John Zeratsky on How to Make Time for What Matters

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episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to hand pick some of our favorites that may be new to you, but if not, they are definitely worth another listen, So we're rereleasing a few of these during the holiday. In this episode is with John Zeratsky. The expectation that when we receive an email, we're going to see it right away, we're gonna respond to it right away, We're gonna stay on top of things. That level of respondness doesn't really fit with the way

that humans evolved. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is John Zeratski. He was a designer in the tech industry who became obsessed with the idea of redesigning time. He's also the

author of multiple books. John's writing has been published by The Wall Street Journal, Time, Harvard Business Review, Wired Fast Company, and many others. His new book is Make Time, How to Focus on What Matters every Day. Hi, John, Welcome to the show. Thanks a lot for having me. I'm excited to have you on. Your book is called Make Time, How to Focus on What Matters every Day, and I think there's so much to learn in this book about creating a life worth living. So I'm excited to get

into it. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which

one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. When I think about that parable, I immediately think about how I'm going to choose to feed the good wolf. Right. So it's so the choice is clear, but the question that is is how do

you do it? And I think that the initial temptation is to focus on willpower and self control and discipline and and have this this attitude that with constant vigilance, you can make sure that you're you're feeding the good wolf, and you're the things that you want to do. You're

becoming the person that you want to become. But one of the things that really has been an important lesson for me is understanding the limits of willpower and understanding that if we want to make decisions that we feel good about, if we want to feed that good wolf, we need to change our environment. We need to adopt habits, we need to kind of set up our world around us so that we so that it's easier to make

the right decisions. That's a great point, and a lot of what you cover in the book is how to do that. So let's just jump in. Let's first talk about the title is called Make Time, how to focus on what matters every day? And you say that what it's you and a co author, Jake is his name, right, Yeah, that's right. I'll reference you for the rest of it,

but listeners will know it's the two of you. Um, you say, make Time is not about productivity, it's not about getting more done, finishing your twodues faster, or outsourcing your life. It did. It's a framework design to help you actually create more time in your day for the things you care about. And I think that's such an important distinction. So You then go on to say that in the twenty one century, we all have two very powerful forces that compete for every minute of our time.

Can you tell us what those are and maybe we can talk a little bit more about them. Sure. The first one of those forces is what we call the busy bandwagon, and that is our culture of constant buzziness, the expectation that when we receive an email or a method, we're going to see it right away, we're gonna respond to it right away, we're gonna stay on top of things. And that level of business, of connectedness, of responsiveness is quite exhausting, it's quite draining. It doesn't really fit with

the way that humans evolved. Um, we evolved in a world where most of the time nothing happened, and if something distracted us or grabbed our attention, it was usually for a good reason. So so we're kind of kind of being wound up by the busy bandwagon. And so when we have a break, when we're looking to unwind, we turn to all the amazing sources of entertainment that exists in our world, things like Instagram and YouTube and Netflix and video games, and we call those the infinity pools.

There's always more water in the pool. You can always dive in for a nice refreshing swim. But but they never stop. Um, you could spend every minute of every day pulling to refresh, streaming, diving back in. And they're

sort of positioned as being a source of entertainment. Their positioned as a break oftentimes, But the mechanisms behind them, the ways that they work, are really the same as the tools that cause us so much stress and anxiety in our work lives, those busy bandwagon tools, And so as humans we kind of feel ourselves just torn between these two forces, with this feeling that we're not necessarily

in control of the ways that we're spending our time. Yeah, the busy bandwagon is so interesting because it's so interesting that it's become such a status symbol. And I realized I was falling into that how are you doing busy? Busy? Busy?

You know, And and I would say it with this sort of combination of I guess, a little bit of pride and a little bit of like weariness, busy, busy, And it was really helpful for me to realize, like I was choosing that I was choosing to be busy, but that leads me to the next point that you talk about, which is so important, is because even though everything we do is a choice, you say that the busy bandwagon infinity pools are so powerful because they've become

the default for us. So a default is kind of what's already set. When you open up your phone, it has certain default it's on it right when you plug in your TV, it as certain defaults. And so instead of these being things that we consciously choose to opt into, they're pretty much the default for everybody in today's world, and we have to actually make very conscious choice to opt out of the busy bandwagon in the infinity pools. That's right. You touched on some of the technological defaults.

