Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of their day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba.
I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work day. So the next few weeks over summer, I am dipping back into the archives of the last two and a half years of hosting How I Work, and I want to share some of my absolute favorite episodes. So for today, I'm going to share with you the very first interview that I conducted and published for How I Work, which
was with one of my personal heroes, Adam Grant. So in case you're not familiar with Adam, he is an organizational psychologist, best selling author, and Wharton's highest rated professor. His books Give and Take, Originals and Option B have sold over one million copies and have been translated into
thirty five languages. Adam has been recognized as one of the world's ten most influential management thinkers, and he also happens to be the host of one of my favorite podcasts, Work Lack, which is a TED original podcast.
Now, what I loved most about this chat is that.
Adam is not only a walking encyclopedia of psychology findings, but it is fascinating to hear about how he applies these findings in his own life to be more productive. And finally, before we go to the interview, if you are enjoying How I Work, If you enjoy this episode, I would love it if you could leave a review or a star rating in Apple Podcasts. It is just brilliant getting a listener feedback, and it also helps spread the word to other people that might want to dip
into How I Work. And of course, if you are a listener to How I Work, you might want to subscribe and that way you'll get alerted as to whenever new episodes drop. So, without further ado, let's head to Adam to hear about how he works.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks Amantha.
Now, people talk about being productive, but I don't think I've ever met anyone on your level. So, your books have sold over a million copies, Your TED talks have been viewed over.
Twelve million times.
You've written a huge number of academic papers in well established and very well respected journals, and you've been Wharton's top rated professor for the last seven years. And then if that wasn't enough, your somehow managed to be a junior Olympic springboard diver and a professional magician. And when I learned all this about you, I thought, well, you know, if you were seventy years old, that would be incredibly impressive.
But you've actually packed this all into thirty six years, and so I've got a ton of questions on how on earth you may that all happen.
Well, that's very kind of you. I don't feel very productive on most days, so this is this is gonna be one of those one of those conversations where I have no idea how to answer some of the questions you're gonna ask, but I'll do my best.
Wonderful, wonderful, Well, why don't we start with the morning. I'm really keen to know what does a typical morning look like for you, if there is such a thing, and what are the critical ingredients in your morning that helps set you up for a good day.
You know, it's changed a lot since we had kids. I would say before kids, I would basically wake up in the morning and sit down at my computer and work until I ran out of ideas, and you know, sometimes that would mean I sat for four or five hours. Sometimes I would work until late at night, and you know, obviously i'd get up to eat and stuff like that. But I really liked just waking up and digging right into a project and then being laser focused on it
for as long as I could. And once we had kids, obviously I decided I was going to change my schedule, and so now it's much more of I wake up in the morning, we have family time, our kids go off to school, and then once our kids leave, I start working and my goal is to finish when our kids get home and then not work again until after their sleep at night.
Wow.
That sounds incredibly well balanced, and I can definitely relate to just the schedule changing.
When you become a parent, everything changes.
And I'm curious, like when you sit down at your computer when the kids are off for the day, like, what are the first few things that you do to get into to that zone.
I think that in an ideal world, what I do is I actually spend a little time the night before. If I'm going to work on something creative the next morning, the night before I'll spend a few minutes, just kind of mapping out a few ideas, and then when I wake up, I find that I processed some of them a little bit, and you know, whatever version of so conscious thought you believe in, and then I feel like I can I can just hit the ground running.
That's awesome. So you're kind of sleeping on the problem, so to speak.
Yeah, I guess. I don't know if it hurts the quality of my sleep, but it definitely helps the quality of my work.
That's excellent. I love it. I love it.
And on the topic of academic work, I was really intrigued when I read Callum Newport's deep work about how you that's your teaching work in the fall semester and research work in the spring and summer semesters. And firstly, I'm curious, is that still accurate? Is that still what you do?
It is? Yeah, I've always taught in the far and I just I feel like teaching is an immersive experience where, you know, I want to spend time in the classroom getting to know my students, figuring out what kinds of questions they have. You know, every year I redesigned twenty percent of the course. I'd like to redesign more, but I don't want to subject the students to the terrible
ideas that I've had every year. And so I figure, if two percent stays constant, then you know, there's there at least some major elements that are tried and true
that have gone reasonably well. But you know, and then I just spend a lot of time answering emails, you know, doing meetings and office hours, and I didn't I didn't want to have anything distract from that work wise, and so you know, then I thought, okay, well, I'm going to have a semester that's that's teaching focused, and then I'll have January through July every year to work on research and ideas and some of the other things that
I've I've brought into my job. And it's been a nice balance in part because like right now it's it's basically June, and I can't wait to get back in the classroom, right I haven't been since December, and I'm like, why am I not teaching? It's the most energizing part of my job. And you know, in December, I was really eager. I had a whole bunch of ideas that I wanted to develop, and I was excited to have
more free time to work on them. And so I feel like I get to alternate between two different jobs that I love.
