325. He cancelled his meetings for a week (and nobody noticed), with Chris Lovett, best-selling author

0:00Al Elliott:You're about to meet Chris Lovett. He's an executive coach, he's an author and proud holder of a 1997 title for best legs in a five-a-side football competition. He still puts on his CV.

0:11Chris Lovett:My name's Chris Lovett and I am currently an executive coach and author of the book Relentless and Discoverive List.

0:21Al Elliott:A few years ago, Chris asked a senior leader to do something that terrified him, cancel every meeting for a week and see what happens.

0:29Chris Lovett:I asked him to decline a whole batch of meetings for a week just to see what would happen. The place wouldn't fall down. No one would die. And surprise, surprise, only one person come back to him and said, oh, actually, yeah, we really need you there because you're going to sign something off. You need me there the whole time. No, not the whole time. Just the first bit.

0:47Al Elliott:One person, one single person out of a calendar packed solid, colour block after colour block, looked like one of those Tetris games. That week didn't just free up his diary, it took apart everything he believed about being needed. Today we're finding out what happens when you declutter your job the way you declutter your house. And yes, it genuinely starts with a broken CD case. I like the way you say declutter, Leanne. Declutter. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you, of course, by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:25Al Elliott:My name is Leanne and I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Now, our guest today, Chris Lovett, he used to have everything society tells you you're supposed to want. He had a great job, he had the title, he had the salary, he had the house, he had the car. Then one weekend, cleaning his apartment in his late 30s, he stepped on an old CD case. He had a full meltdown and then sold almost everything he owned by Sunday night. He made 156 British pounds and he used it to buy a one-way flight to Copenhagen.

1:58Al Elliott:He came back from travelling and did something a lot of us think about but never actually try. He took the same declutter mindset and pointed it to his job. Fewer meetings, fewer reflex yeses, way less busy work. And instead of getting in trouble for doing less, he started outperforming everyone else still grinding through back-to-back Zoom calls. He's now written it all up in a book called Relentless, and he coaches leaders around the world to do the same thing with their working week. If you've ever looked at your calendar and felt oddly proud of how full it is, this episode, my friend, is for you.

2:31Al Elliott:After this quick break, we'll find out exactly what Chris said no to and what happened when he did. The dirty little secret is that most businesses think they know their customers. They have the data, the records, the history, but it's scattered across three teams and four systems, and in our case, it's about 216 ,000 spreadsheets, which means nobody can actually use it. What you should be doing is using HubSpot because why? HubSpot connects it all. Every interaction, every support ticket, every conversation into one platform every team can work from. So when sales talks to a customer, marketing already narrows the full story.

3:07Al Elliott:And when you know more, you grow more. Nice. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:18Chris Lovett:my name is chris love it and i am currently an executive coach and author of the book relentless and discover of less but i guess probably what i'm most famous for is being voted best legs in a football competition in 1997 and which i think still still counts in my mid-40s and i have put it on my cv so it's one of the one of the key things i'm proud of well i would be too

3:45Al Elliott:i mean legs are often neglected and so yes i think that's it's important to have big legs

3:50Chris Lovett:i think i probably did not skip leg day the day before and then when i was 17 running around a father side football pitch clearly it made some sort of impression um at my i think my football

4:02Al Elliott:career peaked at that point tell me i i sense there's a moment in your life where this all