Um For example, when you get a brand new smartphone, the first time you take it out of the box, it's going to ask you to sign into an account of Google account and Apple accounts something like that. By default, it has an email app installed, and by default that email app is going to check for new messages all the time. By default, the phone is gonna let you

know when there's a new message. It's gonna make a noise, or it's gonna buzz and it's gonna show one of those little red badges on the corner so that you know you have a new message. It's all the stuff that you mentioned that technology products that we use have defaults that if we don't consider them, they tend to suck away our time. They tend to eat up a lot of our time. But it's not just technology defaults that we're dealing with here. There's also sort of cultural defaults.

For example, in the office, every meeting is either sixty minutes or thirty minutes long, even if really you only need a quip chat. By default, Uh, these meetings are just sort of scattered about our calendar. They're not clumped together at times of day um that might be be best for us or best for our team and our ability to do work that matters, and and the expectations that you're going to be constantly online and responsive. Those

things are defaults too. And these weren't put into place by some genius who made a master plan for exactly what's the best way for us to spend our time and energy. They just kind of collected over the years, and so a lot of what Make Time is about is questioning those defaults and finding concrete ways that we can change our behavior or our technology so that we're putting ourselves first exactly. And I want to get into the specifics of Make Time, but I first wanted to, um,

have you tell a story about you know. You start off by saying it was early two thousand and eight, the beginning to one of the snowiest winners in Chicago history. And I think it's a great way to lead us into, particularly the first point of Make Time, which is to create a highlight. But um, I just thought you could walk us through that because I think it's a really good story that sets up that first point. Sure, I was living in Chicago and I had been working at

a tech startup. It was a great opportunity for me. There was an amazing team, experienced team, very competent, talented people, and I was basically just a kid right out of college. It was sort of my first real job, and so I wanted to make the most of that opportunity. I wanted to really be able to thrive in that opportunity, this fast paced start up, this big opportunity. So I became obsessed with productivity and I pushed myself to make the most of every hour, every minute and try to

fill my time. And after a couple of years at that tech startup, we were acquired by Google UM, which was a great thing. This was it was exciting, and I kind of felt like, you know, life is life is good. Now I've got this great job. This thing I've been working on has been sort of validated by this acquisition. I had a great girlfriend, she's not my wife. We were living in this brand new condo together in Chicago,

and things were Things were great. But like you said, uh, one day in in two thousand and eight, which which I actually looked it up, it was one of the snowiest winters in the history of Chicago, which is saying a lot for Chicago. I woke up with kind of this feeling that time was just slipping away. It was almost as if I couldn't remember what had been happening

for the last couple of months. If you had said, what do you do over the weekend or what you do on Thursday, I wouldn't be able to answer that question. It was sort of like a blur. I felt like time was slipping by and I didn't have anything to hold onto. So UM that was one of the early experiences that really made these decisions about how I spend my time, really drew my attention to those and made those something that I really wanted to focus on trying

to get right. I think what was really interesting is you recognize this problem and you said, okay, I'm going to try and solve this right. And you started by trying to get super productive. And you thought, if I pack more into each day, I'd have more to remember. And you get so focused on the small test, but the days slipped by even faster. Yeah, so that didn't help. Then you decided to overhaul your approach and you said, you know what, instead of managing my minutes, I'm going

to turn my attention to the long term. I'm going to create you know, one year, three year, five, your ten year goals and um. But that didn't work because you were sort of living a someday life. You quote James Clear, who I'm actually interviewing this Friday. Uh yeah, we both live in Columbus, and he says, you know, I'm not good enough yet, but I will be when I reach my goals. So you had tried to be

super productive, you know, focus on tasks. You tried to sort of look longer term, and still things felt like they were kind of blurring. And what you stumbled upon was this idea of trying to find more meaningful moments. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how you guys sort of arrived at the first part of how to make time, which is to have a daily highlight. Sure, I had started with with trying to maximize my productivity because, like I said, that had been working well for me

in the office. And then when that wasn't helping slow down the of time I I decided to try to set big goals. And these are I think are two very common kind of schools of of self help advice that you might read about. You know, there's a lot of stuff out there about productivity. There's a lot of stuff about goal setting and how important that can be. And so I tried both of those things, but I didn't feel that it really helped with the problem that

