Instead of focusing my energy on what I don't want to do.
I e.
Don't check Twitter, don't check Facebook, don't check YouTube, don't check.
Slack, et cetera.
I try to just put all of my energy and kind of focus on what do I want to do and be very sort of intentional and focused about that. And what I find happens is when I say something like, Hey, here's what I want to get done today, and I just spend less time on whether it's Twitter or or whatever other kind of digital distraction because I have this like I'm sort of motivated to do what I said I was going to do.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics you use by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day.
I'm your host, Doctor Amantha.
I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work.
Date.
Hi there, Before we get started on today show, I just wanted to do a little call out for listener questions. I wanted to experiment with a new format on the Tuesday episodes where I answer any questions that you as a listener, have on your mind about work and productivity and particularly this new world of work. So I'd love it if you could send me through anything that's on your mind. My email address is Amantha at inventium dot com dot au and that's also in the show notes.
So I look forward to hearing from you. Okay, let's get on to today's guest. Who is Ashatosh Priya Dashi.
So.
Ashatosh and I got connected by Judy Anderson, the CEO of startup vic because we both spoke at an event for startup Vick very recently about productivity and.
I was so impressed with Asher.
I feel like he almost out geeks me on the productivity front, so I invited him to.
Be on the show.
So Ashatosh is the founder of sin Sama, which is a startup over in San Francisco that went through the very famous and respected Why Combinator program in twenty nineteen. Sinsama is a daily planner for elite professionals that helps you plan out a focused work day by pulling together your tasks from all your tools. And I've been having a go at using cin Sama and I reckon it's pretty awesome. It kind of takes what I do in more of an analog way and helps make it a
little bit easier to do and streamline things. So Ashatosh has spent most of the last decade building and launching productivity hardware and software. So he's thought so much about productivity and his goal is to build products that help us navigate our work in life mindfully and intentionally. So I really love this chat. I feel like there's a lot of really interesting strategies that Ashatash thinks about and has experimented with in his own life and also in
his startup. There's certainly quite a few strategies that I was inspired to try out that I hadn't come across before. So on that note, let's head to Ashotage to hear about how he works. Ashatash, Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
I'm excited to be speaking to you.
I feel like you're maybe even more of a productivity nerd than I am.
Possibly.
Yeah, Well, the last time we spoke, I was I was like, Wow, you're almost like a productivity scientist or doctor, whereas I like to think of myself more as like a productivity mystic, where I'm trying to like figure it out from my own experience. So I'm really excited to just spend some time talking with you.
H I love that. A productivity mystic. That's a cool label. All right.
Now.
I know that you think a lot about rituals, and you've got like a lot of rituals and routines in your own life. I want to let's start with daily and I want to know what are the things that you do on a daily basis to help keep you focused and productive.
Well, I guess I'll start with sort of the foundational elements of my daily routine, and that's the stuff that's sort of outside of work, and that's you know, sleeping properly. I have the flexibility to sort of wake up when I want. So for me, one of my big kind of daily routines is sleeping until I'm done sleeping. So that has been one of the most sort of important parts for me to be productive each day, is just simply getting enough sleep.
Can I ask, though, what does that mean to sleep properly? Like what are the things that you've put around your sleep to help you get a good night's sleep? And also, I feel like that's a novel like waking when you finish sleeping. I want to dig into both those things.
I think over the years, I've iterated and kind of refined and found the things that help me like both fall asleep, stay asleep, and sleep well. So and I've experimented with a lot of things. But i'd say, if we're kind of talking about what's my current sort of stack for sleep, if you will these days, it's really just the basics, like close the blinds, close the windows, get the fan going so that it stays cool even
with the windows closed. We don't have central air. I sleep with earplugs because we live in a downtown area so it can be very loud. And I found that, like those little things, they kind of add up to just give me much better, better sleep quality. So nothing really sort of groundbreaking, just putting a lot of little pieces together to make sure that I'm kind of getting RESTful, high quality sleep.
