[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Sudddhart here, aka The Focus B, and on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness, and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.
[00:36] Katie: Welcome to a brand new episode of The Focus B show. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here today with Max Frenzel. Max is the co author of the best selling book Time Off. He is also working on a project called Udemon about how to calibrate our mind through physiology. He has a PhD in quantum Information Theory and works a lot on the link between AI and creativity. Welcome, Max. It's so nice to have you here today, and it's so nice to meet you.
[01:10] Max: Thanks so much for having me.
[01:12] Katie: You have so many different interesting topics, so it was tricky to decide where to begin with. But I think a pretty safe point is to begin with your book Time Off. And I'm curious, why is it that you were interested in this topic?
[01:29] Max: Yeah, I think quite a unique, I guess, or roundabout way to getting to writing the book Time Off. So I originally have a background in quantum physics. I did my PhD in quantum Information Theory at Imperial College, and I had a lot of leisure time during my PhD. So I kind of had this three year deadline to write my PhD thesis, but in between I could do pretty much whatever I wanted. My supervisors were extremely hands off in a positive way. If I needed their support and help, I could always go to them, but otherwise they let me do whatever I wanted. I could literally disappear to different countries or even continents for weeks on end without asking anyone for permission. And I made a lot of use of that and I was very productive during that time if I didn't work on something for two weeks because I didn't feel like working, when I came back afterwards, I was suddenly full of new ideas, so it wasn't wasted time in any way. And also I had a lot of creative side projects that I was working on. But after finishing my PhD, I decided to leave academia and just work on something more applied, more practical, more real world. So I went into AI research and joined a few startups, and initially I was happy. I really enjoyed the kind of hustle culture and getting stuff done. But after a year or so, it really dawned on me. It was actually while I was taking time off as well. I was sort of traveling through the mountains here in Japan where I live, and I sat in this beautiful guest house looking out over the mountains and realized, ****, never in my life have I felt more busy and at the same time less productive, so something's wrong. And that's kind of when I started back, thinking back to those PhD days and realized, wait, I was very leisurely there, but much more productive. And now I'm busy and busy, busy all the time, but I'm not actually getting anything done I'm proud of or accomplishing anything. So what's wrong? And that's when I started thinking about this problem and reading about it and also writing about it. And my articles caught on. Somehow people seemed to like them and encouraged me to write more about this, think more about it. Eventually, my now co author John Fitch found one of my articles. He had a similar, but very different kind of opposite backstory, actually. So he was super workaholic, really driven Type A person. But then within one week, his startup crashed, and his girlfriend of six years walked out on him because he was such a workaholic. And that's when he realized, wait, I need to take a different approach. And he traveled through Greece and had some beautiful experiences there. So he came to the realization that time off is important from a very, very different angle. But we both had this passion for it. And he started a podcast on the topic. He came across my articles. He asked me if I want to be on the podcast, and the rest is history. We really clicked. We really connected. And a few weeks later he asked me, hey, do you want to write a book together? And that's kind of how the whole thing really started.
[04:24] Katie: So fantastic. And what you're saying in terms of productivity, leisure, time, taking breaks, I feel it's the sort of thing I'm always talking about. And I'm always telling people on the importance of having breaks during the day so they can think more clearly. And somehow there seems to be this reluctance. And you must come across this also with people who are like your co author used to be overworked busy, type A people. And there's this reluctance to take break because they want to squeeze as much out of every minute of the day. So how can people start to build this rest ethic in their life, in their business, every day?