I was feeling. And and you said that I stumbled onto a solution, which is absolutely right, because it was not on purpose. I didn't have, you know, this amazing flash of insight. Instead, what happened is the winter ended and it was spring, and uh, the you know, the sun came out and the birds began to sing, and and just like we all do in the Midwest, when spring arrives, people come out of their houses and and they start to get more social and they make plans.

And that was the case for me. For example, I had a group of friends and we would meet for lunch every Friday across town and and that would become something that I would I would look forward to and I would plan my day around it because I didn't want to, you know, be late. I wanted to make sure I finished all my work and I could leave on time. I wanted to enjoy that lunch. I didn't want to have to eat and run, so I'd make sure that I didn't have anything scheduled immediately after the lunch.

And I found that I would look forward to that all week. And and the same thing happened with sometimes going for a run after work, running along like Michigan downtown Chicago. I noticed that when I had these types of medium sized activities, not these grand plans, but not these little things on a checklist, they gave my days and my weeks meaning and structure and gave me something to hold onto. So eventually I started doing this at

the office too. If I had a presentation that I needed to get done, for example, instead of trying to slice it up and cram it in between all the meetings and work on it a little bit here and a little bit there, I started to think of it as this bigger chunk of work that needed to be done and really plan my day and plan my time around it. And eventually that's what I started to call

the highlight and the idea. What the highlight is. If you look back on the day and you ask yourself, or if somebody asks you, what was the highlight of your day? I want every day to have a really good answer. It doesn't have to be something life changing, but I want every day to have at least one thing that made me feel like I really made good use of my time. And I found that when I do that that one thing, it makes everything better in my life. Yeah. I want to just read what you

guys say, because I really like it. You said that we believe that focusing on these in between activities, in the space between goals and tasks, is the key to slowing down, bringing satisfaction to your daily life, and helping you make time plenty of self help gurus have offered suggestions for setting goals, and plenty of productivity experts have created systems for getting things done, but the space between has been neglected. We call the missing piece a high light.

And I love that because, as listeners know, I talk about it probably way too often, but I'm such a fan of the Buddhist teaching of the Middle Road, and I love this because it's again, you're sort of splitting the difference between two extremes, and I think that's that's great, and the idea really has resonated with me. And you say, your highlight might be something you don't necessarily have to do, but you want to do. So let's talk a little bit about what the highlight is and and how do

we go about picking a highlight. So the highlight is the one thing that you want to prioritize and protect in your day. Some of the strategies that we use to choose our highlights are to focus on things that that are time sensitive, things that need to get done, and we call that the strategy of of urgency. So you might be looking through your to do list or your email, your calendar and noticing, oh, this this thing

absolutely needs to get done today. Um, I've I've certainly been in the situation where I had something like that, but being in the office, running from meeting to meeting, trying to keep up with my email. I get to the end of the day and then realized that I didn't actually have time for the thing I needed to do that day. So it's sort of like, alright, the day is done. Finally, you know, I'm done with my work. Finally I've got time for my work, you know the

real thing I needed to do. Another strategy is satisfaction, So that's looking for things that are not necessarily time sensitive, but they are important and there are things that you know if you do, you'll be glad you made the time for. An example, at work, might be a new project that you um want to get off the ground or a new way of doing something, and nobody's asking you for that thing. Nobody, you know, there's there's no

deadline attached to it. But by making it your highlight, you can make sure that you give it a chance to have some space, to have some breathing room. The third strategy that we talk about in the book is is joy. So really just choosing a highlight that is just playing fun, just something that you want to do, because those activities often get pushed to the margins, they

often get pushed to the sidelines. And even when we do get to them, you know, if we have something fun planned after work, too often I feel like, you know, we're racing through the day and sort of you know, skidting into that that activity with you know, with no energy, no ability to focus on it. And although it was a you know, it was a fun thing that we wanted to do, we end up not really enjoying it all that much because it's not something we're focusing our energy.

