The Power of Deep Work, with Google’s Productivity Expert Laura Mae Martin

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26:44Now, on the topic of tasks, there is some argument to be made that certain tasks are better done in certain locations than others. And I want to kind of approach this conversation in two ways. First, we'll talk about the fact that so many people, so many knowledge workers right now are in the first few years of adjusting to either remote work or hybrid work. And that has a lot of time management and energy and concentration and focus management implications. So let's talk about that first. And then the second topic, which is related to an aspect of that, is choosing specific locations. If you do have some location flexibility, choosing specific locations for specific tasks.

27:29But to the first part of it, many of the people who are listening are knowledge workers who in recent years since the pandemic have adjusted to either remote or hybrid work. There's a wide range of do I like it? Do I not? Am I more productive? Am I not? How should a person who works better from home adjust their work life accordingly? How should a person who works better at the office adjust their work life accordingly? Like you said, there's a lot of mixed feelings about going back into the office. Some people said, wow, I was at home. I was the most productive I've ever been. I really enjoyed that.

28:04Some people were so relieved to go back to the office because they focus better there. And so, again, it's not a one size fits all. And the most important thing is really asking yourself, what are my patterns of productivity and how do I capitalize on those? So in the book, I describe people as home basers or outfielders. And the real question there is, where do you do your best heads down, non-collaborative focus work? And so most people have that knowledge of themselves. They are the people who are either very excited to go back to the office, in which case those are outfielders, or they were people who were a little disappointed because they were so focused at home.

28:38And so if you have the ability to split your schedule in a way that some days are at home some days in the office, you want to be really, really intentional about what you're doing on those days. And so I am that way and I'm definitely a home baser. So I focus so good at home because there's no people around and I kind of have this zone at my desk. And so I look at my week and I know the days I'm going into the office and I slot work in the right places. So I talk in the book about your power hours, which are your most productive hours of the day. My power hours on my home days, those are like sacred times.

29:13Those are times when I will not schedule anything except for the work that I want to focus on the priorities I want to do, because I know I'm in the spot that I do my best work at the time that I do my best work. That is primo work time. And so I keep that free as much as possible. Now, if somebody asked me, and I know in the office, I tend to be a little more distracted. I'm here, I'm there, I'm chatting, which is fine because I've protected the home days for work. But if somebody asked me to do a meeting, even a virtual meeting, I suggest the days that I'm in the office because I know my day's already going to be pretty chopped I don't have any big work blocks at that time It's okay for me to take a meeting and much much better for me to have that meeting then Than to cut into one of my deep work and focus times and so it's really about knowing yourself and then Shifting your schedule as much as possible to capitalize on where you do your best work And when it comes to deep work and focus, we've had Dr.

30:08Cal Newport on the show several times. He's a, as you probably know, computer science professor at Georgetown University, who has written a book titled Deep Work. And he very much is an advocate for having blocks of time that you hyper-focus on some complex task that requires a high level of concentration. Because those are likely going to be, if you're a knowledge worker, those are likely going to be the things that you do that get you promoted. Right. Right. However, it can sometimes be difficult to focus during those hours. So you might have, I'll speak for myself, I might have a three to four hour block with no meetings scheduled, no distractions scheduled.

30:53I'll put my plane on airplane mode and then I'll just zone out to quote office space, right? I might just zone out even with all of the distractions eliminated. How can a person, as we talk about how to manage your hours, how can a person also manage their focus and their concentration in the hours that they have devoted to a deep work block? Yes, I think we all and if you haven't done all the distraction prevention, you know, we all know those blocks where I'll work on this from nine to 10. It's nine oh five. I just saw a chat. It's nine ten. I just got to check this email real quick. Oh, I saw this tab open.

31:28Maybe I'll start it now. It's nine forty five. I only have 15 minutes left. You know, so I think when time management is a is a buzzword a little bit because it's like we want more time. We need more time. But you had that time. You have the three hours. that example, you have the hour. So I think the bigger piece is the energy and attention and, and the right ways of getting started on tasks. And so the first piece of your three to four hour example, I would say, what did you say you were going to do during that time? And if I asked you on a neutral day, what is the best possible time for you to do that?

32:01You want to make sure that your answer is the time that you've scheduled to do it. So when you look at your to-do list, You want to say, when am I in the perfect mood to do that? And that's when you want to set the time for it. Because what happens a lot is we misalign our energy and our time and we schedule these deep work blocks that are nowhere near when we're feeling our most productive. And so it's going to be hard to do. The output's going to be bad, even if we trudge through. So I give the example, if you sit down at your desk and you feel like, I don't want to do this, it's the wrong time.