4:08Chris Lovett:kicked off when i was in my late 30s had everything that society says you're supposed to have to be successful right so um you had i had the job the title the salary relationship home ownership car and and shit loads of stuff and the interesting bit was i stepped on a cd case whilst i was cleaning around the home and you know the kind of basil 40 moments if you've ever seen any of those 40 Towers episodes where over a period of time there's just yeah yeah the end like smashing a car with a tree branch it was that moment so over a long period of time there'd be like small accumulations of stress that on its own wouldn't really do anything and then you do something like you stub your toe on the bed frame and you just lose your shit and everything then becomes visible all of your issues challenges problems etc mine was just simply stepping on a cd case stepped on a cd case in the middle of my front room i believe it was mark morrison return of the mac um which is from maybe 1995 something like that which probably indicates to you how long i'd had that cd for um and i just had that moment of i've got way way too much stuff and it's now causing me physical pain and so i had stuff everywhere tech and games i hadn't used books i've never read cds i'd just been hoarding for my whole life clothes i never wore and dvds that i'd maybe watch once or never watched at all and they would i'm just accumulating all of this stuff and i realized that it wasn't really making me that happy at all so by the end of that weekend i decluttered most of that kind of entertainment stuff and i i remember the exact amount i earned so music magpie i don't know if you remember that where you scan the barcodes on the back of the dvds and things like that that's when you really know how much your stuff is really worth like oh wow my favorite dvd 5p brilliant um so i ended up re re-earning 156 pounds from selling my stuff and selling that stuff not only just gave me space in the home but it also gave me the opportunity to buy my first plane ticket from London to Copenhagen which then started this kind of odyssey of well I want to achieve more in life and I did that by selling pretty much everything I ever owned and then traveled around the world and it was purely because that one afternoon I stepped on a Mark Morrison CD case and which turned me into like this kind of equivalent of Danny Dyer and the Incredible Hulk with a sprinkling of Basil Fortley.

7:03Chris Lovett:And here we are now with a second book coming out and coaching people around the world to simplify their work. And I suppose we've got the Mac to thank for it.

7:14Al Elliott:I love that. Returning the Mac as well. What a reference. You can tell I'm, I think I'm slightly older than you, but I definitely, Yeah, that definitely takes me right back. So let me ask you, what happened next? You booked your ticket to Copenhagen, and that would be, just give us a timescale. Is that about 10 years ago, did you say?

7:32Chris Lovett:Yes, that was August 2017 I left. So I took a sabbatical at work and sold everything, sold the home, sold the car. And normally, like, for a sense of owning things in life and a sense of success and moving up in the world, you have keys right the more keys you have the more success you have right and i had zero keys which on the face of it looks like well you're not achieving anything but i had the opportunity to step off this kind of traditional and kind of treadmill of life and society and success and yeah disappeared around the world for a bit um so that's when i realized that I could achieve so much more with so much less because I literally just carried a backpack of stuff around the world with me and throughout that journey I got more confident because I was able to navigate these new cultures and organize my life that wasn't a normal nine to five so out of that structure and obviously when you travel you also engage in slightly different ways of communicating probably in a typical typical english way we just shout a bit louder or say words a bit slower um but yeah it was like having to organize your life without having it planned for you having different styles of communication um how to budget properly and how to go on adventures where the likelihood is you'll get lost find your way back figure your figure out the problems the solutions i went and then i came back from that journey and similar to you you know when you when you remove yourself out of the normality of life and you go traveling you go on adventures you go back into some level of routine or home life and your view of the world is completely changed so i always remember a friend saying to me you'll come back nothing would have changed but you would have changed and that's exactly right and so i then obviously had to go back into real life had to pay bills get a job and i got a job back in the corporate world and everyone was just so incredibly busy like doing things that were of low value running around answering messages um going to all of the meetings in the world like working late starting early not having a lunch break and I was sitting there going, surely this is not, this can't be productive or sustainable.

10:05Chris Lovett:So I just used my less is more mindset and started to do less work. To my surprise, I was able to complete more things of value. And then I started to be noticed of people that other people are going, why are you doing less or not attending that meeting, but you're actually delivering more than everyone else and quicker and it's simply because i wasn't getting bogged down in the clutter of work so the thread kind of goes through my whole work really is how to kind of declutter at home and then it's led to going back to work and decluttering your work so you can achieve way more by by doing less let's took let's talk concrete examples so when

10:50Al Elliott:you went back so what were you doing before this big enlightenment adventure at work that you