One you say that the highlight isn't the only thing you'll do each day, but it will be your priority. It ensures that you spend the time on the things that matter to you and don't lose the entire day reacting to other people's priorities. You also say that ideally a good rule of thumb is to say it takes between sixty and ninety minutes. So let's talk a little bit more about that. I guess let's talk about you know,

the sixty and ninety minutes. But also we all do have a lot of things that need to happen each day, or that we think need to happen each day. So talk about a highlight versus the rest of the stuff that you do, and kind of what the distinction is, UM, and maybe how you plan and schedule. We've talked about what the distinction is in how we UM frame it up in our mind, but maybe what's the distinction and how we protect the highlight and make sure it gainst

Maybe two explain. I can just kind of tell you about my day today, which I think, uh had a few different things going on and sort of encapsulates a lot of these ideas. UM. My highlight for today was actually to UM launch the web page for a workshop that I'm putting on in Minneapolis. It's a workshop for people who want to learn about the design sprint process, and that's the subject of the previous book that Jake

Napp and I wrote together. This five day process for teams to take an idea through prototyping and testing it with customers in a week. UM. I'm gonna try not to be hurt that this interview wasn't but carry on fair enough. UM, But that was the thing that UM, you know, kind of felt fell into that um that satisfaction bucket. There was no there was no real urgency to do it. There was nobody who was expecting it. It was something that that I wanted to get done.

I wanted to launch it, and I knew that I was going to have a chunk of time in the morning that I could get it done, so I scheduled that for the morning my highlight time. The reason that that this podcast was not my highlight was that I knew that it was going to happen no matter what, because I I had it scheduled, had been scheduled for

a long time. And that's kind of the other component to to my day, and really too many days is is there's you know, often a small number of meetings or appointments or things that are on the calendar, and try to schedule those things for the afternoon because I know for me and everybody's different, but I know for me that morning is the time when I have the best creative energy to work on something like creating a website for an event and launching that, which knows a

lot of writing and designing and that kind of work. The other component of the day is to really do all the little administrative stuff, and I try to leave that for the time of day when I'm when I know I'm going to have the lowest energy, which is usually the late afternoon. And so um, what I will do is is, you know, sort of I don't often block it on my calendar, but I will mentally know that and the end of the day, as as the afternoon is winding down, as my energy starts to wane,

that I'm gonna go through my email in box. I'm gonna reply to a few things. I might have a list of odds and ends that I need to do. But I kind of planned my days around those three big types of activities, with the highlight being the thing that gets prime position, the thing that I'm scheduling at the time of day when i know I'm going to have my best energy. And so what you recommend is that we determine what our highlight is, we write it down, and then we actually put it on the calendar. We

give it a time that we know it's going to happen. Otherwise, as as we all know, the day can be over before it starts, you know, and like you said, it's six pm, and we go, well, I didn't that there

that didn't happen again. So that's one thing. Let me ask you a question about this because this is something I struggle with sometimes, which is that the highlight for me is sometimes i'll say, the most difficult task for me, Like you said, it's going to take more creative energy, it takes more focus, there's more um perhaps risk associated with it. Right, I need to be in the right spot to do it, and it it does take more energy, so it's a little bit easier to procrastinate. So how

do you guys recommend working with that. I think that when your highlight is something that is particularly challenging or it is, it's going to require that kind of deep concentration. Just getting in the habit of scheduling it for the time of day when you know you have your best energy is really going to help you give it the attention that it deserves. And I think that's where a lot of the tactics in the book around laser mode,

