The One You Feed - Slow Productivity: How to Do Less, Focus More, and Not Burn Out with Cal Newport

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

In this episode, Cal Newport explains slow productivity and how to do less, focus more, and not burn out. Cal argues, our obsession with busyness is pseudo-productivity and while it may look like progress, it isn’t. In his new book, Slow Productivity, he shows how we can accomplish more by doing less with focus and intentWe need your help! We all know ads are part of the podcast world, and we want to improve this experience for you. Please take 2 minutes and complete this survey, it's a quick and easy way to support this podcast. Thank You! Key Takeaways:The impact of technology on productivity and focus.The struggle between distraction and meaningful work in the digital age.The moral implications of smartphone use, particularly among children.The distinction between deep work and shallow busyness.The concept of “slow productivity” as an alternative to traditional productivity metrics.The challenges of measuring productivity in knowledge work.The importance of quality over quantity in work output.Strategies for managing workload and reducing distractions.The psychological and evolutionary roots of digital distraction.Balancing ambition with practicality in creative work to avoid perfectionism.If you enjoyed this conversation with Cal Newport, check out these other episodes:How to Find Focus and Master Attention with Dr. Amishi JhaDigital Minimalism with Cal NewportFor full show notes, click here!Connect with the show:Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPodSubscribe on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyFollow us on InstagramGrow Therapy - Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0, depending on their plan. (Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plans. Visit growtherapy.com/feed today!Persona Nutrition delivers science-backed, personalized vitamin packs that make daily wellness simple and convenient. In just minutes, you get a plan tailored to your health goals. No clutter, no guesswork. Just grab-and-go packs designed by experts. Go to PersonaNutrition.com/FEED today to take the free assessment and get your personalized daily vitamin packs for an exclusive offer — get 40% off your first order.BAU, Artist at War opens September 26. Visit BAUmovie.com to watch the trailer and learn more—or sign up your organization for a group screening.LinkedIn: Post your job for free at linkedin.com/1youfeed. Terms and conditions apply.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Social stress drives you back to your phone because you're stressed that someone you know has sent you a message and if you're not responding, they will interpret it as you're ignoring them. We're really wired for this because if I'm in an actual Forager band 100,000 years ago, these interpersonal connections are everything for my survival. And if someone in my band is like tapping me on the shoulder and I ignore them, that could be a huge problem. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage 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 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 for years i believed the only way to succeed was to put in more hours but when i was working full-time in software while also running this podcast, I couldn't do more. I had to find a way to do less. And then something surprising happened. My work improved. I had to get clear on what was most important in both roles. It forced me to think

about what really mattered for getting results. As Cal Newport argues, our obsession with busyness is pseudo-productivity. It looks like progress, but it isn't. In his new book, Slow Productivity, he shows how we can accomplish more by doing less with focus and intention. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. We are conducting a survey to find out what you want. Look, you know this, I know this. There's ads on this podcast. It's how the podcast stays alive and feeds those of us who devote ourselves to it.

But I'd love to improve that ad experience for you. And in order to do that, though, I need to know a little bit more about you. The survey is quick, it's easy, and it is really important to us right now. It takes two minutes to do and really would be a huge help. Go to one you feed.net slash survey. Again, that's one you feed.comnet slash survey. Thank you so much. Hi, Cal, welcome back to the show. That's always a pleasure. Good to see you. It's nice to see you. I'm excited to talk about your most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable.

And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, 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 grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent, and they say, well, which one wins? and the grandparent 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. I like that parable, right? You contain possibilities, some better than others, and it's a matter of which of these you actually feed. I like that parable. I mean, I think about a lot of my work,

it's in reaction to technology, and the thing I often put up as the alternative to a life that is spent sort of subservient to screens, subservient to distraction and busyness, is something I think of as the depth principle, which is focused on things that matter, giving them the time required to actually do them well,

and trying to clear out stuff that gets in the way. And so I think for a lot of people, that is a battle that my work is trying to deal with. That maybe is one way to look at it, that there's this other battle towards busyness and distraction, and it's very conveniently delivered to you through little glowing pieces of glass if you need it. And then on the other side, you could feed this other instinct, which is, let me pair things away, focus on what matters, do it well, obsess over quality, not worry necessarily about how long things take, but also don't take my attention off it altogether.

It's like two completely different ways. It's deep versus shallow. And so I like it. I think this parable works. I think it maps on to what I talk about. Excellent. So I want to start outside of your new book because you and I communicated about this interview about a month ago. and you were getting ready to go away for a little while, and I had read something of yours

talking about smartphones and children, and I had sent you a study that sort of contradicted a little bit some of the science that is out there today, or said it's a little bit more unsettled than we know. In the intervening time, you wrote a really good article, which basically said, hey, we don't need to wait for all the facts to come in, for us to trust our moral intuition. And I agree with that to a certain degree. And I'm actually less interested in the answer to this question than I am and how you would think about it. Because I think you're a really, you're a deep thinker. That's what you're known for. Is that our moral intuition oftentimes is led astray by popular cultural narrative. And there has been a popular cultural

narrative for a long time, that there's something wrong with time on screens and phones. So I'm just curious for you how you separate sort of what feels like a moral imperative from the fact that those can be wrong based on the cultures that we're in. They can be, right? But I think it depends on the clarity and severity of that intuition. And so when it came to this issue in particular, which is kids and phones, I spent a lot of lot of time talking to parents. It's been a lot of time talking to kids. There's not ambiguity. I mean, they're looking, these are my kids. I know my kids. And I know when like they're going

well and I know when there's something that's not going wrong. I know that like something must be going on poorly at school. They're just not themselves. I can sense that in them. And the parents just see this in their kids. It's like this thing is all you want to look at. It changes your personality. It's keeping you away from other things are more important. And then the kids themselves are self-reporting so heavily. I don't like this. This is making me anxious. I feel like I'm somewhat pressured into having to use it. And so to me, unlike other issues we've dealt with, we could think of them through an epidemiological frame where we have to tease out data, like smoking in lung cancer. I can't directly observe.

Oh, my God, as I'm smoking this, I can see cancerous cell math grow. I need to look at data. We need to somehow separate out. Is this really correlation, not causation? This felt much more direct because it's people's actual lived experiences is clear. And I think especially with parenting, the experience of people around you, embodied wisdom, observation, really has throughout history gone a really long way. And we get a little bit too, it's too easy, I think, to get caught up in the, on the one hand, on the other hand, complexity of scientific analysis, especially with social psychology where there's never clarity. Right.

