. We call the missing piece a highlight. but the space between has been neglected. We call the missing piece a highlight. And I love that because as listeners know, I talk about it probably way too often, but I'm such a fan of the Buddhist teaching of the middle road. And I love this because it's again, you're sort of splitting the difference between two extremes. And I think that's great. And the idea really has resonated with me. And you say your highlight might be something you don't necessarily have to do, but you want to do. So let's talk a little bit about

what the highlight is and how do we go about picking a highlight? Sure. So the highlight is the one thing that you want to prioritize and protect in your day. prioritize and protect in your day. Some of the strategies that we use to choose our highlights are to focus on things that are time sensitive, things that need to get done. And we call that the strategy of urgency. So you might be looking through your to-do list or your email or your calendar and noticing, oh, this thing absolutely needs to get done today. I've certainly been in the situation where I had something like that, but being in the office, running from meeting to meeting, trying to keep up with my email, I get to the end of the day and then realize that I didn't actually have time for the thing I needed to do that day. So it's sort of like, all right,

the day is done. Finally, I'm done with my work. Finally, I've got time for my work. You know, the real thing I needed to do. Another strategy is satisfaction. So that's looking for things that are not necessarily time sensitive, but they are important. And there are things that you know if you do, you'll be glad you made the time for. An example at work might be a new project that you want to get off the ground or a new way of doing something. Nobody's asking you for that thing. There's no deadline attached to it. But by making it your highlight, you can make sure that you give it a chance to

have some space, to have some breathing room. The third strategy that we talk about in the book is joy. So really just choosing a highlight that is just plain fun, just something that you want to do because those activities often get pushed to the margins. They often get pushed to the sidelines. And even when we do get to them, if we have something fun planned after work, too often I feel like we're racing through the day and sort of, you know, skidding into that activity with, you know, with no energy and no ability to focus on it. And although it was a, you know, it was a fun thing that we wanted to do, we end up not really enjoying it all that much because it's not something we're focusing our energy on. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out

if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Crananson is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that the highlight isn't the only thing you'll do each day, but it will be your priority. will do each day, but it will be your priority. It ensures that you spend the time on the things that matter to you and don't lose the entire day reacting to other people's priorities.

You also say that ideally a good rule of thumb is to say it takes between 60 and 90 minutes. So let's talk a little bit more about that. I guess let's talk about, you know, the 60 to 90 minutes, but also we all do have a lot of things that need to happen each day or that we think need to happen each day. So talk about a highlight versus the rest of the stuff that you do and kind of what the distinction is in maybe how you plan and schedule. We've talked about what the distinction is in how we frame it up in our mind, but maybe what's the distinction in how we protect it up in our mind, but maybe what's the distinction in how

we protect the highlight and make sure it gets done. Yeah. Maybe to explain, I can just kind of tell you about my day today, which I think had a few different things going on and sort of encapsulates a lot of these ideas. My highlight for today was actually to launch the webpage for a workshop that I'm putting on in Minneapolis. It's a workshop for people who want to learn about the design sprint process. And that's the subject of the previous book that Jake Knapp and I wrote together, this five-day process for teams to take an idea through prototyping and testing it with customers in a week. I'm going to try not to be hurt that this interview wasn't the highlight of the day, but carry on. Fair enough. But that was the thing that, you know, kind of fell into that satisfaction bucket. There was no real urgency to do it. There was nobody who was expecting it.

It was something that I wanted to get done. I wanted to launch it. And I knew that I was going to have a chunk of time in the morning that I could get it done. So I scheduled that for the morning, my highlight time. The reason that this podcast was not my highlight was that I knew that it was going to happen no matter what, because I had it scheduled, had been scheduled for a long time. And that's kind of the other component to my day and really to many days is there's often a small number of meetings or

appointments or things that are on the calendar. And I try to schedule those things for the afternoon because I know for me, and everybody's different, but I know for me that morning on the calendar and try to schedule those things for the afternoon. Because I know, for me, and everybody's different, but I know for me that morning is the time when I have the best creative energy to work on something like creating a website for an event and launching that, which means a lot of writing and designing and that kind of work. The other component of the day is to really do all the little administrative stuff. And I try to leave that for the time of day when I know I'm going to have the lowest energy, which is usually the late afternoon. And so what I will do is, I don't often block it on my calendar, but I will mentally know that

