About four years ago, I was sitting in an airbanb in New York, and instead of being out exploring the city, I was curled on the couch reading a book called Essentialism by Greg McEwan. You know when you read a book and it transforms the way you think about something, Well, that's what Essentialism did for me.
And when I.
Think about that book, I think about how it really made me prioritize what I choose to work on. And it also turned me into a huge Greg McEwan fan. And when I found out that Greg had written a new book called Effortless, I was beyond excited to read it. And I was even more excited when Greg said yes
to my invitation to be on How I Work. So if you have ever struggled your way through a really tough project, or if you're maybe feeling like you're working harder than ever before, but maybe you don't have the results to show for it, I think you are going to love this chat with Greg. We talk about some really practical strategies to make hard work well effortless. My
name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of Behavioral Science Consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work.
So writing a book is hard work.
And I know this because I'm currently working on my third one, which Greg and I actually talk.
About during this interview.
But I was keen to know from Greg how did he go about writing his latest book effortless and make that process effortless for himself.
Well, there were some things that I did that made it a lot harder than it needed to be. An example is is any day that I worked beyond let's say three hours as a max. You know, if I tried to do four hours or six hours or longer, I didn't just hit diminishing returns, I'd hit negative returns. So diminishing returns is where every unit of effort you put in you're getting a little less back. But negative returns are where for every unit of effort you're putting in,
you're actually getting a worse overall result. So you know, the manuscript is getting worse than it was before I started that day. You know, you're you're you're going backwards. And so I learned that I needed to get the pace right. So so I said, okay, you know every day. I'm going to work on it five days a week. I will open the Google doc. That's my minimum standard. I will go into it. But the but the maximum, okay, never more than three hours. We're just going to you know,
resolve it that way. Similar upper and lower bounds for the number of words written. You know, less than one hundred words, but never more than five hundred words. You know, you're trying to make sure that you don't use up more mental energy. Then you can recuperate each day that you're not using up more mental energy this week, Then you can recuperate this week. Why because you want to be able to sustain the pace and get the you know, get the job done.
Talking about the upper and lower bounds idea which I found really interesting in terms of going, okay, well, this is the minimum I have to do in a day, and this is also the maximum. How did you go about setting those upper and lower bounds for yourself?
If you're trying to find the right pace, you just have to create some self awareness as to what is your optimal input on whatever project you're working on. So for me, you know, I had to keep asking the question, how can I make this as effortless as possible to write a book that can have a significant impact. You know, I'm not changing the goal, I'm not changing the aspiration, but I'm trying to constantly challenge myself in finding a
better strategy. Another thing that I did was to try to make sure that I had the right team working with me. People that I had a high trust relationship with, so I'd trust their work, trust their research. An editor who'd worked with me on Essentialism before effortless, you know, working with her again, I trust is so high she
can go in and work on it. There were times when we'd be working in this same you know, shared doc together, or at the same time, a researcher Jonathan Cullen, who would be bringing in stories specifically that I'd asked him to go and gather Italian. My editor would be working on a section that I'd previously written the day before, and it was almost like a Harry Potter esque scene
where you could see everybody working seamlessly together. And there were so many moments like that through the process that I thought, this is effortless, you know, it's effortless, on effortless. It's just amazing to watch this team working together and to enjoy it so much.
Now, what's the question that you recommend asking when you're feeling overwhelmed by what you have to work on to help sort of reset our thinking.
Well, I think that you can invert the typical overachiever mindset. So let's set some context here. I wrote this book for what my brother Justin calls the hit squad. This is for people who are hard working, intelligent, talented, right, that's the hit squad part of it. This is who the book is for. And you know that's who's listening to this conversation right now. These are people who want
better results continually. In fact, probably nobody listening to this would mind if they could have ten x results, ten x results in their career, in their relationships, in their business, if they're running a business, I mean, you know, that would be fine. They aspire to significant breakthrough results. The complication is that there's not one of them, not one
person listening to this can work ten times harder. And it's that contradiction or that creates this challenge, because if you want better results, but you're already running out of space, you're already pushing yourself to the limit or sometimes well past it, and then you say, well, I'm not getting the results they want, therefore I need to push even harder. Then what you do is burn out and you still
don't get the results. That really matters so much to you. Now, contrast that with what I'm arguing in Effortless, which is what if you could make the trivial things in your life harder but the essential things significantly easier. Well, the value proposition there is that you that you could achieve the results you want, the breakthrough results you want, but not only without burning out, but also with an upgrade in your lifestyle you enjoy the experience more all along
the way. That's who Effortless is for, and that's why I wrote it.