around beating distraction. I'm sure we'll talk about that later where those come in because they sort of pushed to the sides um all those little things that you feel like you should be checking, or you want to be checking, or you want to just you know, quickly sort of flip over to a different tab and look at something. Um. When you know that those are held at bay, and you've scheduled your highlight for the time when you have

the best energy, it becomes so much easier. It's just kind of this freeing sensation of being able to pour your energy into the task at hand. But some highlights still are really just too big, they're too daunting to handle in one session, and so um it can often be really helpful to to break those down, to look at them and break them into sort of sequential pieces. And this is something that we actually learned from one of the most famous productivity guides of all time, called

getting Things Done. This idea of not, you know, thinking of a project as this monolithic beast, but thinking of it as a series of activities that you need to do, some of which are quite small and some of which are a little bit bigger. And so to use my example of working on a presentation as making that your highlight, the act of creating that presentation contains a lot of

little pieces, some bigger, some smaller. And if you say that working on the presentation is going to be your highlight doesn't mean that you'll finish the whole thing or or chain yourself to your desk until it's done, but that you will you will kind of work through the steps involved, um until you run out of time or run out of energy, or you know, until the sort that piece of your day is up. So that idea of breaking the highlight into smaller pieces really could help

make it less intimidating. Yeah, that's such an important idea to to deconstruct things down into something that actually resembles a task. I'll notice things I procrastinate are things that, like you said, they're more like a project, Like I had one on there for like get a video done, and that's like ten steps, you know, there's like ten steps involved in that. And so when I have it written down is get video done right, it just sits there.

But when I deconstructed, and maybe the highlight is write the video script, I'm like, okay, all right, that's you know, that's I can start with. Or I've been creating these series of many episodes for supporters of the show, UM where we do like a poem and a song and a teaching and I've realized, like deconstructing that down into like one of those things like all right, find the teaching right that, you know, right it up, do that, you know, deconstu Acting into smaller tasks makes it much

easier to action. And there's kind of a flip side to that too, which is when there's a lot of little tasks that are unrelated, you know, something like catching up on email, those can kind of feel like they're they're always sort of nagging at us, trying to steal

our attention. And and one of the tactics that we read about in the book is called batch the little stuff, and the idea is to actually let those things pile up, let those little things pile up, and then bundle them together into a batch and one day make that your highlight. I mean, it seems kind of weird to say, like catching up on email is going to be my highlight. Nobody really looks forward to that, but it is surprisingly

satisfying to do that. Instead of trying to just you know, play whackable with all the messages, it is quite satisfying to let it stack up and then just kind of crank through it one day. So that's sort of the inverse of what you're saying is is, you know, trying to deal with lots of little things. Yeah, exactly. So let's move on to the second part of Make Time. Is this idea of laser. So step one, pick a highlight.

Step two is laser, which is basically get into a mode where you are focused like a laser beam on that target. So let's talk about maybe just a couple of the tactics. You've got lots of different tactics for each of these things the way the book is structured, so highlight, there's a lot of tactics. For laser, you have a bunch of tactics, maybe just pick one or two that you'd like to talk about, um for what we can do to get into laser mode, so to speak.

There's a lot of tactics here. Because Jake and I both worked in the tech industry, we we actually designed some of the Infinity Pool apps that I talked about, some of the things that are so distracting. I worked

at YouTube for a couple of years. Jake worked on Gmail when he was at Google, and so we have this really unique perspective of knowing how these things were made and what makes them so compelling, but also having operated in the tech company environment, which in many ways is the most intense, the most fast paced, with the highest expectation of being online and being responsive at all times. So a lot of our tactics come from trying to take back control of our time and our energy in

that environment. Um And and the one that is is the scariest, probably but but certainly the most powerful for both of us is the distraction free phone. And this is this is not about turning off notifications or making a little tweaks. This is about removing the sources of distractions, So actually deleting Infinity pool apps from your phone. So my phone, UM, I don't have Twitter installed, I don't have Facebook, Instagram, I don't have any way of reading