in the end of the day, as the afternoon is winding down, as my energy starts to wane, that I'm going to go through my email inbox, I'm going to reply to a few things, I might have a list of odds and ends that I need to do. But I kind of plan my days around those three big types of activities with the highlight being the thing that gets prime position, the thing that I'm scheduling at the time of day when I know I'm going to have my best energy. And so what you recommend is that we determine what our highlight is, we write it down, and then we actually put it on the calendar. We give it a time that we know it's going to happen. Otherwise, as we all know, the day can be over before it starts, you know, and like you said, it's 6pm

and we go, well, I didn't, that didn't happen again. So that's one thing. Let me ask you a question about this, because this is something I struggle with sometimes, which is that the highlight for me is sometimes, I'll say the most difficult task for me. Like you said, it's going to take more creative energy. It takes more focus. There's more perhaps risk associated with it, right? I need to be in the right spot to do it. And it does take more energy. So it's a little bit easier to procrastinate. So how do you give it the attention that it deserves. And I think that's where a lot of the tactics in the book around laser mode, around beating distraction, I'm sure we'll talk about that later, where those come in because they sort

of push to the sides all those little things that you feel like you should be checking or you want to be checking or you want to just quickly sort of flip over to a different tab and look at something, when you know that those are held at bay and you've scheduled your highlight for the time when you have the best energy, it becomes so much easier. It's just kind of this freeing sensation of being able to pour your energy into the task at hand. But some highlights still are really just too big. They're too daunting to handle in one session. And so it can often be really helpful to break those down, to look at them and break them into sort of sequential pieces. And this is something that we actually learned from one of the most famous productivity guides of all time called Getting Things Done. This idea of not, you know,

thinking of a project as this monolithic beast, but thinking of it as a series of activities that you need to do, some of which are quite small, some of which are a little bit bigger. And so to use my example of working on a presentation as making that your highlight, the act of creating that presentation contains a lot of little pieces, some bigger, some smaller. And if you say that working on the presentation is going to be your highlight, it doesn't mean that you'll finish the whole thing or chain yourself to your desk until it's done, but that you will kind of work through the steps involved until you run out of time or run out of energy or, you know, until that piece of your day is up. So that idea of breaking the highlight into

smaller pieces really can help make it less intimidating. Yeah, that's such an important idea to deconstruct things down into something that actually resembles a task. I'll notice things I procrastinate are things that, like you said, they're more like a project. Like I had one on there for like, get a video done. And so when I have it written down is get video done, right? It just sits there. But when I deconstruct it and maybe the highlight is write the video script, I'm like, oh, okay. All right. That's, you know, that's, I can start with, or I've been creating these series of mini episodes for supporters of the show, um, where we do like a poem and a song and a teaching. And I've realized like deconstructing that down into like one of those things, like, all right, find the teaching, write it up, do that. Deconstructing into smaller tasks makes it much easier to actually do it. And there's kind of a flip side to that too, which is when there's a lot of little tasks that are unrelated, something like catching up on email,

those can kind of feel like they're always sort of nagging at us, trying to steal our attention. And one of the tactics that we read about in the book is called batch the little stuff. And the idea is to actually let those things pile up, let those little things pile up, and then bundle them together into a batch. And one day, make that your highlight. I mean, it seems kind of weird to say like catching up on email is going to be my highlight. Nobody really looks forward to that. But it is surprisingly satisfying to do that. Instead of trying to just, you know, play whack-a-mole with all the messages, it is quite satisfying to let it stack up and then just kind of crank through it one day. So that's sort of the inverse of what you're saying is, you know, trying to deal with lots of little things.

Yep, exactly. So let's move on to the second part of make time is this idea of laser. So step one, pick a highlight. Step two is laser, which is basically get into a mode where you are focused like a laser beam on that target. So let's talk about maybe just a couple of the tactics. You've got lots of different tactics for each of these things, the way the book is structured. So highlight, there's a lot of tactics. For laser, you have a bunch of tactics. Maybe just pick one or two that you'd like to talk about for what we can do to get into laser mode, so to speak.

