Just prioritize better. It's kind of like, don't worry. It's not a very helpful thing to say to people, right, Like if someone.
Is worried, you just don't don't worry. Oh I'm not worried now, right, you know.
My guest today is New York Times best selling author CRUs Gillibo, and today I am so excited to be talking to him about his new book, Time Anxiety, and the brilliant strategies that he has developed to help us break free from time guilt, deadline dread, and chronic rushing.
If we say the time is our most precious resource, like we should be even more attentive, you know, to like cleaning up the calendar and removing things where we can.
Tell me what is email? Bankruptcy?
So I've got all of these messages, you know, in my in box. It's not like a huge number. I mean some people that have thousands. But sometimes things just get too far behind and it's not really going to be that helpful. If somebody wrote three months ago needing something urgently but just dealing with whatever they were asking about, they don't clearly don't need it now.
So I just.
Welcome to how I work a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor Amantha imber.
So.
Chris, you have written a book about time anxiety, which is like, when I picked it up, I thought, Wow, that sounds like an interesting concept, but what is it? So can you tell me what is time anxiety?
I think of it as the fear of running out of time while simultaneously feeling really uncertain or hesitant over how to spend the time that we have, and so this kind of manifests in different ways and such. But I noticed when I was just writing the book and talking with people about it, not even formally, but informally, I was just be chatting with people and they would say, what are you doing. I'm like, oh, I'm working on this thing called time anxiety. And there would be almost
a very very strong visceral response to it. And so many people would say, like, I don't know what it is, but I have that Like that's me, right, And so there's lots of different ways that people experience it, but I think generally speaking, it's like just some uncertainty or hesitation or even dread around how we spend our time and maybe I'm running out of time or I'm too late for something.
How was it showing up in your life when you first started working on this book.
I would say it was the overarching problem of my life. It was something that affected me just all the time. I thought about it all the time, and I constantly thought, oh, I'm too late, I feel regret over choices I've made or.
Have not made, or it's just like a whole lot of things. Right.
It's like, I feel like there's so much I want to do. And you know, a lot of like books and tools and systems are all about how to optimize and to delegate or outsource or like to get rid of all the things that you don't want to do. And I think that's helpful, you know, to a point. But for me, it was like, there's a lot of things I want to do, Like there's still things like there's more that I want to do than I'm able to do, clearly, and that's ultimately how it is for.
All of us.
But I just felt like, there's this phrase that I use in the book, and it's not even my own phrase. This is something that I heard from a lot of people over and over, but once I heard it, I was like, oh yeah, I latched onto it. It was there's something I should be doing, but I don't know what it is, Like there's something that I right now I feel like I should be doing something or maybe working towards something, but I can't quite tell what it is.
It's this vague sense of discontent.
I completely and utterly relate to that. I was thinking about you, like I was reading the book and like it's just so great. I love what you have created. I was wondering, like about Chris. Now when you wake up the book is written all the concepts that hopefully absorbed into your bloodstream, Like do you still experience time anxiety? And is it showing up in a different way for you?
I mean, I haven't solved all the problems of the world, or even all my own problems, for sure. I think what I have is a lot more understanding and insight, you know. I started writing the book out of a place of discontent and dissatisfaction, and not quite like hopelessness, but a little bit of despair, you know, or a little bit like creeping towards despair. And I think I ended the process, which is like a two year process of research and writing. I ended it feeling much more helpful.
So that's something you know, that's not nothing, as.
We could say, definitely, what do you do now? Like if you wake up and you're thinking about the day ahead and you're feeling that sense of, oh my goodness, I just feel like I've got so much to do and I don't know how I'm going to fit it in this day. What have become your go to habits or rituals or strategies When you wake up with that sense of I don't know how I'm going to get it all done today, you're.
Feeling a little twitchy. At least that's how I feel sometimes. Yeah.
I mean there's like two different directions there, and the first one is like, so there are two types of time anxiety, and one is existential of like, you know, time is running out in my life. And for that I kind of learned to reframe my thinking around legacy.