That's fantastic. I love that.
And was that something that you did right from the stat of your academic career.
I think it's pretty common here in the States, at least in business schools. I would say, so, I've done it from day one. I always wanted to teach in the fall because I remembered the excitement of going back to school and how I couldn't wait to learn, and then, you know, always feeling like in the spring semester, I was like, Eh, I'm ready for the summer to come around. So, you know, I felt like it was it was the right time to really reach students and connect with them.
And I just, I guess, from from the very beginning, I felt like I needed protected time to get research done, and I also needed some boundaries to make sure that that didn't spill into everything that I wanted to do in the classroom and the relationships I wanted to build with students. And so I guess, yeah, I've never known it any other way. I've studiously avoided teaching in the spring or in the not fall, I should say, although I've occasionally done a week or so in the spring.
But that's about it.
Oh wow, fantastic. And I've also heard with emails.
Is it true that sometimes you will go a few days without checking emails? No good to clarify that. What I have heard about your inbox checking is that you frame up the task of like you know, waiting, like going through an inbox with let's say three hundred emails in it, which I'm sure is a daily occurrence for you in a really interesting way. Can you talk about how you think about inbox checking.
Well, let me first say that email used to be one of my favorite things. I remember in nineteen ninety I sent my first email. I think it was either nine or ten, and it was to a cousin in Colorado and it took about forty eight hours. Yeah, I mean it was. It was one of those defining moments where I could not believe that I could type something on the computer it was just a sentence or two, and that it would, you know, somehow travel halfway across
the country. And so I I just loved email, and I thought it was I guess it appealed to this. I guess I'm really into efficiency, and it bothers me when something is inefficient, and so I love the fact that with email I could I could reach multiple people at once, and I could you know, respond to multiple people quickly, as opposed to having separate phone conversations with each of them all the time. And slowly, as I went through college and moved into grad school, I started
to hate email and I wondered what happened. And what happened was I started getting too much of it. And you know, there's a curse. I'm sure you've experienced this as well, that the more responsive you are, the more email you get and so but but I didn't. I didn't realize it at first. So, you know, it's really important to me to get back to people, and so often I think I went a couple of years where my average average email response time, you know, between morning
and evening was was just a few minutes max. And you know, I took real I took pride in that it was it was part of being there for people, right And you know what I didn't what I didn't quite realize at the time, was Okay, I'm incentivizing these people to send me more emails. This is this is reinforcement, and so you know that then the number of people you'd know goes up. And so I just I just ended up with with more emails than I could get
to in a day. And so I found myself, you know, especially if I was if I was working on a big project, you know, it would be nighttime and I'd have hundreds of emails accumulating, and I felt like I
couldn't keep up. And so the way that I motivated myself was I said, look, this is something I've studied in my research, and when a task is unpleasant, like you know, trying to clear out three hundred emails, I'm not going to motivate myself by thinking about the benefits to me, because if I thought the activity was beneficial to me, I would already be motivated to do it. The only way to motivate myself is to ask myself, Okay, what good is this going to do for the people
that I'm answering? And so I actually started going through my inbox and sorting by where I could have the most impact. And so it wasn't you know who emailed me first, It wasn't necessarily you know who I knew best. It was where could I add the most value? And as I answered a few of those emails, I started to get a rhythm and I started to feel like, all right, you know what, this is kind of annoying in you know, a aggreate, but I also feel like
I'm doing something useful here. And then you know that that would give me the energy I needed to sort of finish the task and get my inbox cleaned.
That is so cool.
I'm completely going to change how I look at email after hearing that.
I love that.
I don't know if you should actually, you Knowmantha, I think it's a risky idea because you don't want to convince yourself to like email, because then you'll just spend all day every day doing email. I think you just want to make it bearable.
Yeah, okay, well that's a good name, making email bearable.
I love that.
And I guess like where email can be quite troublesome for a lot of people is where they've got the inbox open all day and they've got notifications popping up, and they're just kind of doing, you know, the just check of the email, and you seem to be someone who is really good at fighting off those digital distractions and just staying focused.
And I'm wondering, like, how do you do that?