And what's that key question that you talk about in the book in terms of something we can ask ourselves to help reset our thinking when we are feeling really overwhelmed by what we're working on.
I think the question you're pointing to is just how can I make this effortless? How can I make this easy? It's not something that I would advocate everybody ask. If somebody is not putting in any effort at all, then there's a lot of upside to just, you know, getting up, getting off your behind and going and getting on with the job at hand. I mean, there's a lot of results you can improve. I'm fully in favor of effort.
I believe in it myself. I believe in it for my children, I believe in it for the businesses I've worked with and built. Nevertheless, as I already said that, there's this limit. So one, when we ask a better question, we get a better answer. And so simply by inverting the question we normally ask, which is how can I get better results by working harder? You say, how can I get better results by making it, you know, as easier? What what if? What would this look like if it
was easy? And I remember working with someone in you know, perfect sample of someone in the hit squad. Who is the type of person she said, who's up till four in the morning photo shopping for a youth activity at church the next day, and no one's asking her to do that. But that's you know, she's just wanting better results and thinking the only way to it is relentless self sacrifice. And she even feels if she eats lunch that she feels guilty. And so I said, well, look
ask this. You know, invert, invert this, break out of that paradigm, out of that mindset. Let's see if there isn't you know what would happen if you asked that question, how can this be effortless? You want a great result, but how can you do it in an easier way? And she gets a call then from a professor she works at a university who wanted her to record a semester worth of his class, and she just almost automatically
jumped into the overachiever of mindset. I'm going to get three different cameras in the room, so we'll get different angles, we'll edit it all together, We'll have intros and outros, graphics, slides, music, We'll we'll just wow him. And then she remembered the coaching and she said, okay, invert this. Can I get the result that he wants with it in an easier way?
And so then she started asking questions around that. Well, in just a few minutes of talking with him, she discovered that this was really for one student who just needed, you know, to have a few of the classes because he's going to be missing them for an athletic commitment. And the solution they came up with was just have another student record it on their iPhone and send it to him whenever he was going to miss. The professor was delighted. He hadn't thought about that because he was
over complicating it. And she puts hangs up from the phone and she says, I just saved four months of time for an entire team for the sake of ten minutes with this inverted question. So that's the question, how can I make this essential thing effortless?
I love that.
Now in the book you talk about how Richel's habits that we've put our thumb print on, and I love that way of thinking about rituals, and I want to know what are some of your work rituals.
One ritual that I picked up from another entrepreneur is that if I'm going to have a lot of phone calls to make with people, you know, I may just literally go and sit in the hot tub and call them all back. You don't have to be you know, you don't have to be so formal about it all. And it turns what could just feel a bit like drudgery into something that's funny. And I tell people and it's not a secret, and we just laugh about it, and we get the job done still, but it's in
a more enjoyable environment. And so you know, that's the idea, is to splice together something that previously you thought, well it's essential, but it's drudgery, and you say, well, well what if you could combine it with something enjoyable you want to do anyway, and you create a ritual from it, so then you actually look forward to doing it.
I love that hot tub example. What are some other things like? I'm thinking of email for example? That is definitely a non enjoyable task for many people.
Have you cracked making email more enjoyable.
I have a friend who's amongst the most highly productive people I have you know, I've ever met. I don't even quite know how he does everything he accomplishes. It is pretty remarkable. And one of the things he does when he's very responsive in email. If I respond, if I email him, he might email me within two minutes. He's very responsive, but he'll be very very succinct in his answer, so he's not carrying the burden. You know when somebody sends you an email and you're like, oh,
I don't know what to say about that. Yes, right, and then you hold on to that and it sits in your inbox. I've been guilty of this. I've had email sit in my inbox for days, weeks, months sometimes and you process it ten times, twenty times sometimes because you keep seeing it. Oh yeah, I've got I don't know what to do about it, and then you move on to something else, and then eventually, oh sorry, I didn't get back to you, you know, and you don't say it, but dot dot dot, I haven't known what
to say all this time. It's and you, You've you take that email task and you you make it ten times harder than this friend of mine deals with it. He deals with it instantly. And so since since my last exchange with him, I thought, yeah, I've got to process email differently in the next Literally since then, I've just made just been decisive every single thing and just
responded quickly. And I thought, there's something quite nice about about getting a quick response from someone and not just having it disappear and never know whether you're going to hear back from them again. And I found it. You know, it's a hyper efficient way of dealing with email.
Hey there, Amantha, here, we're going to get back to Greg in a moment, and in the next part of this interview, Greg gives me some advice on how to make a big project that I am working on much much easier.
And if you're enjoying how I.