I used to be into this concept of like leave a legacy, and that was like an operating principle or a driver for me, and I've kind of let go of that, like to a large degree, just because I like so much about legacy is outside of our control, and it's also a lot of pressure, you know, whereas if we can focus on living well, like whatever that looks like, and that still includes like being of service to others and hopefully trying to build something and you know,
all those things, it just it feels a lot better to me. So that's like the bigger picture. But then you know, to your point about you wake up and it's like, oh what do I do? I'm still somewhat kind of triaging, which I think a lot of people are like, Oh, I've got all this stuff and this goes here and this goes there. But maybe I just understand a little bit more that I have to create
constraints and limitations. One of the key parts of the book is like you have to decide for yourself what is enough, you know, for any particular day or any particular project, or you know, whatever cycle that you think on. And so I have to understand that there are some limitations out there, like I have a limited amount of cognitive attention and there's only so many things I can do, So I have to somehow set these constraints and live with them. And I think what I was trying to
do before, So I'm still goal oriented. I still like to work on things like I haven't become like a complete minimalist or a monk, you know, but I think like understanding, Okay, there's only so much I can commit to, and I try to avoid those situations I guess in the first place of like feeling over committed. And if I do get into them, and it's like, okay, what can I do to kind of like unpack myself back to a place of more stability as opposed to how
do I get all of it done? You know, because that's probably not going to happen.
There's a practice that you talk about in the book where you recommend looking I think at the week ahead in your calendar and asking yourself, what are just two things that I could take out? Tell me about, like if you were to do that today looking ahead. We're recording this on a Tuesday. Tell me how you go through that process.
Yeah.
I call it time decluttering, because you know, everybody's familiar with like tidying up your office or your home or your space and like getting rid of objects that don't bring you joy or whatever.
And I think that's good and helpful.
But you know, if we say the time is our most precious resource, like we should be even more attentive, you know, to like cleaning up the calendar and removing things where we can. So what would it look like for me? I guess I would just scan forward a little bit and see, you know, is there anything I was added to that I don't need to be added to. Is there anything that I have set up that I
can say, actually, this could be handled another way. It's not only work things too, it's also like other life things. If I'm not as excited about this thing, do I have to do it? And it's just kind of like some questions that I ask.
I know that something else that you do is you arrive ten to fifteen minutes early before things, which I could relate to. Because I'm an early person, I.
Can see that. I imagine that.
Yeah, so often I'll arrive five minutes early. But when I read that, I thought, oh, ten to fifteen minutes early. I can see why that is appealing, because if you aim to arrive five minutes early, it's very easy for traffic to be unpredictable and for that five minutes early to become five minutes late. And I get very stressed out when I'm late, like in anordinate amount of stress
considering how little it will affect the other person. But arriving ten to fifteen minutes early for appointments, is this something that you do religiously, Like when you look at your diary, are you always that early? What does that look like?
No, I'm not always that early and been late to things, and it's very stressful. I think actually most people find it stressful to be late, even those who are chronically late. And we all like have those friends you know who are like always late to meet or maybe we are that friend sometimes. I don't think anybody likes it. I think it does create a disproportionate amount of stress, and it's a pretty simple way to fix it, you know, but it's hard for people. It's hard for people to
like leave ten to fifteen minutes earlier. It's not so much about always arriving ten to fifteen minutes early for something, it's just adding that buffer of time between transitions, like giving yourself more time for transitions.
I think is something that can.
Bring a lot of relief to people, like a disproportionate amount of relief. And so if you're feeling like a high amount of stress for always being late. Here's a high amount of relief giving yourself more time, and I think people are often reluctant to do it because they feel like, oh, I just I can get one more thing done, you know, and it's really hard for them
to let go of that one more thing. But if you're always being ten to fifteen minutes late, and then you start giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes more time, you're just going.
To be on time. You're actually not going to be like super early. Right.
Most people don't go from being like a chronically late person to being always fifteen minutes early?
Are you chronically early?
I try to be and I always have things to do, right, I guess that's the thing. Like you, Like you have your phone, I have my bag, I usually have my laptop. I have a book, Like I have papers and things. So it's not like I'm worried about what will I do if I get to the restaurant ten minutes before the person I'm supposed to meet. There's always some way to occupy one's time.
We will be back with Chris soon, and when we're back, we will get into how Chris sorts his priorities when everything feels important and the bold email strategy he uses to fight time anxiety even if it ticks people off, and why he's completely fine with that. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work live, I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
Email is such a time waster for so many people, and I feel like there are quite a few interesting ways and innovative ways that you've thought about just how people can contact you and spending less futile hours in the inbox. Tell me what's been most impactful for you in terms of reducing the time anxiety with email.
I feel like I.
Should first say that, you know, we talked about like what was my greatest problem or what was that? What was I experiencing? You know, as I came to the research project behind this book, guilt about my email and my inbox was just so powerful and so overwhelming. It was probably the thing I felt the most guilty about for you, because I would begin almost every sentence of every email with like it's like I'm so sorry for the delay in reply, you know, it's like that's just
like my introduction, that's just could be just templated. And then I noticed I was either very fast or very very slow and getting back to people, like I would try to be fast, but if I didn't respond the same day, it was going to.
