The School of Greatness - 71 How to Increase Your Productivity, Save Time, and Get More Done with Chris Bailey

Episode Date: June 5, 2014

Would you put your whole life on hold to follow your passion? This week our guest did just that. After graduating college, he took the 12,000 he had and invested everything into his passion for productivity. Get all the information from the show listed for you here: www.lewishowes.com/71

This is episode number 71 with productivity expert, Chris Bailey. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Hey greats, thanks so much for tuning in today. And I want to share with you two quick quotes. The first one is by Alexander Graham Bell.

Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus. The second quote by Brian Tracy. You cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that one will be enough, at least for the time being. Now, I thought those two quotes would be great for you guys, as it's all about being the most productive that you can be in this podcast today. And I'm bringing you a young man by the name of Chris Bailey,

who spent a year of experiments, learning about all the different productive ways that we can apply this to our business, to our life, to our relationships, to every moment of every single day, and all the different things that we can save time, energy, and attention to be more productive. And I had a great conversation with him, and I'm excited to share this with you in just a few moments. But as we get wrapped up in a lot of busy things, at least as I know for as an entrepreneur, I'm traveling the world, I'm running a couple businesses, I'm advising, I'm coaching, I'm investing, I'm always launching new ideas and products, running the things that I currently have going, and also working out, having relationships, and living life. That sometimes I can get distracted. You know,

I get distracted just checking my Twitter and Instagram stats, you know, throughout the day. So there's a lot of distractions. And so that's why I was good. I thought it was good for us to get back to being focused and getting things done and living a life, a productive life. So I'm going to bring Chris on in just a second, but I want to give you guys a quick update of what I'm up to. This whole month, I am gone. I'm currently in New York City for the week working on my book, and then I'm off to Alabama to train with the USA national team for a week before we go to Brazil to play in some friendly games with the USA team, and then off to Uruguay to compete in the Pan American Championships.

And I'm extremely excited. This is what I've been training for for years, for the opportunity to continue to play and represent the United States of America and wear the USA patch across my chest. So I'm extremely pumped for this journey that I'm about to take on. And it's time for me to be focused and productive as well with every day that I have in this month in all areas of my life. So I'm very excited to bring on Chris and introduce this topic. And make sure to stay updated with me over on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, because I'm going to be posting pictures throughout the entire month about my journey with the USA national team on our journey to try to make the Olympics in 2016. So hopefully

I can connect with you guys all online. And with that, let's go ahead and jump in and learn about how to be the most productive we can be on this episode with the one and only Chris Bailey. thanks everyone again for coming on to the school of greatness podcast very pumped for this episode because it's all about productivity and i've got a new acquaintance friend on that we just connected with before this interview his name is mr chris bailey what's up chris how are you buddy i'm. I'm a bit warm. It's like 95 degrees Fahrenheit, like 30, 35 Celsius here in Ottawa, but hanging in there. Yeah, it's only 70 or 75 right now in LA, which is kind of strange that it's warmer up in Canada than it is here right now. But I guess that's...

Everything's backwards. Yeah. But that's kind of like, you know, I kind of consider Ottawa. That's like Toronto area, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a few hours away. It's essentially Toronto for,

for anyone who's listening. I still consider that kind of like the Midwest in my mind, even though it's like a colder Midwest, it's still like, it's really hot in the summer, doesn't it? Oh man, it's unbearable.

It's humid, right? Really humid, close to 100% humidity all the time. Oh, okay, cool. Gotcha. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, growing up in Ohio, I dealt with humidity constantly.

It was just miserable. I mean, I love it there, but it's miserable. It's not the heat. It's the humidity. That's what people say. It is, man. Because I'm like a huge, massive man, right? And I've got this massive body that if I walk outside, it just starts.

Just a big wall of man. Just an ogre. And when I walk outside, I just sweat pours out from every part of my body. And the humidity just like drains me. Oh, man. I'm running on like, I don't want to talk too much about the weather, but like I'm running on three or four coffees right now. And I'm just, you don't want to be in the same room. I'm not sweating. I'm percolating right now. It's crazy.

