Focused - 148: Savoring the Moment, with Chris Bailey

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Chris Bailey is back to talk about his dopamine fast, the art of savoring, and avoiding the productivity racket.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Excellent. Excellent. We are happy to be here today. We got a great show lined up, and we got a great guest. Welcome back to the show, Chris Bailey. Not that guy again. I thought he's been on like twice. Yeah, but you're worth it, man.

Oh, okay. It's been on like twice. Yeah, but you're worth it, man. Oh, okay. It's good to be here. Author of The Productivity Project and Focus. What's the name? Focus. Hyper Focus. Hyper Focus. I'm just going to sit here and listen to you try to remember.

You do this, right? Yeah. Hyper Focus. Yes. Hyper Focus. Which was my favorite of the two you've released so far so i don't know how i do how i lost that thread but either way um chris is called the most productive man in the universe by the new york times or is the wall street journal i mean

man you're something like that you are a great intro smart guy great great intro yeah i know the problem is the closer i am to the guests, the more informal I get. But yeah, Chris Bailey is also a dear friend. And he's here today because he was telling Mike and I about his dopamine fast. So we're going to get into that and talk about it with you. But what are you up to lately, Chris? Not much. You? No, I just handed in another book, which will be out. Well, you guys know a bit about how book publishing works. It'll be out in like 10 years. And so

I don't even know I'm mentioning it. It's going kind of through the process right now. But you mentioned kind of the arc, hyper-focus. I prefer hyper-focus to the productivity project. And I definitely prefer book number three, which will not be named to book number two, which I'm also really proud of. So yeah, I'm excited to get that out into the world and traveling around again, somehow, I guess, travels a thing again, doing talks here and there and getting back into writing and podcasting and back into a rhythm. It's kind of that ball in the hose where the ball has to get through the hose. It's always worthwhile for it to do so because it ships on the other end. But there's a lot of stuff behind the ball that is built up. And so now that's what I'm up to. It's the stuff behind the ball.

Well, you know, we all need to spend time on that stuff too. And I think, honestly, on a show about focus, that is something you need to deal with. I mean, it's important that you have time to focus, but it's also, you don't want your life to go to hell at the same time. You got to figure that out. On your book, so what I wanted to say, and I've said this in your past appearances on the show, but I want to say it every time you come on, is I find the two books you have are different. Like my wife was interested in productivity. She's like, what is all this productivity stuff you're talking about?

She doesn't want to learn it from me. Let's just set that straight. She's the last person she wants to hear about. This is for me. So I got her the productivity project. And that's a book that Chris did where he just did a bunch of experiments on himself. Like what would happen if I started work every day

at like 4 a.m. Or what would happen if I started work every day at like 4am or what would happen if I tried to work, you know, long hours or short hours and did experiments and came up with some really interesting insight from it. But it's kind of an overview of a lot of different productivity ideas told from Chris's perspective. And I felt like it really resonates with people who want to explore this stuff, but they don't want to read a whole book on sleep, but you know, you've got a chapter in there and sleep with some good advice. And I just think it's a really good overview book for people. And, uh, hyper-focus is the one that resonated with me. I mean, I make a show about focus. Of course that book resonated with me. But I do think your books do, they kind of scratch

different itches. Yeah, it's, and thanks for saying that. It means a lot. And that's kind of where I see my place in the productivity world, you know, talking about this productivity racket and writing about it too. You know, A, I have to respect somebody's time. And so, you know, a deep dive into one topic as a whole book, it needs to be worthwhile. And really, you know, the main two topics I think that have been worth diving into, there's a third one coming up, but our productivity and attention. But, you know, B, it's also about stepping back because there is a lot of productivity advice out there. Well, you guys know this. You, the listener, you know this too. There's a lot of advice out there and a lot of it's fluff. A lot of it is BS and doesn't allow us to earn back the time that we spend on it. But that's the golden rule that I love the most, is for every minute you spend reading about productivity or listening to a few fellas like us talk about productivity, how much time do you get back because you went through that whole process? And the best productivity advice, you know, planning out our day is a