Be days or weeks I would and I would just keep thinking about it.
It's not like I had forgotten, you know, it wasn't out of sight, out of mind, but I would feel this great resistance, you know, to going back to it. So I feel like what a lot of systems and productivity methods do is they're providing like some tools and things, but they're not really addressing the psychological problems behind why we have resistance towards email, for example, or why it's hard for people to be on time, or many other
examples that we could talk about. And so for me, some of it is just kind of grace and understanding, like I'm not going to be like a great email ninja. There's a lot of people that I'm probably not going to be able to get back to. Like I used to really prize responsiveness and equate responsiveness with excellence, and maybe I've just kind of shifted in that because if I am always responsive, that means I'm not doing other things, and I want to be writing books and you know,
creating projects and doing other work. So maybe that's the first thing. It's just understanding like I can't do it all, creating little buckets of time where I'm like, Okay, I'm just going to go in and spend twenty minutes and try.
To respond to as much as possible.
But I don't have like like have you seen these Like well, of course you have like the auto responders people always have, like I only check email between you know, four fifteen and four twenty five PM or whatever, but I'll get back to you.
Then people that use those, I feel like they never actually get back to you during that time.
They've set this up for themselves and some like they think this is going to be you know, a great thing's true, right, but that doesn't actually work for them. And they're also the people that tend to be intrusive.
You know.
What's funny is like they they need something from you and they're reaching out to you and then you actually respond, but then you get kind of told off. They're like, oh, I shouldn't emailed to you right now, because this is not your email hours.
So that's another observation.
But I guess I've just tried to kind of get away from being a perfectionist about it.
You wrote about in time anxiety. I think, did you call it email bankruptcy? And I want to know if you still do this, if you did this in January? Tell me what is email bankruptcy?
Yeah, So I've got all of these messages, you know, in my inbox. It's not like a huge number. I mean some people that have thousands, but when they get to those large numbers, it's not that they have thousands of individual messages written to them, Like they're just copied on a bunch of stuff, you know, so that you
can kind of go through and clean out. But so it's not a huge number, but there's there's often like I don't know, between fifty and one hundred messages that I just don't respond to and they actually need something from me, And those are the ones that I feel really bad about. And so weeks go by and months go by, and just you know, thinking about what do I do about this? And so sometimes I have like a to dread list where I'm like what are all the things that I dread that I'm dreading right now.
I'm going to write that down and try to spend some time about that. But with emails specifically, like sometimes things just get too far behind and it's not really going to be that helpful, you know, for me to like if somebody wrote three months ago needing something urgently, I mean I could write and apologize, but just dealing with whatever they were asking about, they don't clearly don't need it now They've solved their problems some other way.
So I just like every January, it's like I just archive everything that's in the inbox that I haven't responded to, and I start over, and then I tend to do a much better job at least for a while, because things are all like fresh and clean. And so I think I used to like actually like send out a note to people like, hey, so sorry I might have missed your message, send it again. But now I just don't do that because people don't need another message on their end, and if I do that, that's just going
to have more things coming back to me. So I've just tried to like, let's just try to move on.
So how many years have you done the January email bankruptcy.
For probably like five or six years now.
And has there ever been a negative consequence?
Probably there's probably some negative consequences that I don't know about. That's the other thing, right, Yeah, I was going to ask you, actually, what do you think about this? Does this stress you out?
You know?
Do you seem like a person who is like super responsive and always on the ball and I respect that so much? Are you like I would never do something like that.
It's funny when I think about my inbox and I preface this because I use Superhuman and I feel like if I were to use Outlook or Gmail, and I've used both, they stress me out a lot because everything's just everywhere and the interface is ugly compared to Superhuman. So I'm never in box zero, but I know that feeling of having emails that are just sitting in your inbox for weeks or months and they just feel too
hard to respond to. So, you know what has worked for me, I've got an amazing Ea gem And the longer we've been working together, the more she knows my voice.
She can write like me. She understands the context of most of what's going on in my inbox, and so I would say she does so much for me, but I reckon the single most valuable thing she does for me to remove email stress is she will notice the emails that are just lurking in my inbox and have been there for a while, and she will draft a response. And I could have done that, it probably would have
taken me less time than JEM. But the fact that she has done that work where there's been some kind of a mental block, and I obviously read the draft and will make any edits that I need to, and then hitting send on that email feels so good. So I haven't really thought about this as one of the things that has solved a lot of the email anxiety that I feel, but I think that that is probably the thing that has had a very very big impact. The other thing that has had a big impact on me,
and I remember this advice. I imagine you've come across Laura may martin Google's executive productivity advice. I feel like she's sort of in the same sort of area as us, and she said to me, you know, stop trying to follow the classic productivity advice where just be in your in books two or three times a day, and I have been guilty of giving that advice and getting a lot of pushback from clients, and I think far more practical advice is just closing your inbox for a couple
of hours a day. Otherwise, leave it open, procrastinate as much as you want, be as responsive as you want. But for me, I just know I'm going to in the mornings close Superhuman. It will be not open probably between the hours of eight am and eleven am thereabouts, and that serves me really well. But otherwise I think I'm guilty of responding to quickly because obviously the quicker you respond, the more email you're getting back at you very quickly.