Three or four coffees, that doesn't sound productive. It is. It is, depending on the situation. Well, we'll get into that. You created an experiment called A Year of Productivity, experiment called a year of productivity where basically from may to may in 2013 to 2014 you did this year-long experiment actually many experiments where uh some of them one was meditating for 35 hours over seven days another you watched 70 hours of ted talks in a week then you did another experiment where you used your smartphone for only an hour a day for three months, which I don't know how you did that. Then you were, there's one here that says being a complete slob for a week. Yeah, that's kind of the ones where like the idea of it's really cool and the first few days are really fun, but then it's like you hate yourself by day four. Right,

exactly. I like this drinking only water for a month. I really like that. Taking a three-hour afternoon siesta. So you have all these different experiments, and I want to dive into some of them and really kind of hear about the results of these and what the overall theme is of how to be the most productive. You've done dozens of these experiments, but what is the most productive thing that someone can do to optimize their performance in their work, business, lifestyle, relationships? I don't want you to answer that

right now. I want to wait till the very end. But first off, let me ask you, what led you to do this project in the first place? Yeah. So I graduated like a year ago or so last May. And when I graduated, I got a couple of full- time job offers right out the gate. But I decided, you know, if there was any time that I could kind of say screw it and do something I was passionate about, that was kind of the perfect break point. Right. Right. last 10 years of my life, I've just been obsessed with this stuff. As weird as it might be to be obsessed about productivity, I've always been obsessed with managing everything I have to do and de-stressing and getting as much energy as possible and managing my time as best as I can. So I kind of saw this year as a year to follow my passion and what I was interested in. I'm lucky it got the success it has. And was there anyone that inspired you to take this on?

I know Tim Ferriss does a lot of experiments with productivity in his body and physical things. And so does I think Dave from Bulletproof Executive does a lot of experiments around health. Did anyone like that kind of inspire you or motivate you or you you just kind of like, this is what I want to do? Yeah, it was kind of like, yeah, this is what I wanted to do with my time. I kind of looked at, you know, when I graduated, I looked at how much money I had in my bank account because I wanted to consider like every single option I had. You know, of course, when these like two jobs are being flashed in your face by a couple of companies with nice salaries and nice benefits and everything, it's quite easy to go the comfortable route. But then I looked at what I was passionate about.

There were a few people that kind of pulled me in certain directions on the way. Definitely the folks you mentioned did. But at the end of the day, it was really something that I myself was passionate about. And that's what took me to to where i am today and can i ask you how much money did you have in your bank account when you were done with college and because you were basically like i'm gonna do this for a year yeah did you have like money saved up for the year 12 grand 12 grand okay and were you living at home or did you stay at an apartment or kind of no i was in a yeah i was in an apartment at the time with my girlfriend.

Okay, cool. Yeah. 12 grand for the year. So you're like, all right, this is the time. And if I fail and it bombs and it was a good – it was basically like a master's program that you did on your own. Yeah, kind of like a real world kind of master's. Yeah, which is probably the best thing you could have done. As opposed to going to school and having someone teach you how to do this when you could have just done it on your own and experiment

and share with the world what you were doing. Oh, man. Totally, yeah. So I applaud you for that, taking the courageous step to not go back to school. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think this is another way of learning which you can apply and build a business from right away. So pretty cool. Yeah, schools, it's one of those things.

It's not for everybody. Everybody kind of goes there. Maybe this is starting to change, but people go because it seems like the natural progression, you know, you finish up high school, then you, okay, what's my next step? Okay, everybody's going to university, so I'm going to go to university. And that's what I did, and it's easy to kind of go down that route, but it's definitely not for everyone. Yeah, what I tell people about school and college is that it really developed my character i learned about character relationships and understanding the psychology of people but it didn't teach me anything about getting a job or making money yeah that's i learned how to make money after school and by finding mentors and

working one-on-one with people and doing the research and just doing the work myself. But school definitely set me up to be successful in doing all of that. Yeah, it's a good launching point, isn't it? Exactly, exactly. So you talk about, first let's go off and just what does productivity mean to you? What does that word mean to you and what does it mean to live a productive life? Yeah, I kind of see productivity as a way to do, like, let's say you have 10 hours of work to do every day. I see it as a way to do that 10 hours of work in five or six hours. So you have more time and at the end of the day, hopefully more energy to bring to the things that you actually want to do. And so I think a lot of

people approach it as a way to do more, more, more, more, more. But then, you know, I would question, I really, really question that approach because then when do you stop? If your idea is to always do more, you know, what's your kind of break off point? So I kind of start with the outcomes that I want to achieve. And I think productivity is all about achieving the outcomes that you want to achieve over the course of the day. Every day I define the three outcomes that you want to achieve over the course of the day. Every day I define the three outcomes that I want to achieve that day. So I don't typically have a to-do list. Of course, I capture everything that I have to do in my system, but I really kind

of keep coming back to these three outcomes. And these three things are, you know, if I live a day of my life, these are the things that I want to be different in either my world or somebody else's world. These are things that I want to have created. And so productivity is a way to achieve your outcomes. That kind of sounds corny, but achieve your outcomes in less time so you have more time to do the things that are actually meaningful and important to you, as well as making sure your outcomes are meaningful and important in the first place. Right. So you talk about the, is it called Pomodoro technique? Yeah, the Pomodoro. It's named after that little kitchen timer thing.