really good example of this. I think for every minute we spend planning, up to a point, obviously, if you spent all day planning, you wouldn't have any time for execution. But that's a high leverage activity with regard to our work. If you spend one minute planning in the morning, you might make back five or ten minutes later on. our focus. We chatted about meditation last time, so we don't need to cover that again. But I think we make an inordinate amount of time back through meditation because it allows us to say no to distraction in the moment, and it allows us to settle our mind a little bit. But then you have kind of the fluffy stuff like, oh, this is how Oprah manages her daily schedule. Or this is how Richard Branson vacations. This is how you can have a more productive vacation like Richard Branson. Well, I'm not a billionaire. This doesn't apply to me. I don't necessarily make that time back. And that's where I see my place in this whole productivity picture is, okay, there's a lot of advice out there. Can I be helpful in some way in separating out the advice that works from the stuff that doesn't? So I'm

happy to hear that. So far, mission accomplished. I feel like I need a banner behind me for the first two books. Let's talk about productivity porn for a minute. I mean, I think that's kind of the term for it. And yes, I do find myself like whenever I stumbled into the, like, here is how five productive people run their day, man, that is so tempting to me to click on that when that shows up. Right. And, um, how do you resist it? Because I honestly don't think I've ever got anything useful out of that. I mean, cause you're right. Every, every human is different. And Mike and I say this frequently, we, you know, we don't have all the answers. We're sharing our journey. Yeah. I did get an email from somebody saying, you guys keep saying you don't have all the answers. Well, I have all

the answers. So you should have me as a guest on the show. And I think that person was serious, which really made me laugh, but Yeah, that's kind of funny. Yeah. But how do you, as someone who's kind of in the racket, how do you avoid getting trapped into things like that? I like that word, the racket. I really think it's about awareness. And I would go so far as to say it is almost impossible to invest in our productivity if we're not aware of how we're working and how we're acting and how what we're doing differently leads us to do things differently. I think are self-reinforcing. We see how much time planning our day allows us to make back, and we think, by God, I made back like two hours today because I said no to that project that I've been kind of procrastinating on and instead wrote a few thousand words for something that was far more meaningful. It's the awareness that precedes and follows action, I think, that makes the best productivity tactics self-reinforcing in a way that if you don't have the awareness, you can feel something is different, but maybe it's hard to pinpoint how or why.

You know, a couple strategies for this. Tracking your time is a really good example, so you can make sure that the way you're spending your time is more true to what you value on a deeper level. And also just keeping an accomplishments list every day. What things do your actions lead you to actually accomplish? What difference are you able to make because you spent your time, your attention, your energy in an intelligent way. And I know you guys chat about journaling a bit on the show. I think that works wonders for that. At the end of the day, journal about what you were able to accomplish, what you did differently. And it's that feedback loop around our actions. There are some of us who just act,

and there are some of us who act and then reflect on how we acted so we can act in a way that's better the next time around. And that loop is what creates self-improvement, right? Or else we're just kind of all, what tactics work well. And second of all, we can keep what works and leave the rest. And I think that the productivity racket show title, that's what a lot of people miss when they invest in this advice, is all of us are different. We're all wired differently. We all do different work. Some of us are introverts. Some of us are extroverts. Some of us love journaling. Some people can't stand the idea. Some of us love meditation. Others of us have tried, but we just can't get it. And so we do have to take what works for us and leave the rest. It's personal productivity after all. But finding a way to introduce a feedback loop around our differences in behavior is what leads those to stick over time. And I think awareness is critical for productivity. Yeah. You know, it's funny. This is so timely for me. I was laying in bed last night just feeling like something was off. You know how sometimes you feel like you're out of kilter a bit. And I realized I went on a trip last week. And then this week I've been super busy catching

up on things and I have just been going full tilt. I have not been kind of mindfully transitioning. And I know that sounds weird, but like when I finished something, I just take a few notes about how it went or what I would do different. And then I like transition to the next thing, but I've just been like racing from one to the next. And I feel like I'm carrying this like baggage in my brain about everything going on at once. And I haven't been able to like bring things to ground. And I, I woke up today and said, okay, I'm going to be better at journaling today and make sure I really take the time to finish one thing before starting the next. And I mean, this is basics. Mike and I have talked about this stuff

on the show a million times, but I, without any realization in the last two or three days, I've stumbled out of the line of truth here for me. And so I just have to start over again. That's all. Yeah. And personally, I find leaning on planning to be really helpful during times like that. And it's an odd impulse to plan more when you have more to do. But usually when you have more to do, there's this asymmetry of importance with everything that we have on our plate. And so I noticed this with the book. I was investing all of myself into writing this book, which is why I might sound a bit tired now compared to previous episodes. I don't know. But when I evaluated the relative importance compared to the book of everything else that was on my plate, it just didn't measure up. And so the more I have to do,

