Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they might have for.
The rest of us. So today I am excited.
To welcome Chris Gilibo to the show. Chris is the author of a brand new book called Time Anxiety. You might also know him from Side Hustle School or the Art of non Conformity.
So Chris, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Laura. I's a huge honor to be here. I'm a big fan of you, as you know, reading your blog for many years. So this is very exciting.
I'm excited to have you. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Sure, a little about myself? Well, I was born at a young age. It's always like a dangerous question, right, So like what is pertinent?
You know?
In my early twenties, I spent a few years as an aid worker in West Africa. That was like a very transformative time for me. Led to me traveling to a bunch of other places and just getting interested in like cross cultural things. I'd always kind of worked for myself. I was like this classic unemployable, you know, archetype, Like I really like to work on things I'm excited about. It's very adhd. But if I'm not excited about it, then I don't want to work on it at all.
So you have to kind of work for yourself. So did lots of little entrepreneurial projects. Had a project of going to every country in the world which I started in two thousand and eight and wrote a blog about it called The Art of Nonconformity. That's kind of how I started writing and sharing online. Been doing some version of that ever since. Started writing books, started this podcast that I've been doing every day for twenty eight hundred
days now. And I hosted an event called the World Domination Summit, which you were a keynote speaker at an opening keynote speaker one year, which was really fun. And I have a really wonderful community. So a little bit more about neurodivergence and mental health and you know, related topics these days. But I try to work on things i'm excited about.
Yeah, and you actually made it to all of the countries I get, yes, including the ones that we are not supposed to go to anymore.
I think, yes, that's right. Yeah, it was actually easier a few years ago than it is now. People are still doing this quest, but I think it was a little bit easier. Yeah, back in the early.
Early two thousands before there are fewer restrictions. Yeah, it is an amazing thing to contemplate doing. But I want to talk a little bit about what time anxiety is. So what is this concept of time anxiety?
I'm curious. I mean not to derail, because I'll answer directly. But when I first do it, started doing like the research for this book, I had this phrase, and I started just asking people about it. I'd be curious what the concept time anxiety means to you, Laura, without even any context of the book and such. But I started just checking with people, and like, people are like, what are you working on? It's like, I'm exploring this concept and I come to it honest, I don't come to
it as like an academic or a researcher. Like I actually felt like my life was kind of governed by this sense of like I feel like I'm running out of time. There's not enough time to do what I want. And I mean, you've written about this extensively, you know, from your own perspective and such, And how do I decide what to do next in the face of so
many options and such? So I started asking people, or I started telling them, I'm working on this concept called time anxiety, and almost everyone would have a really strong opinion about it. They would have an experience with it. They would say, I have this thing. I talk about this with my friends all the time, but we didn't have a name for it, you know, like I feel like this is like the greatest problem of my life.
You know, some people would even say so. For me, I think it's you know, there are two types of it. It's one is this existential type of time is running out in my life right and or maybe there's something I should be doing but I don't quite know what it is, and I have this sense or maybe I have some regret over things I done or not done in the past and feel like I can't change that now.
And then the second type is just the day to day routine of how do I, you know, kind of triage and sequence my work and my life and my relationships and my hobbies and all the you know, how do I make these choices? In this world of knowledge work, even if you have like a somewhat defined job, you know, for a lot of people doing knowledge work, there's like an infinite array of you know, the task that you work on and how you you know, approach and schedule them,
and so it can be really overwhelming. And so that's the second part.
I think you had talked a little bit about it being like the sense that you're always behind in some way or another.
Sure, yeah, always behind and not sure how to course correct or you know, like if you ask people like what they really want, A lot of people say, I want to catch up, you know, I want like if I had an extra day, you know, how would I spend How would you spend it? And you expect that they would say like, I, you know, would have like a vacation, or but it's I would catch up on my email. That's my greatest aspiration is I would catch up.
And I kind of felt like this way myself for a long time, and so I felt like it was really troubling and like what do we what do we do about it?
But Yeah, it's curious.
I mean the idea of catching up or being behind implies that there's some objective standard of where everyone is supposed to be, which I guess I've never figured out where that standard was kept or.