Gotcha. Now, what is the Pomodoro technique? Yeah, the Pomodoro technique is when you work for 25 minutes, then you take a five-minute break, and you keep repeating that cycle. And so what that, and you only focus on one thing during that 25 minute chunk of time. And so what that does is that tells your mind that there's a hard stop in 25 minutes. And so you end up saying to yourself, you know, I could do anything for 25 minutes. You know, I'm going to clean the entire basement in this 25 minutes. And it really channels your focus and your attention into a narrow target so you can actually hit it and get that thing done over those 25 minutes.

It sounds like kind of a weird hack because it's just a way to manage your schedule differently on the surface. But on a bit deeper, on a more granular level, it's this really powerful way to manage your attention and your focus, I think. Yeah. I mean, when I was in class in school, specifically middle school and high school, you know, there are 50 minutes and then you have like a five or 10 minute break to the next period. Yeah. And it was just so hard to do that for eight hours a day For me, at least, to stay focused and retain the information. I was just like 50 minutes of this lecture or whatever we're doing. It seemed like it was so much.

But 25 minutes? Yeah. I feel like I can do anything for 25 minutes. Exactly, yeah. And get a lot done. And if I have that deadline. You know, whenever we create deadlines for ourselves, I've got a product I'm launching actually later tonight.

And it's like today I'm getting more done than I've done probably in the last two weeks because product I'm launching actually later tonight. And it's like, today I'm getting more done than I've done probably in the last two weeks because I have to get it done tonight. Yeah. You know, something kind of magical happens when you schedule less time for something. You know, when I coach folks or speak or whatever it is that I do, you know, I always tell people like, okay, pick the important things in your life and don't schedule more time for them. Schedule less time for them them and that seems counterintuitive but when you limit how much time you spend on something you actually force yourself to expend more energy and more focus over less time so you can get that thing done faster and that's why the technique is so powerful yeah and i you know another example i, I'm working on my next book and

I was writing a book proposal for it. And I gave myself, uh, two months with my agent to get it done. And really I got pretty much 80% of it done in the last week. That seems to be the way it always goes. It's kind of like, why don't I just give myself two weeks and make it and get it done a lot faster. So where did this Pomodoro technique come from? Oh, I have no idea. There's a fancy website and stuff dedicated to it. I think it was just some guy's idea. And it kind of stuck within this tribe of people who are really into productivity. And it's a good idea. There's a reason it stuck, I think. How did you find that this was something that was useful for you with all the other productivity time management tips out there?

Why is this one that you talk about and that you use? Yeah, I don't use it all the time. And I wouldn't recommend somebody use this technique all the time because it kind of wears out after a while. If it becomes a part of the tapestry of your day where you work for 25 minutes, then take a five minute break, it's not going to be as effective. And so I usually use it in these short bursts of time when I have to, when it's crunch time for a proposal or to get a post out there or to prep for something or other.

That's kind of when I use it. And the rest of the time I, the time, I think the biggest, one of the biggest ways that somebody can schedule their time to become more productive is to give themselves room to control their own schedule. And so if you have these really, really rigid days where you're bouncing around from one meeting to the next, where you kind of feel like

your schedule's out of your control, I think you feel a lot less motivated at the end of the day. But so I think there's something to be said for keeping control of your schedule in the moment. And so I don't try to overuse it or anything like that. Gotcha. I want to ask you a question about technology. Lately, I go in spurts. But basically, I don't know if anyone else feels this way who's listening, but I feel like it's hard for me to focus for five or ten minutes without checking my phone or stats or updates or comments on whatever I'm posting on social media or my blog, you know,

whatever it may be, there's always some stat to check for me. And it's always like, oh, what's happening? I can stare at the analytics for my site for like two hours and get nothing done. It's crazy. It's terrible. It's basically porn. It's like information porn. It is. So one, do iPhones and technology help us to be more productive or are they an energy suck and just really create these distractions that make us unproductive? I don't think they're an energy suck. I think they're an attention suck at the end of the day. I think what it comes down to is there's a theory that I love from Clayton Christensen from Harvard. And he says that we should look, when we analyze our devices and what we do with them, we should look at the

jobs that we hire our devices to do for us. And so when you look at your phone, I have mine in front of me here. I use it as a Twitter machine. I hire it to do that job for me. I hire it to be my alarm clock. I hire it to be an iPod to play music for me. I hire it to be a camera. And these jobs by themselves are really interesting and really powerful. We have a freaking camera in our pockets walking around all the time. It's incredible. So technology at the end of the day, I think, is a tool.