Okay, yeah, chat, Well you can use the you know superhuman has to send later feature?
Yes, right, so you can.
You can be really responsive, but just say send two hours later, right or whatever you know.
Yes, which I'll often do if I'm emailing after hours because I actually I try not to, but I also don't like to be seen emailing after hours because I feel like it's just it's creating interruptions for other people at times when I don't want to. But yeah, I do. You send later a lot, but not during the day. That's a good tip. I'm going to take that now. I know that productivity advice that you hate is someone saying just prioritize better or just you know, get your
priorities straight. And prioritization is something that I think about quite a lot, and I've tried different strategies. I would love to know, like what works for you, because I think a big part of time anxiety is not knowing what matters the most and where our time is best spent.
So what do you do, Chris, Yeah, just prioritize better. It's kind of like don't worry.
You know.
It's like it's not a very helpful thing to say to people, right, Like if someone.
Is worried, you just don't don't worry. Oh I'm not worried now, right, you know.
And when it comes to priorities, it's like it's also this very big nebulous concept. It's like who's priorities? Like I'm prioritizing, but what if I have competing priorities? And what if I have priorities in this part of my life or this part of my work, And it like doesn't everything.
Cross over one way or another?
And how do I make these decisions like where is the like prioritized button, you know, like that we'll just be like, oh, okay, here it is. You know, everything is perfectly ordered, right. So let's see your question was what.
Do I do?
I think something that is really intuitive for most people, like for like almost all of us, if we just stop and ask ourselves what matters and you can say, like, what.
Matters right now? What matters to me right now?
Like when you do that, I think just about everybody I can identify, Oh okay, there's like a few things that come to mind in terms of what matters right now. And so you might think of people in your life. You might think of something that you're working on. There might be some recurring task or some urgent task that you're like, oh, actually, I really do need to actually get back to this person about this thing or make a decision about this. But you probably won't think of
too many things. When you do that, You're going to think of like, you know, three to five most likely. And I think that is a help just a very simple, helpful way to understand like what are the priorities of the moment. And it's probably also helpful to kind of think long term and like what do I want from my life? And how do I structure that? You know, all those other kinds of things. But I guess if you're like in a state of distress or even just like how do I spend my time today or tomorrow?
I think asking yourself like what matters will be a very helpful starting point. And then as you go forward, you kind of notice like what is bringing you joy and what is bringing you good energy versus what is draining your energy? And I think that's also a good direction to pay attention to. It's not meant to be like a woo woo thing. It's meant to be like actually very grounded in logic and analysis and in what we really want to do and find you know, meaning and purpose in.
Do you have any annual or monthly or weekly rituals around just reminding you to go what matters? What matters this week? Where should my time go? Do you have anything like that in place?
I do have like an annual review that I've been doing for like twenty years, so I've changed that a few times over the years, but it is like the better part of a week of thinking through like what was the year look like? The past year and what are some goals for next year based on different categories and such. But it's a little bit less intensive than it used to be because now I am more thinking.
I'm not really in the moment because I am kind of future minded, but it is more like I know more or less what I want to be doing most of the time, and it's really only when I get off track that I have to like refocus a bit. And also I like projects like you. I like to write books and so other projects like books. I host an annual event, and so with these kinds of things, it has like a built in timeline for it, and
I like that. Actually I like knowing, Okay, seasonally or cyclically, here's what I need to be doing, and here's how I can prioritize those things.
If you've enjoyed everything Chris just shared, then I have good news. This was just part one of a two part chat, and next week we're going to be releasing part two. So do make sure that you hit follow or subscribe to How I Work wherever you're listening to this podcast. So I hope you liked this chat with Chris today, and my goodness, I have personally lapped up everything he has said. I just love how practical his advice is, and personally, I've even started to put some
of these strategies into practice since recording this epis. If you want to learn more about Chris, I highly recommend checking out his book Time Anxiety, and the links to that are in the show notes. See you next week for part two. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the warrangery people, part of the Cool And Nation