Who decided that.
So well, we're all suffering from our time anxiety. In the book, I wanted to talk you know, you have a lot of different tips and hacks of things to try, which I loved about The book is very practical, But I want to talk about one speecific issue. You mentioned time blindness, So now what is time blindness and how can people address this?
So it's kind of a neurodivergent e concept, So for anybody with ADHD or autism, or anybody who identifies with any conditions like that, but not exclusively, A lot of people can have time blindness, which is basically like where we kind of chronically misestimate, underestimate, or overestimate how much time something takes, and this leads to us kind of always feeling rushed, like always feeling rushed, always being behind. So if you're the kind of person who's always late,
you probably don't like that about yourself. You know, it's not like, oh, this is just but your friends have kind of like gotten used to it, like so and so is always late to things, but it's in this case it's probably because you are not estimating, you know, the amount of time that's required for transitions and such. And people will also go the other way and like
overestimate time too. But a really simple thing to do, and this is not like mind blowing, but it can actually change your life, is simply to allow like ten or fifteen more minutes than you think you need, you know, for transitions. And it's going to be the coolest thing because now you are like five minutes early to things. And what's interesting is when I've shared that with people, some people really are worried about, like what will I do with the five extra minutes? You know, and like
this is not a problem. This is a good thing. To take a book with you, right, or do something, you know, like it's a thing to have extra padding, like to have buffer and margin in your life. Is actually it provides relief, I think, And I think what a lot of people are looking for more than organization, And again I'd be curious what you think about it, but like more than organization or hyper optimization, what they're looking for is relief, a sense of like, help me feel better?
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, honestly, people who are chronically late, adding in ten to fifteen minutes is not going to make them early.
They will probably be there right on time.
So you know, it's really one of those funny things. And yeah, people always like but what I could have emptied the dishwasher before I left. But we just need to nip that thought right there. Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Chris Guillibo. Well, I am back with Chris Gilbo, who's the author of the brand new
book Time Anxiety. We've been talking about time blindness. If you find yourself always late, how you can just add ten to fifteen minutes and you will probably be on time. You may find yourself early, but that would be a happy thing that you could celebrate if that happens. So you mentioned people feeling like they would spend their extra time getting caught up on email. I know from the
book Time Anxiety that you find email particularly stressful. In case anyone listening to this also suffers from that anxiety, I wonder if there's anything you've done to help yourself there.
Yeah, I mean this kind of ruled my life in a negative way for many years, and I felt really bad about it. Like I was very bad about getting back to people and getting back to people that I cared about. You know, you probably wrote me at some point and I wrote you back three months later, and I would begin almost every email with the same sentence, which is like, I'm so sorry for the delay in reply, right,
you know. And so I have this whole chapter about the inbox of shame, and I honestly felt like I'm just always letting people down. And it wasn't just a matter of like, oh, I need to schedule twenty minutes into my I need to Like sometimes I would have time, and I would have this great resistance to like there's this block over there's something I'm dreading and I can't
force myself to do it. I think this is also like a NERD divergent kind of thing and understanding that sometimes really small things can can be difficult, you know, to do. And so I think there's a process of it. Like I wrote a little bit about radical acceptance, some of it is you just accept like there are some things that you that you are going to be better
at than others. You can try to and you write about this, like minimizing some of your communication and closing off some inboxes so that you don't have, you know, the ability to get a direct message on every single platform and such. Ultimately, I think you just you do what you can. Like you try to do what you can. You try to prioritize, prioritize like the important relationships and
not worry as much about everything else. I also do things like the you know, inbox bankruptcy, you know where I'm just like, Okay, I've had all these messages there forever and I'm not doing anything about it. This is probably going to stress you out right, you would never do this, but some of your listeners are probably more like me, and they've just had all these things there
for so long. And so the the whole point is if you just like you know, archive or delete and move on, then yes, you may feel a little bit bad about some of that stuff, but you've been feeling bad about it and not doing anything about it, and now you're going to do a better job moving forward with things. So that helps me from time to time.
