Achieve More By Doing Less: Slow Productivity | Cal Newport

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25:52Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. It's an interesting exercise that I've had a few of my clients go through around this thing where they feel this endless stream of inbox response that they need to interact with. And a lot of times there's one or two key areas where they really did need to react to that. It was something really urgent that would have been painful for the business, could have lost money, lost revenue, lost a customer. And that kind of gets stuck in your head and creates this always on need. And of course, the devices, well, they reward that with these notifications and getting the inbox zero and all of the fun stuff that goes along with that sense of accomplishment around pseudo productivity really work against us.

26:36Yeah. Well, and the problem is because those occasional urgent things exist, you have to check all the time. Yeah. And the checking is not cost free because when you check an inbox, you are being exposed to a lot of things where it's salient and it typically involves other people. And even if it's not urgent, it's still things that catches your mind's attention. So then your mind starts processing, let's start thinking about these other things. That's what our mind does. Like, oh, you know, like AJ needs this report. It's not urgent, but he needs a report. Let me start thinking about reports. And then you start firing up those areas of your brain and inhibiting other areas of your brain.

27:12And then when you go back to what you're trying to work on, now you've scrambled all of your wiring. You're like, I can't concentrate on this anymore. But this is why, you know, I'm a big believer in having systems for this type of communication that's not unscheduled, right? I mean, like, here's just a thought experiment. Like, imagine you had office hours twice a day, meaning this half hour or 45 minutes, you know I'm available. Like, my phone's on, Zoom's on, my door's open. And imagine you just had a setup with your clients. but they knew like, okay, if I have something urgent or I need to get an answer, like the best way to do it is go to whatever the next office hours is and just like pick up the phone.

27:53They'll be there. We'll work this out in a couple minutes, right? Now there's nothing to check in between. You know, like I'm not too far at any point from one of these next office hours. The people who I know have tried this, they worried at first, like a client or something is going to say, no, no, no, no. I want accessibility. You're making my life harder, But that doesn't actually happen because what does a client want? What does your colleagues want? It's not accessibility. It's clarity. Right. How do I – I have an issue. I want clarity on how I get this issue resolved because until I have that clarity, it's floating around, you know, in my head and it's a source of stress.

28:28You know, I want to get this – I want to get this resolved. If I know this is how this is going to work, I can call you at this time and I'm going to get an answer. I'm like, great. I know what to do here. And I feel good. If I don't have clarity, then I'm going to demand accessibility. So it's like, look, I'm just going to send this out here, and I don't know until I get a response what's going to happen with this. Then I'm going to be like, respond, respond, respond. Come on, come on, come on. I don't want to just sit here. Bump to the top of your inbox. Yeah, I don't want to. Because I'm wasting cognitive resources here wondering when you're going to get back to me.

28:55So you might as well just be really quick. And, you know, I've seen this time and again when people have tried this. As long as there's clarity, here's how this thing gets resolved, people tend to be happy with it. They're like, I don't need you to respond. In fact, I don't want you to respond right away. I have other things I'm doing right now. I like the idea that you have a shared document somewhere, another thought experiment, where I can just throw on it, talk about this next time we chat. Because now it's out of my head. I don't need you to email me right away. I just need a place I can put this or know there's a place I can go.

29:24Just set it down and know that we'll meaningfully pick it up when we're both ready. We'll pick it up. Yeah. There was a company once I profiled where they had their client sign a communication agreement. Okay. Right. Like, okay, not just a contract for services rendered, a contract about this is how we're going to communicate. And they said, we have weekly meetings. We have a weekly call with you. And we have an itinerary. And you can add to it, you know, whatever you want. And when we get to the call, we'll go through everything. And then we will send you right after the call a written record.

29:56Like, here's everything we talked about, everything we committed to. Like, here's where thing is. They were terrified. We're going to lose all of our customers. Right? Their customers are going to be like, no way. I want to just be able to email you whenever. The customers loved it. Because, like, they don't actually want to deal with and start a conversation with you as soon as they think up an issue. They just want a way to get that issue off their mind. So knowing they could just write it down and it will for sure get discussed and it'll get discussed on Thursday and they'll have a written record of it once they discuss, they're happy.

30:25Yeah, there was a marketing agency we were working with a few years back and it was not quite that level of agreement. But they basically outlined, you know, what their scope is very clearly and what communication around the scope would entail from their end. And anytime we deviated from that, they just pointed back to the scope and said, hey, this is what we're really focused on. And what was interesting at first, I felt very frustrated because I was like, well, there's this other thing that's kind of related to marketing that I think you should know. And they're like, no, let's just get back here.

30:56And what I found in that relationship after looking back over time, we actually got a lot more done with them as our agency than the other agencies who we were just throwing in the marketing hopper and let's talk about it in the next meeting. And you end up just spending so much time focused on things that really aren't moving the goalposts forward for what you really wanted to get done. I don't know if you remember this, but in the late 90s, early 2000s, I had a web development firm in this period. But back then there was this big idea, it was this fantastic idea. And it's what we did, but it was what everyone was doing in that space of the client extranet.

31:29Yeah. Right. Remember this? So it was like the client portal and you would log in and it was, here's the, it would be a calendar and you would see like all the upcoming meetings and you had all these briefs and they would sign the brief and it would be posted and everything was laid out. Like this is every step. This is when we're going to talk about it. Also, there was a work progress blog was a big thing. So the client could see like, okay, here's what's happening. Yeah, there's movement. They work. There's movement or whatever. And it was fantastic. We had to rely on that because when I ran this company, I was in high school, right?

32:00Because this was the first dot-com boom. Yeah. And, you know, the first dot-com boom, people were like, if you're young, that means you know a lot about technology. Like, it was crazy. There was no reason to be hiring a 17-year-old to do this. But I took full advantage of people not understanding the internet. So I was in high school before cell phones. So there was no way to contact me. You're actually in class. I was literally in class. And it was fine because like the mode back then is you had communication briefs and client extranets and the client could log in. I think you could leave questions there.

32:34You could see what we were. Yeah, it was like commentary, discussion board. Yeah. There's what's going on. And it was very well structured. As you're talking about like with the marketing firm, you looked at, you would have these various briefs and you would work through the briefs and meetings. And then you'd commit the paper, what you were doing. And you'd have the customer sign it and then you would post the signed thing. And so we could run a company in high school with no way to contact us during the day without it even being a problem. But then I've talked to web designers more recently, and they lament those days.

33:02They're like, I wish we could go back because it just sort of fell apart. As all of knowledge work became more susumed by this hyperactive hive mind, if everyone can reach everyone everywhere, the extranet era went away. Yeah, it was one point of contact. And now, I mean, they could find my LinkedIn. in. They could, you know, find a comment on this exact podcast on our blog to interact with me. There's just so many channels for that communication to happen. And it feels like almost every time you try to like wall off one, like another one pops up. Yeah. Well, so we went from a slower model to steal the term from the book.

33:35We went from a potentially slower model of productivity to a faster model. The whole knowledge work industry basically fell into this hyperactive, fast productivity. All of this started roughly in the 2000s, right? Because you get the front office IT revolution in the 90s. So, hey, we have a computer at every desk. These computers are networked and they have this thing called email. And in the 2000s, laptops come along as being a much more like accessible option. So now we could work from home. You get more ubiquitous internet and the whole thing begins to spiral out of control. That's why, you know, in the 90s, you might still have an extranet and we're going to, here's how we communicate.

34:12And it was, you know, okay, we get this. This makes sense. But by, you know, 2005. No, let's just, we got to be able to reach you all the time. Like, this is what, this is what work has become. And people don't realize how sudden that was. I mean, there's a researcher, her name is Sophie Leroy, right? And she did this great work on what's called attention residue. So, sort of studying how we, when our attention is fragmented in modern work, it really reduces our ability to think, right? This was her thing. But her story is what was so cool, right, is that she had been in, I guess, graduate school.