[05:07] Max: Absolutely. It's such a great point. And it's not easy because for about 200 years now, we've been so indoctrinated in this cult of busyness. And we actually talk in the opening of the book about the history, how we came to forget the value of time off. Because historically that's quite a new thing for most of history, you aspire not to have to work. And Bertrand Russell said at the beginning of the 20th century, all of modern civilization, all of culture was basically built by the leisure class. They were the ones who had the kind of space of mind to think about literature, think about sciences, build the great theories, built the arts. It was built on a large working class. But Bertrand Russell was very hopeful that now more and more people with modern technology can join this leisure class. But yeah, historically time off was something to aspire to. Only over the last 200 years, starting with the Protestant work ethic, we really came to forget the value of time off and actually associate it with something negative. We forgot the original religious association in many most of us have at least. But it's so deeply in our Western culture. Well, actually, not just Western culture. I'm based in Japan and it's pretty terrible here as well. It's just very deep in our culture. And I myself, I mean, I wrote a book on a topic. I've been thinking a lot about this topic. I'm considered an expert in this topic now in some way, but I still struggle every day. I want to get stuff done. So it's very difficult to convince yourself it's actually very important. But we really believe in that. We wrote a book called Time Off. It's not a book about being lazy. It's a book about being your most productive and creative self. As we just talked about, busyness is not the same as productivity. And a lot of us are fooling ourselves with busyness because it's much easier to measure or feel good. Right? We know when we're busy and we feel like we've actually done something a lot of the time. Being productive doesn't look very impressive from the outside. You're just sitting there thinking about a deep idea or actually, oftentimes it's your subconscious mind that does a lot of the work. And you need to give that subconscious mind the right space. So what we found is quite useful for especially very driven type A people is reframing and rephrasing of a lot of things. Instead of thinking, I'm taking a break, say something or think something like, I'm putting time towards idea incubation. And it is really true. You need to understand the creative process. For example, it's broken down by creativity researchers into four different phases. There's preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Preparation is actually sitting down, doing the hard work, but then comes incubation, and it's a crucial step of the process. You need to step away from the problem and let your subconscious mind make those loose associations that you just don't get. If you're banging your head against the problem, then eventually illumination happens. You get this AHA moment in the shower or out on a hike, and then you need to go into verification, which is, again, active work, where you need to verify was your idea. Actually, that great. How does it fit into the bigger picture? And then you keep going in these cycles. What most people forget is that only 50% of that is active work. It's busy work. It's the hard work. Actually, it's not even busy work, but it's hard work. It's work what we define as work. The other 50% is rest. It's time off. It happens when we're away from work, when you give distance to work, and when we engage in high quality time off. That's why we like to think also of these ideas of work ethic and rest ethic. Everyone knows what a work ethic is. A lot of people pride themselves in their work ethic and that's great. There's nothing wrong with having a good work ethic. And again, busyness is not having a good work ethic. That's a different thing. But a work ethic allows us to execute, go down our task list and actually make things happen. Sorry, work ethic allows us to do that. A rest ethic allows us to incubate and really have these big break for ideas and also recover. We like to think of it like breathing. The work ethic is the inhale, but a lot of us are stuck on the inhaling. We try and keep inhaling holding inhaling a bit more. We need to eventually exhale as well. And that's the rest ethic. And it leads to this beautiful cycle that repeats and feeds each other. So it's really difficult and it takes time and we need to approach this one small step at a time. But we need to rephrase or shift our thinking about time off. It's not something that's opposite to work, it's something that allows us to do better work, especially in the future of work. I spend most of my career now in AI research. A lot of people are worried that AI is going to replace humans. It's going to take our jobs, and yes, to some extent that will happen in certain areas. But the work that's going to be replaced first is the busy work. It's those people who pride themselves in how many hours they put in, how hard they work. They're going to be the first to be replaced by machines. What's going to be much more valuable in the future of work are creative jobs and also jobs that are based on empathy and human to human connection. These are very, very difficult to automate even. We're still very far away in terms of AI technology, no matter what people like to believe. But those will remain very human for a very long time and those will become more and more valuable skills, what we currently consider soft skills in many cases. But those are really based on time off and rest. So building a good rest ethic now is actually also an investment into your future skill set. Sorry, that was a very long answer.
[10:58] Katie: No, it's a wonderful answer. No, apologize. I could listen to you talk about this topic all day. I think it's fantastic. And I love the four phases that you described and the incubation and illumination of the 50% that we can only have during the rest time of our life or in our work. And what occurred to me in that moment is how maybe one of the reasons why there's the tendency towards busy work and towards always doing and not resting is also linked to impatience. Because if we look at those four phases, maybe you start preparing. You have this idea or project or book or report or whatever it is, and you want to do it. And so we don't allow that space where you might get more insights, a better idea on how to do it, who to collaborate with, because you need to pause in the moment when you're already inspired.