And so in that kind of state, you know, a hammer isn't good or bad. You can create with it or you can destroy something with it. And I think a cell phone or technology is much the same way. You know, I think people tend to focus too much on these kind of productivity hacks. And, you know, if you search for to-do lists on the iPhone, you get like a gazillion apps and I don't use any of them myself. And I still, I consider myself pretty productive. So I think it comes down to the jobs that you hire your device to do for you. That said, you know, a lot of the activities that the average person does on their smartphone, or I'm using my smartphone as an example, but this applies for anything,

are pretty low leverage activities. Like you don't really change many things in the world by checking Twitter every five minutes on your phone. And so there are use cases like that that make absolutely no sense productivity wise, but are addictive, are very stimulating and very entertaining, which is why people do them. But on the other hand, it's great that we have a weather app that you can check the weather in five seconds anywhere on the planet. That's incredible when you think about it. So I don't know. I'm kind of mixed in that way. I see technology as a tool that's kind of neutral. I think it's helped a lot of people become more productive. And I think it's hindered a lot of people in becoming more productive. But you have to go back to step zero and kind of ask yourself, okay, what jobs am hiring this device to do for me? And that's kind

of one of the big things. Sorry, I ramble. You can cut me off at any time. But one of the big things I've learned over the course of the year is productivity is all about intention. You know, you have to, you're perfectly productive when you intend to do something, then you do it. If you intend to relax for the day, then you relax for the day. I think you're productive, even though you don't actually do anything to change anything in the world. So you have to start with the intention. And that's kind of where people fall into a trap on devices like these because you get sucked in, right? You go on autopilot.

I did this terrible thing at the beginning of my year of productivity. Thank God I don't do it anymore because it's terrible. But I wouldn't get out of bed. I'd spend an hour and a half in bed every morning. I'd bounce from Twitter, then I'd go to email, then I'd go to Instapaper, then I'd go to Feedly. Feedly wasn't around back then. But I would go to my RSS reader, let's say, to check on any news. I'd go to my Analyte. I would bounce around between all these different apps for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours in bed and actually get nothing done.

Right. Whereas I could have gotten up right away and read a book and meditated or something. You're one of those people who lay in bed every morning. Exactly. Just check stats. Yeah. Oh, it's terrible. Yeah.

So how does someone like me and you and anyone else who does this that just check stats for an hour throughout the day or whatever, how does someone change their habit or their intention? You know, the intention may be clear, I'm going to get things done. But then when things are popping up, or you're just like, you go back to this habit of checking, how does someone change that habit or only set certain times to check and limit it as opposed to hours and hours or whatever? What do you find is productive in changing that habit? Yeah. I think one of the big things is you have to be honest with yourself. And step A is slow down. It's very easy to bounce around between distraction to distraction to again and again

and again until you're laying in bed for two hours. But you have to be honest with yourself about, okay, what do I want to do with my time right now? And you have to slow down. Slowing down is key to kind of observing the intention behind your actions, right? Intention behind your actions, it's like wood behind an arrow. You absolutely need it or else you're just going to be on autopilot and you're not going to really have control over what you're doing in any moment in time. You know, we need habits. Habits are important. You know, I interviewed a man named Charles Duhigg for my project. He wrote a book called The Power of Habit.

And 40% of everything that we do every day is a habit. You know, half our life is a habit. We have good habits. We have habits to visit the gym every morning and meditate and eat well and get into a good sleeping routine. There are definitely good habits, but the key to kind of changing and rewiring bad habits, I think, is observing your intention behind your actions. So, you know, I would recommend slowing down. And, you know, slowing down is one of those weird kind of recommendations that whenever I give

it to somebody, they're like, okay, screw off. What do you mean? Productivity is about going faster, faster and doing more and more. But what happens when you slow down is you can observe the intention behind your actions and not do things that would make you less productive in the first place, like checking analytics for two hours, right? If you can periodically, like when I started doing this, I started playing around with this idea because there wasn't much written on it. And so I set an hourly chime on my phone. You know, there's a million apps that'll do this for you. Where every hour, on the hour, I would just step back and think, okay, am I on autopilot right now? Or am I doing something that

I'm intending to do? And so I think slowing down is the key to doing it. And just being honest with yourself, like people lie. Sorry, I'm rambling again. But people lie to themselves all the time, I think. Like, you know, how many times do you set your alarm clock and hit snooze 10 times every morning? And like how many times do you like binge watch on a Netflix show and tell yourself, okay, I'm just going to watch one more episode of House of Cards or just New Black.