Yeah, No, honestly, I mean, I don't respond to everything instantly or anything like that, but I do. I do an email triage is what I call it, every like two to three days and trying to get myself to current, and sometimes that involves deciding that I'm not going to respond to something which you know, you have your Friday list, you know, which I know the world has not stopped spinning yet, so it seems to be okay at this point.
So, Chris, what is a reverse bucket list? I love this idea of a reverse bucket list.
A reverse bucket list is about celebrating what you've actually already done, what you've already accomplished. So obviously listeners know that the bucket list is like, oh, here's all the things that I want to do. I want to go to Paris, and I want to go bungee jumping, and you know, et cetera, et cetera, And I'm very future minded. I tend to be very goal oriented. But always being future minded means sometimes that I don't appreciate the present or actually reflect on, Oh, I've been able to do
some cool things. I have been to Paris. I don't actually care about bungee jumping, so the reverse bucket list is like, this is a list of things I have done, you know, and it can be any It can be bucket list like items, it can be accomplishments of any kind. It can be relationships that you are proud of, or times that you've made good choices in relationships, times that you've showed up for yourself. I mean, it's your list, right,
So it's good. It's a way of like, look, I actually have done, you know, a lot, and so I think so there's the big picture bucket list reverse bucket list kind of thing. But I also think even at the end of the day, just a short little because we have a to do list, you know, we always have like our running stuff that we got to do
and then we check it off and it's gone. I think it can also be helpful, like at the end of the day, for example, or a week, to be like, what are three things I actually did today, not just the three things I need to do going forward, because I tend to not I tend to just finish stuff and move on. Finish stuff and move on. And I think it's really helpful to decide, like what's enough, and then I can celebrate that.
Yeah, well, I'm a big fan of daily celebrations. We should have more celebrations in general. I mean, I've added stuff to my to do list that I've done just to cross it off, so you know, I like giving that little gold star.
So you mentioned that when you ask.
People what they do with an extra day of the week, many people suggest that they'd get caught up on their email. But you suggest that people actually do an exercise of thinking what they would do on an extra day of the week. And I presume you don't want them to do email, So maybe talk a little bit about that exercise and what.
Yeah, I had to take. I had to take catching up off the list of options. So the idea is instead of thinking about your one single, ideal perfect day, which is kind of another thought exercise, and that can be helpful, but it also is like pressure inducing, like it's like a one day, it's got to be perfect.
You know, what if you had an extra day every week, and so it's the eighth day of the week, you got seven days a week, but now there's an extra day and on this day, not only can you not use it to catch up, you know, presumably you have other responsibilities and obligations and such on the other days, but on this day, nobody is asking you for anything, right, So it's your day. And the key point is it repeats, so you know, you get fifty two of them a year.
So what would you do on that day? And if you think of it in that context, I think it's more helpful than just thinking about like what do I want to do with my life or what's that single day? Because sequentially you can do a lot, right, and Lauria you're the model of this, right, with like war and peace and the bak and everything else that you do.
So it's like, you know, people can write a book in a year, you know, using this framework, they can learn a language, they can learn something else, they can practice something. So I think it just kind of helps you get in tune with what you really want. And I think a lot of people don't think very deeply about that what is it that I really want to get out of life? And what is it that I want now? And what do I want in the future? And how how can I be kind to my future self?
What are the choices I need to make now so that my future stuff will be able to you know, whatever that thing is, and maybe just to give it make it even more simple. Just a really practical thing is like as you were going through the day, like maybe you're doing the trademark Laura VANDERCAM time tracking system, which I love and respect and have talked about many times. But you can also just intuitively, maybe just notice and ask yourself, like what do I want more of and
what do I want less of? And I think when people do that, they tend to just like moving forward, kind of interact differently with the world once you know, oh I want more of this or I want less of this. I don't actually want to talk to this person all the time. Maybe I have to talk to them some of the time, but you know, I want to lessen those interactions. And I'm actually I'm really enjoying, you know, these puzzles that I'm working over something else, and like, be cool if I spend more time.
Doing that, Yeah, yeah, on the eighth day of the week, we would not be talking to that person that well.
I think the idea is most people don't.