the news. I don't even have an email app on my phone. Now this sounds a little bit scary, but one thing to keep in mind is that I can always reinstall these things very easily, or in the case of email, I can re enable it very easily. And with something like Twitter, I do spend time on Twitter every day, but I do it on my computer and it's something that I have sort of a scheduled block four because I enjoy using Twitter and I like to hear from people who have read my books, and I

like to answer questions and that sort of thing. Um, but taking those things away from that shiny device that is in your pocket or in your bag, or in your hand or right in front of you on the table is amazingly effective. It creates a barrier to getting distracted. That means we don't have to use willpower, we don't have to use self control, and doing that we can reclaim a ton of time. I read the Distraction Free

iPhone with a mix of trepidation and curiosity. Um, you mentioned like sort of the low hanging fruit, Like I turn off all notifications like the thing never well except for when you are getting ready to talk, never really beeps at me unless it's like an incoming phone call. And um, the other thing that maybe you're a you're a smart tech guy. Maybe you've got an answer to this, right. So I love do not disturb on my iPhone. It's

like my favorite feature, flip do not disturb on. My problem is that I never turn it off, which is generally okay, except I don't get calendar reminders when I do not disturb is on, which reeks havoc on my on my life because I end up showing up late to things because I turn it on, get to turn it off. And so if you don't need to answer that, but if you know of any way to make calendar notifications work while do not disturb ason, I actually, yeah,

I don't know how to fix that particular problem. And I actually use an Android phone, so especially um about iPhone stuff. But I will say that that's that type of problem is one of the reasons why I have stuck with the distraction free phone for so long. I think that when I remove the source of the distraction, um, then I don't have to worry about all these you know, settings and configurations and working about is this thing going

to get through or not that thing? Um. I have a sort of a mantra that I tell myself, which is that my friends are not a distraction, And so that means if I get a phone call or I get a text, you know, they're not always for my friends, of course, but just generally speaking, if somebody is reaching out through one of those channels, I don't mind being distracted.

And I kind of think of my of my calendar in the same way if if I if something on my calendar, and it's something that I'm going to actually do. I'm gonna actually spend time on. I don't mind that it's showing me a notification to remind me to do it. Um it's the it's the infinity pool stuff. It's the stuff that that nags at us and just sort of quietly reminds us that it's there, even if it's not making a noise or or making a sound or flashing that that I find really really tough to deal with.

Ye And so the essence of this tactic, you know, you can take it is as far as you want to take it to lead all that stuff off your iPhone. Different things, but the basic idea is that if we rely on our willpower to not check those things, it's gonna wear out. Right. We may resist it for the first day, we may resist it, but eventually the old habits assert themselves were back on it, and so you know, getting rid of it, rid of it makes it a

lot easier to do. You know. Basically, the idea of if you don't want to do something, put as many obstacles between you and doing it as you can, um right, And so that's the distraction free iPhone where you delete all that stuff. So I took part of the advice there and I got rid of some of it the email app I have not quite been able to bear doing yet. What I did do is I moved, I took the advice. I got it all off of the

front screen. So the front screen is just a clear picture of my dog, and I have to go looking for I have to go looking for mail or Facebook or any of that stuff. I have to I have to make a concerted effort and just that moment of like wait a minute, like do I really want to do this right? You know that that helps, but I suspect I'm going to end up deleting uh email off

the phone. But like you said, one of the things for some people who have like customer support type stuff or sales stuff, to do quick response to some of that stuff is is important, and so that's part of

my challenge. Yeah, definitely. I think that the underlying idea is to create barriers to distraction, because if you think about, or if you know anything about how these apps are made, how they're designed, you realize that people like me, designers in the tech industry, we have spent years and years making this stuff as friction free as possible, as easy to get into, as efficient as possible, and so that that also points to the solution, which is to add

some of that friction back in. And I think that we really hope that people will experiment with this stuff. You know, maybe they'll try one of these tactics that seems a little scary and try it for a day or two or a week and see how it goes.