34:46So, studying sort of psychology, organizational psychology. It was like, whatever. I don't think I want to go in academia. Like, she discovered you can buy things with money. So, she's like, I'm going to go back to the working world, right? So, then she returned to the working world. She was doing consulting in New York and the things had changed. This was the early 2000s. Things had changed so much since when she had been in work in the 90s versus when she returned to the 2000s. Things got so much faster. People had so many more things on their plate. There's so much more communication. She said, oh, I got to go back to academia because someone has to study this.

35:19Like I've just, this change happened like overnight. And she went back and sort of wrote the definitive work on distraction. It was like a five-year period. She left work, went to grad school, came back, and was like, the whole world is different. You know, it changed in that period. I know my first job, there was never any reason to reach out to anyone else on the team outside of working hours. I would never pick up a phone outside of working hours. It would wait until the following day. In a meeting, we would discuss it or even at the water cooler. But I would never call anyone outside of 9 to 5.

35:51Yeah. And now the expectation is why are you not responding outside of those hours? Yeah. It would be convenient if you would just respond. Yeah. The ongoing conversation never stops. Yeah. I mean, that's fast productivity. That's pseudo productivity. So we talked a little bit about this before we hopped in here. You know, I've had the luxury of traveling, spending a lot of time in Italy. And you talk about the slow food movement in the book around this concept of slow. And one of the things that's always been funny when we invite our other American friends, Western friends, to come join us in Italy for a meal, how they're like getting antsy around getting the bill.

36:24And like, we got to check our phones and we got to like, why are we not moving fast? And sometimes they'll get upset. Like, I wish we could just tip them so they would move faster. And my wife and I just laughed because we're like, no, we actually enjoy this. Like, we love that things move this slow. We could savor each course. There's no rush to move forward onto the next one or leave. But it is very different for those of us who are in the pseudo productivity mindset in all facets of our life to just enjoy a long meal with friends. Well, I mean, so it was surprising to me how much slow food actually influenced my work on slow productivity.

36:57I mean, I looked into slow food just because of the word slow, right? So I thought this would be tangential, you know, like, well, I'm working on slow productivity as a concept. I should know, like, why are other things called slow? But actually, the philosophical substructure of slow productivity owes a lot to the philosophical substructure of slow food. So, like, here's the way it influenced me. I didn't know much about slow food until I looked into it. And it turns out it has two really big ideas. You know, one, in responding to a sort of result of modernity you don't like, so the sort of fast food culture in this particular issue, don't just critique, offer a positive alternative, right?

37:37That's the first of the two big ideas of slow food, right? Petrini was saying, I want to offer you an approach to cuisine that makes McDonald's superfluous. I'm not going to just say why McDonald's is bad. I'm going to make it superfluous, right? Two, don't invent the new approach from scratch. Look back to existing traditions because these traditions have probably formed over years through cultural evolution. Yeah. So look back to the way your great-grandmother ate. Don't just say, here, looking forward, I'm going to invent a new way to eat. Both of those ideas I ended up adopting as I went deeper in the slow productivity.

38:14So, like, first, don't just critique what's going on with fast productivity. I mean, we've had plenty of critique here, but the anti-productivity movement that arose and got accelerated by the pandemic largely just critiques. Yeah. Right? It's just productivity is bad. It wants to blame it. It's a lot of looking for blame. It's capitalism. No, it's not capitalism. It's sort of social media hustle culture. No, it's, you know, it's just trying to find things to blame, which is fine, but kind of stops there. But Slow Food would say, no, no, you've got to offer the alternatives. So slow productivity is an alternative to the fast productivity, not just a critique.

38:51And then two, and this was the more surprising one, looking back at traditional culture. And like, well, where are there traditional knowledge workers, right? Like this knowledge work was coined in the 1950s. But what I realized is if you look back historically, we have a lot of traditional knowledge workers. It's the artists. It's the playwrights. It's the philosophers. It's the scientists. The monks. These were all people who made a living using their brain. And, of course, their circumstances are very different. So we can't literally copy how they work. You know, hey, let's work like a monk.

39:24Like, we can't go to a monastery. Like, I have to go to meetings, right? But what we can do is recognize, like with slow cuisine, they had a lot of freedom and flexibility to experiment with what works best. you know if you are a an artist who is a patron of the mediches you had a lot of flexibility what really works best for creating stuff with my mind so we can see them as these little natural experiments of what's the right way to do stuff with your mind to produce value with your mind then we can isolate those principles and then adapt them to modern knowledge work right right and that's what i ended up doing that was all slow food that inspired me to do that that's what That was the breakthrough.

40:03That's why this book doesn't cite a bunch of social psych studies. And instead, it's stories. It's, you know, it's Jane Austen. It's George O 'Keefe. It's Newton. It's Galileo. It's Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's Mary Oliver. It's realizing like, oh, they're the ones who did the work of figuring out what works when producing value with your brain. And then I did the work of saying, so how do we bring that to a job where I have a laptop and meetings and a boss or whatever? And it turns out a lot of the principles they discovered can be adapted to modern knowledge work. So one thing that really stands out to me there is just, you know, with the names and the stories in the book, you know, famous for their knowledge work, yet all of it happening slow.

40:43So they obviously understood this. And I'd love to unpack the three principles in the book and we can start to talk about some practical ways that we can bring these into culture for ourselves. Because I feel, and I'm sure in a lot of our listeners' minds, this concept of, okay, that all sounds great. I'm feeling all this pressure, but how do I actually do it? Yeah. So that's where all the interesting stuff comes. Yeah. Right. Like you discover these principles and then you figure out how it can apply. So I'll summarize like the three big principles, right, just so we're all sort of oriented. So like the three big things that came out from studying these traditional knowledge workers should work on fewer things, right?

41:20Notice that doesn't mean complete fewer things. So people get stressed about this. Not complete fewer things, but work on fewer things. Work on fewer things at once. This will actually probably mean you complete more things, but you have less than your plate at once. Two, work at a natural pace. So it's not just it's taking longer. It's having more variation. There's periods of big intensity and periods of lower intensity, like trying to get away from this homogenized eight hours a day, five days a week, you know, 50 weeks a year. Like we're just like in a factory, always trying to just be be all in instead, have way more, way more variation.

41:56And then three, obsess over the quality of what you do. Right. Those three principles together that will get you to a much slower way of thinking about productivity. Yeah, I think it's a great framework as we approach our to do list and think about all of those tasks on our plate. And exactly the first thing, fewer, everyone's like, but I have to complete these things for all the other team members who are tapping me on the shoulder. virtually in all of these different capacities. Yeah. But here's the reality of it. So first of all, why should we do this? Then second of all, we can say how to do it.

42:28Why we should do this is this overhead tax we were talking about. So if you have more things on your plate, you spend more of your time servicing the administrative overhead, not accomplishing the task, but servicing the administrative overhead. The more time you spend dedicated administrative overhead, the less time you spend actually accomplishing things. And it's not as if the administrative overhead nicely lumps together. No, no, no. It spreads out over your day, which makes it harder and harder for you to make any real progress on actually completing things. So if you have less things on your plate at a time, your ratio of administrative overhead to execution gets a lot smaller, which means the rate at which things finish goes up, right?

43:08So there's a deep motivation to wanting to do this. It's actually a better way to process through a list of things. Now, the question is, how do we actually pull this off? And one of the points I want to make is you say no all the time already, right? You don't happen just coincidentally to exist in a work environment where the amount of work coming your way is just like exactly matching how much time you have available. No, everyone is just throwing stuff at everyone else. And you're saying no all the time. So it's not as if you're not saying no. So what are you really doing here is you're just changing the threshold of where you say no.