We don't really think about what we'd like to spend a lot more time doing because people assume they have no time.
So what would be the point of asking what you want to do more time?
But if you think about it, then hopefully we can start to build that into the one hundred and sixty eight hours we have in the week without actually getting one hundred and ninety two hour week.
Great, right, right, right, very good? Yeah, exactly. I think you can do it strategically or you do it intuitively, and like both both ways are going to help. Ultimately you're going to be better off.
Excellent.
Well, We're going to take one more quick ad break and I will be back with Chris. Well. I am back interviewing Chris Gilibo, who's the author of the brand new book Time Anxiety. He's also the author of the book The Art of Nonconformity. Been telling us all about his amazing projects, like visiting all of the countries in the world back in the day. So, Chris, among the happy tips in your book is to think about death once a day.
Yeah. Is that great?
Why should we have this memento Maury every day?
What's in that for us?
It's so interesting. I was talking with Ryan Holiday about this recently because he has a similar take. I think not everybody has the same awareness of mortality. Everyone has an intellectual awareness of mortality, which is like everyone dies, we know this, but to have a more personal awareness is like someday I will die. And when I was doing the country quest, I wrote a book about other people doing quests of all kinds and such, and one of the commonalities I found among them is that they
often had this more personal awareness of mortality. Maybe they had had something that happened to them a close call of their own, or they had lost someone close to them, or maybe not, but they had this more personal understanding of it, and it instead of being like pressure inducing or a sad and scary thing, well maybe it is a sad and scary thing, but it could also be like a purpose inducing thing. And it kind of makes
you think, well, okay, life is short. We know that, you know intellectually, but if I what does it look like to like live each day with that understanding? And maybe I will make different choices if I just remember, okay, I won't get this this day back. Time is precious, right, You're right about this a lot. So you know, for me, like thinking about death is it's not meant to be like overly negative thing. It's meant to be like I want to do more. You know, I don't actually want
to be a minimalist. I don't want to like less is not the answer, you know, I want there's some things I want to do less of, but actually, like, I love my life and I want to do more stuff that's exciting, and I want to set goals and I want to get closer to people that I care about and like try to have as much impact as possible. And you know, part of the reason that I want that and other people you know want that, is because we realize like that time is limited. Right, What is
it that you say? You know, what was the classic phrase that we borrowed? You know, I think at WS one year you know it better than me. It's the Laura of Andercam phrase.
I don't know.
Yes, I don't have time.
It's not a priority, no, No, it's about the expectations are infinite.
Time is finite.
You are always choosing, well, right there, you go choose, well, all right, we're going to choose. Well, well, one of the things you want is to choose. Chris, though, making this a little lighter now is a granny hobby. So why are we choosing a granny hobby?
And what is yours.
Sure, Oh yeah, wow, I wasn't prepared for the second part.
Other people.
So a granny hobby, and some people might prefer the term cozy hobby, but granny hobby is not meant to be disrespectful in any way. Granny hobby thinking of something like like crafting or knitting or crochet or baking or gardening. You know, we think about like some of the things that our grandmothers or grandfathers you know, might traditionally do, and like I grew up like gardening with my grandma, and it was like this really special time. So there's
actually a lot of research. It's not just like, oh, this is a fun thing to do. There's a lot of research that a tactile doing that is tactile and sensory and low stakes can actually like increase our cognitive you know, attention, our focus, as well as reducing our anxiety. So the low stakes is key, right. It's like it's relatively easy to learn to do the basics of a lot of these kinds of crafts and then you can
get better of them over time. But it's not that hard, and if you mess up, it's okay, right, if you if you if the cake gets burned in the oven, then you can make another cake the next day. You haven't like sent the email, you know, like c see the entire office on the wrong email or something right, So low stakes, it's tactile, it reduces anxiety, and it's also like I think the person that I borrowed this
idea from Anu mentioned her in the book. She also calls it like hands on thumbs down, so your technically you're still using your thumb, but you're not scrolling on a device, so it's a device free. So I actually don't know if I have at the moment a good granny or cozy hobby. Yeah. I like some board games, but I'm not actively like playing them right now, So maybe I need to work on that after the book launch and tour. Find my my granny hobby a challenge exactly exactly?