There's a lot of tactics here because Jake and I both worked in the tech industry. We actually designed some of the infinity pool apps that I talked about, some of the things that are so distracting. I worked at YouTube for a couple of years. Jake worked on Gmail when he was at Google. And so we have this really unique perspective of knowing how these things were made and what makes them so compelling, but also having operated in the tech company environment, which in many ways is the most intense, the most fast-paced, with the highest expectation of being online and being responsive at all times. So a lot of our tactics come from trying to take back control of our time and our energy in that environment. And the one that is the scariest probably, but certainly the most

powerful for both of us is the distraction-free phone. And this is not about turning off notifications or making little tweaks. This is about removing the sources of distraction. So actually deleting infinity pool apps from your phone. So my phone, I don't have Twitter installed. I don't have Facebook, Instagram. I don't have any way of reading the news. I don't even have an email app on my phone.

of reading the news. I don't even have an email app on my phone. Now, this sounds a little bit scary. But one thing to keep in mind is that I can always reinstall these things very easily. Or in the case of email, I can re-enable it very easily. And with something like Twitter, I do spend time on Twitter every day, but I do it on my computer. And it's something that I have sort of a scheduled block for because I enjoy using Twitter and I like to hear from people who have read my books and I like to answer questions and that sort of thing. But taking those things away from that shiny device that is in your pocket or in your bag or in your hand or right in front of you on the table is amazingly effective. It creates a barrier to getting distracted that means we don't have to use willpower.

We don't have to use self-control. And doing that, we can reclaim a ton of time. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Oh, yeah. Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I read the distraction-free iPhone with a mix of trepidation and curiosity. You mentioned sort of the low-hanging fruit.

I turn off all notifications. The thing never, well, except for when you are getting ready to talk, never really beeps at me, unless's like an incoming phone call. And the other thing that maybe you're a smart tech guy, maybe you've got an answer to this, right? So I love do not disturb on my iPhone. It's like my favorite feature. Flip do not disturb on. My problem is that I never turn it off, which is generally okay, except I don't get calendar reminders when my Do Not Disturb is on, which wreaks havoc on my life because I end up showing up late to things because I turn it on, forget to turn it off.

And so if you don't need to answer that, but if you know of any way to make calendar notifications work while Do Not Disturb is on, I'd be thrilled. I actually, yeah, I don't know how to fix that particular problem. And I actually use an Android phone, so I'm especially dumb about iPhone stuff. But I will say that that type of problem is one of the reasons why I have stuck with the distraction-free phone for so long. I think that when I remove the source of the distraction, then I don't have to worry about all these settings and configurations and worrying about is this thing going to get through or not that thing. I have sort of a mantra that I tell myself, which is that my friends are not a distraction.

And so that means if I get a phone call or I get a text, you know, they're not always for my friends, of course. But just generally speaking, if somebody is reaching out through one of those channels, I don't mind being distracted. And I kind of think of my calendar in the same way. If I have something on my calendar and it's something that I'm going to actually do, I'm going to actually spend time on, I don't mind that it's showing me a notification to remind me to do it. It's the infinity pool stuff. It's the stuff that nags at us and just sort of quietly reminds us that it's there, even if it's not making a noise or making a sound or flashing that, that I find really, really tough to deal with. And so the essence of this tactic, you know, you can take it as far as you want to take it,

delete all that stuff off your iPhone, different things. But the basic idea is that if we rely on our willpower to not check those things, it's going to wear out, right? We may resist it for the first day, we may resist it, but eventually the old habits assert themselves, we're back on it. And so, you know, getting rid of it, rid of it makes it a lot easier to do. to do. Basically the idea of if you don't want to do something, put as many obstacles between you and doing it as you can. Right. And so that's the distraction-free iPhone where you delete all that stuff.