43:40Yeah, it's a problem with the triage, right? It's just like an emergency room. It's like if you just took every patient who walked in at any given time, well, there's going to be people who are dying in the emergency room because they have much more severe injuries than a person with a cough or a sniffle. And for a lot of us, we're just not triaging the work as it's coming in as effectively as we can. What most people end up doing, their heuristic for workload management is – because they think what they're doing, by the way, is I say yes to everything. No, you say no to a lot of things. So what do they do?

44:05What's their metric? Is they use stress as their governor on workload, right? So you asked me to do something. There's a social capital cost to say no, right? If, however, my workload has grown so high that I'm, you know, just completely anxious and stressed out, then I have psychological cover to pay that social capital cost. So the pain of my workload is now sufficiently high to outweigh the pain of having to say no to you in the moment, right? That's how most people actually govern their workflow. The problem is, is this means that you have engineered your workload to always be 20 or 30 percent too high, right?

44:46Because you're using I'm about to burn out as your metric. This is why, by the way, a lot of people spiraled out of control in the first two or three months of the pandemic is because people operate typically at this level of I have 20 percent too much to do. Then the pandemic came and the switch to remote generated all at once like an extra 20 percent of tasks that had to be done right away. So people had this sort of dump of new work all, you know, unexpectedly. Well, if you're already 20 % overloaded and then someone adds 20 % more work essentially overnight, people just spiraled out of control.

45:22And this is where I began to get reports from readers and listeners of mine who are saying, I'm in Zoom meetings eight hours a day. What is that? That is administrative overhead has now taken every minute of your day, right? And that's when people – Invisibility, right? That's the one thing that comes into the equation here. when we were going into the office together and your office door was closed or you were at your cubicle and you were staring at a screen, we could mentally be like, that person's busy. I probably shouldn't bother them. But then that visibility was completely removed in work from home.

45:51Yeah, then you're an empty vessel that can do my work. There's this cool story. It's not actually in this research study, but the researcher told me about it. Gloria Mark is a researcher who's really the top thinker and researcher on what goes on in the office with workloads and attention, right? And so she has this paper, which is really cool because what they did in this paper is they went to this company and said, we're going to take a dozen employees and just turn off their email. And we're not going to give them like a big heads up. We just want to – it was like let's see what happens. It's like a – you know, there's a research methodology where it's like let's just break something and see what goes wrong.

46:26Like that's how we're going to understand it, right? You know, it's like pull out this cable and see what breaks. Now we know what this cable does. So they took 12 employees and just said no email for a week. And they watched them and they studied them. And they were – actually, they were – they liked it, not surprisingly. They were productive, not surprisingly. But Gloria told me a story that wasn't in the paper but about one of the subjects from the paper. And it was a guy who part of his job – because this was like a – they did research and development lab. Part of his job was setting up one of the research labs.

46:56And it was sort of a time-consuming thing to do. And he was always really annoyed because his boss would email him like all these things. Hey, what about this? What about that? And he'd have to keep stopping what he was doing and answer these emails, and it really slowed him down. So then when this guy was selected to be email-free, he told Gloria, like, oh, this is great. My boss doesn't bother me anymore. I can just sort of, like, set this up. And what made the story cool was his boss's office was three doors down from the lab where he was setting up. So just that extra friction of I have to walk 12 feet down the hallway and be like, hey, Bob, can you do this for me?

47:34just that extra friction got rid of the bulk of the stuff that he was being asked to do. So I think you're on to something when you get rid of all of the social capital costs. And it's not just a shut door. It's also like if I have to look you in the eye and ask you to do something, I have to actually confront that I am – it's a social debt I've just created, and I'm a little bit more circumcised. I'm putting something on you. I'm putting something on you. None of that exists digitally. And we don't – Just drop down a sign. Okay, this is your to-do. And all of a sudden that person's list is tripled.

48:05Yeah, so that's the difference. Walking 10 feet and saying, hey, can you do this versus email. Yeah. Made most of the work go away. The boss was like, this actually doesn't raise, I don't want to pay the cost. I'll just take care of it. It's not really that important. Well, what's fascinating to me is that stress as a governor, it's kind of the same thing I experience in Italy around food. It's like as an American, you see American portions and then you go to Italy and you're like, oh, this pasta portion. But when it's slowed down, you actually don't overwhelm your system and eat more than you need to eat.

48:35And then you come back from Italy and it's like, I ate pasta and pizza and I lost weight. Well, yeah, because you were just going slow. Right, right. The Americans' problem is not that they eat pizza, it's that they eat half the pizza. Right, in 30 seconds because they've got to answer that slack. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we get something similar with work, right? You slow down. in this analogy, the quality of what you produce now goes up, right? I mean, the big thing about slow productivity is the hard part is getting it started. Because once this flywheel is turning, the results start to come, right?

49:07No one's bothering you about your workload when you're shipping faster than anyone else. When you start obsessing over quality and you start getting really good at something, now you have a lot of control over your job. And people are like, okay, how do you want to do this, right? I mean, it's a really positive self-reinforcing loop. The scariest part of slow productivity is that first month where you're convinced everything's about to fall apart. I know for a lot of our listeners, they're not quite in leadership positions yet. They want to move to that place, the middle manager and above role where it's a lot easier to delegate and it feels like you have more control over what that workload could be.

49:44But how do we get started on fewer things when it feels like everyone around us just wants to keep coming at us with more? So a lot of the ideas in the book I'm now realizing come back to the strategy of making your workload more transparent. Right. So instead of having it just be something you know about and no one else does, put it in front of other people's face. Right. And there's a lot of ways to do this. But here's a way that is it started as a thought experiment, but people are actually doing it. So now I describe this as like this is real advice. All right. So you have like a shared document.

50:17And at the top of it, it says, here's the things I'm actively working on right now. And you can keep that to like two or three things. And then below it, here's a queue of things, you know, I've agreed to work on next in the order I'm going to do them. And now when someone comes to you and says like, hey, can you do this thing for me? You say, yeah, go throw it on the workload document, right? and make sure I have, you know, you can point me towards whatever information I need to do it or this or that. They now have to confront, oh, this is everything on your plate. And so this is, you're not actively working on this right now.

50:49You're working on these three things and there's six things ahead of it, you know, and now I'm recalibrated. I'm not even going to hear from you about this for like another month. And in fact, maybe then I'm not even going to put this on your plate because you clearly don't have the cycles to do it. And it's not some amorphous claim of busyness. It's concrete. I have these things going on. You can even tell people, just keep an eye on this document. You can see, am I working on it actively? Or you can watch it like march up towards the act of work. Like there's no, you don't even need to bother.

51:19You're not going to do meetings until it gets up there. It sounds preposterous, right? But it's not at all actually when people try it. If people are like, okay, I get what you're doing. I get where this is, if I'm your boss, I can also now make decisions with you about prioritization. Like I can come in and say, not just this is a priority, but this is the thing I want you to deprioritize, right? So now they have to actually, they can be helpfully involved in prioritizing. And you're free to just work on the things at the top of that list. Everyone else sort of knows I'm waiting until my thing gets up there to accomplish.

51:55It gives you a lot of breathing room. You think it's going to annoy people, it doesn't. Again, clarity trumps accessibility. What's interesting is it introduces that social capital to all team members now. Yeah. Because typically in these situations, it's just you and the other person. But now if they have to bump someone else's priority on that list, then they got to go explain why theirs got bumped down. And now it's much more collaborative than just here's a load of work. I want you to do this for me. That starts to dissipate. Now, if you work in a team, another simple, easy thing to do is to say, okay, we have a document of what our team needs to work on, and we will keep that separate from individual people's plates.