Work, make sure you connect with me on these socials because I post quite a bit of extra content there. So hunt me down on LinkedIn, look for Amantha Invera. I think I'm the only one. Or follow me on Twitter at Amantha or on instagt, which I'm getting back into for various reasons, and you can find me there at amount of eye. You talk about reducing the lag
indicator for essential activities and a reward. Can you give an example of how you've applied that concept to your work, whether it be with your writing or consulting or something like that, maybe even with writing the book, like because that can be you know, fairly grunt worksh day after day hitting a word count.
I'm right in the middle of that process myself, so with rating.
Yeah, I'm working on my third book at the moment and on a fairly tight deadline.
And you're feeling and you're feeling the stress of it.
I am like, I've I've got a calendar on my whiteboard that literally says how many words I want to have written by the end of each week in order to hit my deadline in October, And like every day like I enjoy the writing, but then some days it's like I'm doing this just so I don't fall behind.
And I'd love to know, like maybe if you have any advice for me.
On how I can you know either like reduce the lag indicator, because certainly, come October, I'm going to be feeling really happy because I'm going to be submitting a
complete manuscript. But right now, I'm in the thick of it, and I've got all these things that I need to do and research and write about, and I feel overwhelmed, and it like it doesn't feel terrible, but it doesn't yet feel effortless, and like, you know, I feel good when I hit my word count for the day, but it can feel like hard work on some mornings.
So what should I do?
Greg? Yeah, I got to ask a couple more questions about it. How are you on a scale of one to ten on your like your energy level right now, like your overall physical fatigue. I'm good, I'm good. Yes, you're sleeping well, very in resting well, You're relaxing. Well, yeah, so then you come to do the job. Which part is hard? Is it? The thought about writing? Like you go, oh, I've got to do that again.
I think it's the idea that I have to write this book, but I also have to do my job in terms of my full time job. My hours have not increased in terms of what I do within my consultancy inventium, but now, all of a sudden, sixty thousand words have to appear from nowhere by October nineteen.
So I write.
I write every day as part of my job, and so you know, I enjoy the process of writing most days, although some days I'd prefer to be doing something else. And so it's just kind of going, oh, gosh, I've got this huge extra project that I have to do along with everything else that I'm working on, and sometimes that can feel a little bit overwhelming.
Yeah, I can imagine. That sounds like it's the I mean, even what you just said that the sixty thousand words that alone just feels like, oh my goodness, I'm really going to get sixty thousand words done. So what do you do now? Tell me your current process?
What I do.
Now is the very first thing I do on almost every workday unless I've got a commitment like a keynote or something that is not movable in terms of time. Is that I will write but between one thousand to fifteen hundred words per day, and I will do that five days a week.
There's a lot of words.
It's quite a lot of words. But having said that, a lot of the research has been done, so that makes it a lot easier.
Is the hardest thing, just oh, I've done this for a while, I'm in the Is it that you're sort of in the y of the motivational curve where you're halfway done with it and so you've already put in a lot of work which you're not actually close to the end. Is that the experience you're having.
Yeah, I think that's it. I absolutely do. Yeah, I think I'm right in the middle of it.
And funnily enough, I'm at about the halfway point of the first draft. Like I haven't gone through my own edit, you know, littlone submitted it to my actual editor. But yeah, I feel, yeah, I feel like right in the trenches at the moment.
Yes, there's you know, the yuke of motivation. For those who don't know about it is that you feel you feel more motivated at the beginning of a project and at the end of a project, and as you get as you get close to halfway, that's that's the lowest the lowest EBB in any project because you can still see how much is left to go, but you don't have the evidence of success because it's not actually finished.
And so so I think you might want to construct some sort of reward system for like the next literally the next two weeks. You know something that you say, Okay, like what's what's a reward that you just something that would just be really enjoyable for you? What do you love to do? Regardless of this, I love.
To read fiction, and I right now would love to get a massage that would be really nice. That is not something I've had done in quite a while. Yes, there are two things that come to mind.
Okay, here's here's you could do this. You say, Okay, we have ten days worth of work, so not completing the manuscript, but ten days of hitting your goal. I'm
going to say for you a thousand words. I'm reducing your goal for you a thousand words a day, and every day you've done a thousand words, counter off, and I want this graphically in your office so you can You're like you're a you know, a child in primary school, and you're marking off each day and at the end, you know, Okay, the end of ten days of doing this, I get a massage. Okay. That is one thing that
I think you literally could do. I think on the fiction, I wonder whether even like you schedule your time to write your book, whether you don't say, okay, as soon as I hit five hundred words, I read a chapter of my of a book that I love right now, just give my brain a little bit of a break, so you do like, let's say, how long does it take you to do you a hundred thousand words?