Yeah, And then how do you know when you're done sleeping?
I don't know if that's an obvious question, but I feel like most people in the world would probably have no awareness of that because we're being driven by other people's schedules.
So how do you know.
When I open my eyes of the morning, then it's like, oh, I'm awake, So I guess we're going to get at it today.
All right, So you're just waking naturally with no alarm.
Yeah, that's right.
And you know, there are some sort of natural elements that sort of nudge me out of my sleep, whether it's you know, just the light and the noise from the outside starting to kind of pick up, or you know, my wife starting her kind of daily routine and those kind of things, like they're kind of like in the background and they kind of push me out of my sleep a little bit. But I don't kind of use an alarm clock or anything like that.
So when you're done sleeping, what then happens for your for your daily routine?
For me, the first thing I do is just sit quietly and drink coffee. I have like a really slow kind of boot up in the morning, from like the point where I open my eyes to the point where I'm like sort of excited about the day is like a solid twenty minutes or so. So I'll usually have have my coffee and I'll do a variety of things just kind of depending on my mood on a given day, I might start by just sitting and staring out the
window and drinking my coffee. I may read something that I was I've been reading, or you know, some days, I may just scroll through Instagram because that's what I'm feeling like, So I switch it up and I'm not sort of tied to the routine of you know, this is exactly what I do. And I'm sure we can probably talk about this more in depth later. But one of the things I found is having a lot of kind of smaller routines that kind of match my mood
and energy for a particular day. So I don't try to do all of the exact same things every single day as much as like, you know, what are the things that I, you know, need to get done today, Like how is my energy, Like what other obligations do I have, And which of my like kind of sequences of routines that I have that I like will kind of help me get the most out.
Of this day.
That's interesting, and so is that quite conscious?
Then You've sort of got a series of different routines that I guess asserted to different moods or states that maybe you want to create or that you're in and then you'll kind of like deliberately go about sort of matching that.
Is it as conscious as that?
Yeah, I mean I think it's it's it's semi conscious. It's it's sort of an intuition developed over just working through so many days sort of alone as an entrepreneur, where you have to kind of figure out what you want and there's not a lot of like sort of external stimuli to push you to do certain things.
It's all sort of self motivated.
And I kind of think of it as, Oh, I'm a big basketball fan, and so I kind of think of it as almost like you're just reacting to the situation. So you may have wanted to go one way and sort of score the ball today, but it turns out that there's a bunch of you know, defenders in that direction. So like what is what is like your move? Like how are you going to kind of adapt to the day.
So some days I wake up and for example, I may have gotten a message from a colleague saying like uh whatever, like our app is down and like somebody needs to do something, and so that those kind of
things can derail your day. But I've kind of found ways to almost kind of cope with that, and later in the day I may go through like a Okay, I don't usually do this, but maybe now's a good time to go for go for a run, have some lunch, and that like mini routine kind of resets me so that later in the day I might be able to kind of refocus my energies.
And all of this really.
Is is possible because I have so much flexibility and freedom. But don't know if that makes sense that idea of like kind of micro routines or they're like moves more than they are kind of routines.
Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. I like that.
I want to know, like, what else are you doing on a daily basis.
Exercise is a is a really big one. That's something I do pretty much every day. Some sort of kind of personal spiritual or meditation practice is another thing that I do on a daily basis. And then the rest of my day is pretty much work, so that that kind of rounds out the vast majority of my time, especially on working days.
And I know that you have a daily planning ritual, which I think you do the evening before the next day to set out what your priorities are going to be can you can you talk me through what that looks like.
Yeah, So I sort of plan out my day Almost twice. I do a light planning the night before where I kind of say like, Okay, these are the things that I want to do, and obviously I use sin sama for that, which is my company, and sin sama is basically a guided daily planner. It kind of walks you through the process of planning out your work day and pulling things in from.
All of your tools.