But that ultimately people will will likely sort of step back from that most extreme experiment and find a balance that really works for them if they do need to be responsive to email because their job truly demands it, or because um there's an app like um a stock market app which technically has sort of this this infinitely updating content but maybe doesn't make you feel twitchy, but you know, you like being able to take a look at the end of the day. Uh. But he kind

of finds their own sweet spot for this stuff. Yeah, And the book is really great at laying out a lot of those different options. I found it. I found it really useful in that regards. There's a lot of great tactics there. Let's move on to the third part of the make time formula, which is um managing your energy. So we've got a highlight, we pick our highlight, we've got laser mode, we get into laser mode. But another important part of making time and using our time well

as managing or energy. Talk to us a little bit about that. This is a lesson that Jake and I really learned when we were running design sprints. So I mentioned this earlier, this process where we take a team through a very particular set of exercises to help them go from a problem or opportunity to having a real concrete solution that they can test with customers before they

spend months of time kind of executing on it. And when we were running these sprints, we basically got to control the environment and the schedule for a team of people for a week. We had them in a room. We could say no devices, we could say, you know, here's the schedule, here's when you come in and out of the room. And one of the things that we noticed when we were running these sprints is that people would really run out of energy at the end of

the week. The work was demanding in the sense that it was intense, not that it was pulling people in a million directions, but that we were expecting them to really be focused and intent for the full week, and at the end of the week they would just kind

of be drained. And so we started to experiment, and we found that things like having everybody get up and leave the room and go sit around a table and eat lunch, you know, getting face to face time talking, stepping away from the work gave people a huge energy boost. We found that shortening the day, we actually shortened the sprint day to five pm. We found that that allowed us to get the same amount of stuff done, but to actually have it be higher quality work and have

everybody feel better at the end of the week. And so seeing this play out with team after team, in person after person, really opened our eyes to the importance of a lot of this basic stuff, you know, the stuff that everybody knows about, diet, exercise, sleep, Just how important it is because it enables us to not only make good decisions about how we're spending our time, but to really enjoy what we're doing and to really pour energy into those things that we've decided to do. Yeah,

it's such a drag that the answer is always diet, exercise, sleep. Well, Like you know, we all wanted easier answer than that, right, But man, it's just there isn't one that's you know. And and I think that's true for whether you want to talk about managing your energy, being more effective at work, if you want to talk about dealing with mental health conditions like depress and or anxiety. I mean, it's over and over. It's the same sort of very core you know.

I think of them almost as like the fundamentals, like if if those fundamentals aren't in place, you're gonna feel like crap. You may there might be twenty different varieties of crap you feel like. But but you know, but I just I always it just sounds like such a mom answer to do, like you gotta exercise, you gotta eat, you know, but it just there just doesn't seem to be any getting around it. It's such a key component

for I think happily and well and and productively. And again, I don't think we're talking about productive in the sense of being able to get ten more things done for your boss. I mean in the sense of being able to do the things that matter to you. Yeah, And and I think we all come to this realization on our own at at some point, and you know, some people perhaps never truly realize the importance of these fundamental

human things. UM. But I think the closest we can come to making it easy is to try to make the advice really concrete and to systematize it. So some of this stuff in the book, in the energized section is um for example, lowering the bar for what real exercises. You know, instead of the idea that you have to go to a gym for an hour, we suggest exercises that you can do at home that only take fifteen

to twenty minutes um. Instead of you know, uh, grinding it out on a treadmill, we suggest trying to build walking into your day, which not only is exercise, but it's gonna free up a little bit of mental space where you can you can listen to a podcast or make a phone call, or you can just think. You can just sort of, um, you know, allow that space to to bring in some some reflective energy or some

creative energy. So the book is is full of of those kinds of ideas, concrete um and hopefully automatic type things that people can do that that go from the momlike advice of you really should eat healthier to the you know exactly how can I eat healthier? Yeah? Yeah, the book has lots of lots of great tactics and and that is so much of it is just simplifying these things, breaking down the barriers to getting them done.