And so you can massage retrospective datasets. They sort of say whatever you want. And I spent a lot of time into literature on this issue. I sort of have interviewed the players on this multiple times, and it's become a muddied morass that's never going to be dried up because once we measure the trajectory of this subatomic particle, we know for a fact what it is. It's never going to be clear. So I take your warning, but I think this is an issue where everyone kind of agrees there's

not a lot of doubt here in our lived experience. This is not that complicated. So it's just a matter of pulling to trigger on making changes. I think it's really interesting the self-reporting aspect, because as I was thinking back to, like, okay, well, what would be other examples of our moral intuition in these ways leading us wrong, right? Comic books, video games, rock and roll music. Precisely. But what the kids that were doing all those things would not self-report is that I feel bad when I do this. They'd be like, I feel great when I do this. And I think that does make it a different animal. Yeah. And also, so I think it's a great point. The kids playing pinball. Penball was a big scare for, but I'm going to put big, I'm going to come back to this. I'm put big in quotation marks here for important reasons. The kids playing pinball are reading comic books. We're not like, oh, my God, man, I just wish I feel pressure. I'm playing too much pinball. I don't like this. This pinball is making me anxious. I wish I was from my parents generation where they didn't have pinball machines. Like you never would have heard that. But the other aspects, and the reason why I put big scare in quotation marks is I did some work.

on this. I wrote an article for Wired magazine about this a few years back. I looked at a lot of these prior sort of technophobic scares, right? They were often more minor and more religious than today what we do is we take like, look, we were afraid about everything. That's just what we do. We had moral panics. And you say it's not comparable a lot of these. Like you'll go back and look at a pinball. We hated pinball or whatever. This was much more minor and it was like much more religious. It's a very different. character than what I think we're feeling now with the most comparable example I think for the last 20, 30 years is like television, right? But that turned out to be pretty much correct. Like the

role that television, we got worried about how much TV we were watching, but it really did jump up to something like six to eight hours a day on average for an America. Like it did have a, it was right. Like actually the critiques of television was right. It did change culture in a massive way. And in ways it was like very largely non-positive. That's, had a similar size concern. Almost none of these other quote-unquote moral panics did. They were much more parochial or narrow. Most people would be like, what are you talking about? You know, it's, it's tipper gore and rap music. That's exactly what I was thinking of. And that was around my, you know, I was in my late teens around that time. So I was very into the kind of music

that tipper gore and all those people were saying was so, so dangerous. So I remember that one. And you're right. It was on a much smaller scale. Most people didn't care. Most people didn't care. Most parents were like, they're cursing a lot of this. But that was kind of like the extent of it wasn't, God, it's like the day and day out concern of a lot of parents right now. I mean, if we were listening to, you know, that music in the 90s, I guess, I don't know, the equivalent would be if like we stopped doing our homework. We stopped socializing. All we did was like sit around listening to the music. And our parents like, oh, my God, this is like a problem.

They're obsessed with this. It wasn't that, though. So, so I think this is, I try to make these distinctions between different types of pushbacks. And I also also make the case, like it can't, it can't possibly be the case that these are always, like I don't, I never understood this universalist argument that we always moral panic about technology because it's a universalist statement that says, so therefore like a technology can never be wrong, right? Like it's, which doesn't make sense to me. I mean, so even if we are prone to getting worried more than we should. or exaggerating worries, it's not a dispositive to the claim that there could be technologies that are a real problem, right?

It doesn't actually free us from the burden of actually assessing when concerns come up. Does this feel real or does this feel overblown and being sometimes like the answer is going to be, well, maybe this is real. Right. And it's one of the things I appreciate about a lot of what you write is there's a real nuance in it, right? You aren't striking one position or the other incredibly firmly. there is a there's a nuance in there that says well yeah we certainly do overreact many times but

sometimes we don't and i think that this is a day and age i'm one of those people when everybody says that the world is getting worse i pause because i'm like well everybody always thinks the world is getting worse right like that's a historical fact that's what old people do yep and it's possible that indeed in some ways it is you know i think it depends on who you are and where you are in the global economy and all that, whether the world is getting worse for you or not. It's getting better for many people in many different ways. But okay, I don't want to belabor our whole conversation there, but I did want to kind of hit on that and get your thinking on it. Let's move into the latest book, Slow Productivity. You open the book with an executive at CBS named Leslie. You may not

open it exactly. Actually, I opened it with John McPhee. But early on, you reference Leslie at CBS demanding people work longer hours. And then you kind of swing back around near the end of it and tell a different story. Walk me through why this idea of measuring productivity on hours is so possibly misguided. I mean, it wasn't until it was, right? So if we think about productivity as it was introduced as an economic term, it's like a pretty clear definition. It's measuring outputs for inputs. So you have this many acres of land. How many bushels of wheat did that produce?

You have this many, the way they did for, I looked into this, automotive assembly lines, the input was paid worker hour. It's like how many hours of, in my pain, paid hours is going into my factory, how many Model T has come out on the other side? And like, that's the ratio you want to make better. So like productivity was a matter of measuring these ratios. Then you get to knowledge work, right? This becomes a major economic sector starting like mid-20th century.

That becomes complicated because suddenly if I work in an office, I'm Don Draper in the 1960s or whatever, it's not a one thing I'm doing. I'm not producing Model T's. I'm not, you know, having a pile of widgets I can point to and be like, hey, today you pay me. I worked eight hours and I produced 55 widgets, but, you know, over here they produce 65 widgets. they're more productive because what happened is work became creative, it became nonlinear and it became varied. So people would be working on multiple different things. What I'm working on might be different than what the person next to me is working on. It was hard to directly measure also output because you could have contributed the idea that unlocked an ad campaign that then down

the line was going to get you a huge contract with a company. How do you trace that all back to that idea you had that day ended up generating $10 million a new billing. Like, it's very difficult to measure outputs in a way that you can connect to inputs. So what we did, like my argument in the book, is that manager said, what are we going to manage? If we can't count things, what are we going to manage? And the fallback was it was like a band date, a heuristic was like, well, we'll just use busyness in general as a proxy for useful effort. Like seeing you hear doing things is better than not.

And so if we want to be more productive, the only lever I know how to pull is be here more hours doing things. Because it was like a rough heuristic. We needed something to manage. And that was to Leslie Moonvest stories, is that CBS was in last place among the major networks above Fox, but below the other three networks. And his solution, and this was in the late 90s or late 2000s, he said, we got to work longer. He said, look, you think he was at the headquarters, CBS headquarters out there, television city. And he was like, you think over at AB, over at the other network, you know, I guess he was at CBS like at NBC. You think you think the parking lot's empty at four, I bet they're there.