[11:55] Max: That's such a great thought and I totally agree. And I think that's also why we need a rest ethic, right? We call it deliberately arrest ethic. Rest. Good rest is not just something that happens in the white spaces in your calendar. It actually kind of counterintuitively, takes a bit of work to do good rest, it needs some planning, it needs preparation, kind of just like you said, when you're in it, you want to keep going, you want to achieve this thing. So you're impatient to get to the end. You need a rest ethic to actually tell you no, you'll have a better result. You'll actually achieve it quicker and with higher quality if you take a break now and if you can detach from that problem. Right. I think a lot of us over the last year or two during the pandemic have realized just how important a rest ethic is. We spend a lot of time at home, we spend a lot of time technically away from work, but without consciously cultivating a rest ethic, we don't get the detachment we need. We're constantly sort of in this gray zone, 50% on, 50% off, rather than operating at this either fully on or fully off. I think that's also what's really important for people who care about their performance to realize you want to be either fully on or fully off. If you don't have a rest ethic, you're usually at 50%. And 2 hours at 50% are not even close to 1 hour at 100%. So a lot of people, I think, are deluding themselves there with the busyness.
[13:24] Katie: Yes, for sure. I loved what you said about the full on and the full off. I think I'm addicted to them and that's why I hate checking my phone over the weekend. I leave my computer in my coworking space, I don't answer emails. And I think it's because when we get used to working at high intensity or to being off and fully off, they're both so much more pleasurable. We can really get in the flow of the work or we can really rest and think about something totally different at the weekend or the evenings. And when it's that gray zone which does happen to me, not in a practical sense with my computer, but in a mental sense, still thinking about work at home. When it gets meddled, the quality just isn't as high. So I love that you said that basically we have to be intentional you didn't use the word intentional, but that's what came across about having rest, about building this rest ethic. What are some ways that how we can start to do this in an intentional way.
[14:27] Max: Yeah. So in the book we stress this point a lot. We really believe that everyone's rest ethic looks very different and we have many different examples. So we back it up with science. But then we have very clear examples of people, historic as well as present, who were successful through their use of time off. And we give a very practical point from each of these people for people to try, for readers to try, but they're actually, in some cases contradictory. So we want people to try these different things and then build their own rest ethic. As a result, my rest ethic might look completely different from yours. For example, one thing that we bring up over and over again, because it's just such a relatable thing, is cooking. To some people, cooking a meal for their family is one of the best forms of rest. They can completely detach. They get into a flow state. They really, really enjoy it. To other people, it's just miserable work. Same writing the book in the first place. It was a ton of work, but it was also really amazing. Leisure time. A lot of these high quality time off activities fill your life with meaning and actually counterintuitively. Again, they do look like work to people who don't see meaning in this particular activity. Right. But what exactly the activities are that bring you meaning, that fill your life with this meaning, and that are building your rest ethic? It really depends from person to person, but there are definitely some more universal things. The first one, absolutely good sleep. You can't get around that. So I'd recommend start with your sleep. If you do one thing, look at sleep and we have a whole chapter on sleep in the book, so that's huge. The other thing is awareness and reflection. A lot of these things, and we talked about that already, it's kind of a chicken and egg problem, right? Until you actually step away and take time off, you don't really realize just how much you need it. So even if it's just five minutes, ten minutes, sit down with a notebook and reflect about these and related things. And we do have a bunch of reflection, prompts and questions in the book. But one thing I'd like to encourage people to start with, it's seemingly simple, but if you go deep, it actually can reveal quite a few interesting things. It's is all my hard work actually working? The answer might be yes. Great. But if you dig a little bit deeper, you might realize no. Another really simple thing, and that's taken from Seth Godin, is a more of less of list. Just take a piece of paper, draw down a line in the middle, and on one side, write things you want to do more of. On the other side, write down things you want to do less of. And the more you do it and the deeper you get down to it, the first few things that come up might be quite trivial. I want more time, I want more money, I want less meetings, whatever. But as you sit down with it a little bit longer, you can uncover some really interesting things. And then there's other small things. I really recommend people develop a small ritual almost. It can be anything but something you do when you just need to get five minutes and pull yourself out of whatever you are banging your head against. So for me, that can either be a short walk around the block or making coffee for me is also that kind of ritual. I don't want to do it too many times a day because otherwise I'll be super caffeinated. But a couple of times a day, that works really well. Grinding the beans from scratch, pouring the coffee and then enjoying that, it just completely resets my mind. So those are just a few ideas, but there's many, many more in the book as well.
[18:05] Katie: So many golden nuggets in what you shared. And I really like the aspect that you said about how we need to think about our time off beforehand and also high quality in terms of leisure and different activities for different people. I was reminded of my day yesterday because I didn't have enough reflection time. And you said this really interesting point about we don't realize how much we need rest or time off until we start taking it. And I noticed yesterday that I didn't have enough reflection time. I was going through a lot of things and different learnings throughout the day and I kept thinking oh, I must sort of summarize what I just learned and pause for a bit and reflect on this. And I just went from I took some breaks like tea, small walk, but not enough reflection time. And I really noticed it at the end of the day. And I think, and you're probably similar to this, when we develop a habit of pausing, of resting, of journaling, reflecting, if we don't do it for even just today, in my case, yesterday or week, it feels like I felt chaotic in my head. I was like wait, I haven't finished thinking this through properly because in action all the time, we don't process it thoroughly. So we need to pause to finish the processing.