So I took part of the advice there, and I got rid of some of it. The email app I have not quite been able to bear doing yet. What I did do is I moved, I took the advice, I got it all off of the front screen. So the front screen is just a clear picture of my dog and I have to go looking for, I have to go looking for mail or Facebook or any of that stuff. I have to, I have to make a concerted effort. And just that moment of like, wait a minute, like, do I really want to do this? Right.. And just that moment of like, wait a minute, like, do I really want to do this? Right. You know, that, that helps, but I suspect I'm going to end up deleting email off the phone. But like you said, one of the things for some people who

have like customer support type stuff or sales stuff to do quick response to some of that stuff is, is important. And so that's part of my challenge. Yeah, definitely. I think that the underlying idea is to create barriers to distraction. Because if you think about, or if you know anything about how these apps are made, how they're designed, you realize that people like me, designers in the tech industry, we have spent years and years making this stuff as friction-free as possible, as easy to get into, as efficient as possible. And so that also points to the solution, which is to add some of that friction back in. And I think that we really hope that people will experiment with this stuff. Maybe they'll try one of these tactics that seems a little scary and try it for a day or two or a week and see

how it goes. But that ultimately, people will likely sort of step back from that most extreme experiment and find a balance that really works for them. If they do need to be responsive to email because their job truly demands it or because there's an app like a stock market app, which technically has sort of this infinitely updating content, but maybe doesn't make you feel twitchy, but you like being able to take a look at the end of the day. Everybody kind of finds their own sweet spot for this stuff. Yeah. And the book is really great at laying out a lot of those different options. I found it really useful in that regard. So there's a lot of great tactics there. Let's move on to the third part of the make time formula, which is

managing your energy. So we've got a highlight, we pick our highlight, we've got laser mode, we get into laser mode. But another important part of making time and using our time well is managing our energy. Talk to us a little bit about that. This is a lesson that Jake and I really learned when we were running design sprints. So I mentioned this earlier. It's this process where we take a team through a very particular set of exercises to help them go from a problem or an opportunity to having a real concrete solution that they can test with customers before they spend months of time kind of executing on it. And when we were running these sprints, we basically got to control the

environment and the schedule for a team of people for a week. We had them in a room. We could say, no devices. We could say, here's the schedule. Here's when you come in and out of the room. And one of the things that we noticed while we were running these sprints is that people would really run out of energy at the end of the week. The work was demanding in the sense that it was intense, not that it was pulling people in a million directions, but that we were expecting them to really be focused and intent for the full week. And at the end of the week, they would just kind of be drained. And so we started to experiment and we found that things like having everybody get up and leave the room and go sit around a table and eat lunch, you know, getting face-to-face

time, talking, stepping away from the work, gave people a huge energy boost. We found that shortening the day, we actually shortened the sprint day to 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., we found that that allowed us to get the same amount of stuff done, but to actually have it be higher quality work and have everybody feel better at the end of the week. And so seeing this play out with team after team and person after person really opened our eyes to the importance of a lot of this basic stuff, the stuff that everybody knows about diet, exercise, sleep, just how important it is because it enables us to not only make good decisions about how we're spending our time, but to really enjoy what we're doing and to really pour energy into those things that we've

decided to do. Yeah. It's such a drag that the answer is always diet, exercise, sleep well. Like, you know, we all want an easier answer than that, right? But man, it just, there isn't one. That's, you know, and I think that's true for whether you want to talk about managing your energy, being more effective at work, if you want to talk about dealing with mental health conditions like depression or anxiety. I mean, it's over and over, it's the same sort of very core, you know, I think of them almost as like the fundamentals. If those fundamentals aren't in place, you're going to feel like crap. There might be 20 different varieties of crap you feel like. But it just sounds like such a mom answer to do.

You got to exercise, you got to eat. But there just doesn't seem to be any getting around it. It's such a key component for, I think, happily and well and productively. And again, I don't think we're talking about productive in the sense of being able to get 10 more things done for your boss. I mean in the sense of being able to do the things that matter to you. Yeah, and I think we all come to this realization on our own at some point. to this realization on our own at some point. And some people perhaps never truly realize the importance of these fundamental human things. But I think that the closest we can come to making it easy is to try to make the advice really concrete and to systematize it. So some of the stuff in the book in the energized section is, for example,

lowering the bar for what real exercise is. Instead of the idea that you have to go to a gym for an hour, we suggest exercises that you can do at home that only take 15 to 20 minutes. Instead of grinding it out on a treadmill, we suggest trying to build walking into your day, which not only is exercise, but it's going to free up a little bit of mental space where you can listen to a podcast or make a phone call, or you can just think. You can just sort of allow that space to bring in some reflective energy or some creative energy. to bring in some reflective energy or some creative energy. So the book is full of those kinds of ideas,