Stay here longer. We'll work longer hours where because that's the only lever he knew how to pull. And it did become, they did jump to number one. And my argument, as you mentioned, I wrap around to it at the end of the chapter. The argument is like, well, they became number one not because the employees came in an hour later and stayed earlier, say an hour later. they became number one because of Survivor. It was like an idea for a show from this iconoclastic, weird, highly creative writer in Las Vegas who was like working on this concept and got this bone in his teeth and wouldn't let it go.

And it was uneven and he'd work on it. There's nothing about it that had to do with maximizing hours per day. But that creative output, that turned around the whole company. So I was trying to emphasize this idea that in knowledge work and creative work, what moves the needle is not just how many hours is the butts in the seat. And that it's this great mismatch that we're having right now in the world of work in general is that we still have this industrial mindset of more hours, produces more than less, and busyness, therefore, is better than less busyness. And it leads to a measure of productivity that's essentially disconnected from the things that really matter.

And I think that's deranging over time, right? It really gives you this disconnect in your day-to-day work. It all becomes performative and weird and arbitrary, and it's burning a lot of people out. Yeah, it is very interesting. I was in the software business for many years of my career before I start. doing this. And I remember struggling with that very question. What am I measuring here? Because there are so many factors that go into software development. You don't know how hard a problem necessarily is, even at the beginning of software development. And so I struggle with

this a lot. And I think I also fell into the both for myself and early on in my career, the hours model. What I found very interesting, it was late in my career, and it was after I had started this podcast, but I was still in the software world. I had a podcast to do in addition to a full-time software executive type job. And so I only had so many hours in the day. So I ended up putting less time into my job, you know, my software job. But what I did was I got hyper-focused on what actually really mattered. Like what was the most important thing? What was what was going to drive the success that was going to make? And I spent way more time thinking about that question than I ever had before. And I think I got better at what I did. I think I got better because I knew what was

most important. This makes a lot of sense to me because I've kind of lived it. This explains a lot of the seemingly contrary in results from these four-day workweek experiments that have happened over the last four or five years, where mainly in Europe, they commissioned these studies where they'd have companies and say, lop a day off of your work week and we'll have these measures of like output or whatever. And they keep finding study after study production in the way that matters, like your revenue or whatever. It's not going down. We cut out 20% of the days and it's not going down. And then when they'll interview people, it's always exactly what you're saying. they're like, yeah, I mean, a lot of what we're, a lot of it's just busyness, the actual things that move the needle don't take 40 hours a week.

And so if you take away a day, we just like lop off, that's fine, we just lop off more busyness, the stuff that matters still easily, easily fits. Like, that's the conclusion I take away from those studies. Not that the work week is wrong in its length, but that our focus on busyness or pseudo productivity, as I call it, is like that just underscores, that's what we're doing here. That if you can arbitrarily take away 20% of the time and it doesn't change what's being produced, the conclusion shouldn't just be, oh, we should have a four-day work week. It should be, we should rethink how we're working. Like, what were we doing in that extra eight hours a day? Like, what a waste. Like, we could be work, you know, that's the real issue there.

So, yeah, I think I'll in depth. But it speaks to the confusingness of knowledge work, that it's really nonlinear. It's hard to measure. And it's not a linear dose response of just if I add another hour, then I get this much more useful stuff produced. And I think it's been a massive managerial headache. It is. Because it's unclear how to manage.

running a podcast in a small business means the work never really stops even when i close my laptop my mind keeps circling who do i need on my team how do i find someone who fits not just on paper but in spirit because in a small company like mine every role is vital one person can change the whole culture for better or worse the right person doesn't just fill a job they bring energies ideas and momentum. The wrong fit can be catastrophic. That's why I like LinkedIn jobs. They make it easy to post a job, share it with your network, and get in front of the kinds of candidates who can actually help you move forward. It's not just about resumes, it's about finding people who fit. It's like what I talk about on the one you feed. Small steps compound into big outcomes. Posting one

job opens you to an entire network of possibilities and that one conversation you have with the right person, it can change the trajectory of your business. So if you're hiring, try it out. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash one you feed. That's LinkedIn.com slash one, the number, Y-O-U-F-E-D. So LinkedIn.com slash one you feed to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. There are a lot of Holocaust films that focus on the horror, and rightfully so. But what struck me about Bao, artist at war, is that inside all that darkness, you see something else. Love, humor, creativity, even moments of laughter. It's people insisting on their humanity when everything around them is trying to take it away.

Joseph Bow was an artist and a dreamer. He risked everything to help others survive and to keep his love for Rebecca alive. In the middle of the concentration camps, they secretly married. a wedding in a concentration camp. It wasn't only an act of love, it was an act of defiance. And for me, this film isn't about what was lost, it's about what was found, the resilience of the human heart. And if you know me, you won't be surprised to know that by the end, I was in tears.

Bow, artist at war, directed by Sean McNamara, opened September 26. You can watch the trailer and find showtimes at bowmovie.com. That's spelled B-A-U-Movie.com. You're a writer. You've written a number of books now. I hear you talk about turning in a chapter or doing this. I just wrote my first book, which will come out next April. And I had no idea how much I could produce in any given window because I had never done it.

I didn't know could I write 500 words a day? Could I write 1,000 words a day? I just didn't know anything. So what I measured in this case actually was effort. Not crazy amounts of effort. I didn't set a goal of like, well, just as many hours as I can get. I set what I thought was reasonable and sort of learned kind of like, oh, well, after that point, I'm useless kind of thing.

But I measured effort because I couldn't measure anything else because I didn't know anything better. How about you? How do you think about, do you end up on book deadline? If you do end up on book deadline, how are you managing to it? I think I have a pretty good instinct through experience at this point about what it feels like to be producing at a sustainable rate. And effort's a good way of talking about it because it's not necessarily strict hours, but it's not strict pages either because some pages take a lot longer than others. I just have a sense of I'm producing good stuff and I'm giving it enough effort that we're making, we probably are in good shape heading towards a deadline. Pushing it beyond this is probably going to become less sustainable, right?

And I know where that sweet spot is, that sort of like two to four hours, most but not all days type of sweet spot. That for me is producing but allowing the engine to recharge, right? So like in writing, I have that really dialed in in a way that I think in a lot of jobs people don't have that dialed in at all. And so it all just becomes busyness, right? Or avoiding non-business because non-business is a signal that you're not productive. So let's talk about slow productivity in general. You mentioned it's sort of a philosophy for organizing our work efforts in a more sustainable and meaningful way. And you've got three aspects to it. Walk us through what those are. In general, I see it as my alternative to pseudo productivity. So if the thing that we are mired in right now is this idea that busyness is a proxy for useful effort, so more is better than less. If that's what we're doing now, what's an alternative that's going to work better? So we'll set it up. is slow productivity is a particular alternative.