And you end up watching the entire thing and going through two buckets of Ben and Jerry's when you're doing all that. That's the best. It's the... Dude. I was going to swear. It's the greatest. When House of Cards 2 came out out i watched the whole thing in a day and a half i said all i'm gonna do this weekend

is watch house of cards i didn't care yeah not yeah yeah my girlfriend my girlfriend went to guatemala like the day she had to leave for guatemala she led a trip there the day after the second season launched and i promised her like like, you know. You'd wait. Arden, I'll wait. I'll wait. But the next morning I thought like, fuck it. I'm just going to watch the entire thing. I'm sorry. I dropped an F-bomb.

I'm sorry about that. You're good. Okay. So I just interviewed the last episode, episode number 70. It was about, it was with Carmine Gallo. And he has a book out called talk like ted and basically in this interview we go over the top secrets of public speakers from ted and how you can apply that to your own public speaking and in one of your experiments you watched i think 296 ted talks

is that right yeah you got it 70 hours of ted in seven days. So which ones were your favorite and which ones speak directly about productivity? Oh, man, you're really going to ask me my favorites? Maybe give a couple that came out and which was the best one that covers productivity, if you remember. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's like the entire experiment was a blur. So it's hard to pick the talks that kind of rise above the rest of them but you know the real the real talks that kind of stick with you and this is something interesting that i found throughout this experiment were the ones that kind of struck you at a deeper level like anybody can talk about

stats and anybody can kind of be enthusiastic about the stats because this is their work. You know, TED is where people come to talk about their work and what inspires them the most. But the most inspiring talks and the talks that actually changed me when I watched them were the ones that kind of hit me at a deeper emotional level. emotional level. And so, you know, some examples of this, obviously the most watched TED talk of all time was by Ken Robinson, where he talks about how schools kill creativity. There's a reason it's the number one TED talk. It's because he makes you laugh. And when you're laughing, he throws these like little pellets of wisdom into your open mouth. It's incredible how he combines the two kind of emotions. He uses humor and he uses that as a way to connect people on a deeper level. That was one that really struck me.

There was one about, I don't remember his name, but he talked about how unconditional love is so – unconditional acceptance is more important than unconditional love or is just as important as unconditional love. And he's somebody who went through a bunch of hardships and struggles as someone who's gay throughout his history. And he talked about those and he brought them to the stage. And he wasn't afraid to be vulnerable in front of the audience. So he connected on that kind of emotional level. And so it's these talks that really kind of strike you at a deeper emotional's, oh, there's one other one. I think his name was Ben Zander, where he talked about classical music and how classical music, everybody actually loves classical music. They just don't know it yet. They just haven't been exposed to the right type of classical music. And he plays classical music. He connects with you through his medium, but he does so at that kind of deeper level. And so that was another one.

I think his last name was Xander, but I don't have it in front of me. Yeah, we'll check it out. We'll link it up in the show notes if we find it. Yeah, throw it in the show notes. I'll send you the links to these talks that I'm a little bit talking about right now. Okay, cool, yeah. That I'm somehow, yeah. So some talks that'll kind of make you more productive. There was one by, I think his name was Russell Foster and he's a circadian neuroscientist, I think. And he studies sleep and how sleep impacts your attention throughout the day and how you manage your attention,

all that kind of stuff and how sleep impacts your life. And he talks about what we know about sleep and what we don't know about sleep. So that was an interesting one with productivity. You know, one of the things that I write about a lot on the website is that, you know, one of the best ways to become more productive is actually really, really boring on the surface, right? You know, you can hack around with your time and downloading to-do list tabs on your iPhone. But the biggest thing you can do to become more productive, I think, is the basic stuff. It's getting enough sleep. It's exercising. It's eating well. And these are kind of the biggest things that people miss. Like energy is the fuel that you burn throughout the day in order to get

stuff done. I really, really, really believe that. And getting enough sleep should be one of the most important things you do every single day so you bring more energy to your work and not just throw more time at stuff like we talked about. So that talk was an interesting one about why we sleep. Yeah, I'll back that up. I interviewed a guy named Amir Rosic, and he lives in Toronto as well, I believe. And he talks about the power of sleep and how you actually can live a longer life when you sleep a certain way every night with a certain amount of hours and how you can be

productive, actually get bigger, faster, stronger, be mentally sharper. So I definitely believe in sleep as opposed to working yourself to the bone every day and having nothing left in the tank. Yeah. That's one of the biggest mistakes people make, I think. Yeah. Just wearing yourself out. It goes back to that thing, you have to be honest with yourself when you try to become more productive. You have to be aware of, you know, what you want out of the moment. That sounded really corny, what you want out of the moment. But you have to kind of have this awareness behind your actions and know why you're, it's kind of like what Simon Sinek talks about. I think you had him on a few shows ago. You know, you have to be, you have to know why you're doing what you're