[19:26] Max: Completely agree. And there's something kind of related. I also like to encourage people to do a very simple exercise, but also reflection. Think about the days where in the evening you sat down and you felt today was a really good day, I really accomplished something. I think in a lot of cases they're not like your days yesterday, they're days where you actually weren't working all that much you might have even been out on a hike. But if I think back through my career, the big breakthrough moments, for example, when I was working as a researcher, the big breakthroughs in my thinking came when I was doing something completely different. When I was out on a hike, when I was I don't know what, they definitely didn't come. The days where I was in one meeting after another and felt busy the whole time. So I'd also encourage people just think like, what days do you in the evening think, this was a really good day, I accomplished a lot. And how can you get more of that?
[20:19] Katie: I feel we could do ten episodes on this. I encourage all the listeners to obviously read your book on time off and to start analyzing it for themselves, to think about their good days, as you mentioned. But before we finish the episode, we still have six, seven minutes left. I'd love to transition to your project. That's Udemonia right now. Udemon. And it's linked to Udemonia. So if you could say a few words on this, I think it's a different topic, but super interesting. So I'd love to hear more about it.
[20:50] Max: Absolutely. So since publishing the book, I've been working on a new project which seems very different, but it is in a way actually quite related. And specifically it's related to heart rate variability, biofeedback training. So HIV biofeedback training, some people might have heard of it, but the whole field is still quite new. But the idea is a healthy heart actually does not beat like a clock. It's not a metronome. It really responds to the tiniest changes in the environment. As you breathe in, your heart naturally speeds up. As you breathe out, your heart naturally slows down. And if you're well adapted to stress and if you're healthy, you actually have a lot of variability within the individual heartbeats. Your average heart rate might be 60 beats per minute, but it does not beat once every second. That would actually be a very bad sign. And heart rate variability, biofeedback training uses sensors to track your heart rate in real time and then you go through specific breathing exercises to basically improve that heart rate response. And it's been become very popular over the last actually only two, three years probably in the elite performance community because they need to operate under stress. And it also trains you to switch on when it counts and then switch off immediately afterwards. And that's super important in athletic elite performance, but also in business. And the other side is a clinical community's proven very useful treatment of anxiety and depression. So there's a lot of really interesting research backing that up. I experienced the benefits of it myself last year. I was in a job, it just wasn't the right fit. And I felt quite anxious and I came across it and I practiced it and I felt much, much better as a result. I quit that job then and I thought, how can I use my background in AI? And I've also been working a lot on AI and creativity and specifically music. How can I combine that? So what I'm doing now with this project, udemon is trying to improve this HIV biofeedback training even further by generating soundscapes and generating music on the fly based on a practitioner's real time biodata to get you even deeper into that state. And yeah, where the whole name comes from is from Eudemonia, which well, depending on who you ask, which Greek philosopher, they all translate a little bit different. But it's roughly well being in a sense. But the origin of the word is super interesting as well. So Eudemon or eudemonia actually has this root in the word demon, which was sort of seen as the spirit or this supernatural force that is residing within the human. And it wasn't seen as anything good or bad necessarily, it's just this kind of superhuman force within us over the years, centuries, millennia actually. It also gave rise to the modern English word demon. So kind of the negative connotation of that and it can pull you in that direction. A lot of creative geniuses, I think Carl Jung was talking about this extensively, he said in a lot of creative geniuses over the centuries, it was their inner demon demon that drove them both in the good ways but also in the bad ways and Eudemon. So the u kind of for the Greek good is the positive manifestation of that. And I want to help people work with their inner demon and find the positive side of it through this HIV biofeedback training. So that's the direction I'm taking and still in the early days, still developing the product itself. But it's very exciting.
[24:32] Katie: Yeah, it's interesting the origin of the word and the link to demon and this view that we have nowadays of demon. But in this case, like you said, it's a neutral word that just means life force. And it's also interesting relating to the previous topic on time off. And obviously with the HIV, the heart rate variability, how time off and rest has a huge beneficial impact on the HIV. So there must have been a lot of cross studies here.