32:31And so, you know, getting ahead of that piece first. The next piece is getting rid of all those distractions. So I talk about in the book, acting like you're a separate person, childproofing for yourself. So what could I get into if I didn't want to work on this? I would probably open my email. Let's close that. I might go get a snack. Let's go ahead and get that. You know, I might be tempted to check my phone. Let's set that across the room. So you're almost taking that objective, you know, how do I make it so boring that I will only be able to drop into deep work? So that's the second piece.

33:01And then the third piece is trying to, instead of just zoning out or becoming frustrated with a large task or having a hard time getting started, what I like to do is almost trick your brain into how do I just get the ball rolling? Because that's always the hardest part. Let's say your goal is to run five miles every day. You cannot get over that mental hump because that feels so huge. That is such a commitment. Then maybe you go down to three miles. Still feels huge. One mile run. And still, I don't want to wake up for that. A walk, still don't. What if I just want to wake up at six and put my shoes on?

33:37That's my only goal. Can I do that? Yeah, that feels like doable. So now I've set my alarm. I've taken the time to walk all the way to get my shoes and put them on. Now that I've done that, I'm probably awake enough to go outside. I'll probably go on a walk. And I might even run five miles at that point. But had I just made the goal five miles, that feels too hard for our brain to wrap around. So I call it Swiss cheesing. Just poking little holes. how small can I get till something feels doable? So if this deep work block you had, maybe it was to build a brand new presentation for a training you're doing instead of build new presentation that just feels again.

34:12So what about just open the slides and title it or find three fun images that you want to include. Now you have the images you might, Oh, I'll just put some bullets next to this. And so now you're getting the ball rolling and that's how you drop into deep work. It's by getting over that little bit of a hump of the big tasks. And now two hours have passed and the presentation's awesome. And you're excited and you didn't even realize two hours have passed because you weren't interrupted. You were at the best energy and you got yourself started. And now all of a sudden you don't even need four hours.

34:43You needed two hours and you just got time back. So I think all of those pieces are important. And I think you said it best because we're not paid to email. We're not paid to meet. We're typically paid to work. And so those should be your most pristine times that you really care the most about is those deep work focus. Right, right. So make it as small as possible in order to get started. It reminds me, there was a writer named Leo Babuda who wrote a website called Zen Habits, who often recommended that if you want to start doing pushups, do one pushup. He was like, just get on the ground, do one pushup, and then get back up and proceed on with your day.

35:27And if you do that consistently day in and day out, eventually one is going to turn into two. Right. Exactly. And if you said do 10 pushups a day, you would never, ever, ever get started. He was also famous for saying floss one tooth. Oh, yeah. That's a good one, too. I like that. So let's say that you are working from home. Well, your dad worked from home starting in 1996. Yes, he was original. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Back when it was still called telecommuting. Yes, exactly. That's true. And at the time, there was no Wi-Fi, so he had to be connected to the Internet through an Ethernet cable.

36:04So he got used to being locked into one place. And there's actually research that shows that there is a neurological case for that. Yes. So it's called state dependency. In the book, I give a study about scuba divers, and they took some on land, some on water, half and half. They taught them, I think, phrases or things they needed to remember. Then they switched them half and half. So half the people that learned on land went into the water, et cetera, and they asked them to recall. And it was statistically significant that the people who were in the same location as where they learned recalled better.

36:44And so it speaks to the fact that our brain is taking in so many cues when we're working, when we're learning. And it's not just what we're learning. It's also the sights, the smells, the sounds, the environments. It speaks to why many authors, they write their entire novel at the same seat in a coffee shop because the smell of coffee, their scenery, all those things puts them back into those characters and they're able to write again. And so when we think about how to use that to our advantage, it's really about finding different spots for different tasks so that it makes our brain easily slip in.

37:21So for my dad's example, he had one spot. And so he was really in work mode when he was in his office, but he didn't have the ability to bring his laptop around. So he was really out of work mode when he left his office. A lot of people complained about that during the pandemic. It's hard for me to slip into work mode because I'm at my house. Well, you used to have your commute, your Cubemates chatter, your coffee, all these things that kind of primed your brain so that when you got to your desk, you're already in work mode. And so the way to expand on that is by saying, I want to do different types of tasks in different places.

37:52And this could be either in office or at home if you're hybrid or just around your home. So maybe when you want to take that time to really answer email and zone in, you sit outside on your porch and that's your email place. And that's always your habit is drinking coffee and doing email on your porch. But when you code, you want to be sitting at your desk with your monitor and that's kind of your coding spot. And then maybe you're in sales, you answer client emails that you're always going to do from a certain chair in your living room. And so it allows you to then get your brain used to doing those tasks in those places so that when you go out on your porch, you're instantly used to thinking about email and you kind of slip into that mode.