Well, are there any particularly mentioned?
I mean, among the many things you do, you know, your daily podcast for twenty eight hundred days.
I mean that's a that's a pretty long time.
I'm curious about your daily routines, if there are any routines you have that you feel make you more productive.
I love this thing about how we all have like two to three hours a day of like you know, productive energy of like this cognitive focus. And the more and more I have thought about it, the more I understand how true it is for me. And I've tried to be really protective of that time. I think that's the biggest thing I do. I do exercise every day, run every morning, and so I like to have that and then I like to not schedule myself a lot
in the morning. Typically, I like to have that time just for creative work that I can structure however I see fit. I do like these repetitive kinds of projects. I find a lot of like comfort in making the podcast every day. It is you'll understand this perfectly. It is easier for me to make it every day than it would be to it three days a week, you know, And that's something that not everybody understands. They're just seven days a week for like seven years. I'm like, no, no,
that's the secret. It would have been harder, you know if it was weekly. So I tend to like a lot of those kinds of like building blocks, milestones of things. And so I think the trick is to make sure you're doing the right things, because I also want to say.
I try to be very like candid in the book, like it sounds like I have all this expertise and I've done all this stuff, but I actually really had like a mental breakdown and really really struggled and felt like I was getting I was so into the productivity like industrial complex that I was getting good at doing the wrong things, Like I was getting really really efficient
at being ineffective. And so I think it's you know, I think it's just important to mention that that it was a little bit of a journey that I've been on.
Yeah, well we've all been on our journeys. And I guess one last thing about a journey here, Chris. I mean, normally I ask people that I interview what they've done recently to take a day from great to awesome. But I'm not going to let you choose, because I want you to talk about the time you walked twenty miles to dinner.
Okay, this was so funny and I'd never done this before. Yeah, I just had this idea maybe three or four days in advance, so it wasn't like completely spontaneous, but it wasn't super planned. There was a restaurant twenty miles from me in San Diego, and I was like, I should I should walk there, And I was like, how okay, was there a good route for that? And how much time would that? I mean, I do run every day, so I'm somewhat used to, you know, those kinds of things.
I've done marathons, but I maybe actually walked like for hours and hours and hours, and so I just I just had this idea and it wouldn't leave me alone. And I thought, well, it could be like a really dumb thing, but it's also low stakes again, like if I don't like it, okay, And so I did that. I left it around lunchtime, and I got to the restaurant at like right after seven pm. I made a seven pm reservation. I showed up like right after ten
minutes after, and it was so much fun there. I ordered this like large pan of cornbread that's supposed to be like a shared appetizer, and obviously ate the whole thing myself. And then afterwards I took an uber back, which took like twenty five minutes, you know, and I'm passing like all the ways that I had, all the things that I had passed on my course. It's funny because I thought when I went on this long walk that I was going to be productive, you know, it's
just how I think. I was like, I'm gonna make some phone calls, I'm gonna do some stuff. But then like my phone battery like charged down, like within the first couple of hours because you're using GPS, and I was like, oh, okay, so I really do just have to I can't even listen to music for most of that walk. And so it's just a small, small thing that is now a core memory of mine. And it
wasn't that hard to do. And so the reason I did it, I probably should have said this first is I just I found myself too much in the routine and I wanted to disrupt it a little bit. And so I was a chapter in the book about practice having fun and how do you actually practice having fun? And for me that's that is a little bit of a journey because I like to work. So it was good for me.
It was good.
All right, Well people can try that if they wish, sure, you know, maybe just do something else.
That's a little adventure for well, Chris, where can people find you?
Oh? Thank you, Laura. So the new book is Time Anxiety Time Anxiety dot com. There's some information about the book. I'm doing a tour across North America, and then I write a weekly newsletter. E're of mental health dot com. You can read it there. And then I'm on social media at Chris killipo, which nobody can spell, but if you talk about in something close to that, you'll get to me.
That sounds good, well, Chris, Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everyone for listening. If you have feedback on this or any other episode, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.