10:57Chris Lovett:realized you didn't need to do when you went back yes i remember when i was my old work was in fraud and investigations and catching bad guys for a living which sounds very interesting but once you've done it for like 10 15 years it just becomes another job and i'm sure similar to you like you know and most of your listeners like you tend to fall into a job and then that job becomes your career and and then so that's that's what i had this realization as around i didn't actually plan any of this like it just happened to me and i was reacting off the back of it so my career was never planned but yet i spent you know all of my adult life in it and and so i would be doing things like writing excessive risk reports which sounded fucking fascinating right um and you know completing spreadsheets and going to all of these meetings where we all just talked so much about the work we're not actually doing anything about it um so yeah once you kind of got off that treadmill i went back into a new context but saw the same patterns and i just didn't engage in those patterns anymore so a prime example being we have meetings for an hour because that's the default and so i would ask it kind of can we do this in 45 oh well take 15 minutes off what we're gonna what we're gonna do so we've probably not waffle around for 15 minutes um or complete you know questioned work that we would be working on as a team and i'd be like is this the most important thing we're supposed to be doing right now because we do get attached to this new shiny thing so a new bit of work will come in and that'll be the latest and most urgent thing and everyone will rush to that and i'll be like but what about the urgent thing yesterday are we is that not urgent anymore no and so yeah so we get caught in these habits throughout our career and then covid happened and it kind of it took away the commute everyone was on zoom meetings every day and so we had we worked probably about 20 more time-wise and stopped having lunch breaks because it was easy just to log on and work through everything was a crisis and we've carried all of these habits into this new way of working where it's hybrid teams a threat of ai is going to take my job constant restructuring downsizing of companies but not downsizing of things to do a constant stream of societal things that is prompting you all the time to grab your attention download this app watch this film make sure you eat healthy drink your water there's so many things in life that are pushed onto us that we have to do sometimes you have to unplug and just take a step back and go what is the most important thing i need to do today you focus on that one thing i think there's

13:59Al Elliott:going to be a lot of people listening who are going to go that sounds lovely but in my work i have to go to these meetings i have to fill in this spreadsheet what would you say to those people

14:08Chris Lovett:Yeah, these are probably narratives that we've had over a period of time. So we have to do these things and we have to attend and we have to be there. The reality is once you do one tiny little bit of disruption or what I call like an internal rebellion, you realize that actually some of the stuff that we have invested so much time and effort into probably doesn't need to be done at all. so a prime example being then i asked a very senior leader client of mine who was complaining that they didn't have any time which is a very kind of modern challenge we all have we all struggle with time and so i asked him to share his work calendar with me and it was almost like a game of tetris that gone right or wrong i don't know but it was just like blocks of color across all I was like, when do you go to the toilet?

15:05Chris Lovett:When do you eat? But he'd convinced himself that every single one of these blocks, these meetings needed him there. Despite him being in a very, very powerful position, he felt that his time was not his own. So we just had a conversation about regaining control over the things we agreed to do, the places we agreed to go. And so as one small experiment, I asked him to decline a whole batch of meetings for a week just to see what would happen. The place wouldn't fall down. No one would die. He's not a surgeon, so no one would die. And surprise, surprise, only one person come back to him and said, oh, actually, yeah, we really need you there because you're going to sign something off.

15:52Chris Lovett:So I said, does he need you there the whole time? No, not the whole time. Just the first bit. And so once that kind of reality was presented, it kind of shook that whole narrative of, I do not have time. I don't have ownership over my calendar. I can't say no to things. And that just rearranged his whole view of work. so now he put he put a cap of how many meetings he would attend he delegated a little bit more and there was a psychology of like i have to go because i have a title because i have the power and i want to and i need to go to to also tap into my own need of needing to be needed and wanting to be liked because we you know what it's like al you get an invitation to a thing you're like oh well yeah i'll see how i can go to that same with work if you get invited to something like to a meeting it sets off the almost like the happiness hormones in the brain because it's like the serotonin kicks in the dopamine kicks in and it feels good so if someone says to me you know give me some advice you'll stop everything and you'll go sure i'm gonna lay down my best advice see because it makes me feel good um so there's an element of making our own selves feel good in that moment and and then at the end of the day you go home and your partner goes how did you get on today how and you know been absolutely manic back to back yeah oh cool what did you achieve buckle

17:30Al Elliott:look i want to really go down this i know it's such a cheesy thing for a podcast to say this rabbit hole but i really i really want to dig into this because it seems like you described analogy at the beginning that if you have many keys you're powerful and important the online version of keys seem to be calendar events if you if you have many calendar events you're busy and important and it's funny when you ask someone how's things oh it's hectic at work it says i am an important person once you get rid of that is it not a sense of loss that you've lost this importance oh yeah it's a massive identity with it and uh you know there's sometimes when i ask people how you're getting on and there's no words at all it's just noises

18:16Chris Lovett:oh that bad okay um but yeah there is an element of kind of reframing what success is like in modern life because the way I've grown up and been educated and with my family it was all about working hard it was all about the graft right and but now we've got all these tools that take the graft away so how do you determine what successful is and my view on it is by the impact you have in the world is by the the kind of person you become the influence you have the things that you deliver in a workplace that are meaningful and add value to people and so things like um not going to order the meetings and actually not you know rejecting some of those meetings and working on the most important thing that's going to impact the most amount of people increase the profitability of whatever or launch a new project quicker than anyone else um so they're the things that ultimately you would put on your cv i don't know anyone now that's gone to an interview and been asked, how many meetings do you attend a week?