I don't know, it's kind of a weird impulse to spend more time planning, the more you have on your plate. But I think it supports whatever you happen to be doing when there's that asymmetry of importance, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I think that if you do it, it's intuitively a waste of time. It feels like, oh no, I, you know, the, the ship is sinking and I'm rearranging the decks on the chairs on the deck. Right. That's the, that's the feeling you get, but it's actually just the opposite. It's like, no, the ship is sinking. I need to figure out what needs to happen so I don't die, you know? And, and that, if you can just get over that, and my advice would be just

try it because the results will bear out. And, you know, one, one strategy, if you're struggling, if you have a lot going on right now, uh, make a list of every activity that you have going on in your work and, uh, ask yourself after you have that list out of your mind and onto a sheet of paper in front of you or text edit file if that's more of your style as it is mine. I'm a big fan of text. Text edit is easily the best application that Apple has ever made. Come at me, everybody. But make a list of everything that you have on your plate and ask yourself, if I can only do one thing on this list, day in, day out, every single live long day, which one of these things allows me

to accomplish the most? Which one of these things allows me to deliver the most value and make the biggest difference? Then you can pick a second, you can pick a third, but stop after around three or four because you'll find that your marginal productivity begins to fall off of a cliff after that point. And the productivity that everything else produces, it's far less important. The things that remain in that text edit file, on that sheet of paper, usually support our work, or they get in the way of our work. And so they're kind of the landmines to avoid and was of equal importance. Because we could just go to Twitter, and that's as important as going into a text edit and writing, which is as important as answering our email, which is as important as everything else. And it speaks to the

fundamental truth about the show, which is that productivity is about more than just cranking widgets. And this is, I think, a fundamental disconnect that we need to internalize from the era when work was simple and repetitive. And the more time we spent on it, the more, quote unquote, productive we became because we produced more with our time. But now that connection between time and creation has become severed when we do knowledge work for a living. The more intelligence we throw at something, the more productive we become. The more thoughtfulness we devote to something, the more strategy, and the more deliberateness, and the more intentionality we devote to what we have to get done, the more productive we become.

we devote to what we have to get done, the more productive we become. And curiously, one of the most curious things that I find about knowledge work is as you progress from that kind of spectrum of work. So on one side is the factory kind of work where it's simple, it's repetitive. We do the heavy lifting with our hands rather than with our binds. And there's a direct connection between time and productivity. And on the other side, there's the knowledge work, right? The closer you are to knowledge work, the broader the importance of what you do. You know, there are some tasks through which you contribute an inordinate amount of value. And then there's the stuff that you just have to say no to and try to keep up with and try to minimize. But that simple activity, finding the most important things on your plate, so, so critical. And like you were saying,

it's simple. It's common sense advice. But when we're so busy, that's sometimes common sense is the first thing that we forget about. Do you mind sharing an example of that? Because it sounds great to hear that advice. And then the logical next step after you finish listening to this podcast is, okay, I'm going to do that. And it seems at that point much, much harder. But I know because you've shared it with David and I, you had a very effective way of tracking the most important thing for yourself when you were in the process of writing this latest book? Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's just tracking how much time you spent. I love tracking the time I spend only on the most important things on my list. And so, yeah, to illustrate that with an example of the most important tasks, my three have kind of stayed consistent over time. Number one is writing, because that's how I communicate my ideas. Number two is research, because that's how I find new ideas that I don't just come up with in my own head. I need to read about Richard Branson's schedule, for God's sake. No, I don't.