[25:02] Max: Absolutely. And also the breathing analogy I was giving earlier, the work ethic being the inhale and the rest ethic being the exhale. I wasn't even thinking about HIV at the time when we came up with that analogy. But it makes perfect sense because during HIV biofeedback training on the inhale, your heart speeds up, it actually stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight response. On the exhale, the opposite happens, you stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest response. So it is really inhale is related to this kind of switching on work active and breathing out is related to this calming down and essentially what you're doing during the training is you're cycling through these phases. So you train your system to be more responsive to this on off switch and again through these cycles, just like with the right cycles and the right balance of work ethic and rest ethic, that's how you achieve the results.
[25:58] Katie: I'm wondering now, if this because of the link with the inhale and the exhale, is it then beneficial when doing certain exercises like yoga or Pilates, the linking of the movement with the breathing, what actually happens? It feels good when I do it, but how does this actually happen? What actually happens in the body?
[26:18] Max: It's a very good question and I don't feel confident enough to give a comprehensive answer to this. I think it's very complicated interactions and it's very mechanical, actually. So doing the resonance breathing, which is another name for HIV biofeedback breathing training, you're breathing at a very specific frequency. Your heart has a natural response, how fast it turns on or off, and that kind of switches between these phases, which is personal for everyone, and you can measure that easily. And then you just follow this particular breathing rhythm with combining it with exercise. It's super interesting and I want to learn more about that as well. And actually quite a few people have asked me that question, so I should be more prepared or more read around it as well. But it just adds a whole layer of complexity to the whole mechanical flows in your body and everything around it. There definitely is a lot you can achieve through the right breathing with the right motion. But yeah, I don't feel competent enough yet to give you an answer on that.
[27:20] Katie: I feel you've already explained so much around this topic and it's just a complementary way of looking at it and also knowing that it's healthy to do it that way is good anyway, where we know exactly what's happening in the body is. Just curious with the actual HRV training. Wonderful. We have a few minutes left. What are your last thoughts on these topics? I feel like I want to leave this quite open and wide because it's such an interesting topic and there's just so much to say in general on these topics.
[27:51] Max: Absolutely. I could talk about this for a very long time as well. I think we both could have a very long conversation about all sorts of different directions. But I guess what I would just encourage everyone who's listening to do is just sit down five minutes, take whatever reflection prompt you like. Take one of the ones I was suggesting, like maybe is all my hard work actually working? That's maybe a good one to start with and try and answer that for yourself, see where it takes you. If you sit down for a bit longer, it might take you quite far, actually. And then also, maybe with the upcoming holiday season, maybe it's time to. Plan ahead a little bit, how you want to approach that. So we also work with corporate clients and we do coaching. We help companies establish their rest ethic. We were just working with a company who had a company wide holiday of several days, and they wanted us to come in and help their people essentially prepare for that. And what we taught them is treat. It kind of like you treat a meal. If you're preparing a big feast for your family, you don't just suddenly sit down. There is a planning phase where you think, okay, what am I going to cook? Then there's a preparation phase where you go out and buy the ingredients and actually prepare the thing. Treat time off the same way, especially kind of longer festive season. Then when you're doing it, you're fully enjoying it. You're not running back from the table to the kitchen. You're actually sitting down there, ideally with your friends, with your family, and you're enjoying the moment. And also when you come back to work, when you come back from the feast, you take some time to digest. You don't straight away run a marathon. After a big feast, you take some time to reintegrate and you actually bring the joy from that back into your everyday life, into your work. So we shouldn't see the separation necessarily either. That is kind of hard boundaries. Yes, there is something to be set for the hard boundaries, but the right kind. We should bring this motivation, this energy that we get from it back into the workplace. And it can also be a great chance for you to upgrade, actually. If you talk with someone who maybe did the work for you, took over your role while you were gone, it's a great chance to really reassess what you were actually doing and really upgrade your work. But that's a very specific case, like for the long holidays, upcoming holidays in general, just rephrase what you're doing. Instead of taking a break, think about incubating on your next big idea and try to slowly, slowly, slowly shed a little bit of that guilt that we all have around not working. And don't worry, we're all in this together. Even people who wrote books about it are still struggling with it every day. But one step at a time, we can make it a little bit better.
[30:43] Katie: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Max. It has been such a pleasure to have you on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for all the insights and for your time. Thank you.
[30:53] Max: Thank you so much.
[30:58] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Bee show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. So let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day. Ahead.