You know. I love that idea of you know, I think one of the most important, you know things for exercise, we had a guest. It's been a long time now, but she had a rule which was everything counts, right, Like, every every bit of movement that you do counts. So, you know, five minutes here walking, you know, taking the stairs, um doing a seven minute exercise, some push ups, like you can string lots of little things together if if the time doesn't seem to exist, to go to the

gym for an hour. And I think that's such a powerful idea. And you guys really talk about that. You pointed to uh seven minute exercise routine. That is really helpful. Also. Yeah, I think the the other thing that we tried to do in this part of the book is reframe it away from this is what you should do to be healthy and toward this is how you can build energy to enjoy your days, to do the things that you want to be doing so away from that long term what you should be doing to a short term here's

what you can be doing for the immediate payoff. And for me anyway, that is so much more motivating because I can directly see the connection between eating healthier and and feeling better the rest of the day, for example, or walking to work and enjoying that that energy boost instead of slumping in the back of an uber you know, looking at my phone while I'm driven to the office. Yeah,

I think that's such a key point. I mean, exercise became sort of a locked in thing for me when I really realized, like it wasn't about then I wouldn't get a heart attack in twenty years. I mean, that's great. It wasn't about how I looked. It was really about like I felt better or every time I exercise. There has never been a time that I didn't exercise that I didn't immediately after a goo boy, that felt good.

I'm so glad I did that. You know, you would think something that has a hundred success rate over forty years would be easy to do, Like, you know, I've never done it, and have it not been I've never been unhappy I did it, you know, and so you're right that that connecting to a more immediate goal can be is so important. That reminds me of something that I think James clear As has written about and probably others as well, the the value of focusing on the process,

not the outcome. And so the in your example, the outcome would be, well, you're not going to get a heart attack in twenty years, you're gonna you're gonna live longer, whatever, um. But the process is that day and day out routine of doing some exercise, feeling better, doing some exercise, feeling better. And when you can focus on those things, you can, uh, you can really make those behaviors into habits, and you can get the short term boost. But the cool thing

is you also get the long term boost. You also get that that eventual outcome, but it's just so much more motivating. Yeah, I agree. I think it's so useful to focus on, like even with eating, Like, notice how much better I feel when I eat a healthy meal versus a crappy meal. Like I'm talking immediately, you know, It's not like I have to wait, you know, two months for that. It's like I can feel it like now.

And I think you guys tie this to energy, and I think that's such a useful short term marker, is how is my energy when I do this versus that? Yeah, And I think that many people are used to thinking about health related stuff in that way, but I think people are are less familiar with looking for those connections between you know, the way they use technology and how

that affects the way they feel. And so one of our goals with the because that people will just start to be aware of that and and and we we don't think anybody's gonna have an overnight transformation or or even you know, even a transformation in a in a week or a month, but we do hope that people will be aware of how their choices about how they're spending time or how they're interacting with information or technology

affect just how they feel in general. You know, that feeling that that I remember from being a kid before we had the Internet, of you know, just being totally undistracted, uninterrupted, pouring my energy into some hobby or activity. They cared about becoming reacquainted with that feeling for example. Um, it's just it's just so amazing. And I think that it starts with awareness and and and once we're aware of it, then we can start to make some decisions that intentionally

create those feelings day in and day out. One of the things I loved about the book is at it gives you lots of little things to try and listeners know, you know, I'm such a big fan of baby steps, you know, like just start something small and and experiment, and the book really lays all that out. It's got a framework for doing that. Um, it's got lots of little tactics, and it's it's great in that way. Um, we are at the end of our time here. Um,

but the book is wonderful. I'll have links in the show notes to the book, to your guys sites, all that stuff. You and I are going to have an interesting conversation here in the post show about optimizing caffeine. So for you caffeine lovers out here, these guys have even got a bunch of tactics for making that even better. So you and I are going to talk about that in the post show. Listeners, if you're interested, when you feed dot net slash support, you can get access to those.

You can also get access to something new. I'm doing the teaching poem song many episode when you feed dot net Slash support. John, thanks so much for taking the time. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, me too, Thanks a lot, Eric. Yeah, and I really enjoyed reading the book, so thanks so much. Cool. Thank you bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community.

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