And the three principles, like sort of the high level description, the first is do fewer things. And what that really means is do fewer things at once. So the number of concurrent projects you should be juggling, you want to get that down to a reasonable size, right? And this is not just about because that makes your life less stressful. You produce more. That if you have too many things that you're working on at the same time, the fixed overhead

of each of those things begins to pile up and conflict. And then you just end up in a spot eventually if you're working on enough things where basically most of your time is just dealing with the overhead of the things you've agreed to do. Very little actually gets done. If you graph like how much useful stuff is coming out of your brain, it begins

to precipitously fall. The second principles work at a natural pace. Right. So this covers both how long you think is reasonable to take to complete something. We tend to write fairy tales in our mind about wouldn't it be great if I was able to finish this in two weeks

and then we fall in love with that story because like that would be great like everything would fall into place and then we want that to be true but of course this is a four week project right like it was a completely unreasonable prediction so like be okay with things take time I've learned this in my writing career

take an extra year for a book makes all the difference in the world to you and no one else notices right publisher's like great okay so Cal has their book when does he want to come in then great when we get closer to it we'll look for it right like let things take time but also work at a natural

pace means variation on different timescales as well. Like, I'm busy, big push today, tomorrow. I'm sort of taking my foot off the accelerator. This has been a busy month, but this month coming up, I'm doing a little bit less. This season I'm really into it, this other season I'm recharging. So it's letting things take time, don't rush them, and allow yourself to have variation intensity. And then the final principle, which holds those together, is obsess over quality. So this only really works as a sustainable way to be sort of successful in the world of work. If you couple these two ideas with, I really care about how good the best things I do are. And that is what eventually is going to get you the ability, the better of the quality of the

stuff you produce, that's going to gain you the ability to have this sort of flexibility in how you work and to get away from pseudor productivity. It's like you're buying your way out of pseudo productivity with quality. And it's also going to make you intrinsically want to escape pseudo productivity because the more you care about quality, the more busyness begins to seem intolerable. So, like, you put those three things together. It's an alternative way of thinking about productivity that I think is not going to burn you out. But it's still going to, if you're an individual, going to produce stuff that you can make a living on. If your company is going to make your company successful, I mean,

it is a strategy, a definition of productivity that's not just sustainable, but I think I actually, like, economically very viable. So it's obvious for someone like you or me even who sort of control our own destiny to a certain degree that we might choose or be able to do this. How does somebody who's sort of in the, for lack of a better word, the cogs of the machine implement this sort of thing into their lives? Or what are some starting places where they can begin to bring some of this in? And this is basically the bulk of the advice in the book is how do you implement this? If you work in a company with 1,000 employees and you're on a team of 20 and you have six layers of bosses or whatever.

Because you're right, it's if you have full control of your schedule, the implementation details aren't as interesting. Like, you're like, yes, I'm going to take on fewer things. And I'm going to take longer and I'm going to give myself variation. Like, just do those things. It'll be good. So the interesting advice is about what if you don't have that autonomy. The overarching thing, but this is like the long term strategy is that principle three. get better at something that's valuable, you get more control.

So that's like an overarching argument. Adam Grant talks about, he calls them idiosyncrasy credits. Like, the better you get at something in your organization, the more you can kind of cash in these credits for being idiosyncratic in the way you work or what you take on or how your day functions. It's earned. I am really, really good at integrating whatever, these AI models into our client offerings or whatever.

No one else here can do it as well as me. a savant at it. This earns me a lot of flexibility. And now when I say I, you know, I don't want to work on committees, I only do this one thing. I work remote four days a week. Like you have options. More short term. So before you get really good at something valuable, I mean, I talk a lot in the book about workload management, right? There's a lot of different ways to do it. One way is you can try to get explicit about your workload with your actual team. Like, hey, we should be clear about what we're working on and who's working on what so that everyone has to confront, oh, I can't just throw this on your plate. You have four things on your plate. So you know what?

This thing that we need to do is going to go in this other column over here of things we need to do where it's not assigned to any individual yet. And as people finish things, it will come on to someone's plate. And now suddenly you're not paying the overhead cost about it. If your team doesn't want to do this, you can do this simulated internally where you're like, okay, here's the things are on my plate. I don't have a say about what comes on to my plate or not, but I'm going to sort them. Here are the things that I'm actively working on. Here are the things I'm waiting to work on. And I have them in an ordered list. And this is, I'm going to make this public internally. It's in a shared document or spreadsheet or something. And the three things at the

front of this list, I'm actively working on, meetings, emails. This is where my focus is. And everything else is to like I'm waiting to work on. As soon as I finish something in the active list, I'll pull the next thing on. And so someone asks you like, hey, what's going on with this thing you agreed to do? You can be like, here you go. It's in position five. And you'll see it'll march. And as soon as it marches into my active list, I'm going to call you up and let you know. And like, we're all into it. And by the way, if you think it's a higher priority than other things, I'm happy, you're the boss. Tell me, I'm happy to do a swap in here. If you say like swap this thing out of active and swap that in, you're the boss. You tell me how you want to swap it. But you are preserving a

system here where the concurrent things is controlled. So the things they're generating meetings and emails and overhead are limited. So there's a lot of things you do like that. Quotas is another thing you can do where you're like, I need to do some of this type of thing in my job, but I have too many of these things coming into my life to be sustainable. Here's my quota. It's I do one a month. I do three a quarter. And so when they come back like, hey, can you join this committee? Instead of having to say, I don't do committees, which is bad. Or yes, I'll say yes to everything, which is also bad. You're like, yeah, I'm happy. I love doing committees. A big part of my job. I have a quota of three per quarter. That seems to be like the right amount of

balance of that in my other work. And I've already signed up for three, so I can't do this one this quarter. That works really well because you're not being obstinate. You're being clear. And the argument you're putting up there is one that's hard to push back on. The pushback would have to be your quota's wrong. You should be doing four, right? Like you're, a lot of this is about forcing a confrontation with the reality of workloads. So there's all sorts of things you can do, calibrated to how much autonomy you have, how reasonable your bosses are, all sorts of things you can do in the short term. But the long-term lever that is going to really gain you a lot of freedom is get good at

something that matters. I think people underestimate the degree to which an employer, their number one thing they care about is keeping good people, right? I think employees worry, they imagine in their head incorrectly, that their employer is like, can we fire him yet let's we're collecting evidence to fire him right like hey hey like they have a whole team of people there's a bulletin board with your face on it and they're pinning up yarn and stuff like that you know what's going on is eric done anything anything today that gives us a reason to fire him because we just really want to get rid of this guy the reality is if you're good and doing something

it's really valuable they're up at night like what if he leaves like that's going to be a hard person to replace so you know we often swap that as soon as you are doing something that is rare invaluable. Your boss's number one fear is that you leave, and there's some value in that. convenient. In just minutes, you get a plan that's tailored to your health goals. When I took their free assessment, I was struck by how simple it was. I've tried sorting bottles on my counter before and would forget what to take and when, what I had taken before, what needs to be taken tomorrow. Persona fixes all of that. You get daily packs for morning, evening, and bedtime. And with your subscription, you also get unlimited consultations with their nutritionists. Yep, you heard that

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Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday, I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show, things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose, into bite-sized practices you can use the same day.