Speaking is the third one. And these are the ways I communicate my ideas. Everything else is secondary. And so everything else that's left on that list, email, social media, I don't even know what else. I try to shrink it all and delegate it all. But I think that's kind of the key. Does that answer the question? Well, that does. But then you had a real simple way to track how effective you were with that

because you were sharing with David and I a word count. You kind of have like one of those scrum burndown charts. And I feel like that's maybe it seems like that's an oversimplification. But here you are writing books and it's working for you. So I think the big thing I just want people to understand is keep it simple. You don't need a complex application of these principles. Simpler is better. Moving the needle doesn't have to be hard. Oh, I remember what you're talking about now, the chart. Yep, yep. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So this is my favorite way of tracking progress with longer term cumulative projects that are longitudinal over time, where you make kind of incremental progress towards something. I have a very, very simple system, but I started it with the first book. I continued it with the

second and the third and an Audible original that I wrote as well. And that's just make a chart in numbers. I don't even use Excel. It's not even that complicated. So I have a numbers sheet where I have the pacing of if I were to ship a project on a given date. So I'll put the due date on the very right-hand side of this chart. I'm terrible at describing how charts look, so I hope to paint somewhat of a visual in the listener's mind. But I kind of have a pacing line that goes up and to the right of if I were to write exactly how many words I needed to every single week, this is my progress. This would be exactly shipping on time. And then I would have the pacing line, which is my actual word count every week. And I could chart that relative to the pacing line. And this works for any cumulative goal. If you're trying to ship a book, if you're creating a course, you can break it down into little deliverables for a lesson, which lets you track the incremental progress for that. It works for losing weight, which is something that I'm going to apply this technique to now to try to become as fit as David Beckham. Maybe I'll call it the David Beckham experimenter. I don't even know. But essentially tracking the pace and the progress relative to where you should be at any given point of time. And this deconstruction progress

allows you to really consider what you want your goals to be. Because you start thinking, okay, what is a reasonable pace if I am to deliver a book at this time? And you might think, oh, I have to write a thousand words a day. There's no way this deliverable is realistic. And then you adjust the deliverable and you don't set yourself up for disappointment. So it's a good, it's a good way of introducing some realism into projects too. And adjusting as you go. Very simple, but very helpful, I found. And it also helps overcome a problem of, like the problem is busy, right? You look at yourself, you're like, man, I'm really busy. I've been running all day.

But you don't look at how much did I really do that matters in terms of what's important to me. And it's very easy to have a 14-hour day where you actually don't produce anything of value in terms of your actual goals. And I think holding yourself accountable in that way makes it a lot easier not to spend a long time in email and on Instagram and all the other distractions.

And that's the problem with the productivity racket is your reward for being more efficient is that you get to do more work, especially when you have no idea what the most important thing is. There's always something else for you to be doing. Yeah. Yeah. The reward for working hard should not be that you have more work to do. Absolutely. And yeah, it's so true. I've started to think of it as a busyness layer of activity in our lives because there's the essential things that we do that are, you know, analog often. We're spending time with people, we're writing, or we're just doing our digital work, living our digital lives. But then we have that busyness layer that we kind of slather on top of the rest of our lives. And it's often a layer that just stimulates our mind, often because of

our constant desire for dopamine, a neurotransmitter that propels us toward pleasure. And we tend to this busyness layer. I think I have that right. iPhone 3GS with that glossy black back that scratched way too easily. And this started as this wonderful device that allowed me to connect with anyone around the world whenever I wanted to. It was beautiful. It was magical as Apple names everything these days, even keyboards for some reason. But over time, that just introduced more activity into this so-called busyness layer in my life, where I tended to things only because they provided my mind with stimulation. And I would often find myself in the moment, propelled to act in a certain way. And I remember kind of like how, what's his name?

Dr. Strange. You know how Dr. Strange can do that thing where he steps out of his body and observes himself from afar? That's kind of how I felt using Twitter sometimes, where I would kind of observe myself compulsively checking just for that hit of stimulation. And then I'd go over to Instagram to get another hit of stimulation, another hit of dopamine, check the news, get another hit of dopamine still. And it was this weird out-of-body experience sometimes where it was just mindlessness that contributed to this busyness layer of activity in my life. And it's interesting how things change over time, but we so often tend to what provides us with that stimulation and that dopamine and that validation. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

Go to squarespace.com slash focus and make your next move. Enter offer code focus to check out to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. You can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, services, and even content you create. Squarespace has got you covered. With Squarespace, you can sell your products in an online store. Whether you sell physical or digital products, Squarespace has the tools you need to start selling online.