Oh, I'd say sort of nineteen minutes to two hours, I'd say.
So maybe you say, actually, fine, you do it like that. You say, I'm doing a nineteen minute sprint. You don't even have to call it a sprint. We do a ninety minute segment and then I read for ten minutes out of a book that I am really looking forward to. So you could have that right on your desk. You set your time, you say, ninety minutes from now, I'm reading that, well, you know, I'm just going to keep
going on this with a cycle. There's really interesting research that I came across in writing Effortless, which is done by Anders Eriksson, that he was curious about the sleep rhythms that we all know about, these ninety minute rhythms that you have. Each of us to have a good
night's sleep need three of these cycles. And he just questioned, like, what if that isn't a sleep phenomenon, what if it's a human phenomenon, that isn't just a nighttime thing, but just a life thing, that we're all just rhythmic beings that they continue into the day. And he found as he continued this research that it did continue into the day.
And so the ramification of that is that we should prioritize three pieces of work in the morning in ninety minute approximately ninety minute cycles, so that you do your ninety minutes, and you take a break for ten minutes, ten even as many as fifteen minutes, you go for a walk. In this case, you read it fictional, you know, your fiction book, not at the end of the day. Only. Okay, well, I've saved up all day. Now I can read a
bit of fiction. But you build that into your schedule so that you take that ten minutes, give your brain a rest, and you're signaling to yourself going forward, like, hey, listen, I write, and then I have this enjoyable ritual almost immediately following it, well, immediately following it. How does that sound to you? Does that sound like a nice ritual for you?
It does, it does, Greg. I'm excited.
I've been taking notes as you've been talking, and I'm going to do that from monday.
I'm loving the sound of that.
Yes, thank you, Yeah, And just to connect the dots here, it's what we're trying to do. Rituals are habits with a soul. Habits are what we do. Rituals are how we do them. And if you can create the right ritual, you enjoy the experience of doing it. I'm still trying to think for you about what would make that first ninety minutes, you know itself more enjoyable. Let me ask you this, what are there some days you say, some days you really enjoy it, versus other days it feels
more drudgery, right, which makes sense. I mean there's ups and downs for all of us, But what is it on the days that you enjoyed the experience. What's different for you?
I think one of the things, and I've had this advice from a couple of guests on the show. I think it was Adam Grant and Rachel Botsman, and they both talked about how they would essentially end their workday with this concept of parking on a downhill slope, like they would finish work, you know, like if it was writing work, it would be mid sentence or mid paragraph.
And I think when I've kind of when I start the day and I've got that momentum, like I've actually started writing the chunk that I'm going to be working on the following day, and I've started that the day before, then it does it kind of feels effortless, like I get I can get into flow much more quickly.
So that's definitely something I've noticed.
That that puts me in mind. So so of course you can. That's a specific thing you could put into a ritual. I'd probably encourage you to write up a ritual like a recipe for you with writing, because yours will be different to mine, will be different to Adams, like everyone has their own rituals. And but if you can pay attention to your what works for you or
you add that in it. So we've obviously this is now sort of our third specific piece of the ritual for you know, for you that you have this on a list so that you can keep coming back to it and tweaking what really works and what and what doesn't. I think I think that that's that's part of this, you know, creating a ritual. I John Acuff would be a great guest at your show if you want to
have him on. He wrote a book recently called Soundtracks, and he's terrific and and one of the things that he said is that in his wife came to him and said, you are You're miserable to be around through the two years that you write a book. And then she said, and you're and then you're you're really miserable to be around for the two years marketing the book afterwards. And it really challenged him to think, well, how am
I thinking about this work? And and you know many as many writers have have read the idea, well, it's easy to write. All you have to do, is, you know, is to pull up a typewriter and bleed that kind of language. And the idea that writing is one of the hardest things you'll ever do, and all that thinking, that is a paradigm, that is a way of thinking, and he recognized it as such, and he suddenly said, well, I'm going to choose a new soundtrack. I'm going to
choose a new way of thinking, a new mantra. And the phrase he pulled was light and easy, that he was going to try to make writing as light and easy as possible, and that that's what he'd keep thinking about. And as soon as he started getting oh yeah, that's right, it's hard. Be so happy afterwards, but it's hard right now, he'd go, hold on, stop that that's the one way
of thinking about this. What about light and easy? And one of the things he did in his ritual is he went and bought a pair of the Nike shoes that were used in the the very famous now two hour marathon. You know, they make big headlines around the world to get the first person who ever ran a
marathon under two hours. And he was wearing these particular shoes they've created for him, and you know, they are, of course light and easy, They're as light as possible, and he wore those every day that he wrote as a symbolic reminder to reinforce this new soundtrack not miserable and you know, blood, sweat and tears to get this done. Light and easy. And so you know, I'm not saying you have to go buy those shoes. I've never done that, but I've enjoyed the mantra the soundtrack light and easy.