What are your tricks for not being tempted by the various digital distractions that are out there.
Well, you know, it's funny. I think I've been really intrigued by the science of self control here, because if you study self control, one of the things you will see in the data is that people with high self control actually exercise it less. So if you have really
great willpower, you use less willpower. And it sounds like a paradox, but the reason for that is anyone who has good self control recognizes that it's easier to to prevent yourself from getting into a situation where you have to manage an impulse then it is to manage the impulse in the moment. You know. It's the equivalent of saying, all right, I should probably set an alarm clock and then put it halfway across the room so that when I wake up in the morning, I am not tempted
to just hit this news button. And that's a habit that I think you can carry throughout your day. And so, you know, I think there are extreme versions of this that I actually don't endorse. I guess you could go cold turkey and say, all right, you know, I'm gonna turn off all notifications, I'm not gonna check any technology. I'm gonna disconnect myself from the internet whatever I need to do. And I actually find some of those distractions
to be useful mini breaks. So you know, when I'm stuck on an idea or a sentence when I'm writing, I'll actually go over to Twitter and check it for you know, a minute or two. But I limit myself on a clock, and I also usually have goals for how much I have to finish before I'm allowed to go over and check, and so that kind of helps. And so you know, it's a simple thing, right saying all right, I'm going to duse social media five to ten minutes a day when I can't be doing anything else.
So you know, I will do it when when I'm sitting on a flight waiting for it to take off, or you know, i'll be on it when I am. I actually end up doing it quite a bit, and you know, in like a left or an uber a taxi, and you know, otherwise I'll just I'll use it as a small reward for making progress on the things that I think are important.
I like that, so it's a reward.
And then you said that you set the clock, because where I can imagine people coming undone is that they go great.
Adams told me to reward myself with Facebook.
I'm going to pop on and then two hours later, hang on what task was I working on?
Like?
How does that work?
Like?
Are you setting a really noisy stopwatch? Do you like? No, how does that work? No?
I just have a time in mind, so you know, it's if it's seven fifty six, I'll say, all right, I've got four minutes, and then at eight o'clock I'm gonna get back to work. And if I fall short on that, I'm disappointing myself and I start feeling guilty and that's not pleasant. So next time, I'm like, I don't want to feel that way again. Let me let me just stay on task.
Yeah, you know, I will also say, though, I feel like, if you know, if if the urge to spend hours scrolling through Facebook is dragging you away from your work, then your work isn't motivating enough.
You know.
I feel like I actually feel the opposite of impulse. If I'm if I'm scrolling through Facebook, I'm like, ah, but I have this really exciting work to do. I want to get back to that. And you know, I obviously don't think it's practical for every single moment of
every single day to be that intrinsically motivating. But I think to you know, to have an enjoyable and meaningful work life, it's it's probably worth asking, you know that that desire you feel to engage with whatever you're guilty distraction is, how could you actually design your work so that it creates that?
Yeah, so that's interesting.
You bring up intrinsic motivation and I was quite intrigued by I think it must be one of your latest publications in the Academy of Management Journal, where you talk about when people work on a task that is intrinsically and deeply motivating, performance on the extrinsically motivating task falls and Aloran, can you talk a bit more about what you found there? And I'm personally curious how have you applied that to your own life because it was such a curious research.
So, Amantha, you've really done your homework here, because this was just accepted for publication in the last few weeks, so it's i'd say it's hard off the presses, but it's not even on the presses, it's impressed. So this is a series of studies the Gisian lead, and we started off with this idea that it's assumed to be a good thing to have intrinsic motivation, but we all have a range of projects and tasks that make up our jobs, and nobody's really ever thought about or studied
the spillover effects. And we wondered, if there's a dark side of working on an intrinsically motivating task, that it could make your boring tasks even more dull in you know, in juxtaposition, and that's basically what we found. So in one of the studies, GA gathered data from a Korean company and it turned out that the the more you have one task in your portfolio of five or six that's off the charts and intrinsic motivation, the more your
performance suffers on your less interesting tasks. And then we designed an experiment which was really fun. We had people search for YouTube videos as the first task, and so the interesting version was to find the most fascinating videos on YouTube and then write about what made them so interesting. There was there was kind of a medium interest condition where you had to search for life hack videos and you know, and just summarize what you know, what what
the practical insights were there. And then in the boring condition, we had people watch videos of paint dry, so you actually had to sit there and watch paint drying, and we had people we had people describe them so that we could check to make sure they were actually watching them. And so then you've just done an interesting or boring task or one somewhere in between. And then in a second task, we had you either play a really fun
computer game or copy numbers from a phone book. And it turned out that people who had watched the fascinating YouTube videos actually made more mistakes and performed worse on the copying task.