And when you get started with Squarespace, you get a best-in-class website template to customize it to fit your needs. with Squarespace, you get a best-in-class website template to customize it to fit your needs. It's as easy as browsing the category of your business to find a perfect starting place, and you can customize it with just a few clicks. If you want to get blogging, you need Squarespace. Squarespace has powerful blogging tools to share stories, photos, videos, and updates. You'll be able to categorize, share, and schedule your posts to make your content work for you. you'll be able to categorize, share, and schedule your posts to make your content work for you. I've lost count of the number of family and friends I've helped set up Squarespace websites. And I use the term set up very loosely.

Usually all I do is say, go try Squarespace, and they figure it out on their own. Because it's just really easy for anyone to use and create a new website. And the best part is, I know that the people I'm sending the Squarespace are going to get a solid website that works, that looks beautiful, that it's aware of what device it's on. They just take care of all the little details for you and at a very reasonable price. Just last week, my daughter set up a new website for a school project on Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com slash focused for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focused F O C U S E D to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace.com slash focused. When you decide to sign up, use the offer code focus to get that 10% off your first purchase and show your

support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Well, before the break, we were talking about these attractions and you have taken it, you know, kind of in the Chris Bailey fashion to another level. Tell us about dopamine in general and your dopamine fast. Dopamine is quite a fascinating neurotransmitter. And I'm sure that pretty much everybody listening to the podcast right now has heard of the neurotransmitter dopamine. It's like serotonin and oxytocin. We hear the names of these transmitters, and people often try to reduce these neurotransmitters to one sentence of what they do. They'll say dopamine is a pleasure

chemical. And it's always kind of true. I've been deep into the research on dopamine and these other I've been deep into the research on dopamine and these other neurotransmitters lately, so don't mind as I nerd out a little bit. But we think of dopamine as a neurotransmitter that leads us to pleasure, right? It leads us to feel pleasure. But the truth is a bit more nuanced than that. There's this kind of dopamine fast experiment idea that is circulating around the world, especially through Silicon Valley right now, where people want to do dopamine fasting, where they go without any dopaminergic, so other related to dopamine, stimuli for a period of time to try to reset their mind for stimulation so that they can just crave less of this emptiness that comes from internet dopamine.

Can I just say for a minute the irony that that's a thing in Silicon Valley, that that is where they've decided they don't want dopamine? Yeah, exactly. They can provide others with dopamine, but they can't get hooked on their own supply, so to speak. Before we go into it, though, could you explain? Because my level of understanding of dopamine is at the one-sentence level.

I understand it makes you happy, but how does it exactly work? I mean, to the extent, I know you're not a doctor or a scientist, but can you give me a little more depth? Well, yeah, exactly. That's the thing. It's involved in pretty much everything that we do. We use dopamine when we think logically. And so you can't fast from dopamine as any more than you can fast from carbohydrates for a period of time. Our body relies on it, right? And so it's involved in everything that we do. But generally speaking, as it relates to a distraction on the internet especially, dopamine is what propels us to act in a way that we think will be pleasurable to us. distraction that comes in on our phone, like a notification on Instagram, we get a hit of dopamine not because our mind is happy in that moment, but because there is a promise of happiness.

And so dopamine is what fuels the chase toward pleasure, if that makes sense. And so the idea of a dopamine fast, which is impossible, by the way, I think a much better word for it is a stimulation fast, because when you actually look at the research surrounding dopamine, you can't fast from dopamine. You would have to be comatose. And even then, your body and mind might need dopamine in some capacity. But essentially, the idea of a dopamine fast is to reduce the level of dopamine coursing through your mind by craving less pleasure and by engaging in fewer behaviors that your instinctual mind will think leads you to pleasure. And so, disabling notifications, cutting out social media, this is what I've done a few of these as experiments, and what I find works well over time, cutting out all digital distraction. Anything that is part of that busyness layer of activity that we slather on top of our lives that didn't even exist before whatever the equivalent of the iPhone 3GS was for you that