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And I used to love it when my people did that to me as a leader. Yeah. Because if I just keep giving you things and you're not going to get them done, I mean, one failure that I had as a leader, and I think a lot of leaders have it is I'm not really entirely clear how much I've loaded up onto you. Yep. Right? I just go, yeah, okay, give it to so-and-so. Give it to so-and-so. And so when so-and-so would say, like, well, I'll take it, but it's going to, you know, it's going to displace this or displace that. Then I got to decide what was important. That's a really valuable conversation. Now, and most of us think that no one's going to want to have that, like that our bosses aren't going to want to have that conversation. But many of them will. Because they're measured on results in the same way that you are. And they don't want to be skipping down the road thinking this is all getting done when it's not. They'd much rather than go to their boss and say, hang on.

Yeah. Well, and you can tell me if this matches your experience in leadership positions, but like another thing that seems clear, and I think this is helpful to a lot of people, is the problem you're solving for like a manager when they ask you to do something, right? the problem you're really solving is one of stress reduction this is something that's on their plate the manager's plate like this thing this needs to be done right and as long as

it's on my plate it's like a source of minor stress and the problem you're solving is taking that stress out of their life so it's not necessarily what's important is that it gets done right away what's important is that they 100% trust that it will get done like if managers know

you're organized and this is the side effect is showing them some sort of kind of ridiculously color-coded spreadsheet or whatever is they know you're on the ball. And if they know this ball will not be dropped, it will move down this list and they'll get back and this will get done. I don't have to worry about it. You've solved 99% of that manager's problem and they're happy with it. In fact, like, they probably don't want you to do it right away anyways because then it's going to generate more work for them in the short term. Like, it'll be nice if this could just like, it's not going to disappear. It's going to get done. I can trust it's going to get done. Maybe not.

right away. Because often when people are demanding, like, hey, can't you just do this right away? Often that is because they don't trust that you're going to do it. And so the stress is still on their plate until it gets done. If you're not trusted, then the manager is going to want you to just do that right away because they can't release the stress tell it's done. If you are trusted, you have a lot more leeway because they say the stress was reduced as soon as you took this on your plate because I know you'll get it done. So I don't have to. I don't have to keep track of this anymore. Yeah, I think there's more, be reliable, deliver what you say you're going to deliver,

deliver it at a high level. That foundation is something you can build a lot of approaches to work on. And it's also, it's pretty rare. Yeah. And there are situations where no amount of doing any of that is going to work, where the demands are unreasonable and they remain unreasonable. And that is a reality in many cases. It's almost the worst thing is when you have a boss who can't.

say no. That's almost the worst scenario to be in because they just keep taking it. You were saying that, you know, I wish I could get this done in two weeks because that would be really great is also like every project manager's nightmare is like, well, when do you think best

case scenario you could get this done? Erica I'm like, well, October. Well, now it's October. That's October. So you learn never, you know, you just double everything. Yeah. It's the persuasion technique of anchoring. Don't let them anchor on October. Anchor them on like next March. Yeah. And doubling is usually right, by the way,

like when we double, that just gets you in the ballpark of like roughly how long it's going to take. Oh, yeah. In software development, I certainly also learned like he says it's going to take X amount of time. I'm going to double that. He says it. I'm going to do four times that because, you know, he always wants, he wants to please. Yeah. He's going to give me the best, you know, the shortest answer he can because he wants to make me happy. And so I know, you know, you just sort of start to learn. learn how to how to work with these things. I want to talk about doing fewer things. So you talk about doing this in sort of three, call them propositions in the book, but limiting the big, containing the small and pulling instead of pushing. And we've talked about this a little bit,

but I'd like to have you kind of break down each of those three because they are different. Yeah, you're right. There is some nuance to this otherwise simple idea, like do fewer things, Right. And so limiting the big, that's about the number of like large commitments. It's more more than like an individual commitment, but like things that you regularly are working on. Right. So I'm doing marketing and I'm working on like this software product, but I'm also sort of working on this other software product. Now there's three major things that are like regularly generating like ongoing obligations. Keeping that small right up front. makes a difference, right? So once you've, like the argument is like once you've agreed to a big direction, there's a certain amount of work that necessarily generates that needs to be done. And so once you've said yes to too many big directions, there's not much else you can do downstream to really get away from doing too many things because, you know, each big thing you're working on, there's some minimum amount of work you have to do to keep that thing

rolling. And so all the downstream solutions to having the cues and the tracking the active and non-active, that can all get overwhelmed if you're working on too many big picture things because you just, you're not going to be able to even keep up with like the minimum effort required. When we think about the small, that's talking about more of like the overhead itself, the administrative, the small things that can eat up so much of your schedule. So that's like, how do we get our arms around that? How do we make sure that I'm not just like answering emails all day, like trying to. And some of that is how you deal with the better organize the smaller things in your life. A lot of that is how do you rearrange your work to

generate fewer small things? I think that's actually like more important than what you do once it's already there, right? Like by the time you're worried about how do I organize my overstuffed inbox, it's already too late. You need to figure out how to prevent so many messages from arriving in the first place. And then the pull not push is getting to that idea of I'm, this is what I'm working on actively. This is the stuff I'm waiting to work on. I'll pull one of those things in when I finish one of the things I'm working on. So the just sort of enforcing. But yeah, you need all of those things.