So I use sin sama to kind of plan out here are the things I want to do today or tomorrow rather, and then the next morning sort of after I've had my coffee and I'm sitting down, that's when I'll actually kind of get into the to the nitty gritty and see it, you know, were there are things that came into my email or kind of requests that came in from colleagues that I need to stitch into the to the fabric of my work day.
When you're planning at your day. Because I've I've been trying out sin sama and finding it really helpful and really interesting. Do you leave buffer time? Because I find where I can sometimes fall down when I've been using this process and I sort of use it in a sort of used a similar process before trying out cin Sama is that if I don't leave buffer time, then my day can get a bit chaotic, like if lots of things are taking longer than I thought that they
would take. So what does that look like for you?
Yeah, I definitely I do two things. I sort of double buffer. I leave buffer time in my day, and I sort of overestimate how long I think things will take, and so that gives me just usually plenty of time. Of course, it's one of the things about estimating work is that it's basically impossible, but you try and do your best.
So what I try to do.
Is when I'm planning out my day, I kind of add time estimates to all of my tasks, even little tasks that may only take five or ten minutes. I say that, you know, I'm going to spend five minutes on this or ten minutes on that, and I try to get it to the point where the sort of total sum of my day is around seven hours, and I'm typically in front of the computer kind of working for longer than that.
But that's kind of I found over.
At this point, like years of when I plan out my day, if I sort of allocate about seven seven and a half kind of at max, that's my total capacity for how much sort of focused, heads down work I can get in a day. And now, of course you'll have days where you know, just some sort of emergency comes up in the middle of the day and you can't always predict those things, but sort of on average, that number has been the sweet spot for me.
Yeah, I think it's interesting to work out what that sweet spot is and does that include meetings as well?
That's seven hour total.
Yeah, that's that's sort of like all of my work related activities. So meetings plus like tasks, and I only have about two days a week where I have meetings and tasks on the same day. Otherwise I try extremely hard to separate those two so that they don't blend. And again, I have that flexibility and so I I take full advantage of it.
Ah, really, so how does that work?
Do you have almost a weekly rhythm, like days that you'll do meetings and then days that will be more for deep work and maybe shallow work as well.
What does that look like?
Yeah, exactly. So I'll give you the kind of the structure of my week. So Monday for me is just kind of my miscellaneous variety day and looking forward to the week. So that's when I have like my meeting with the rest of my team, and then I just kind of do any sort of small stuff that just has kind of piled up, and I just that's a day where I'm really just cranking and looking for like
a lot of throughput. Tuesday is the day I focus entirely on our customers, So I have a number of calls with customers, I do customer support tickets, and I review all things like customer surveys. And one of the reasons I do all of that on one day is basically that it allows me to sort of concentrate all of my focus and attention on what are our customers thinking, what do they need, as opposed to kind of dispersing
that thought and focus throughout the week. And then Wednesday and Thursday are deep work days, so I don't have any meetings at all on those days, and that those days, you know, each week, it changes what I might what I might do on those days, but it's you know, oftentimes like building a feature or doing some product development or designing something. It's it's that kind of work that happens on Wednesday and Thursday for me, and then Friday
is a day for reflection for me. So I'll review metrics and dashboards, I'll do my one on ones with my teammates, so we do those all sort of asynchronously over email. And I also do my kind of one on one and sort of thinking ahead for the next week with my co founder on Fridays, So they're kind of thematic in a sense.
The days.
I love that.
I find that super fascinating and that makes so much sense just to reduce the context switching and so you can just really admit to the thing that you're doing on.
Whatever day it is. I like that a lot.
I want to know in terms of quarterly or even annual rituals or planning cycles or things that you find really serve you that you repeat sort of on that sort of longer cycle. Are there things that you do quarterly, six monthly, annually to help you keep focused on what matters.
I actually don't have any goal setting or planning rituals outside of my weekly and daily ones. And what we do at least as a company is when we feel like our longer term sort of roadmap has reached the end of its life cycle. That's when we'll decide, like, hey, it's time to kind of refresh this either because we've learned some new stuff and it just feels out of date and not kind of aligned with maybe what our customers want, and that's kind of when we do it.