It's so interesting, Like what I was really curious about because I was reading that research and reflecting on how would I apply that in my own life?
And I felt quite sort of challenged to go, well, how do I do that?
And I was curious, like I would imagine that when you find these things in your research studies, you reflect on your own life and think about how can you integrate that. So I'm curious if you found a way to integrate this into your own life, and if so, what is that?
Yeah, I have. Actually I think about it a little bit like athletes who taper before a big competition. So you know, if you're a runner or a swimmer or a weightlifter, you're not supposed to do a max like a max intensity workout in the few days before your
big competition. So you know, runners, if they're training for a marathon and the you know, in the few days before, they won't do a really long run, or same for a swimmer or a weightlifter won't lift quite as heavy, and the idea is that they're they're kind of tapering down to have maximum strength. I think that there's I don't know if the analogy holds perfectly, but I've started to think about the sequencing of tasks in my days
as involving some tapering. So I used to think that I should put interesting tasks and boring tasks back to back, and that as I'm working on something that I find just just endlessly intriguing, right after that, I should do my most dull task of the day, because then I'll have some energy to carry over, and when our data show is that's false. Instead of energy carrying over, there's just this awful contrast where you're like, wow, this was horrible before and now it's going to crush my soul.
How can I possibly do this? I? How do I just spend more time working on this fun task instead? And what's interesting is that if this is all assuming that you care about your performance in the boring task, right that it you know, it's it's it may be dull, but it's important or it matters in some way. If you don't want your performance to suffer in that task, then what you want to do is sandwich a medium task in between, and so you taper down from interesting
to moderately interesting to boring. And if you work on a moderately interesting task that's kind of okay before the boring task, it's not so different to create that contrast, and so the boring task doesn't suffer. Instead, you actually do have a little bit in an energy that seems to carry over and it boosts your performance on the boring task. And so now I think about these these kind of little trios of tasks where I start out, I go interesting, you know, okay, boring and then I
go back to the interesting task. And what I love about that is that helps power me through the boring task because I've got something really exciting to look forward to when I finish.
That's really cool. I love that idea of tapering.
I feel like I can definitely definitely apply that in my own life. That's very cool. One thing I was very curious about is that something you're very well known for is being such a generous giver, and so much of your research has focused on essentially the power of giving. And on the other hand, I read so much in the productivity space about the importance of saying no and the power of saying no, and I was curious.
How do you balance that?
Because I can't even begin to imagine how many people are requesting your time, and I know that you are very much a yes person, and how do you balance that? How do you know when to say yes versus saying no?
Oh?
I don't know. I feel like I'm struggling through this the same way that everyone else is. I'll tell you what has been most helpful to me, though. I think you know. I used to try to say yes to everyone and to everything, and I just found that that was impossible, as you know, as I got busier, as my profile you know, got I guess got raised outside
the Ivory Tower. I just didn't have enough hours in the day to field all the requests that were coming in, and so I ended up coming out with a bunch of heuristics that more or less mirrored what I've studied when I've when I've looked at the differences between you know, people who are what I've called successful givers who are productively generous, and failed givers who are too selfless and end up burning out or getting burned by the takers
who have they have the misfortune of dealing with. There are a few kinds of choices that really matter. The first one is to be thoughtful about who you help. And so for me, that's That's meant that I have a hierarchy of people that I'm trying to support, and it's family first, students second, colleagues third, everyone else fourth. And at some point I realized that friends were not in that list, and I felt really bad about it.