came into your life. Eliminating that busyness layer, most of which is digital, mindless, dopaminergic activity, and finding substitute activities to sub in for that. So in mind, I find when I go on social media more, that's an early sign that I need to cut back on dopamine. So I'll get rid of all the news websites that I check by downloading a distractions blocker like Freedom and just enabling it 24-7 on every single device. I'll eliminate social media. And I find that with my work, at least, there's a lot of egometrics. And you guys might find this too, but metrics like, oh, how many people are downloading my podcast this week? How many books am I selling this week? How many people visited my website? I'll cut all of that out

because these are all activities that I would engage with for the purpose of the dopamine hit itself, for only the purpose of keeping my mind at a high height of stimulation. But if you look at where the most important things that we have in our life lie, they lie at a lower level of stimulation than these high heights of stimulation that are produced by so much dopamine that certain behaviors like this exhibit. If you think to when your most meaningful experiences happen, you're probably not scrolling through Twitter or checking email one more time. Maybe you're by a campfire and your mind just finally has a chance to calm down and you're not engaging with something that is in the moment stimulating, but there's this kind of general stimulation that is very

calming and very soothing. This is what to reconnect with during that dopamine fast. I find that one month... I don't like the word dopamine fast, but let's just run with that, I guess, for the sake of this conversation. So find some analog hobbies that produce a more balanced response that aren't just for the hit of stimulation, like time in nature is an incredible example, playing an instrument, time with people, of course, incredibly stimulating, not in a dopamine kind of way, not in an empty kind of way, but in that rich experience kind of way. So in the moment, the thing to keep in mind is we'll always gravitate to what is likely to provide us with dopamine. We'll always go to the distraction because that's

just what our instinctual mind craves. We want to behave in a way that we think will provide us with pleasure. But usually, especially in the digital world, this isn't really the case anymore. And you'll find, I hope you guys try this. It's a wonderful way of just easing your mind, you know, you'll never, and just calming your mind and finding this presence and also productivity in what you're doing, you know, you might kind of exhale and ah after having a sip of tea or coffee, but we rarely do the same after checking Facebook. You know, it's that presence that a more balanced mind, one that isn't so dopaminergic, leads us to. It's a true, true gift, and it's possible to reconnect with that. I feel like I've rambled on for 10 minutes with this answer, but hopefully that's helpful.

I was going to ask you to rephrase that, actually. For layman's terms, one sentence description, why should somebody engage with a dopamine stimulation fast? Because you'll feel more comfortable in your mind. I like that. You'll have more control over what you do and you'll feel comfortable and present in the moment. That's what life should feel like. It shouldn't feel like bouncing between different things that we don't have control over that make us anxious and fire up the threat response in our mind. We naturally gravitate to what is most novel. There's three things that make our mind release more dopamine. One is novelty, so how

unique something is. Second is whether something is salient, so just how much it affects our life directly. And the third is genetics, and so we're all wired to have a different relationship with dopamine by default, which is why this strategy might work for you. It might not, as with all productivity, take what works for you and leave the rest. But the internet is kind of a digital equivalent of time square in a way, where everything is novel. And because everything is novel, we gravitate to it. But at the same time, relative to the different stimuli that are on the internet, nothing is novel when everything is novel. And we find it hard to cultivate that deep presence like we do in the analog world. But feeling more comfortable in your own mind, finding that sense of deliberateness, that

calmness. Calm is a subject that's really misunderstood, is something that I'm finding. And it's possible to find in ways unexpected, and the stimulation fast is one of them. Yeah, I feel like the technology industry has let us down in a lot of ways because it has chased that dopamine hit, the advertising dollar. I mean, the way the industry is structured, there's no respect for people's calm. In fact,

they know stimulating you is how they get to buy their Teslas. I would go so far as to say the productivity industry is letting us down. It leads us to productivity industry is letting us down. It leads us to overvalue accomplishment as if accomplishment is the only thing in the world that matters. And the only thing that we should ever value is how much we produce with our time. That's ridiculous. There are other values too. There's connection. There's happiness. There's meaning. All meaning is when we manifest what we most deeply value through our actions. And we don't only value accomplishment. Accomplishment does matter by traditional measures, right? We can make a difference in the lives of other people. But I think that's a big gaping chasm, I think, in productivity advice, where it assumes that accomplishment is the only thing that matters. And not to go off on a dopamine tangent too much, but this constant craving for more. Any moment, regardless of what we have, we want more than what we have. That's another sign of a