But like we have as a company, haven't gotten to that level of sort of process yet. And I also haven't a personally found that to be something particularly valuable to me, because I find that if I'm being thoughtful day after day and week after week, the things that I want to do on longer term time skills, they
just kind of tend to work out for me. And maybe it's just kind of how I think, but it's easier for me to think about, like what are the things I want to do today and next week, as opposed to like, what are the things I want to get done in a year. One of the things I've always struggled with is when you're thinking about really large time skills, and for me, that's like anything larger than two weeks, it just feels so kind of abstract. It's just never something that has resonated with me.
I can definitely relate like I do.
I go as far out well, I guess Inventium has annual company goals which help everyone set their individual goals and kind of know where we're heading.
But yeah, I can definitely relate to that.
My natural disposition is to be like you, but I feel like I've tried to at least look twelve months out and then my personal goals is six months at which kind of I've sort of gotten used to, but I completely understand where you're coming from.
How does that then.
Work in terms of the team and your team knowing what they're working on if your preference is for kind of just sort of thinking about the week ahead and relying on.
Obviously very up to date data to make those decisions.
To date, it hasn't really been sort of an issue for us, And again, we're such a small team where we're only five people, so we're able to be a
bit more agile and kind of change direction quickly. And for us, it's like all of the kind of planning that we do or sort of anytime we come up with like a hey, here's a roadmap for like the things we want to accomplish in the next three months, it's often within the first month that we've learned something new from customers or usage, or from the data that we have about the business that's sort of invalidates that.
Every time we try to plan ahead, we find that there's something new that comes up that is just so much more obviously impactful. So in terms of the rest of the team, it's so easy for them to just say, here's what customers have been saying, or here's what we decided was like the highest priority things, and we'll just kind of chip away at those.
And how do you prioritize which features to build, because I imagine you must be getting a lot of customer feedback and things that they would like to see. How does that decision making process work for you and your team.
It's hard to explain this, but there's some things that just feel obvious. So we kind of, like, you know, we may generate like a like whatever, like fifteen ideas of things that we want to do, for example, and if there's anything on there that just doesn't feel obvious, we just discard it immediately and stick to the ones that are obvious. Within those, we usually have some sort of guiding usually a metric that we're trying to optimize for.
So one of the things we've been working on recently to give you a kind of a practical example, is we noticed that people who kind of finished the process of planning out their day two times at least two times in the product were had a fifty percent chance of upgrading to a pro plan. Obviously, that's like a
great sort of correlation there. So you know, we just looked at each feature on at roadmap and we're like, Okay, which of these things will either help people get through those first two days of planning their day and which of those things will also kind of help them have a good experience around planning their day. And so just like looking at that and having kind of a metric in mind that we're trying to optimize for makes it
easier to evaluate like which things should we build. And from time to time, we you know, we change what metric we're looking at, Like right now we're looking at that kind of activation metric. There were times where we're kind of focused on, Okay, why do people who have been using the product end up stop using the product and what's causing churn? And so we always just try to have a particular metric in mind when we're making decisions.
But again, you can't always predict which features will kind of move the needle, So there is just that constant need for experimentation.
Something that you've written about. I imagine you're a fan of Paul Graham, having graduated from Y Combinator, and in something you wrote, you referenced his essay Lives Too Short, where he writes about pruning bullshit from his life, and I was wondering if you could talk about what this means and how you apply that in your own life.
I was just thinking about this the other day.