52:33And then separately, people are working on individual things from these. In fact, you could even go through and put your initials on this list next to the things you're actively working on. Again, it seems like a small thing, but by separating in this case, what the team owns versus what the individual is doing, Right. The individuals don't have to have seven things on their plate simultaneously. So now the email showing up in your email inbox are greatly reduced because you're not talking about seven different things. You're talking about the one thing you're doing. Yeah. And the other things, the team knows they haven't been forgotten.

53:03You know, it's on this list, but no one is responsible. It also triggers another thing that happens in teams is when you have incoming, oh, my God, this is something we need to do. The person that that comes into who realizes that feels this moment of panic of this is on me. I don't want to drop this. So what am I going to do? I'm going to be like, we got to hop on a call and talk about this, right? And now you have another call on your schedule. Or I'm going to send out an ambiguous email message, CCing five people. Hey, what are we going to do about the Johnson memo? Yeah, now you've created all this discussion.

53:37With this strategy, there's an alternative. Oh, I'll just throw it on the list. I put it on here. I write it on the list. you know, now it's on here. We're not going to forget it. We'll talk about it at the next team meeting. It's off my mind. I'm happy. You know, these are like small things, right? Nothing here is like a complicated project management tutorial. None of it is about like the anti-productivity people like taking a righteous stand against, you know, you know, you understand, you know, what my workload is like. And no, it's just we list our projects. And the plus side is the visibility piece is so key to you getting promoted and being seen for the work that you actually do.

54:14I know for a lot of our clients, where they struggle on the communication front is they're happy to bury their head in the work and just plow through work, but then they're not good at the visibility around all the great work they're doing. But if it's documented, if it's archived, and everyone's seeing it, it's collaborative, well, now that visibility goes up. Yeah, so if you obsess over quality, and there's a reason why that's the third principle, and you have visibility, then you really begin to leave a trail that's impressive. It's like, okay, I'm seeing the work you're doing. And the work is really good.

54:44Yeah. You know? And I don't notice that you're not on Slack. What I notice is this is really shipping. That reality is so true that actually the other problem can happen as well, which is as you shift the more or shift the more visibility, it's bad for the people who are doing the opposite. Right. Which was, I'm not really doing much. Right. Paper shuffling. But I'm an email warrior. You know what I mean? I'm on there, you know. And so we have some evidence from this. There's a particular work philosophy called ROW, R-O-W-E. Results-only work environments. And during the pandemic, I wrote a profile of this philosophy and the founder for The New Yorker.

55:25So I talked to a bunch of companies that were working on this. It's a difficult philosophy to execute. It's a little complicated, but it's like instructive to learn from it. But like the key thing for our purpose is if you're a row work environment, it's all just results, right? So that's what you're measured on. Like when you work, how you work, that's up to you. Every project you work on, you kind of make an agreement about, okay, here's where we're going to talk about this. It's all results. So they have no notion of vacation days or in-office days or not in-office days. And this is more familiar now post-pandemic.

55:58But when this came up in the early 2000s, people were like, are you crazy? Yeah, what's going on? One of the things they found, at least some of the companies I talked to, is you lose like 20 percent of people when you do this because there's 20 percent of people from the non-managerial class who were just obfuscating, right? They were just like sending lots of messages and jumping on and bouncing things around. We heard through the pandemic some of them had two, three full-time jobs. They were just in the shadows. Like one of the terrible things about the pandemic for individuals, especially for parents, is suddenly now it was like, hey, in addition to doing your job, you also have to be doing child care and like home education, all doing it at once.

56:39We should probably be a little bit worried that it was terrible, but also like people had it worked like the company's going to fall apart. So then you should be thinking about like, wait a second, how much work were we actually doing if we could if we could add so many other things onto your plate? And so when the people went the road, that's what they found is to about 20 % of people, it became clear, oh, you weren't really working. You know, they also lost, which I think is interesting, about the same percentage of managers. Because for some managers, they had a very hard time switching to that because they liked, yeah, answer my email.

57:13Yeah. You don't do that in a results-oriented environment. And so 20 % of managers also moved on. So, yeah, so it's not without its cost on the other side as well. is the good news is if you're getting after it with your work, this makes your life way better. The bad news is if you're not, it also makes that hard to not notice. Yeah, to obfuscate and hide in the shadows in email. Yeah. You bring up a great dynamic in the book, push-pull, and the shift that you recommend. Can you break that down? Because I thought it was really fascinating. I mean, I think this is the right way to think about workloads.

57:44And we could almost use it as an umbrella term for some of the particular strategies I was talking about. But the conceptual shift is instead of pushing work onto someone's plate. People instead pull work onto their plate when they're ready for it. Like that is, I mean, this is well-known in manufacturing, right? This is well-known in software development. If you use like Kanban or something like this, I mean, you literally have columns on a board and you pull something over to the next column, you know, when you're ready for it. It makes all the difference though. Like this is the way that human cognitive work should unfold.

58:22You pull something onto your plate when you're ready for the next thing. This idea of work exists and we just push things on the people's plates. And so everyone just all the work is distributed onto everyone else's plate. It is just a terrible way to allocate resources, right? Like we don't do this in software development. We don't just say, here's all these features we need to add to the software. And just like, can you just do these 20s or years? Make sure these 20 features get added and the marketing department's calling you up. And, hey, what's going on with the, you know, the new user form or whatever.

58:52And you have to have conversations and meetings. No, software development figured out like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how you write good code. We'll keep these over here. You're working on this thing. And we'll have like a five-minute stand-up every day. We're like, here's how it's going. I need help on this. You get it and you sprint. Like all I'm doing is focusing on one thing until it's done. More people should be doing that. I mean, this is the way to actually use your brain to actually do good work. And so a pull methodology, that's what we should be doing. Well, it also creates agency.

59:22And I know for a lot of people who are in jobs where they don't find it meaningful or purposeful, one of the main reasons they quit, they give up, is they feel like they have no agency with everyone just pushing more work on versus like, hey, I want to do that. I'm excited to do that. Let me take this on. Yeah. Yeah. And the transparency here helps as well because now you see, like, how much is someone working on? Yeah. Like, oh, he's working on. Like, I can't push more stuff over there. You know, part of what happens when you don't have this type of transparency and you don't have that agency is it also becomes really inequitable, right?

59:55Because now what is beginning to control how much work is on your plate? Part of this now becomes factors that are completely unrelated to the things you would care about. It becomes things like are you able to get away with, in a social sense, say no more often? Boundaries. Are you a good communicator? Are you just like kind of rude and people just put up with it? Yeah, so now being rude becomes a professional advantage, which is like actually not the thing you want to – you know, I don't want to advantage. This happens in law firms a lot is that the people who are sort of like rude and antisocial sometimes, they get more work done.

1:00:30They just say no. People stop bothering them about these other things. Yeah, they don't want to work with them. So then they move up to the partner track quicker. And then your partner is like full of a bunch of antisocial degenerates, right? This was like Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate. this was his famous strategy for getting good physics work done is he said, I actively cultivate the reputation as being irresponsible. And eventually people stop asking me to do things. Cause like if we, if we put Richard on this committee, he's not going to do any of the work and it's going to make things worse, you know?

1:01:00So if you're a Nobel prize winning physicist, you could do that because people expect you to be weird and idiosyncratic and antisocial and you can get away with it. All right. So what about people who aren't that? Well, then now you're doing like twice as much work. And this breakdown's on a lot of lines. Like there's interesting research saying when it comes to – they call them non-promotable tasks. It's like tasks that are not directly related to how you're evaluated or how you get performance. So, you know, organizing the birthday cake, you know, this type of thing, right? Like women, for example, are significantly – they take on significantly more of this than men you'll see in studies.