doing and connecting with the why behind your actions, not just if you run a company and connecting with your why, but when you run your life, you have to connect with the why of why you're doing what you're doing. Yeah, that's that. Sure. Sorry. Again, I ramble. No, it's all good. One of the other experiments you had was working 90 hours a week now did you find yourself getting more done when you were focusing all this time on tasks or what did you find i found i procrastinated like way more and i you know we we talked about throwing more time at a problem when you throw more time at a problem it just forces you to not care about your time. You care

about your time less and less the more time you throw at something. You know, that's why deadlines are so powerful. That's why it's so powerful when, you know, you tell your agent that a week from now you'll have your proposal done. You'll light a fire under your ass to get that proposal done. Time is this, it's the easy way to kind of think you're going to become more productive. And what do I mean by that? I see productivity as the confluence of three things, how you manage your time, how you manage your energy, and how you manage your focus and your attention. And you absolutely need all three ingredients. And where your time, your energy, and your attention kind of meet in the middle, that's how productive you are on a day-to-day basis. That's kind of where the sweet spot is.

And so people have this tendency, this is something I found throughout this experiment, they have this tendency to throw more time at a problem instead of finding ways to get more mental or physical energy, instead of finding ways to focus on the right things or not focus on things that are low leverage. People spend too much time focusing on managing their time and throwing more time at problems instead of throwing more energy or focus at problems. If you have a proposal to do and you give yourself a 90-hour work week to get it done in, throughout that week, you might be focusing on that proposal 30% or 40%. 30% or 40% of your focus, your attention might be dedicated towards that proposal at any given moment. But when you learn to tinker with your time and schedule less time for something

instead of just throwing more time at it, what you do is you channel more of your focus and your attention into that task so you can get it done. And instead of spending, you know, 30 or 40 percent of your attention on it, you can dedicate 90 percent of your attention to that thing and get it done better and dive into it deeper and produce a better result at the end of the day. And so that's kind of the big thing I learned throughout this kind of mini experiment within my year-long experiment. People have the tendency to throw more time at their problems when they should be throwing more energy and focus at them. So time, energy, and focus is the three things that when you combine them all together equally,

you're the most productive. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of something I realized towards the end of my project. I realized that every single thing I wrote on a year of productivity could be divided into one of these three buckets. It had to do with time management, energy management, or attention management. Yeah, and the sweet spot where they meet in the middle

is how productive you are. I like that, interesting. And there was something else that I saw or read on your site somewhere about productivity or how you gauge what you're gonna be working on. I can't remember, tell me if this sounds familiar, but you're something about how impactful it is, how fun it is.

Yeah, like the highest leverage activities. Is that what it is? Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, you had like three different things, like financially, the impact, and like the amount of fun or something like that. Am I? Yeah, yeah.

What is that? Well, I think you have like a number of areas in your life. Like you can kind of from a 10,000 foot level, like, you know, on the maps app, go back to your smartphone, you know, that kind of zoom out button where you kind of, you press it, then it kind of zooms out to where you are. Um, this is kind of like the 10,000 foot view of where you are and you can, how you channel your time, your energy and your attention, you channel it into one of, I think, seven hot spots or so. Like your mind, your body, your emotions, your relationship, your career, your finances, and having fun.

So that's kind of the high-level view of your life. Everything you do fits into one of those buckets. Some people throw in spirituality there, but I personally don't. I think that works into a few of the other characteristics. And so one of the best ways to become more productive is to figure out the highest leverage activities in each of these three different or each of these areas. And the way I do that, and I forget where this idea originated, I wish I could give him or her credit, but is to ask yourself, you know, make a list of all the activities you do at, say, your work and pick out of all those activities and think, you know, if I could only do one of these

activities out of this entire list all day long, what would it be? And then ask yourself, okay, if I can only do two activities out of all of these things that I do in day long, what would it be? And then ask yourself, okay, if I can only do two activities out of all of these things that I do in my work, what would the second activity be? And do that again for the third thing. And those are the three activities, just the few high leverage activities where you contribute 80 or 90% of the value to whoever you work for. And the same is true if you're an entrepreneur. For example, for my project, I did this exercise. It's difficult to do at first, but then I realized that the highest leverage activities that I could do were reading, reading books to generate more material and

reading articles and writing, writing about those books and articles and experimenting. And again, that goes back to writing because I wrote about these experiments. And that's where I contributed 80 to 90% of the value in what I did. And it worked out for me in the end. Like, you know, especially when you work for somebody, whether you work for somebody or whether you work for yourself, especially when you work for somebody, you get paid and your performance gets measured against very specific variables. You get paid for specific and measurable outcomes that you produce in your work. And this is one of the best ways to not only identify those outcomes, but channel your time and your focus and your energy into those outcomes every day.

your time and your focus and your energy into those outcomes every day. I like it. I like that. And at the end of the day, you did all these experiments and you're still doing more experiments. I see some progress right now, reducing your body fat, two weeks of living ultra productively, waking up at 5.30 a.m. every morning. So you're still doing these experiments. But at the end of the day, what have you found based on your, I guess, research and findings and experiments over the last year? What have you found to make you the most productive and make most people the most productive throughout the day?