38:31So you can do that whether you're in the office or in your house and it just helps train your brain. Right, right. And the scuba diver study that you mentioned at the beginning of your answer, that was a fascinating study because the level of recall that scuba divers had, depending on whether they memorized the string of numbers and letters on land versus in the sea, there was a massive, massive difference. Right, because they were associating, you know, if you were underwater and you learned all these things and then you're underwater, you can recall these things. So I think it can work for you.

39:06It can also work against you. So I talk about having not spots in addition to what I'm calling hot spots, which I just described, because if you have a relaxing room in your home that you really love, and during the pandemic, we all had to invite work into our home like it was a guest. So I say, just like with a guest, you need to create boundaries. You're not going to invite a guest into your room at 6 a.m. first thing. You shouldn't do that with your work. You're not going to have your guests all the way till the last second before you go to bed. Same with your work. And so you need to have some spaces, especially if you work from home, that you've never worked, that are kind of your mental safe zones.

39:40Because if your brain has never associated that spot with working or being stressed or thinking about work, and it then allows your nervous system to easily relax in that spot. So you want to have places where you don't bring your laptop that are just your Zen zones or whatever it is that you can just say, oh, when I come here, I just, I feel relax. I never bring my laptop here and it's just a good spot for me. So that's something you can do if you're fully remote, even that helps you create that balance. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you like tea time you or this tea time you or even this tea time you said you hear about Dave or even tea time tea time tea time you so update on Dave it's up to you we'll take the laundry rinse it's time to be great when you walk into a Burlington you're walking into amazing prices and great gifts that's main character energy because at Burlington the holiday savings aren't the only things turning heads Discover quality finds and perfect presents for everyone on your list, even those who are hard to shop for.

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41:17Now you mentioned email. I want to close this out by asking about how to manage email. I want to go into this by confessing that I manage email. If you were to look at how I manage email through the framework of how a person manages laundry, right, it makes no sense. So as you've described, if you were to manage your laundry by opening the dryer door, picking out one shirt, folding that shirt, taking it up to your room, putting that shirt away, then going all the way back to the dryer, finding another shirt. And then you give up halfway through and you panic when you need some clothing because you don't remember if you've washed it yet or not.

42:00That is exactly how I manage email. And that has actually, it's a terrible habit, but it's actually even started spilling out to snail mail. I will sometimes go to my snail mailbox, my physical mailbox, and open the mailbox, look through letters, pick out one, and I put the rest back into my mailbox. Oh, that's not considering future you. I literally will just leave the rest of the mail in the snail mailbox. Oh, that's an all-time bet. Yeah. I'm like, ah, it's junk mail. I don't feel like throwing it out. I just leave it there. So yeah, you're basically then using energy the first time you do that, then you're using energy the next time you're in the mailbox and maybe even the next time.

42:48So you're kind of screwing over future you. So, and I think that one of the biggest pieces of the thinking of email like laundry is just because we all are familiar with laundry and the best way to do it. And so it really clicks with people. So I think that one of the biggest pieces is actually sorting, reading, answering as separate tasks because you're doing a lot of context switching. If you're folding the shirt and then you're walking all the way upstairs and then you're coming back down and then you say, okay, there's a pair of pants. Maybe I'll hang those pants. And now you're moving on to socks, but I don't feel like dealing with this one.

43:26It's wet, throwing it back in. So you're just wasting so much energy there versus if you had taken all the clothes out, just quickly put them into piles as its own activity. So that's sorting. It's just emptying it out. It's not saying I'm also going to fold as I'm taking things out because that's not a good way of doing it. You won't ever get through the dryer. And so saying, I'm going to actually take the time to just empty out what's in my inbox, maybe in the morning or the afternoon, putting them into piles based on how to set up future you. So how to tell future Paula, what do I need to do with this?

43:56I need to respond. I need to read, or I just need to revisit. It's somebody else's action that I need to go back and bump. And so those are really the only three actions that any email can take. No matter what your role is. It's really, you know, something you need to do, something someone else needs to do that you need to follow back up on or something that you just need to read or absorb, but doesn't require any action from you. And so once you've put those into baskets, now you can actually find so much economies of scale by basically saying, okay, I'm going to hang, hang, hang, hang. Cause you have all the hangers there.