1:01:36So now you've created a tax on being like a reasonable human being. It's like great. So like now men are going to get an advantage because they're like less socially adept. They don't care. They get the weird cake, you know. So they're like, fine, we'll just let the – yeah. And so, yeah, you get these unplanned inequitable outcomes as well. So there's like all sorts of other motivations for transparency, you know. And also it just makes clear – people say, yeah, but all these little things need to get done. Great. Now we have to confront what they are. Like how many of these things do we have?

1:02:08Like maybe we shouldn't be just distributing these among random staff members. Maybe we should have like a dedicated admin that does this. Maybe we shouldn't be doing the birthdays. Like it forces you to actually make really intentional decisions. Is this really necessary? I mean, so much of slow productivity is about just being intentional, like asking the question. How are we actually doing this work? Does this make sense? You know, we don't ask these questions right now. Knowledge work is so weird in this way that it's just like shoot from the hip, you know, rock and roll. This company just introduced a new productivity software tool.

1:02:43Let's get that, you know. And there's no – there's so little discussion of how do we actually want to do this. I mean, I – Well, yeah. I think for a lot, especially tangential to tech, they look to tech to force productivity. Yeah. So if this tool can come in, that will increase productivity. If this AI can come in, that will increase productivity. They don't often look at the communication, the strategies, and the frameworks that they're already operating in. And with a lot of this pseudo-productivity, one thing that we notice in our clients all the time who are really struggling to get promoted is it's also unclear what quality really is.

1:03:20Yep. Because everyone is so busy. And no one sits them down and goes, this is actually the quality of work that gets you promoted. Yeah. This is the quality that's unacceptable. and they often see the email warrior putting in subpar quality and still getting promoted because they're shuffling papers. So, you know, I'd love to focus on that principle for those who are not in a place where quality is very clear, but recognizing like that also provides meaning to your work when you can really feel good about what you deliver. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, craft itself is something humans are wired to feel good about, right?

1:03:52Because, I mean, this is partially what separated our species from other species. we want to make our intentions manifest concretely in the world. Yeah. And when we do, our brain lights up. And it's like, oh, okay, this is good. I mean, this is why we get these elaborate leisure hobbies. You know, why are we learning to woodwork or mastering a physical, like, triathlons or knitting or whatever it is? Golf, right? Because we love the feeling of getting better at something that's hard. You know, we're just wired to enjoy that. And so in work, once you start saying, I'm going to obsess over quality, like I care about the quality.

1:04:27What do I do that's most important? I care about the quality of it. And I want to get better. I want to see that I'm getting better. This unlocks a lot of slow productivity benefits, but it also unlocks just more satisfaction. Yeah. Like it really does change your relationship to work. But then the two things it does at the same time is once you start obsessing over quality, you naturally begin to care less about busyness. Right? I mean, like, think about the people you know that are least communicative on email. They're not hopping on calls all the time or whatever. They're probably people that have a real craft they care about, you know.

1:04:59Chris Nolan, the director, doesn't own a phone, right? It's because he's got this other thing, right, that he's working on. He's trying to make Oppenheimer, you know. And so he's like, this is what I'm really focused on. So the stuff that we fill our time with seems, you know, unnecessary. And then as you get better at something, you get more leverage to slow down because people are like, oh, wait a second. You're doing this thing really well. All right. You keep doing that, you know, and now you have more leverage to not be on 20 projects, to not always be answering the emails. Right. I mean, so Chris Nolan can keep not having a phone because Oppenheimer made almost a billion dollars.

1:05:39Right. So it's a kind of a virtuous cycle. That's why I think this quality piece is really the glue for everything else. You feel better. it just naturally shifts your attention away from busyness and then it makes it more possible to shift away from busyness all from the same idea. And you truly can become a linchpin. Yeah. You know, in a lot of these situations being the Swiss army knife who does everything average but can get everyone's to-dos done actually doesn't get rewarded over the long haul. Yes. So you end up getting lost in the shuffle and getting dinged for things that were out of your control because you are quote-unquote good at everything.

1:06:15But if you are great, if you are the one person in the company that always delivers on that type of project, that task, that outcome, then people will respect you for that and you will move up quickly. Yes. The tradeoff is I always think about it as you're trading accountability for accessibility, right? So you're basically saying, hold me accountable for producing stuff that's great. Yeah. But as in exchange for that, because that makes my life scarier, right? Because I'm being held accountable for results. and those results might not be good. The trade-off is I don't have to be accessible. Like that's the trade.

1:06:50You got to trade something for not being accessible. I mean, it's why the advice people give to assistants in industries where you have to start as an assistant and then move up is you want to be hyper-competent. You want to like demonstrate that you're very, very smart. You don't want to be too good. If you're too good at like, I keep all of your requests organized, I'm indispensable to you, then they don't want to promote you. You know, it's like, oh, this person is like really good at putting out fires and anticipating like what the issue is going to be here. But that's not actually the skill you need to be at the next higher level, right?

1:07:27It's like the talent agent doesn't need to be good at figuring out that, OK, I thought ahead that this car service I'm going to have to pick you up. There might be traffic and it could swing by and get your dry cleaning. That might make you indispensable to another agent, but they don't want to promote you because that's not at all interesting for the stuff that's going to matter once you're a junior agent, you know? So it's like you almost want to be not too accessible, too good at the small, too good at the... I always get a response on email. Artificially put delays into your email response.

1:08:01Apologize at least a few times a week. Oh, sorry, I didn't see this earlier. You know, so people are like, yeah, you know, okay, I don't always hear right back. So maybe when the next small thing comes up, I'm not going to send the cow. I'm going to send it over to, you know, someone else. Yeah. Having some, demonstrating that you're not a great Swiss Army knife is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you can then back it up with, you know, a really good carving knife. Yeah. I think that's the piece that often gets lost in the social media advice around slow work, quiet quitting, and a lot of these, like, just let everything drop.

1:08:36It's like, well, you will be judged on that. So if you are letting things drop and being intentional and drawing boundaries, then you better be delivering at the quality that is necessary for you to be recognized. Yeah, I think that's the tradeoff that's lost. This is the issue with a lot of, I think, the current anti-productivity literature, is that it's trying to set up instead more of a zero-sum dynamic, right? So it's – which it was more the dominant dynamic between managers and workers in other sectors and through more of economic history. So when you get sort of standard left-wing labor politics, it's looking more in a situation where I own a factory.

1:09:13You work at a factory. We have a zero-sum relationship here. Like the more I make you work, the better life is for me and the less I work, the worse life is for you. So now we have to sort of bargain and that's why we'll do collective bargaining and, you know, because it's zero-sum. And that's why you need a regulatory framework. It's why you need labor unions because it's zero-sum. What makes your life better makes my life worse. What makes my life better makes your life worse. Knowledge work is not quite that. It's more that we're just all really bad at work. You know, that's a big part of it, right?

1:09:41So it's just, I mean, the way knowledge workers work does not produce more money. The fact that we're on email all the time, it's not like that produces more money for the owners of the company. That makes the company less profitable, right? It's just it's hard and there's managerial entrenchment and it's difficult to do. So we kind of work in this haphazard way. Well, I mean, even human nature, if you look at, you know, hunter-gatherers to agriculture, there was always slow baked in. There's seasonality. There's hibernation. There's crops that have to grow that you have to tend to. It's not you're harvesting every day.

1:10:14You're not killing every single day in your hunting. You're waiting. You have to be slow and recognize that there's going to be days where there's zero yield. So, I mean, I went into this because I was fascinated by this question. So, like, in the book, I said, here's the question I'm interested in. what did work, I guess I'll put quotation marks around, but what did work look like for most of our history? So I'm talking, you know, roughly 300 ,000 years ago until roughly 15 ,000 years ago. So the whole Paleolithic period, we were hunter-gatherers, right? What did work look like? Because my thought was over that long of a timeframe, we probably, there's an evolutionary game going on here.