19:25Chris Lovett:Because we're looking for you to do between 15 and 16 meetings a week. Cool. Also emails, if you could reply within five minutes, that's the standard that we set in this organization. It's bollocks. You don't put that on your CV, right? You got to inbox zero quicker than the rest of your team. so but we still kind of see those things as successful but yeah so my my kind of view of with relentless is ultimately just saying there's a lot of stuff we we all do and we all get caught up in in that that isn't that important focus on the really important things and you might be able to grab yourself some time back and be the friend parent that you've always wanted to be and actually look after yourself because the kind of stats around burnout linked to it are are huge as well

20:22Al Elliott:well let's talk about what you actually do so let's say we've followed everything you've done we've now got our week back we have now managed to do our work in 20 of the time that whether we used to we used to do it in i sense there's going to be people sitting there going shit what do i

20:38Chris Lovett:actually do now yeah it's a great question um so i think that will be the utopia right i think when we was in the 1950s, there was a guy called, I think maybe Alvin Toffler, but you might have to check that. He said we'd be working 15-hour weeks by now. That's not true. Obviously, we're not anywhere near working 15-hour weeks. There's a massive call for a four-day work week. So many countries are now trying, implementing things, especially in Scandinavia. some some countries in public sector roles are starting to go to four-day work weeks now and then actually seeing the increase in productivity in quality of life well-being and profits so so yeah so we're moving in that in that direction and the trouble we're seeing is society and our own need to be doing will always kind of drag us back which will level it all out but yeah of course you know in workplaces especially in corporate life there will always be a need to do more so it's finding that balance of making sure that i've got enough that adds value and potentially letting go or at least pausing the rest of it until i do have adequate time to to come back to it but yeah i i've i'd love to be in a place out where i'll be like i only work two days a week and i and it's just the most important stuff that um unfortunately the reality is is not like that yeah what about you do you work two days a week no but we do work sort of three days a week that's good that is good you've got you you've figured it out tell everyone the

22:22Al Elliott:secret do you know what the secret my secret is i just don't reply to emails because i think if they're important enough they will email again there you go there you go that's that's one of

22:33Chris Lovett:thing right in a workplace context email is probably the slowest form of communication now you'll have a team's message you're ping off you'll have a slap message and ah analog shock horror people can ring you um if they really needed an urgent answer on something so one of the tiniest tiniest little rebellions you can do is by not being the first person to respond to like a group email but again all of that is layered in our experience of work what success means our own kind of internal monologue and like if i reply first or reply quickly then that comes across as a positive view in the eyes of people of power but interestingly you'll get a reputation of that you respond fast not that you get a reputation of you deliver great value

23:27Al Elliott:Well, I stick with the idea. Okay. I think that there are a lot of people. I know some people, and I used to be this person when I had a job about 20 years ago was, oh, well, if I don't, if I'm the first one to reply or I send an email at 7am, my bosses are going to go, wow, this guy, oh my God, they're the next for promotion. So I think if you're coaching me, tell me, no, don't do that. I might be worried that your boss think, well, these people are lazy. They're Al's lazy. he's never going to progress does it ever work out that way yeah that's a great shout because

23:58Chris Lovett:the view of of laziness and and even like resting things like that has been given such a bad rap because of the hustle bros and the hustle culture don't forget to get up at five do your miracle morning and eat your eggs and protein and go for a marathon before you log on and also don't forget that you've got parenting responsibilities because you're going to be the best dad and the best mum. It's ridiculous, right? And obviously the stats now go the other direction of like, we tried that as a society and it ended up bad because there's about 79 % of people in the UK have experienced some level of burnout in the last year or so, according to Mental Health UK.