But then I realized, you know what, I actually my goal in a friendship is not to be you know, helping the person. It's to be you know, to be a friend, and that may involve lots of different things, and you know, I'll fit them in wherever, but uh, the other the other categories. It was it was important for me to be clear because when a request comes in, I know that I'm not going to be equally generous
to everyone. And so I had to realize, you know what, I'm okay with the fact that my colleagues may well think that I'm less generous than my students do, because I just did not become a professor to try to inspire other professors, right. I became a professor because I wanted to have an impact on students the same way that you know that I was really influenced by, you know, by the the great teachers that I'd had, and I
wanted to try to pay that forward. And so, you know, when when a request comes in, I just kind of go through that list, and it depends on how much I have in the day. And it was so important to put family first there because you know, it's easy to say, well, you know, there's you know, there are lots of requests that come in workwise that are urgent, and you know, you also are able to gain status
and build connections by helping people. And you know that some of the family stuff is sometimes less exciting if you're changing diapers, for example. But you know, when I took a step back and I thought about my values, I knew that it was most important to me to be you know, to be showing up for my family first and foremost, so that I found really helpful. And then the other choices are about how you help and
when you help. And you know that basically breaks down to saying, look, I want to help when I can add unique value and when it does not detract from my energy or my ability to get my own work done. And so what I tried to do was break down all the different ways that I was I was trying to say yes to people and figure out which ones
I enjoyed and excelled at. And you know, if people are asking for help and domain where I didn't feel like I had a unique contribution to make or it was exhausting me, I knew that over time that meant I was going to have less impact. And so for me, that's been kind of zooming in on two things. One is knowledge sharing. There's there's almost nothing that bretens my inbox more than somebody reaching out and saying, yeah, I had this question about, you know, something related to work psychology,
like has anybody ever studied fill in the blank? And I'm like, yes, there's a chance to take all that esoteric information that I'm collecting from academic journals and share it with somebody who might be curious about it or who can apply it in some way, And so that that's always a treat, and I feel like there aren't that many people who you know, kind of who where that's the way that they help. And then the other is I really love making introductions, provided that they're mutually beneficial.
And so you know, I feel like I by virtue of the kind of work that I do, I get to interact with lots of different industries and kinds of people, and it's just really fun to connect the dots between two people who could help each other and or who could create something really meaningful together. And so I've tried to focus on those requests. And that means that when somebody reaches out and it's not in one of those buckets, I'll let them know that, you know, their request is
not in my wheelhouse. But if I could be helpful by sharing knowledge or by making an introduction, then you know, I'd be happy to do that.
And on that I'm very encouraged to hear that you do indeed say no? And how like, how do you say no politely? Do you do you have like a go to no strategy?
I have a few of them. Let's let's try them out. Make a request, So.
Adam, I'm gonna be in the US in a couple of months time. Can I stay with you for a week?
No? No? There are a couple different ways would answer that. So the first one is, you know, Amantha would love to see you when you're in the US. I try not to impose people on my family life, and in particular, my wife is segmentor and an introvert, and she really it's important for her to have boundaries and she doesn't like the blurring between work and home. And so you know, I learned a long time ago that it wasn't fair to her to just invite people that are total strangers
to her into our home. So as much as I would love to have you, I can recommend some great hotels.
That's great. So you're giving a very clear and detailed rationale behind the no.
Yeah. I mean, look, I don't I don't feel like I actually have an obligation to do that. If somebody has the gall to ask something that's unreasonable, then I can be perfectly unreasonable back. But I still prefer to err on the side of politeness. You know another thing I might say, though, which is, you know, it's not that often that somebody would just ask out of the blue, can you stay with me? But I do get a lot of you know, well, hey, I'm going to be
coming through Philly, can we meet up? And you know, my standard answer to that is, actually, when I'm in Philly, my time belongs to my family and my students, and you know those those are my two priorities. And so you know, the only way is that the only way that I can really protect my time and show up for the people that I've made a commitment to supporting is to set that boundary. And I really hope you understand nice.
That sounds very polite and reasonable.
I like that right.
Now, before we move on to rapid fire questions, there was one other thing that I wanted to ask you about, and I'm not sure if this is still true but I'd read that there's a certain way that you start every week where you think about what you want to accomplish and how you want to help, and that.
Kind of becomes your compass for the week.
Is that still something that you do and if so, could you maybe elaborate on what that looks like?
Sure? So I started doing this when I realized that I'm I guess, you know, I think about personality in terms of we all have lots of traits, but are the traits we expressed in any given moment. I think that's often governed by our dominant trade, the trade we're most extreme on, and my dominant trade is probably being goal oriented. If you give me a goal, I just get tunnel vision and the only thing I can see or think of is that goal. And so I wanted
to I wanted to improve my peripheral vision. I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose sight of my priorities. And I saw that going both ways. Sometimes, you know, I'd get totally focused on a work goal, and you know, I'd miss out on some ways that I really wanted to be responsive to other people. And then on the flip side, right, I get totally immersed in helping somebody, and you know, a work task would fall off my plate.
And so I just want to make sure that those those two things, you know, achieving my own goals and then helping other people, that they stayed on my radar. And so what I what I like to do is I like to start a week by asking myself, what are three things I want to accomplish and what are three people that I want to help or three ways I want to be helpful? And then you know, I just kind of do an informal check in on a daily basis to ask am I making progress toward those goals?