1:10:51Like, so we're probably, what are we evolved for? Whatever we were doing for that first 285 ,000 years. And so then I got into this question of like, well, how do we know how like our Paleolithic ancestors work? So I got into the paleoanthropology. And then it turns out there's like a whole field of anthropology that emerged in the 20th century, where what they would do is study extant foraging communities. Like there's some hunting and gathering communities left. There's very few now, but there were some left. Not that these communities were direct reflections of the ancient path, but they showed what work meant for foraging.

1:11:29So what is it, what is the actual work rhythms like for foraging, which is what we did for hundreds of thousands of years and found some really cool studies on it. It's like a really interesting, whole interesting, I wrote a long New Yorker piece on this too. So I really nerded out on this. Okay, we'll link it in the show notes. But the main, one of the main things that was found is that in the intensity of work is all over the place, just like you're saying, and on lots of different time scales, right? So in this one study, it was down following a community in the Philippines. They would go follow them.

1:11:58The researchers would follow them on like a hunt. It's really up and down. Like it might be for hours in the middle of the day. They're just sitting under trees. It's sunny. It's hot. And it's the animals are in the shade. So like, OK, we're just going to chill. OK, now. But when we're on a stock, it could be three hours of like we're running, you know, the fishing. It would be you'd be in the boat napping and then you would be working. There were some days where you're heavily foraging and other days because the weather was bad, you do nothing at all, right? And then you add seasonal variations on top of that as well.

1:12:28Like in the rainy season, you're basically doing nothing. So it was super varied. So that's the environment we came from was one in which the work had a super varied intensity with periods of – I'm really locked in and periods of napping and stuff in between. Socializing. And socializing. And it was – what we did not do was work starts now, and I'm going to be locked in and focused for eight hours. And I'm going to do this day after day after day. I mean, this is not what we're wired for. What I'm curious about in writing especially, a book like this, it bridges the creativity side with the knowledge work because all the research and the stories that go into it.

1:13:11And when we think about a project as big as a book, for a lot of our listeners, writer's block comes to mind. Like, how do you even take on a project like this? And how do you use slow productivity in writing slow productivity? So do you have any guidance around the principles as you apply them in writing this book? Well, I mean, when I work on these type of books, I spend years with the ideas, right? Because for an idea book, the thing that really matters are the ideas. And then everything else is just craft. All right. Do you know how – you know, now that I have the ideas, do you know how to research it and write it?

1:13:43And that's more craft. And that can be done pretty systematically. Now I'm just writing. I mean I write all the time. So I'm very used to writing. The hard thing is the ideas. So these take years for me to work out. So like this book in particular, I was doing a lot of work for The New Yorker, right? So I sort of took on a position there in like 2019, 2020. And so I used that as a platform to explore a lot of the ideas. So for years, I was just exploring ideas. Because I was magazine writing, it gives you a really useful way to get sources to talk to you. And it also gives you feedback and heavy scrutiny from world-class editors on, like, is this idea working or not?

1:14:22So, I mean, I spent years working through these concepts. I coined the term slow productivity in 2020. I began to really unpack it on my personal newsletters and podcasts in 2021. I introduced the term slow productivity as a title of a New Yorker article in early 2022. So I slowly let these things unfold. You get feedback. You're exploring it. And then when it came time to actually write, and I typically will write a book in eight months, It's not as if I was starting from scratch at the beginning of eight months and saying, what do I want to write about? Blank page. I knew everything I was going to be writing about.

1:15:03I knew there was holes. I needed some research. But I basically had it all worked out. So that eight months when I'm writing, that's just a mechanic in the garage time. That's just craft time. Okay, now I got to actually put together sentences and like figure out the storylines. And it was interesting for this book because I did – it was like a bonus I was offering people who preordered it. I said, okay, one of the things I'll offer you if you preorder it was a chapter by chapter audio commentary, like directors do for movies. I just thought this would be really cool. And I recorded this recently.

1:15:33And it was really fun, actually, to go through each chapter and remember and walk through all the craft stuff. There's a lot of that. The craft stuff's interesting. It was like, well, I couldn't make this work. And then we cut that. And then this started the flow. And so, I don't know. I always tell idea writers that there's two different stages. There's coming up with the idea, and that takes as long as it takes, and it could be forever. And then there's the craft portion. I know what I want to say. Now I really care about, you know, editing the proverbial film so that it flows. Right. It feels almost like there's the sourcing, the weaving of the textiles, and then there's the seamstress that comes in and cuts everything up and makes the beautiful dress.

1:16:11But sourcing those original ideas and the cashmere and the silk, that's where a lot of the time and deep thought is spent. Yeah, and figuring out, like, what if we did this color and we wrapped it in this way? Right. Yeah, and both are important, you know, because where do things fall short? Like if we think about books, it's always one of those two things, right? So it's either, if it's not someone's first book, often what gets, what makes a book not function is the ideas weren't really there. They kind of forced it. Like I need to write another book now and they kind of forced it and it's written fine.

1:16:39But you're like, what am I learning here? It's the payoff, yeah. Or if it's someone's first book, you often get the opposite. It's an idea they've been gestating forever. So it's like, this is a great idea. This is why they got the book deal. Right. But the craft isn't there. And it's a lot of these sort of hokey, the stories are hokey and everything just like perfectly works out and it's full of rhetorical questions. And there's all these things you see in bad idea books, like writing for the sake of writing. Like you're clearly just trying to fill out the rest of this chapter. I can imagine you on some Monday morning, like I got to get to a thousand words.

1:17:09What about this? You know, so it's like when one of those two things fall short, the book doesn't work. Right. Right. So in writing this book and the response you've gotten, what's been the most surprising around this concept and idea as obviously you've proved it out in your articles and now in the book? People are almost immediately, even before they read it, just a title, are saying, yeah, I'm on board. Yeah. I was thinking I was going to have to do a lot more convincing, right? That's why I take my time of let me explain the problem with today and how we got there and pseudo productivity. People are like, no, yeah, slow productivity, let's go.

1:17:42Yeah. You know, before they even know the principles. And really, the last time I got a response like that was maybe when I wrote Deep Work. People are like, yeah, Deep Work. Yeah, I need more of that. Yeah. Even before they read the book, you know, and people kind of invented their own definition of what it meant. So I'm surprised how ready people were. I thought I was going to have to do a lot more convincing. Yeah. Well, I feel like so many of us feel like we're in an out-of-control car with no brakes. and that they know that in those moments where they feel themselves internally they're most productive is when there is the time and the space and it's slow and it's not forced.

1:18:17And that's why you hear all this advice about airplane mode and throw your computer out the door when you go on vacation and go right when you're away from this environment because so much of this environment is just faster and faster. I mean, I think this is the problem is it's not as if people like this way of working, right? They like the fast work and like, hey, this is what work is. It's like, you're really going to have to convince me this is the right way to work. That was the surprise is, no, no, people really dislike it. And I think that's what's so deranging about our current moment, right?

1:18:45Is that when you know, I can only get good things done when I have time and space and breathing room to do it. And you can't have it. But your job is like, we want you to produce good stuff. By the way, if you're not checking your email every five minutes, the whole world's going to blow up. It's like professional gaslighting, right? You're like, this is crazy making, right? This is what happened with the eight-hour Zoom marathons in the early pandemic is that it was like a Kafka play. Like it was like a metaphor for the absurdity of life or something. People are like, this isn't even real. Like this can't possibly be real.