It's so easy to fill your workday with stuff that's tangentially relevant or not totally obvious how it helps your end goal. And for me, it's like the way I try to sort of remove bullshit from my working life is like I look at everything that I plan to do in a given day and I just ask myself, is this thing like obviously and directly correlated with the results that I want. If it's two or three steps away from what I want, that's usually for me a
good indicator that this thing is probably bullshit. So you know, something like, for example, like you get invited to, like a networking event or something like that. In the kind of work I do, that's usually like a couple steps away from having a direct impact on like the thing that I'm working on, for example, improving activation and getting more customers to use Sinsama. Maybe I meet someone there and maybe that person helps me get some attention for
some some et cetera. It just feels like it's not obvious enough, and so anyway, my basic point is I just try to do the things that feel so obvious and urgent and important and just forget about the rest. I'm not sure if that answers your question, but that's kind of how I think about it.
Yeah, it absolutely does answer my question, because I feel like they're like, not many people are doing this, and I feel like, you know, particularly in large corporates who
form a lot of Inventium's clients. I think about what they're doing during the day, and I think about friends of mine that work for, say, what are the big banks or something like that, and I just feel like meetings in particular, there are so many meetings that I think would be classed as bullshit, as things that are two or three steps away from what really matters in
terms of making meaningful progress. I just think it's a really interesting barometer that perhaps not that many people are using. I like, how you think consciously about that? And so is that something that you that is almost in the back of your mind every day as you're looking at your day and planning the things that you're going to get done today.
Does that essentially pass the bullshit test?
Yeah?
And I think one of the really interesting things that happens when you sort of plan your day often, and by often, I mean every day, you just you kind of build these safety checks into your day, and it just makes it harder for you to kind of accept
bullshit into your day. So it's it's almost like a practice, like when somebody emails you and they're like, hey, can we get on a quick call or whatever it's And I've done plenty of I've said yes plenty of times when I when I really shouldn't and shouldn't have and I took a meeting that was basically bullshit, And it's kind of like a practice and an awareness of knowing like Okay, like I've been down this road before and there was just like these things are not really that
valuable and yeah, you just eventually just it becomes second nature.
I think something.
Else that I know that you apply in your working life and think about is Parkinson's Law. And for those that are not familiar with Parkinson's Law, it's basically saying that the task will stretch to as long as the time that you give it. So if you have a report to write and you've blocked out an hour in your diary to write it, it will.
Take an hour. Same thing applies to meetings.
And I want to know, how do you think about Parkinson's Law in your own working life and how do you apply it.
I think one of the most interesting applications I've found for Parkinson's Law is to basically pick almost insanely small time periods for certain things and try to force your problem and solution into that space. So one of the things that we did in the really early days of building Sinzama is that we started operating on two day sprints. So basically what we would do is we were a really small team at the time, there was just four of us. So on Monday we would say like, hey,
these are the Monday morning we're going to build. Each of us would say, hey, these are the things I'm going to build, and we would sort of demo it and ship it to like our production website by Tuesday evening, and then Wednesday morning we would repeat the same process and demo it to the team on Thursday afternoon and then ship it. And the really interesting thing was, basically we gave ourselves this kind of like two days.
It was really like a day and a.
Half to make progress, and a lot of really interesting things happen. One we figured out ways to take what we thought were really hard problems and just break them down into things that could be done in two days.
So a very practical example was we wanted to build integrations with other services, and usually the development time on something like that is just a lot longer, and so we were sort of forced to find really creative solutions to how can we make our users and customers get the value of having kind of an integrated experience in the app in a way that it's something we can
build in two days. And so we kind of used Parkinson's law to force us to one think of new ways to solve the problem and not and basically get our engine of iteration moving really fast so that we could learn a lot faster.
Yeah.
I like that a lot because typically people think about, you know, the classic like Google design sprint which is five days, and then doing that in a day and a half ready to ship. I think that's that is a really cool application of Parkinson's law.
When you were talking about that, I was I was thinking, you.
Know, in my own life, like just challenge of going, okay, can I get this task that could take hours actually done a whole lot more quickly. And something I do every week is I'll generally be writing a column or an article or something like that for some media publication. That tends to be a weekly task that is on
my list to do. And I know myself, I know that I could easily spend hours doing that, but typically when I'm time boxing my diary and essentially setting a meeting with myself to write the article, I'll generally keep it to one hour, sometimes ninety minutes.