And I think it keeps me from getting stuck in the weeds of the one goal that's happening to loom large at the moment, and it forces me to make sure that I've got my priorities in order.
Hmmm, I like that.
Can you give me an example of maybe what one thing that you're trying to accomplish this week has been and one way that you are trying to help a person or something this week?
To give an example.
Sure, So this week my big work goal was finishing up a draft of an audiobook that I'm releasing later this summer, which is called Power Moves. It's been a really interesting project. It's a collaboration with Audible, where they said, look, we know you're going to be going to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, and we're wondering if you want to do an audiobook around a theme about the lessons and you can interview a bunch of people
and add in your own analysis. And so I ended up doing about two dozen interviews and Davos with all sorts of interesting leaders and thinkers, and it was around the theme of power, asking how it's changing and how we can use it for good, and so you know, I've been working on that since then, and my goal for this week was to finish a complete draft so
we're ready to record soon. And then in terms of being helpful on a professional front, my big goal for the week was to help one of our doctoral students get a paper out for publication. And so I read it, I gave comments. Then we strategized about which journals to submit it to and how a best frame it to make a contribution. And you know, I had kind of I had both of those actually on a to do list, and I was just checking out by myself over the last couple of days.
Awesome, I love it. Love those examples.
Now onto the sort of the rapid fire finish for for the show. So a large part of staying focused fit is tuning into useful and insightful stimulus and tuning.
Out the rest because there's so much of that.
And so to finish off, I've got a few quick questions for you on this topic. To start with, what podcasts are you currently listening to and loving?
Oh? I love Invisibilia on NPR. I think it's a show about all the hidden forces that cheap behavior, and I just think it's mind bending, is a good way to describe it. My favorite episodes were How to Become Batman and Flip the Script and then I'm also a big fan of Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell.
Oh that's so good, isn't it?
Yes?
Awesome?
What is it a newsletter that you subscribe to and actually look forward to reading? Oh?
I have a lot of favorite newsletters, but one of the ones that I get the most out of is Dan Pink's Every Other Week.
I love that one too. That's such a good one. Yes, Now, what is a great book that you've read recently.
I actually just read two outstanding books that were both released in the fall. One was Joyful by Ingrid fetel Lee and the other was Rule Makers rule Breakers by Michelle gelfand fantastic.
I'm going to check those ones out.
And finally, what's your favorite research study into productivity and what did it reveal?
Oh?
There are so many? Do I really have to choose one?
You do?
You do?
Yes?
Oh? That is cruel and unusual punishment. I don't know that I can choose a favorite, but I'll tell you. Actually, the most interesting one that I read this week, when I was procrastinating on some writing, I read this study out of Ohio State University, which really bothered me because the arrival of my Michigan Wolverines, but I'll try to get over that. And it was actually a series of I think eight studies which showed but when you have a meeting coming up in an hour or two, you
use the time in between much less productively. And so in one of their studies, when people knew they had a meeting on their calendar, they use the time between now and then to get twenty two percent less work done than they would have if they had taken that off their calendar. Wow, and you know that it's obviously a mistake, right, we waste a lot of time. Yeah, just saying well, there's no point in starting that because I have a meeting in six hours. How could I
ever make any progress between now and then? And I think you know, one takeaway from me on that is it's reinforcement for something I've done for a long time, which is stacking meetings more or less back to back on a meeting day, so you know, on a teaching day, what I'll do is I'll hold all my office hours back to back. And I learned that I needed a little buffer so that, you know, maybe five minutes between each meeting just to catch up on email or in
case a meeting rent long helped. But then I'd have another day with no meetings at all, where I could really focus and be productive. And this research just kind of reinforced that form me.
I love that.
That's fascinating. Oh well, thank you so much for your time, Adam. I was really looking forward to speaking to you, and you did not disappoint. Now, for those who want to get more Adam Grant into their lives, how can.
We do that.
Well, I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but if that's what you wanted. I've had a lot of fun doing my work Life podcast with the Ted team, and we just finished season one and are just starting to think about season two. And then I do a newsletter every month called Granted, where I share new insights about work in psychology and answer reader questions.
Fantastic and where can we sign up for that?
Oh, it's just an Adam grant Net.
Wonderful, wonderful, And I got to say, I'm loving your work Life podcast and also your e newsletter is one of the ones that I look forward to.
So I I thank you for that. Yes, so, thank you so much, Adam. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Pleasures a online thank you, Amantha.
That is it for today's show.
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