It reminds me of what you wrote about talking about what are the minimum steps required for completion?
And I really loved that concept.
Are you able to talk about, like how you've applied that idea with processes in your work life?
Yes, I mean, just to set that up just for a second. You can. There's all sorts of examples of this in business. But I interviewed Mike Evangelist, who that's his real name, but he worked at a DVD burning company, and this was when DVD burning was brand new by one of these machines that cost thirty five thousand dollars. The manual alone was a thousand pages long. You can imagine.
And Apple comes along and says, well, we'd like to buy that because we want the software that you've built, and we've got to put that standard on the new Mac. So they're given a couple of weeks to prepare a slim lined streamlined I think as the term. I'm looking for version of what they've had before. And they just keep stripping this away. That's stripping away and stripping away, and they're so proud of what they've been able to do in a couple of weeks. And they're ready for
the presentation to Steve Jobs. And he comes into the room and before they get to the presentation, he walks up to the whiteboard and he draws the rectangle and he draws this little you know, square within it that says burn. And he says, this is the app we're going to build. You just draw, take what you want to burn, you put it here, and then you click that button. That's the whole app. And as soon as he did that, they all felt embarrassed about the deck
that they'd prepared. They never shared the presentation because compared to what he'd just shown, it looked so complex. There was so many steps and pieces to it. And that was when he learned what he thought was a really sort of lifelong valuable lesson, which is that Steve Jobs was starting with zero. It wasn't taking complexity and whittling it down. He was starting with zero and saying, you know, can I achieve it in one step?
You know?
And if not one, can I do it in two steps? But that's the idea. And so from that the goal is, can you solve a problem entirely by having in a one step thing? Can we remove the steps entirely instead of streamlining your process, you're saying, let's start from zero. Can we do the whole thing in one step? So that's the principle, a particular way to approach simplification, it says Agile talks about it in the manif Agile manifesto.
It's to maximize the steps not taken. If you can do this, you start to remove from yourself the need. No matter how easiest step is, it's still harder than taking no step. In fact, when I was first starting in the podcast, I remember the team, that production team sent me a list of instructions that I could send to guests, and there's like, you know, fifteen steps to it. I remember reading it myself just going, oh my goodness, that is overwhelming number of steps. I just thought, there's
no way I can send this out to guests. So it's just too much for them to handle if I can't even read it. And so I said, okay, what you know, start from zero was the minimum number of steps someone would need to take to chat with me on Zencaster. And once I had the answer, the process was literally and what I sent to people and said of these fifteen steps was one click on the link that I'm going to email you before the interview. Two I'll start and end the recording it. So all you
need to do is chat. That was the instruction, And so it's a very liberating question to ask, like just okay, how can we start from zero? How can we do this at the minimum number of steps. You start to realize all the stuff that other people think needs to happen, including yourself in the past, don't need to happen.
That's awesome. Now time has flown, Greg, and I need to release you to the world.
So I have one final question for people that want to learn more about you and get their hands on Effortless, which I highly recommend, such a great book as well as Essentialism. I still remember when I read that, I was actually traveling in New York, and I have such a clear memory of reading that book and fundamentally shifted my thinking on many things. So how can people consume more of what you're doing?
Greg Well, I love that you just shared that about essentialism. These really go together, right. This is like the Paul McCartney and John Lennon, but both of those artists created music separately, but it was the magic happened when they went together. And you know, essentialism is about one question is what's essential? You know what is essential and if it's not essential, don't even do it effortless? Says Okay, how can you take that the essential few and make
those essential few things effortless? And so it's together that they really I think that the magic can happen. You know, I would recommend that people come to essentialism dot com. There's a twenty one day challenge people can take there which takes you know, the essential things and breaks them down into small micro adjustments that make this easier to
do what matters most. There's the What's Essential podcast. I just love for your listeners to subscribe to What's essentral podcast if they've enjoyed this conversation and you know, come join the party there. And beyond that, I would just encourage people to maybe maybe listen to the audiobook version of Effortless so that they can kind of get a quick overview of the of the whole arc of the book and the design of it. And those are a few options for people.
Amazing. I will link to all that in the show notes. Greg.
It has been an absolute joy and privilege chatting to you and also getting your advice on my book as well. I was very appreciated, so thank you.
So looking forward to the book when it comes out, and it's been a pleasure be with you, Ammpha, thank you.
Hello there. That is it for today's show.
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