And I'm almost like surprised that, Oh.
Hang, I know I can do that, and it just forces me to be very focused and work very hard and get it done.
So I can absolutely relate to that.
I think that's like one of the most important things you can kind of keep in mind when you're also sort of planning out your day. Is when you say like, hey, I think I can do all this stuff in like seven hours. You kind of start off the day then feeling like, hey, if I stay focused, I can get this all done. Which is it kind of gets the
like the flywheel of motivation inside of you going. And so for like the same thing, even on like a small scale, when you're like, hey, I'm gonna I'm going to get this done in an hour, you actually get it done in an hour. And if you didn't have that sort of almost artificial time constraint that you had created for yourself, you just you kind of move through the task with a bit more passivity than you would
have otherwise. And it's like you're making that commitment to yourself and you're almost kind of challenging yourself like, hey, can I do this? And I think a lot of sort of really kind of effective and productive behavior comes from setting basically like a goal or something to kind of strive for when you're when you're working towards something like that.
And now I imagine that there are probably listeners going, yeah, look that that's all well and good, but what about the myriad of distractions, particularly digital distractions that are out there and pulling our focus away from the task.
What strategies have you.
Found most effective to help keep those digital distractions in check and not get lured in by them.
This might sound crazy, but I've just learned to embrace them and live with them and use them and kind of be okay with them. And instead of focusing my energy on what I don't want to do, ie, don't check Twitter, don't check Facebook, don't check YouTube, don't check slack, et cetera, I try to just put all of my energy and kind of focus on what do I want to do and be very sort of intentional and focused
about that. And what I find happens is when I say something like, Hey, here's what I want to get done today, and then I also tell, you know, my colleagues, Hey guys, this is what I'm planning to get done today, I sort of just naturally kind of focus my time, energy and attention on my work and the things that I actually want to do, and I just spend less time on whether it's Twitter or whatever other kind of digital distraction because I have this like I'm sort of
motivated to do what I said I was going to do if that makes sense, And so it's not like I don't check those things at all. Now I do, but I'm able to just kind of push it aside and get back to what I want to do because I have that kind of goal and that commitment both to myself and to the people I work with.
That makes a lot of sense.
It actually reminds me of something I had Adam Grant on the show, the organizational psychologist from Wharton, very early on, and something he said stuck with me because we were talking about checking things like Facebook, and he will, you know, he will almost like let himself check social media almost as a you know, a several minute almost reward, I guess, after doing you know, a sprint of deep work, let's say.
And he said, you know, if you're finding that you want to stay on Facebook for longer, and Facebook is suddenly seeming a lot more interesting than your actual work, then you might want to think about whether they are actually in the right job if that is becoming more interesting than the work that you do. It reminds me of that, and I feel like that is it's a really interesting thing to reflect on. I think when people
are being pulled by digital distractions. Are you actually legitimately inherently interested in the work that you're doing.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think it's like what happens is when you say, like, hey, these are the things I want to do at work, and I'm kind of assuming you're you know, you're interested
and motivated and excited by that. You just kind of naturally get more satisfaction out of doing that, and you don't think and even if you are taking like a Twitter break or a Facebook break, it's just not as deep and fulfilling as the work you're doing, and you sort of naturally just want to get back to it, even if you spent you know, five minutes checking Twitter.
And I think for me, I've just found it easier to forgive myself and just be okay with the fact that I sometimes scroll through garbage and that's okay, Like that doesn't make me a bad person. Maybe it does, I don't know, but I just I just find that so much easier.
And I guess, like having said that, you know, I think we also all have days of low motivation where everything just feels a bit hard. What do you do for yourself when you're starting your workday and you're just feeling flat. Maybe you've had a bad night's sleep. I don't know, Like, how what do you do on those days?
That's when I'll try to adjust and see kind of why am I feeling low motivation that day?