Like any one of these things by itself won't be enough. Pulling versus pushing, it's not enough if I have like seven major projects. Because the amount of things I'm working on actively at a time is just not going to be enough. Like things are going to, it's going to be a problem. If I don't control the small, even a relatively reasonable workload of commitments could overwhelm my whole life with like emails and meetings that can get out of control. really easily. So you've got to do all three of those things. Yeah. Yeah, my business coach for years had a three project rule. Basically, like, that's it. Any more than three big things you can't really do because you'll, as you said, drive yourself insane. Yep. And you won't move any of them

forward. Yeah. Because you'll just keep doing a little bit of time on each and nothing ever goes out of the queue then. Yeah. Right. Nothing ever gets done so that you can then move on. And That's as a small business, I'm sure you have this also, is that you've got to be spent a lot of time really thinking about like, well, what are those three? You know, those are important, important decisions. Give me an example of some of the things that we can do that fell into the category of making sure you don't keep getting more small things on your plate. You referenced email. I'm sure you have a host of different things, but pick one that sort of this, I think you call them task engine sometimes.

Yeah, like, that's one, right? So if you're, you're picking between different things to do, like, what's the right thing to measure when deciding, hey, which of these projects should I take on, right? We often measure difficulty in terms of like, oh, how hard will this be? Like, is this a hard challenge? Am I really going to have to learn something complicated? Is it going to be really law? This report I have to write is going to take forever to write.

Like, we think about the hardness of it, where I say what we really should. should probably also evaluate it on is how many small tasks is it going to generate? And more importantly, there's a particular type of small task I care about, which is going to be small tasks that are like relatively unpredictable when they arrive, relatively frequent, and require like a relatively prompt response. That's a killer. So if you have something that's generating, let me talk to this person and get back to them and then they're going to get back to me and then I got to make this call and then I got to jump on a call and have these meetings, that's a schedule killer. And so like one of the examples I gave in the book is I said, okay, imagine you're choosing between two hypothetical

projects. And one of them is going to be really hard intellectually. It's creating like a really large, some sort of report, right? It's like self-study or marketing report. It's going to take a lot of hours. It's going to be a lot of writing. It's going to be a lot of research. Like, it's going to be a hard thing to do. The other project is like organizing a client conference or something like that. And it's not as intellectually demanding. And, you know, there's a time frame. Like when we get here, it'll be done. I said, do. the hard report because it's all self-driven. You're doing research, you're writing, you control when you do that.

The client conference is going to be all emails and phone calls and caterers, and it's going to generate all of these interruptive small tasks that's going to make everything else impossible. So don't measure hardness when making a choice. Like I was arguing measure the amount of interruptive small tasks that a particular project's going to generate. And all other things being equal, I would minimize that second property. that's a really interesting insight to think about you know i'm i'm just sort of running through in my

head the things that i and and my person on my team choose to do and and seeing like oh yeah some of those definitely are the one you describe they're they're these open loops they're all these open loops there's this thing that'll drive me crazy on my like i go through a task list and oftentimes one of the statuses i have is waiting yeah you know and when those start to pile up, it starts to get really unmanageable, you know, because you don't know when they're going to come back. You don't know when it initially feels good. Like, okay, I did that. I did my part of it. It's now in waiting. I sort of mentally sort of check it off, except when it shows back up, it's not done. Yeah. And you don't know when it's going to show back up.

Exactly. Whenever. Yeah. I think, so I've long argued the real productivity poison, right? Like, the thing that kills output and makes people miserable is unscheduled messaging that requires responses. And the reason why that's that's sort of poison is that when something comes in, things are coming in that require you to respond, but you don't know when they're going to come in. This means you have to monitor these channels all the time, right? So if we're working on something that we're figuring out with back and forth messaging, so I don't know when your response is going to come.

But I have to see it pretty soon after it does because I have to bounce it back to you and time for you to bounce it back to me so that like we can kind of come to an agreement over email before like close a business or whatever. I have to check that email inbox all the time because I don't know when your message is coming in, but I know when it comes in, I need to respond to it quick. What happens when we have to check these inboxes all the time is that we're constantly inducing our brain to go into network target switching. We're seeing other things that are salient and important and from people like in our circles that are different than what you're different than what. we're doing, and whether we want to or not, our brain begins changing this context. So when I have to just jump into a quick reply to your email, it's not just the 19 seconds it takes for me to reply. That initiates a context switch in my brain. And when I come back to the other work, I have started my brain already trying to switch over to this other complicated context for this

task. And then I try to stop that and bring it back to what I'm doing. But then I have to check my inbox again five minutes later because there's other and then that starts another context switch and it's that intercontextual stasis that we put our brains into where I never give myself the 20 uninterrupted minutes required just to get my brain all in on a task that makes us miserable and it's why here's like the clearest purified example of this so people can test this in their own life why is it so hard to take an email inbox and just go chronologically answering emails why if like for a lot of people, that becomes incredibly difficult. You begin to feel a huge amount of resistance.

It's because every email is a different context and you're asking your brain the switch and switch and switch and switch. And it's killer. And your brain can't do it. And it's why people hate, like you think it should be easy. Like, why can I just go through message after message until my inbox is empty? Because you're switching your brain context so much that you get this massive resistance. It's why people give up and just bounce around looking for easy to answer messages. We can't switch context that much.

Like a big part of my advice to companies is that's what's killer, is context shifting, mainly caused by unscheduled messages that require response, find a more structured way to collaborate that is not dependent on unscheduled messaging, even if that more structured way to collaborate is a pain, and it means you might have to wait longer, and there's more rules to follow, and it's not as easy in the moment. I argue that is all worth it if you're saving someone from like the cognitive impossibility of I have to check in on like 20 unrelated conversations every five minutes. It's just the worst possible neurological context to try to get anything done. Right. And the context switching,

if that's all the tax you're paying, is actually not as bad as what mostly happens, which is you pop over to see if there's an email from Jim, and there's one from Ted that you weren't even thinking about. And now you're off down that rabbit hole. I mean, we all have these experience where you're like, I go to pick up my, this happens to me, I go to pick up my phone for a specific purpose. Yeah. And there is a message, a text message or whatever. Then I go chase whatever that thing is. And then I'm like, how did I even come here to do? Like I've completely, I mean, and I think that in addition to the context switching that you're talking about is the other real danger is that we just, you know, they used to use that term surf for the internet. But it's

the same thing. You're just following the wave wherever it happens to be going. which is very challenging. You wrote another, I don't know if you call them blog posts or essays, but they appear as blogs on sort of what we traditionally think of a blog is on your website. It was an interesting idea where you looked at texting as I'm paraphrasing here, the gateway drug to more serious problems that we have with like TikTok or Instagram. And your point was that people feel like they have to respond quickly. So they're being drawn back to their phone often.

I mean, the way I would almost make it as a former addict myself, it would be almost as if I was, you know, walking to the place where they sold drugs all the time and then was surprised, why do I keep buying drugs? Yeah. Right. I mean, the particular studies I was looking at, the connection they were drawing is social stress is a major driver of behavior. So social stress drives you back to your phone because you're stressed that someone you know has sent you a message. And if you're not responding, they will interpret it as you're ignoring them, right? Because we're really wired for this because if I'm in an actual forager band 100,000 years ago, these interpersonal connections are everything for my survival.