dopamine imbalance in your mind. Dopamine, researchers describe it as the chemical of more, the molecule of more. I've never heard that before. Yeah, I think it's even the name of the book, The Molecule of More. I chatted with that guy in preparing the next book that I have coming down the pike. And we don't see distraction and our drive for more success as being related to one another. But they actually have the exact same neuroscientific underpinnings, which is that over-reliance on dopamine. And so the dopamine fast can, and it's not as if you do a dopamine fast, you won't crave, you know, you won't feel the need, you won't feel drive anymore. It's just a recalibration of not having too much ambition, which can lead to some big costs.

The context for me is kind of like well you know how everybody in productivity talks about the lizard brain right and yeah the lizard brain to me uh another metric is the the monkey right we're what depending on who you ask our dna is about one percent difference from a monkey and yeah i feel like it's very easy for me to go into what i'll call for lack of a better term monkey mode you, and that's where I let dopamine take over and the brain look for its happy chemicals and I am no longer in charge of the ship. many days before they put me in a box i have things i want to do i don't want to go off on a dopamine high for two or three days and lose those two or three days and that to me is where the rubber kind of meets the road the idea of realizing what i'm the price i'm paying for letting you know genetic chemicals take control of my day.

Yeah. And it's not the dopamine. It's the empty hits of dopamine. The things that we engage with for the sake of the dopamine itself. And I know you guys talk about intention all the time on the podcast. Dopamine can lead us to a breakdown of intentionality because we crave stimulus over a deep presence with what we're doing. And it makes us more productive overall, especially when you define productivity as I do, which is just accomplishing

the things that we set out to do. Regardless of whether you want to put your feet up on the beach or write 5,000 words in a day. It's those empty hits of dopamine where we engage in something for that hit itself. That's where we run into problems. By the way, nothing wrong with... I feel I'm hating on dopamine quite a bit, and we do have an over-reliance of it, but we can get our dopamine from better sources that also provide us with some of the other neurochemicals that I was mentioning. Oxytocin, which is that presence that we have with other people. You know, that serotonin, which provides us with a boost of happiness. Again, impossible to summarize these things in one sentence.

Science doesn't even understand it. You know, things are changing all the time on the margins of scientific understanding. But when we get our dopamine from cleaner burning sources, we use it to think logically. We use it to solve problems. That is far more meaningful. And it produces a balanced concoction of other chemicals as well at the same time. And it produces more meaning, right? That's what it's all about. So how did it go for you? You did this dopamine fast, for lack of a better term. Yeah. What was the experience like? I was kind of surprised at how well it worked.

I'm a big fan of doing experiments because I just value experimentation. You know, and that's how I manifest that value is by exploring the ways that I personally can live a better life and hopefully others can too by trying a lot of these ideas out and seeing what sticks and what's just kind of that fluffy BS productivity porn kind of advice that we were chatting about. I was very, very surprised by how much presence I was able to cultivate after this experiment. It was not easy at the beginning of it. The first week, two weeks or so was misery sometimes, especially in the first dopamine fast where I wasn't accustomed to doing the dopamine fast. I wasn't sure how it would go. But I found after that, I was able to just enjoy things more. I was able to savor the experiences that happened in my life more. I was able to, I remember one moment, you know, I allowed myself time with technology, but no real dopaminergic technology. So I was allowed

to poke through the photos app on my iPad mini phone, for example. And, you know, in doing so, I would look back on pictures with people that I loved that I haven't connected with in quite some time and I sent them messages and reconnected with them and in every case, they were happy to hear from me. It's such a simple recollection of a memory, but little recollections like that would never have happened if I just fired up Twitter instead, right? It's that depth, I think, that we ultimately want to find through an experiment like this. And one analogy that I've come to really think about these ideas in the terms of is heights of stimulation. think about these ideas in the terms of is heights of stimulation. So we kind of have our daily height of stimulation, which is a function of how much dopamine the things that we engage with every day