1:19:17This is like some satire about the British, you know, civil service in the 1800s or something. Like is this real? Like it's like a David Foster Wallace novel. Like it really – it's deranging because people are all looking around like we all know this is crazy, right? I mean, there were some viral moments where people would just film themselves sitting in front of the computer and then try to swap that out as their Zoom. So it looks like they're there while they're actually behind the scenes doing the real work. I mean, do you know the movie Office Space from 2000, right? Like, so Mike Judge was so ahead of this, right?

1:19:49He was sensing this early on. But, you know, there's that moment where the consultants come in, the efficiency consultants, and they're interviewing. And the employee is trying to explain his job. And finally, they're just like, what is it that you actually do here, right? And it was like a joke back then. Actually, that's like most of us right now. It's accelerated, yeah. Yeah, it's like, except for now the scene would be like, well, I answer emails. And you're like, oh, and then you do the, no, then I answer emails. I'm a Slack leaderboard. Yeah, I'm a Slack leaderboard. And we talk about the conversations we're going to have where we're going to talk about work.

1:20:21Yeah, look at all these meetings I attended. Yeah, it's like, oh, so like are you in a business where like you get paid for going to meetings? No. Are you in a business where like your clients are paying you for emails? No. So what are we doing here? I mean, it's people are so done with it. I think for us, and we don't talk a lot about productivity on the show, but the impact that this has on your relationships. And I talked about that earlier, like the quality of life at home with your partner, your spouse, your loved ones, your friends. All of that seems to have been pushed to the wayside with the pseudo productivity.

1:20:51And then your relationships at work have also been harmed in this pseudo productive world where we see the jerks, the assholes getting ahead. We see the people who are gruff, who are rude, creating boundaries that allow them to slide away from doing the actual work. And then we feel a lot of times we're doing quality work, but we're not being recognized in this current environment. Yeah. And I think this is one of the reasons that this is particularly misery-inducing, the relationship piece. I mean, this is why I think mobile computing played such a big role in the crisis of pseudo-productivity is because this is a major thing that we didn't realize.

1:21:30But once I have the ability to demonstrate activity wherever I am, because I can send an email wherever now. I can send – I can jump on Slack wherever. Now think about it psychologically. Every moment where I'm not, you know, at the office, I have to be negotiating this tradeoff of like, okay, so what gets priority here? Should I demonstrate a little bit more work or should I like have a conversation with my partner? Should I do a little bit more work or should I go for a walk? You have to constantly do this negotiation. And that is exhausting. And it also generates all this resentment, right?

1:22:04And you get like a lot of resentment towards your work. And I constantly have to have this negotiation. And this got a lot worse, of course. Again, like I think the early pandemic was just like a magnifying glass. That's why it was – I keep talking about it. But when a lot of people were completely remote for the first time, so now they're all – this negotiation became constant. Yeah, because I'm just home all the time and I have to do other things while I'm at home. So now I'm just constantly having this back and forth. It's where I got a lot of messages from readers and listeners. I replicated some in the book where they had this sort of just intense resentment towards work.

1:22:42And the thing that was setting people off was they would get an email from their boss in, you know, May of 2020. And I was like, the key thing here is everyone's we got to just like stay productive. And it was like setting people off because just the suddenly every moment of their day, they had to go through this negotiation. That's where I think quiet quitting came from in part. Like listen to the rhetoric of quiet quitting. My life is more than just the labor I can produce. You know, this type of rhetoric in the context of knowledge work wouldn't make sense in 2019, right? But it suddenly made sense when every part of your life you had to be assessing, could I be doing something here that demonstrates productivity?

1:23:22So it's that ability to do pseudo-productivity at any time that really came in and made work much more psychologically taxing. Well, I also look at the dynamic now as you go to hybrid and who's running back to the office first around productivity. It's like, no, now I can actually get deep work done at the office because I'm not babysitting. I don't have all these distractions and I'm not expected to be on all these Zoom meetings anymore. Like I want to go back to the office. Yeah. Well, and hybrid is, you know, I have an article. It'll be out by the time this interview airs so I can talk about it.

1:23:54But I wrote an article for The Atlantic. I mean, unless something goes really bad today. It should be coming out. But so I had this – I was talking about hybrid work, right, because I have this proposal. Okay. I have this bold proposal. But first I looked at the data. Hybrid work is where we ended up post-pandemic. Yeah. Right. So if you just look at the data of remote-capable jobs, what you see is you get to March of 2020 and almost everything jumps fully remote, right? On-site jobs dropped from 60 percent down to like 12, right? Yeah. All right. That's what you would expect. Then something kind of unexpected happens.

1:24:29Two things unexpected happen. One, the on-site jobs basically never come back. They bounce back up a little bit to about 20%. And they've been there ever since, right? So, like, that was it. Like, basically, most remote-capable jobs are not fully on-site. But the other thing that happened is fully remote work just has been it steadily fell, stabilized low. Hybrid's what came up. Hybrid is 2x more percentage of people's jobs than any of these other categories, remote or on-site. Okay. Four jobs that are capable of doing this. So here's my proposal is, okay, we already just made – this is a major change, right?

1:25:03Like we now kind of permanently almost like the majority of these jobs in office some days and home the other days. Right. Here's my proposal. The days that we're at home – and I think we should synchronize this if possible. The days we're at home, no email, no meetings. That happens when you're in the – we could do the opposite, but I think this way is going to be better for various reasons. In the office, emails and meetings. Yeah. So now at home days, the whole culture is just get things done. Work on the things you have to work on. All right, then when do we talk about work and have conversations about work?

1:25:35Well, the other days in the office. But hey, now that we're in the office, instead of saying, hey, let's throw a Microsoft Teams invite that's going to have to sit on my calendar and eat up 30 minutes, I'm probably just going to grab you and be like, hey, what about this? What about that? We're going to have in-person meetings in the office. so then at the end of that meeting, we can talk about like three other things. And in seven minutes, we've just taken care of 70 emails that would have been sent otherwise. Scheduling, yeah, agendas and all that. I think those two things could have a huge impact on the overload crisis just fueling everything that's going on right now because A, you're getting more done.

1:26:10You have all this uninterrupted time. You're not completely exhausted. And then B, the communication we do is now a lot more efficient because it's largely in person when we communicate. The context that we're in. The context that we're in. So now we have less days that people are pushing work on our plates. We have less big meetings squatting on our plates. Office hours can actually be office hours. Great. As long as we're all in the office. Yeah. These two hours every afternoon just come in, you know? And we don't have to set up a formal meeting. Just like swing by. You know, we'll talk about it.

1:26:40And I don't mind doing that because I know the next day I can spend the whole day just working. Right. I think if we did this, I call it hybrid attention versus just hybrid work. I think this could make a huge difference on that first principle of slow productivity, this doing fewer things. I just think people would be so much happier. You know, work would be so much less deranging. Well, I also feel just based on that trend and, again, the environment that it creates, you can basically structure it in a way that is universally adopted quite easily. And I feel like a lot of these initiatives really fall flat because, as I said earlier, we're injecting new technology, new platforms.

1:27:17We're trying to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways. It's like, no, office hours are office hours. It's like I could only reach my professor in his office hours. Other than that, he was doing deep work, researching, working on papers, publishing. And it worked out. And you know what? You still got your questions answered. Like I'm teaching a class right now. I have office hours. I have a great TA that has his own office hours. And you know what? My students are never that far away from getting a question answered. Right. But if they want a question answered right now, they can't do it. But we're used to this in academia.

1:27:48The other thing about hybrid attention is really what's the hard part about this is having a schedule where some days you're at home and some days you're at work. We've already done that hard work. That's a drastic change. Like if I came to you in 2019. And suggest, yeah, like here's what we're going to do. Like two days a week, your employees aren't going to come into the office. Like what are you talking about? Like we can't do that. But that's the hard part. Now that we already have a difference in kind. We dispelled the myth around productivity at home. Yeah. Because before that, everyone's like, if you're home, you're just doing laundry, watching TV, you're not going to be productive.