And if someone in my band is like tapping me on the shoulder and I ignore them, that could be a huge problem, right? Because they're going to think that like, oh, we have a bad relationship and I'm not going to share food. And it's a whole thing. So we have, we feel a lot of social stress around messaging. Even if there are modern conventions about, hey, we know this is not urgent, we know this is not time, you know, time sensitive. It's very difficult for our social mind to get beyond the idea of someone is tapping me on the shoulder. I better not ignore them.

So social stress drives people to their phones. Once they are habitually looking at their phones to try to satisfy this social stress, I'm going to make sure no one's text to me. Now you're in the addict. It's in the drugstore, right? It's like, oh, now that I'm there, there's all of these other things. things that are very shiny, right? That maybe like abstractly, if I'm nowhere near my phone, I'm not like, I really want to look at TikTok.

Like, it's sort of, you know, it's a weird kind of arbitrary behavior when looked at objectively. But when you're already on your phone, it's right there, right? And so it's this interesting idea that social stress starts the path for people, for some people. And it ends up in these highly engineered addictive things. But what actually gets you on the phone is not billions of dollars of investment in these apps, it's millions of years of evolution for a social brain. Now, this is a, it's very gender specific, so it's interesting. This affects women more than men because, uh, women are, they care more about social connections. They're a little bit more sophisticated than this than

men seem to be. Men in these studies have their own problems. So there's a, there's an interesting gender split on that too, which, which was interesting. So different people are drawn to their phones for different reasons. But I thought that was interesting is that our wiring, it's something so simple. The apps that no money is spent on. The apps that have no engineered addictiveness is the gateway drug to all like the shinier things. Right. Right. I mean, because once you're on your phone, you're kind of on your phone is what I have found. Yeah. You know, once I have it in my hand, I do the thing I'm going to do. And then there's almost this like, well, what else? I don't know how to describe it. It's almost a, shouldn't I be doing

something else while I'm here kind of thing? And things can be so situation context wise like that. I'll give you an example. Like my, I joke about this on. the show a lot, but it's not really a joke, which is my favorite way to escape when I'm working and I hit a hard patch is I start playing solitaire. It's a silly thing. I never crave playing solitaire anywhere else, except sitting in front of this computer. So if I don't come to this computer, I don't find myself randomly playing solitaire. But you sit me down in front of this computer, there's a chance that some part of my brain is going to start up, right? I'm saying that, like, I resonate a lot with exactly what you're saying. It's like, once I'm here in this

context, then I do this behavior. Take me out of that context. I don't do that behavior at all. I mean, this is the good news, bad news about phones and what, what like separates them from other types of addictions, especially more like chemical or substance addictions, is the good news is it's very situational, right? Which is not the case, you know, with other types of addictions, right? With a drug addiction, you will go way out of your way to find access, you know, to the drug or if I have an alcohol addiction. Like, I will go find, you know, alcohol. Or it's not the case with phones.

Like, you could be like, I use TikTok so much and it really, you know, bothers me. But if your phone is broken, you're not probably going to go get up off the couch and load up your laptop and go to TikTok.com. And go to, like, you could, you could take a little bit of effort. You're not going to do it. You're like, oh, it's not with me. The bad news is the situation is always with you because the phone is something that you always have on you, right? So it's like, hey, the good news is you're not going to have, like, addiction to seeking behavior. The bad news is you never have a need to seek because you have this thing with you all the time.

And that's where something like texting plays a big role because that's a good reason to have your phone if you worry about the social stress. Yes. And then you have, like, the beer bottles are just at the table with you. everywhere you go, right? Like it's so it's, and it means like the solution, though, is finding a way to break the constant companion model of your phone where you go back and think this phone is very useful. There's a lot of things I do with it. It's not a constant companion. I don't keep it on my person all the time. If you can change that relationship with your phone, a lot of these other behaviors get better. The number one thing that makes that hard to do is texting because people

say, well, that's the one thing where I do need to have it nearby because I'm in the middle of 19 different conversations, and I, I want to be a part of them. So it's like, you have to break the constant companion model. And then it's fine. If the phone is in your foyer and plugged in the charge, like, you're not going to go get it. You're not going to get up and go get it to look at the thing, the play wordle or whatever, right? But in order to get away with doing that, you have to get rid of any habitual connection that requires you to have it with you all the time. Right, which sometimes you can't do. But, you know, like I live my life more or less on do not disturbed to the chagrin of some people in my life. Yeah. And yet like there are times where I need to

be reachable by certain people for certain things. Yeah. In your latest podcast episode, or at least the latest one I listen to, you talk about this. You give some really useful strategies for here's how to handle it if you've got to get a text from your kids about soccer practice or, you know, but I think we all can lesson, at least my experiences, most of us can lesson how quickly we really think we need to respond to things. Yeah. With some concerted effort. Not perfection.

You know, you give the example of like a listener or a reader asking like, well, what do I do if my parents are in the hospital that afternoon and there's a group text? You're like, well, have your phone with you. Yeah. You're a group text. Yeah. You're your parents in the hospital. Yeah.

Sometimes you've got to do that. I want to come back to the book now for a second and talk about assessing a little bit more on quality. You talk about obsessing over quality. and then you also talk about people saying, well, but my problem is that I'm a perfectionist. And I was wondering if you could tell a story. And the reason I'm asking is two things.

I'm in London today. So, and I'm a huge Beatles fan. And today on my Beatles, on my day in London, I took a tour where I went and saw some of the key Beatles sites in London. And you have a Beatles story in the book. So it's too perfect to let go. Oh, I was a, I love that story. too, because it gets at exactly this tension between quality and perfectionism, but also

it's something I didn't really understand before, right? So, like, the whole story there is it's about Sergeant Pepper and about what's important about that album is that it's the first album that the Beatles did after they made a decision that was basically unprecedented in popular music up to that point is they said, we're not going to tour anymore. And this was, I went through the whole, this year leading up. to them making this decision was like a terrible touring year. They had all these, this was the bigger than Jesus year when, you know, but that was just

like the icing on the cake of, oh, they went to Japan and they, they insulted, you know, the emperor by accident, like, oh, this is a sacred place where you're doing your performance. They go to the Philippines and somehow they snub, you know, Milda Marcos and now suddenly they're like sabotaging the Beatles so that like they're just chased out of there, right? I mean, it's just they go to the South and they're having threats because of the bigger than Jesus. Like, they're just done. Like, we're not going to tour anymore. And which was, like, unprecedented, but they were an unprecedented band so they could say that.