What are the things that they need to do? That's a cool question. Again, I'm going to give a really, really boring answer. The basics is usually what people need the most and they forget. Yeah. And it sounds so cliche because people have repeated this thousands of times. I don't know how many times in my life talking to people that they say, oh, yeah, get enough sleep, man. Or yeah, you should totally exercise. Or yeah, you have to eat well, you know, from hundreds of different people. And I ignored them. And instead I downloaded a bunch of apps about productivity that I just wasted time with.

You know, it's, it's the basics. It's these boring cliche things that people bother, that people repeat again and again and again but the reason people bother to repeat them in the first place is because there's this huge nugget of truth behind everyone like you need enough sleep to have enough energy exercise releases all kinds of you you know this probably more than anyone exercise releases these incredible endorphins and allows you to focus and bring more energy to what you're doing. Eating well, you burn food as fuel throughout the day to get stuff done. People don't put high-octane food into their body. They eat crap all day and so they burn out by 5 p.m. Another thing, I would add this to the list, is meditation. You know, people, meditation is one of these ideas

that people have a lot of resistance to because it's this really ambiguous kind of term. But it really, it's a really powerful concept. You know, neuroscientists all over the world have shown that it calms you down. It increases blood flow to your brain. It makes your brain actually age slower. It increases the amount of gray matter in your brain. It makes it easier to get into a flow

state. And I personally think, remember that old disk defragmenter in Windows XP, where you ran it, then it rearranged the blocks in your hard drive? I kind of see meditation as kind of the defragmenter for your thoughts. And so you have all these thoughts and ideas that you have to process over the course of the day. And a lot of the times it's hard to make sense of them and organize them into the right places. But meditation is this beautiful way to step back and not only see the intention behind your actions, but rearrange the actions in your mind about what the most important things are and what you should actually be doing. So meditation is this huge idea that seems kind of hippy-dippy on the surface. And you think, okay, how can sitting on a cushion for 15 minutes every morning make me more productive?

And I fell into that trap for years, but then I actually started doing it. Like you spend all day, every day doing something. Like whether you're just relaxed, even when you're relaxing, you're doing something. You're relaxing. But when you meditate, you create this kind of air pocket of time. When you do this kind of air pocket in your schedule where you do absolutely nothing for however long you're sitting for meditation. Every time your mind wanders to think about something, you bring your attention gently back to your breath. And what that does is it creates this kind of air pocket in your schedule where you're doing nothing. And it really allows you to get a perspective on everything you're doing. And going back to what we were just talking about, it lets you step back to see your life from this

kind of 10,000 foot level. So you can see how you're spending your time, your energy, and your attention across these activities, your mind, your body, your emotions, your relationships, your career, your finances, and your fun. And so it's this really powerful activity. Yeah. I mean, I can attest to that just because I remember the most powerful five, six months of my, I guess, college experience. I was meditating every day. I was doing a guided audio meditation that I would listen to and go through the experience for about 30 minutes every day. And I was so on fire. Like everything was on, like I could not be stopped. I was just in the zone for six months or whatever it was in the

sports and school relationships. Like I was healthy. I wasn't getting injured. It was amazing. I was sleeping well. And I, for some reason stopped that for like 10 years, that process. And I picked it up about four months ago and I'm doing it every night before I go to sleep it kind of puts me to sleep and then I wake up first thing in the morning I do that it's only about 13 minutes but for me I just find my intention throughout the day is much clearer

yeah you can kind of the cloud is kind of lifted you can kind of see the matrix and know why you're doing what you're doing exactly so I really believe in that and so just to recap what you said, the basics, which is eating right, sleeping, and meditating. And exercising. And exercising, yes.

Yeah. Eating and sleeping right, meditating daily, and then exercising. Yeah. And I know I sound like a mom giving these types of advice, but people forget about this stuff. It's the basic, basic stuff that people don't bother to do. It's easy to not meditate because it's a task that's important, but it's not necessarily urgent. There's all these tasks in your life that are very, very urgent, but not important, like checking email that are easy to focus on. It's easy to put out fires all day long,

but the highest leverage activities are usually, they usually lie in the quadrant where you're doing activities that are important but not necessarily urgent. I like this. This is great stuff, my man. And if anyone goes to ayearofproductivity.com, you can check out everything that Chris has gone through over the last year. And then there's an experiments page that covers-