concrete and hopefully automatic type things that people can do that go from the mom-like advice of you really should eat healthier to the exactly how can I eat healthier. Yeah, the book has lots of lots of great tactics. And, and that is so much of it is just simplifying these things, breaking down the barriers to getting them done. You know, I love that idea of, you know, I think one of the most important, you know, things for exercise, we had a guest, it's been a long time now, but she had a rule, which was everything counts, right? Like every, every bit of movement

that you do counts. So, you know, five minutes here walking, you know, taking the stairs, doing a seven minute exercise, some pushups, like you can string lots of little things together if, if the time doesn't seem to exist to go to the gym for an hour. And I think that's such a powerful idea. And you guys really talk about that. You pointed to a seven minute exercise routine that is really helpful also. Yeah. I think the other thing that we tried to do in this part of the book is reframe it away from this is what you should do to be healthy and And toward, this is how you can build energy to enjoy your days, to do the things that you want to be doing. So away from that long-term, what you should be doing to a short-term, here's what you can be doing for the immediate payoff. And for me anyway, that is so much more motivating because I can directly see the connection between eating healthier and feeling better the rest of the day, for example, or walking to work and enjoying that energy boost instead of slumping in the back of an Uber or looking at my phone while I'm driven to the office.

Yeah, I think that's such a key point. I mean, exercise became sort of a locked in thing for me when I really realized like it wasn't about that I wouldn't get a heart attack in 20 years. I mean, that's great. It wasn't about how I looked. It was really about like, I felt better every time I exercised. There was never been a time that I didn't exercise that I didn't immediately after go, boy, that felt good. I'm so glad I did that. You know, you would think something that has a hundred percent success rate over 40 years would be easy to do. Like, you know, I've never done it and have it not been, I've never been unhappy. I did it. And so you're right that,

that connecting to a more immediate goal can be, is so important. That reminds me of something that I think James Clear has written about and probably others as well. The value of focusing on the process, not the outcome. And so in your example, the outcome would be, well, you're not going to get a heart attack in 20 years. You're going to live longer, whatever. But the process is that day in, day out routine of doing some exercise, feeling better, doing some exercise, feeling better. And when you can focus on those things, you can really make those behaviors into habits and you can get the short-term boost. But the cool thing is you also get the long-term boost. You also get that eventual outcome, but it's just so much more

motivating. Yeah, I agree. I think it's so useful to focus on, even with eating, notice how much better I feel when I eat a healthy meal versus a crappy meal. I'm talking immediately. It's not like I have to wait two months for that. It's like, I can feel it like now. And I think you guys tie this to energy. And I think that's such a useful short-term marker is how is my energy when I do this versus that? Yeah. And I think that many people are used to thinking about health related stuff in that way. But I think people are less familiar with looking for those connections between the way they use technology and how that affects the way they feel. And so one of our goals with the book is that people will just start to be aware of that. And we don't think anybody's going to have an overnight transformation or even a transformation in a week or a month.

overnight transformation or even, you know, even a transformation in a week or a month. But we do hope that people will be aware of how their choices about how they're spending time or how they're interacting with information or technology affect just how they feel in general. You know, that feeling that I remember from being a kid before we had the internet of just being totally undistracted, uninterrupted, pouring my energy into some hobby or activity that I cared about. Becoming reacquainted with that feeling, for example, is just so amazing. And I think that it starts with awareness. And once we're aware of it, then we can start to make some decisions that intentionally create those feelings day in and day out. One of the things I loved about the book is that it gives you lots of little things to try. And

listeners know, you know, I'm such a big fan of baby steps, you know, like just start something small and experiment. And the book really lays all that out. It's got a framework for doing that. It's got lots of little tactics and it's great in that way. We are at the end of our time here, but the book is wonderful. I'll have links in the show notes to the book, to your guys' sites, all that stuff. You and I are going to have an interesting conversation here in the post show about optimizing caffeine.

So for you caffeine lovers out here, these guys have even got a bunch of tactics for making that even better. So you and I are going to talk about that in the post show. Listeners, if you're interested, whenufeed.net slash support. You can get access to those. You can also get access to something new I'm doing, the teaching poem song mini episode, oneufeed.net slash support. John, thanks so much for taking the time. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, me too. Thanks a lot, Eric. Yeah, and I really enjoyed reading the book. So, thanks so much. Cool. Thank you. Bye.

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