What I didn't realize is, like, why was that a big deal? Well, because when you're writing and recording songs as a popular music act, you always are writing and recording with performance in mind. It's like, this can't be, we're pretty constrained in what we can do. It has to be like a four-piece band or a five-piece band can play it, right? So, like, it's pretty constrained. they go to, you know, Abbey Road Studios, I guess it was called that then, and still is. Still is. Yeah, that's probably one part of your tour.

Yeah. And suddenly it's like we can do anything on this album because we're never going to go on tour to play this. Like, why not have a sitar on here? Like, why not play with tape loops and changing the speeds of things? Like, we can do any sounds we want to do on here because we'll never have to be on stage at like Kandlestick Park playing dish or whatever. And it opened up this issue of. So you could spend forever working on this album.

Like, there's always more things you could do. And it was an interesting, it was an interesting tension because on the one hand, they needed to spend time to do this right. Quality mattered. They were trying to do something new. Quality mattered, right? It couldn't be like their first album. I got the number somewhere.

They basically recorded the first album in like a day and a half, right? It was like, it's crazy. Yeah, they'd been playing these songs again and again and again. They were tight. They showed up. They played them. They left. Right.

So it couldn't be that. But you could also go forever. And a lot of bands ended up having those problems in the 70s and 80s, the progressive rock movement that followed, where people would just stay in the studio forever trying to perfect a sound. And like they would never finish their album. And so they had the walk a tightrope. We want to spend more time than we ever have before to build something better than we ever had before. But we can't be in here forever. And the solution was, and I often mixed up the name of the various people, I think it was Brian Martin, who did this.

I think the manager, right? He's like, this is great, spend more time. but as soon as you had something that was like kind of done he released it as a single and he's like so there is a stake in the ground now like you don't have to finish this tomorrow

but we released a single a single so like this needs to be done now within the next X number of months so do the best thing you can but there's and it's more time you spent before but there's also a stake in the ground like you only have so much time so do the best you can in that constraint

push yourself not to build the best thing ever but to build the best thing you can in this constraint. Yeah. And, of course, it was, you know, their masterpiece and one of the most successful albums of all time. It worked out pretty well. Yeah.

That seems to be the solution to the perfectionist quality quandary. It can't be I'm going to produce the best thing ever. It is I'm giving myself a reasonable amount of time and I want to produce the best thing I'm capable of producing right now in that amount of time. I want to be better than what I did last and what's the best I can do in that constraint.

So it's not the best thing possible, but the best thing I can do in this time. And then I'm going to try to make the next. thing better. That's the mindset that builds quality that walks that tightrope between trying to get better and never releasing things. There's a book, I don't know if you've heard of it. It came out this year. It's by a British writer named Ian Leslie. And it's called John and Paul. You might like it because, A, he is an outstanding nonfiction writer. And it's a really interesting look at their relationship and how the creativity that came out was influenced by their personal

relationship. And it's a really, really good book about music and creativity and highly recommended. Oh, interesting. So that would probably give an even deeper insight. I mean, they were just, they had that locked in. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they worked and they shipped and they did the work, but they also cared about the quality. And I think that aspect of their relationship is probably underappreciated, like how good they were at the art of producing good things, which sounds like really self-evident. Like, yeah, you try to do really good things. But now, there's a whole art to producing, and maybe I should say shipping good things. Like there's a whole art to that because it's about pushing yourself, exposing yourself to influence, like giving yourself the

capacity to grow, but also like continuing to execute and ship and get feedback. And so like this balance between production and growth and stretch and ambition and practicality. There's a real, there's a real art to being really good. Yeah. That I think we just, we just think it's like, oh, you're just a genius. So like the stuff, you're like everyone else. You sit down and you write songs. It's just years are much better. Yeah. And it's much more complicated than that. It is much more complicated than that for sure. Let's wrap up with you giving us one small thing. If somebody wants to embrace slow productivity, what is one thing they might be able to do today as a starting place? Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this

before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly bites of wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection, and links to former guests who can guide you, even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose, and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed.net slash newsletter. Again, one you feed.net slash newsletter. I'm going to break the question, give two answers, a bottom up, top down. Both of what things you could do like today you could start on, but one small one's big, right? All right. The bottom up answer, I would say, you know, workload management is probably, like, the right way to start.

And what's the right way to start with workload management is write down everything you've agreed to work on? Just force yourself to confront. Here are all the things I am working on professionally. I'm working on this project. I'm in charge of this and that. I'm taking on this. And look at that list and say, is this reasonable? And if it's not reasonable, what size would give me margin?

And, like, to me, margin means I usually use. a four-day rule. So it's like, if someone just randomly came and took a day out of your week because, like, you're sick or something like that, could they do that without it being a problem? And if they could, then you have enough margin in your schedule, right? If you're like, no, if I lost a day this week, like, this is going to be a huge problem, you probably have too many things. So just looking at and confronting, and my show, my podcast, we call this Confronting the productivity dragon, this is what I'm committed to, reasonable or not. It's not, I can't, ignoring it, doesn't make it go away. And then being like, where should that

really be. That's often like the first step towards workload management. This should be half that. And now I'm confronting that reality. Most people just don't really know what they have. The top down thing to do would be to make a decision of like, what is one thing in my professional context? It might take me some time that I could get great at. Because ultimately, I call the obsessing over quality principle, this is the glue that makes everything else work. Because if all you're doing is trying to reduce your workload to something reasonable to slow down how much you're working on things you could end up eventually just an antagonistic relationship with work like yeah like I guess all the stuff I'm doing is about like doing less work and people trying

to give me work is bad like a necessary evil that I'm trying to minimize as soon as you add into it I want to do something really well it changes your relationship to this you're trying to minimize other stuff so that you can do this better not just because work is bad right you have a reason for trying to push back against a pseudo-productivity. And it's what's going to give you the leverage to push back even better because the more valuable you get, the more leverage you have. So, like, decide right away, what is something I could get good at? You even take six months or a year.

But something I could master and be really proud about and do it a high level of quality. Because, like, that ultimately is going to be the engine of slow productivity being sustainable in your life. So it's like the negative thing is confront your real workload. The positive thing is identify the skill product or ability. that's going to be ultimately your key to freedom. Excellent. Well, that is where we're going to wrap up for today.

Cal, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for the book. And like I said, you've got a great podcast that keeps giving people information. And your website with your essays are really good also. So thank you so much. Well, thank you. I always enjoy chatting. Thank you so much for listening to the show.

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