Is it?
Is it that I, you know, didn't get enough sleep.
In that case, I might just try to do something simple, you know, maybe I'll just get through my inbox, kind of get the day started, and then take a nap, have some lunch, and then try again. So I don't try to do things that just feel like they clash with how I'm feeling. Obviously, I'm not saying you should never kind of push through suboptimal feelings. I think there's value in that, but I try to listen and feel how I'm feeling and act accordingly.
Now you're right in the heart of tech innovation land in San Francisco, and I want to know what your favorite software or applications and also gadgets that you're using at the moment, or maybe that you're feeling a bit excited about trying out.
That's a good question.
So one of the products I'm probably the most excited about is an email application called tempo. And so the reason I'm so excited about this product is, well, one, they kind of built the product around a workflow rather than it being a tools. Just like a tool that is about kind of speed and power and flexibility, it's really about helping you, as a user, as a person who has to do email, have a good workflow around email.
And then the other thing that I love about what they did is that they turned off all of the notifications by default, so you don't see new emails except
for two times a day. And I thought that that's almost a courageous decision by the product designers to say, like, we're going to take the most addicting part of email and we're going to turn it off because we know what you really want deep down inside is to not be addicted to these intermittent rewards in your email and you want to kind of handle your email on your terms.
And the reason I say it's courageous is because as a person who's designing a product, one of the things you want is your product to be sort of sticky and addicting. But I think they're doing it in a way that's almost virtuous, unlike something a product like Slack which just sort of praise on our desire for kind of intermittent rewards throughout the day.
I love the sound of that, and I think it's really interesting these companies that are designing email around workflow, Like I think obviously about Hey, which I've been trying out for my personal email from the creators of base Camp, and I'm really liking that. And I'm finding for the first time my personal inbox is very clean, unlike how it was when I was just on Gmail. And look a couple of other questions I had for you. I know that for you, you know from what I've read
and hearing you talk. You know, when you think about productivity, it's about output, not ours. And I feel like this is an important distinction, particularly in the world of remote working, where you know, when we're in the office, it's really easy to see productivity correlating, you know, even though it's
quite nonsensical with hours spent in the office. But now you know people that have managers that don't really know how long their team is sitting in front of their computers or being productive for kind of has to be about output. But I think that's a hard mental shift to make, and I want to know for you, was there a point where you were aware of making that shift around productivity being about output instead of hours or have you always kind of thought about it like that.
I think for me it's it's definitely not about the hours you put in. What it's really about is like picking the right things to work on and making sure that sort of the majority of my best hours of the day, my most energetic, my most focused times of days, time of day is spent on the things that I think is important because you can only control kind of
your results and your output to a certain extent. But basically, yes, I've never thought thought about it as ours as much as just like, am I doing the things that I want to be doing and the things that I think are valuable? If so, that's that's really all I can ask of myself, because I honestly can't always kind of predict how long things will take or exactly what the result will be of the work that I'm doing.
That makes complete sense.
Now, my final question for you, for people that want to know more about you and also find out more about cin Sama as well.
What is the best way for people to do that?
Well, if you want to know more about me. You can just reach out to me personally on Twitter or just shoot me an email. It's my name A s h U t O s h at sun sama dot com. That's s U N s A m A dot com. And yeah, if you wanted to try sin sama for planning out your workdays, just head over to sinsama dot com and give it a shot.
Fantastic, awesome, Well, Ashatash I've loved chatting with you and just nerding out on productivity stuff. It's been awesome, So thank you so much for your time.
Yeah, this was great. Thanks thanks for taking the time today.
That is it for today's show.
If you liked my chat with Ashittagh, then maybe share it with someone that you think would also appreciate it. And if you're feeling in the mood to maybe leave a review for how I work in Apple Podcasts or if you listen to the show, that would be awesome. And thank you for all the hundreds of people that have done that. I'm deeply appreciative. So that's it for today and I will see you next time.