All the pain I've put myself through. Yeah, all the pain. There's an experience page that's really cool looking about all the different things he's done. Again, he's got one that's taking a three-hour afternoon siesta, only drinking water for a month, living in reclusion for 10 days. Total isolation, yeah. That was a bitch of an experience. I can imagine. So definitely go and check out his site, ayearofproductivity.com. And again, you can scroll through all the different pages and see what Chris has been up to and what he's

currently up to with his experiments. How much longer are you going to do these productivity experiments for, Chris? The rest of my life? I don't know. Nice. I want to keep going as long as I can. I kind of realized something that I had this incredible community of people who kind of gathered around this idea of becoming as productive as possible. And I met such incredibly cool people throughout the course of the project. I'd be a total fool not to keep going with it. And so, yeah, I have

this new site called The Life of Productivity at alifeofproductivity.com. It's kind of the natural progression of a year of productivity that I'll kind of transition into doing. I'm still kind of in the planning stages right now. I have my feet in kind of a few different, I don't know what you want to call it, a few different places right now. Like I'm doing some coaching, I'm doing some speaking, I'm putting together a book proposal. And so I'm still kind of trying to find a place in my life for writing about productivity. But my goal is to write about productivity for at least 10 hours a week going forward and experiment for just as long so that's what i'm hoping to do very cool well yeah make sure everyone to go ahead and check out chris bailey at a life of productivity and a year

of productivity.com and i'm sure you're all over the place on social media as well even though you're not checking it every hour anymore like i know like i do and like you used to but um let's let's i do check my email like every hour come on you're a productivity guy let's go i know that that's the thing like people like i have to live up to this name like i'm the your productivity guy but but no i still check my email every hour sure well to wrap things up this has has been a great insights for me. And I'm really glad to know that it seems like everything, every sport that I play comes down to the basics.

And this is true in life. I believe that sports applies to life almost identically. And it comes down to being productive as being getting back to the basics, always getting back to the basics. You can do hacks here and there and try these different techniques and download apps and use technology and whatever. But my friend's got a new wristband

that's called Pavlok that shocks you when you do certain things that aren't productive. It's like an electronic shock. So again, there's some things you can use to support you with these, being more productive. That's kind of cool, actually. But at the end of the day, it comes down to being disciplined, staying consistent, and sticking to the basics. So I'm glad that your experiments have brought you back to this idea that is time-tested and probably will there. Um, and just for people to understand

that that's, what's the most important thing. So to wrap up with the final question, uh, what is your definition of greatness, Chris? Ooh, that's a, that's a good question. Something I look at when I explore productivity, when I look at the course of a typical day, man, that's a tricky question. I would say just making the world a better place than you found it at the beginning of the day. That's what productivity is all about, right? You can have all the hacks in the world. You can have a million apps on your phone that'll quote unquote make you more productive but at the end of the day like you have to look at you know what's different in the world because you lived a day of your life and you know greatness is about i just i just think bringing more um to

the people around you to yourself that, that kind of thing. That sounds really corny, but that's what I believe. I love it, man. That's what I believe as well. So I'm glad we're on the same page. Thanks again, brother. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and sharing with my audience. And it means a lot. I appreciate the experiments you're creating for all of us to understand how to be more productive. And we'll make sure to link up all this in the show notes. And yeah, thank you again. Thanks for having me on, man.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode as much as I did. I know I learned a lot from all of Chris's experiments and what he did. And I'm definitely going to be checking out his site. So make sure to go over to lewishouse.com slash 71, the number 71 to check out all the show notes. We linked up all the good stuff on the TED Talks that Chris mentioned from the graphs on the time, energy, and attention and how to create the most maximum productivity from all the different things that he talks about in the experiments. We cover it all there at lewishouse.com slash 71. Again, I'm going to be posting pictures all month, guys, over on Instagram and Facebook,

so make sure to add me, Instagram slash lewishouse, and post a picture. Tag me where you are listening to any episode on the School of Greatness and post it on Instagram. I'd love to be able to connect with you guys. And I see pictures every day from listeners. And it makes me really excited when I see that because I get to learn where you guys are listening from all over the world.

And if you ever see me in public, I get people email me or message me on Facebook and say, hey, I think I just saw you here in New York or here in LA or in the airport. If you ever see me, make sure to come say hi because I really want to learn what you guys are learning and connect with you all in person if possible. So make sure to say hi to me. Post a picture and tag me on Instagram. And I'm so grateful that you continue to listen to the show, that you support the show by sharing it, by leaving reviews and ratings on iTunes and following everywhere else online that you can. So thank you from the bottom of my heart again for listening and for being a part of the School of Greatness community.

You mean so much to me and you're the reason why I continue to do this each and every week. So you guys know what time it is. It's time to step up, go out there, and do something great.