24:41Chris Lovett:So we tried the hustle and it ended up that we were just all going off stress and unfortunately some people were passing away due to overworking. I think the most recent case of it, there was a guy in China who was only 32 and he was working every single day remotely, had probably the responsibility of about five or six people, five or six jobs because of the restructuring and wouldn't take any breaks he had a heart attack at home and as he was being wheeled out of his home on stretcher he said to his wife don't forget to bring my laptop to the hospital he passed away a bit later unfortunately and whilst he was passing away he was still receiving teams messages asking if he could respond to something because it was urgent eight hours after his death he got a complaint from another colleague to say why have you not responded yet this is really urgent so we tried it as a site we've tried the hustle and unfortunately that's not necessarily an extreme example but these examples are becoming more prevalent.

26:06Chris Lovett:So being more sustainable, so if people are having a bit of a, feel a bit iffy with the word lazy, because that's got a negative connotation to it, actually high performers build in breaks and rest all the time. Let's look at athletes, for example, right? You don't see a 100-meter sprinter turn up at 9 a.m. on the track and sprint until 9 p.m., like not sustainable they do a sprint they stop they stretch they recover they analyze what worked what didn't work right let's go back to the start how did my how did my start go what was my middle like like and that's what they they recovery and rest is part of the work so even there's so much science on the impact on the brain as well so even just after covid when we had the bit of the zoom apocalypse right where everyone was on on zoom because you didn't have a choice and microsoft did some experimenting on the activity in the brain if you were doing back to back meetings and again the term back to back it feels us kind of like well i'm do i'm important i'm doing stuff right again however the science tells us something different so back to back meetings if you have no breaks and the stress on your brain increases every time you go into another meeting if you had a meeting even if you had a 10 minute break between your meeting the brain recalibrates and the stress levels out if you continue on without any breaks your attention and your engagement drops by about 40 so if you're in charge of say big businesses people's careers and big products by three four o 'clock if you've not had a break you're you're probably working at about 60 attention which means you might not be fully listening you might miss a few things and you increase the risk of errors and then when you layer on later into the evening because of course now i've been to all of these meetings i've got to do the work right all of the actions after me into all the people i've got to respond to once you're doing that later into the evening you then start to kick into the law of diminishing returns which is a classic that goes back maybe a century or so right so these these things are not new they've just been remixed for a modern working life and again if you get to the point where it takes you an hour to think about how to respond to a message you are more likely to make things worse than make things better so So also you lose your return on investment of hours input versus quality of output.

28:53Chris Lovett:So you have to be aware of when to stop. Use breaks as a tactical and strategic approach to get the best out of your brain because you are a corporate athlete and you use your brain. That's your key muscle. So look after it, keep stretching it and give it the rest it deserves. So, yes, I kind of use the term lazy as a little bit of a poke. for us to be a bit more strategically lazy. And so we can actually just go back and have our lunch break, have a little five minutes between your next thing and just go and make that cup of tea because your brain will thank you for it and you'll likely perform a lot better because of it.

29:39Al Elliott:Did you know that the UK's number one management podcast, that's us by the way, and the UK's number one marketing podcast are both on the same podcast network. We actually have a lot in common. We both use behavioural science to help people do better at work. And we both had to wrangle Rory Sutherland on an episode. And two out of three of us are devilishly good looking. And you're not going to say wit. Phil, host of Nudge, UK's number one marketing podcast. It's brought to you, We Need to Do This in Threes, the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination, or business professional. Seamless.

30:14Al Elliott:Seamless. Tell us about your latest episode, Phil. we've just done an episode on fake fandom and how new york indie bands are paying agencies to create

30:23Chris Lovett:fake tiktok videos about how much they like their work and we talk about the behavioral science behind fandom and how that encourages people to enjoy the music and all of that good stuff and do some big things about how this affects the world of politics business and brands as well it

30:36Al Elliott:is it's such it's such a good show of course you'll hear all the stuff you want to hear about how to grow your business by using behavioral science in your marketing but there's also just some really interesting episodes that will be right up your street. Personally, I enjoyed Can Balsamic Vinegar Make Beer Taste Better? It can. And are we all just status-seeking monkeys? I am. Go and listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. But come back. Yeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this, so come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in.