44:27Same thing. I'm going to read, read, read, and I'm also going to match this with my energy. So how about if I had put things into piles, what a waste it would have been to use my power hours to read industry articles. That is not the right energy, but a meeting ends early in the afternoon. I'm a little sluggish anyway. Great time, 10 minutes just to read through those articles. So you're putting them in baskets for when you have the right time for that. You're making time for those baskets and you're batch tasking. And so it's really just a lot of people come to me after I train them on this and say, Oh, I made such a difference in my energy.

44:59And it's funny because it's an organizational system, but it's really about clearing the mental clutter. And it's about helping you feel like that email from my boss, that pink shirt, I know where it is. I haven't replied to it yet, but it's in my respond folder. And I know when I need to reply to it. And I'm only touching those things two times. I'm with the first time I see it and the time that I address it. I'm not, you know, people like to mark as unread your every time you do that, then future use, like, have I seen this? Oh, I have. Oh, wait, no, I have, but I'm not going to address it now.

45:31So now some people touch emails five or six times and they wake up in the middle of the night. Did I ever respond to that? Where is it? You know, so it's kind of that way to create that ironclad system for yourself where inbox zero does not mean I've addressed everything. Doesn't mean I folded all the clothes. I might go to bed with clothes that haven't been folded, but I know where they are. I know how much is in that basket. So I know what I need to make time to do. I know where the pink shirt is and I know that I've addressed everything that needs urgently addressed. And so it's again about intention and rethinking about how we're managing email because email is so personal and it causes so much anxiety for people.

46:09And it's kind of like a lot of people's first thing they see and the last thing they see. And so getting that in control, I always say is the first step towards clearing some of that mental clutter. Excellent. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Are there any final points that you want to emphasize? I think you did a really good job of covering it all. I think that what it really comes down to is not making giant changes, just like achieving financial goals. It's more about being intentional and consistent about the small changes that really adds up over time. And so when people want to make a difference in their overall productivity, I never recommend giant overhauls or new tools that require all this upskill.

46:51And it's really just about what are some small changes I can make in my day and my time and how I'm spending it. And when you do that, you start to see how much it benefits you and how much more time you have or how much lighter you feel or how much more focused. And so it's just about getting started. Well, thank you. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more? I have a website, Laura Mae Martin. Mae has an E and I'm on YouTube and LinkedIn. Excellent. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, redefine productivity.

47:32Laura is all about shifting how we see productivity. It's not just about cranking out work. It's about balancing creativity, well-being, and making sure that our efforts stick around, making sure that we are in this for the long haul. True productivity includes how you're doing overall, not just how much you're getting done. I think productivity is traditionally been defined as your output, how much you're churning out. But I think the new definition of productivity is merging into how are you achieving holistically? So are you creative? Are you functioning? Are you well? Is the productivity that you found lasting.

48:14So work at a pace that you can persist at for the long term. It's a marathon. Set a marathon pace, not a sprint pace. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, know your top three priorities. There's only so much that we can do. You can do anything, but you can't do everything. And you certainly can't do everything all at the same time. So whittle down to your top three priorities and then laser focus on just those top three. Because if you start saying yes to too many things, if you let too many other good ideas crowd out the great ones, you end up doing nothing. Your work becomes so split between a handful of different directions that you don't end up making lasting progress in any one particular direction.

49:14So prioritize three at the most. What are your top three priorities? And eliminate anything that isn't that or defer anything that isn't that. You should have an idea of what your top three priorities are for your time right now. Just like you might have top three priorities of, you know, your financial goals or something that you're working on. You want to have that in the back of your mind all the time defined so that when that new invite comes in for a committee that you would say, oh, that is a good opportunity. You know, you have that laser focus. So laser focus on your top three priorities.

49:53That is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three, embrace deep work, but do so at the time of day in which you are most productive. Each person has a certain time of day where your energy peaks, your focus, your concentration, your performance peaks at particular times of day. Some people are morning people. Some people are night owls. You know when that is for you. So figure out what time of day you are most productive and protect that time of day. Schedule your deep work blocks during that time and protect it like it's gold. You want to make sure that your answer is the time that you've scheduled to do it.

50:35So when you look at your to-do list, you want to say, when am I in the perfect mood to do that? And that's when you want to set the time for it. Because what happens a lot is we misalign our energy and our time and we schedule these deep work blocks that are nowhere near when we're feeling our most productive. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Laura Mae Martin. Thank you for tuning in. This is the Afford Anything podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with a friend or a family member. That's the most important thing you can do to spread the message of great financial health.

51:07In addition, chat with other members of our community at affordanything.com slash community. Absolutely no cost. You can also subscribe to our newsletter at affordanything.com slash newsletter. And you can find me on Instagram at Paula Pant, P-A-U-L-A, P-A-N-T. I'm also on Twitter at affordanything. Thank you again for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode. You