1:28:18Well, the pandemic forced us all to showcase that that's not true. And the funny thing about it, because in the early pandemic, I wrote an article about the history of remote work. And the funny thing about it is that until the pandemic came up, people were convinced this could never work. Because the period in which remote work became possible without huge headaches was like roughly 2006. Right. So 2006 is when we already had Skype. Skype added video conferencing. So that was it. We had pretty wide penetration of at-home broadband. We had very wide penetration of at-home computing. People had laptops.

1:28:57And now we could do conference calls and video conferences low cost because we could do it over the Internet. Right. So everything was in place in 2006 for remote work. And a few places tried it. There were some really big examples. And the managers almost immediately were like, I don't like this at all. I don't like this one bit. And they canceled them. And we never touched it again until the pandemic came. And the managers up and down were saying, people just won't work if they're at home. Yeah. Like, it just won't work. Things will get missed. They obsessed over the potential small bad things you create.

1:29:28You imagine, like, well, what if this happened and I couldn't get in touch? They were very distrustful of their employees. You know, I mean, this is why Yahoo canceled. canceled. Marissa Meyer at Yahoo canceled their experiment because she had her IT team look at the server logs. And she was like, well, how often are they logging into the servers when they're at home? And then she got sort of obsessed with this idea that they're not logging in that much. What if they're, what if they're like at the beach? You know, it was this weird, it's like fear. And so they were convinced this will never work.

1:29:59And then in like three weeks, we realized like, actually, it's fine. It works fine. Yeah. That was the hard part. It was learning that we could do that. And too hard. I'm a huge fan of that proposal. And I'm thinking about it now how we could roll it out internally because I feel like we've all essentially agreed on hybrid. Yeah. And now with that structure of communication and ability to do deep work at home, I think would really unlock not only slow productivity, but just overall employee satisfaction with the roles that they're in. Yeah. And so many of the complaints are around the pseudo productivity.

1:30:32So the two numbers I saw that I helped, I think help support it. So one, when we shifted the hybrid work, online meetings jumped up because we were still doing meetings, whether we were at home or not. But when you're at home, the only way to coordinate about something is to have a Zoom, right? Because I can't just grab you and talk about you. So, the report I was looking at reported a 252 % increase, right, in virtual meetings since the start of the pandemic. And the number's not going down. So, it's not just, oh, in the beginning of the pandemic when we're fully remote. Even since we've stabilized at hybrid, we have this 252 increase has stabilized.

1:31:09Then there's numbers that says roughly half of hybrid employees really think meetings are much less effective than they used to be. Because now it's not only the virtual, but like some people are at the office and some people aren't, and it's this weird mix or whatever. So now we have just like concrete numbers. All that goes away if we just don't really do virtual meetings anymore. I can't remember the company, maybe you know from the research, that essentially created a plugin that would add the cost of that time for every staff member to join that meeting. And it basically showed, okay, I'm adding this person, their hourly rate is X.

1:31:41And now this meeting is actually costing the company this much money. And it's that transparency piece that you talked about where it's like, well, wait a second, do we really need this$2 ,000 meeting to talk about a potential for another meeting? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, so I love, I love this idea of, of, uh, reducing asymmetries in work generation where one person can do a little bit of effort to create a bunch of effort from other people. There's a section in the book called Make People Work Harder, right? And it's all about these asymmetries. Like, I love this plug-in idea. Like, another thing that we're just making people do a little bit more work, for example, to assign something to you.

1:32:18Like, okay, I have to collect for you. Like, let me know once you've gathered all the information I need, you know, to do this thing and then I'll work on it. You get a lot less things coming your way because it's really quick to say, hey, can you deal with the Johnson contract's sin? But if I have to actually gather the information, and a lot of what's going on here is obligation hot potato, is I just want to get this off my plate. Like what I'm doing now is just trying to whack my inbox down. And if I actually have to do more work to assign you something, that's, you know, I'm not going to do it.

1:32:49Another idea along these lines is reverse meetings. So no, no, no, I can't make five people come to me and all have to spend an hour of their time as each of them only has five minutes of things to say, but we have to go through like everyone's thoughts. No, I have to go to each of you. So I'm only taking five minutes of each of your time, but I have to like, you know, go to your office hours and go to that person's office hours to go to that person. I, as the convener of the need for this information, I should have to do five times more work than the other five people that are in it, you know?

1:33:21Ideas like that, I think, go a long way. Yeah, that friction, you know, I'm picturing your Google document with the projects I'm working on, okay, add it, and adding in a Google form that's like, okay, you want to add this, now give me all the details, fill out this form and this form in this box, and then it'll populate on my document. And you notice that no one wants to go through the extra five, ten minutes of collating all the information you need to then have that on your plate. My department chair at Georgetown is great at this because, like, one of the things that happens in academic departments is there's always people who very much in the moment have, like, a complaint about, like, we should be doing this.

1:33:57Why aren't we doing that? You just sort of like send this all towards the department chair's direction. Like, why are we dealing with this? It is this great, I think, completely reasonable response, which is like, yeah, you know, we should discuss any issue that needs to be discussed. Here's what you need to do. You need to like circulate or whatever through the department and gather feedback. And then if you propose the discussion topic to the faculty with two weeks notice, it can then go on the agenda so that we can discuss it at the next faculty meeting. Nothing makes it onto the agenda. nothing makes it on because what are they really doing is like in the moment they're like me mad you know yeah just getting rid of that emotion moving on so if you as the department chair there is like okay so I guess I have to deal with this now too and you know it could just be this huge asymmetry he gives a little bit of friction into it like yeah okay these things have to be two weeks in advance and like gather some information and hey guess what most of these things weren't so important I love this discussion let's make it frictionless for our audience to find your work and the book yeah so calnewport.com I don't use social media.

1:34:58So this is speaking of friction. So that's the place to find me. The book, Slow Productivity, you can find it, you know, anywhere books are. But at calumeport.com slash slow, we made it so you could get a big excerpt. So if you want to sort of read about a bunch of this stuff. I also have a podcast, Deep Questions, which you can find wherever podcasts are. And it's just this type of stuff. People call in or write in with questions about their jobs and how to be slower and be less distracted. And we just sort of rock and roll and chat about these things. So check that out too. I love it. Thank you for joining us.

1:35:28Thanks for having me.

1:35:39This week's shout out comes from Todd. Well, I'm going to let Todd tell you. Take it away, Todd. My name is Todd Ramirez and I joined X Factor to deepen my relationships and expand my network. There's a lot of information online and I didn't know where to start. With the X-Factor program, they showed me information that was most relevant to me, how to implement it most effectively, and I could also get questions along the way and get them answered. Also, receiving feedback from others and their points of view helped me realize there's a lot more into it than I thought initially. Without these people, I wouldn't realize how many weaknesses I had.

1:36:18And without these weaknesses, it would have been months until I figured out, wow, this took me forever and I could have been somewhere further. With this mentorship and this program, it really creates me to become the better person I want to be faster. And getting experience from AJ, Donnie, Michael, and other coaches, it really helped me realize that I can reach these goals and that I got the potential. You should really join X Factor. Now, if you've listened this far, my guess is because you want more out of life and to finally succeed at work, love, and life. And if that's the case, then join us, the Art of Charm team and hundreds of other people just like you, who are experiencing breakthrough conversations, supercharging their confidence, and growing an incredible network inside our world-famous X-Factor Accelerator program.

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1:38:14Like you were just a toy And you sold the world You're a song of a tragedy Cause you had your taste All black on the yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh yeah, I remember you In my mind When I brought you away Thank you.

1:39:14Thank you.