Today's episode is another my favorite Tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. Today's extract is from my chat with Ashtosh Priyadashi. Ashatosh is the founder of Sansama and a graduate of hy Combinator back in twenty nineteen,
the very famous incubator at Silicon Valley. So Sinsama is a daily planner for elite professionals that helps you plan out a focused work day by pulling together your tasks from all of your tools. Ashatasha spent most of the last decade building and launching productivity hardware and software, and his personal goal is to build products that help us navigate our work and life mindfully and intentionally. And I think it's fair to say that Ashutosh is as much as a productivity nerd as I am.
So in this extract of my chat with Ashutosh, we talk.
About how he uses artificial time constraints to significantly boost productivity, which I found fascinating. So let's head on over to my chat with Ashutosh 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 Twoday 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.
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 I was thinking, you know, in my own life, like just that 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 on, no, 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 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 working towards something like that.
And now I imagine that there are probably listeners going, yeah, look, 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 is it for today's show. If you want to listen to the.
Full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out.
And if you.
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So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.