produces. And if we just, you know, if we work all day, we spend all day in email, we're bouncing between that and social media and the news and we come, and we sit on the couch with several beers, and we watch YouTube videos, and then we go to bed, and we do it all over again the following day, that's a pretty high level of stimulation. But when you lower your level of stimulation through something like a dopamine fast, disengaging with the things that only produce dopamine, you find that you fly at a lower level of stimulation and that you find more meaningful experiences down there, right? Because if you look at different activities that we do, because they release different amounts of dopamine, they live at a different

height of stimulation. So something at the very top might be consuming alcohol or hard drugs, for an example, that, you know, only produced dopamine. And something at the very bottom or close to the bottom might be, I don't know, doing taxes or counting or even meditation because of how not stimulating they are. And what you'll find is that your average daily height of stimulation determines the activities that you're most comfortable with. And so if you fly at this really high level and you engage with a lot of dopaminergic activity over the course of the day, you're going to find it very, very hard to meditate because you have to come all the way down from the top of your height of stimulation down to that grounded level of stimulation. But when you do the fast, when you do the stimulation fast, you find that your level slowly falls as the month goes on and that things that you were resistant to before become far more comfortable and easy to do. And that without the option to engage in something

just for the sake of stimulation, you gravitate to the things that are more meaningful. Because the most meaningful things that we can engage with usually exist at a lower height of stimulation. And it brings back that memory of just scrolling through pictures of people. And I remember stumbling upon a few pictures of when my wife and I, we first met, and she just moved into the apartment that I was living in at the time. And we were decorating, and it was just like connecting with this memory and savoring it in a way. That presence that an experiment like this was able to cultivate was, it's tough to describe, but it's that campfire feeling, right? When you sit around a campfire with a few friends and you're just kind of chatting and you alternate

between these periods of silence and looking at the fire and just chatting or, you know, listening to each other talk, you're at that low level of stimulation, right? You're comfortable with the moment. You're still and you're present. And that's what, you know, this experiment is definitely not a shortcut to that point, but it'll get you a lot of the way there. And personally, I was surprised by how much closer I got to that point. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Ahrefs. Wish you could get more traffic from Google? Half the battle is understanding

what you need to fix on your site. You could hire consultants, but that could get costly. And your solution is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, and it's free. The best part is this is not a 14-day free trial offer. It's just free, and it's a super powerful tool that will do a full website audit for you, and it'll keep working for you. It'll scan your site and prioritize precisely what you need to fix to improve your search results. So you can see which keywords your pages are ranking for. You can finally understand how Google sees your content and you can discover how making changes can potentially

blow up your traffic, which could do a lot for your business. It's time you started getting Google to work for your business. So go to ahrefs.com slash webmaster dashools. That's A-H-R-E-F-S dot com slash webmaster-tools to get the free tool now, or you can click on the link in the show notes. That's Ahrefs.com slash webmaster-tools. Our thanks to Ahrefs for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Now, Chris, before the break, you had talked about how it was difficult for you the first time. And I think if anybody tries this, it is hard to come down off that high level. I mean, how did you get past it? And what are some tips you'd give somebody that wants to give this a try?

Well, people will have to wait for my third book. No, I'm just kidding. So I would just make a list of everything that you engage with for the purposes of stimulation that are part of that busyness layer that you can reasonably cut out for a period of a month. And then once you cut those things out, find some things to substitute in for them. I really think that's the key because you don't want some like Twitter-shaped hole in your life or some news-shaped hole in your life where you're just kind of sitting around and twiddling your thumbs and trying to find some idea of what to do with that period of time. So find some, I highly recommend anything that exists in the analog world.

We gravitate to the digital world because it's so dopaminergic. But when we gravitate to what's analog, that produces this calm feeling. So I would recommend finding some activities to sub in for those things that you engage with just for the purposes of stimulation. Try it for about a month. If you find that, I should say that there are some things that there would be some withdrawal from. So alcohol is an example of this. Caffeine is an example of this. Consult with a doctor, of course, if you think you might have withdrawal symptoms because of something of that nature. But I think you might be surprised by what you find. Yeah, I remember my dad telling me when he quit

smoking, the ritual is what telling me when he quit smoking, the ritual is what bothered him because he would always carry the cigarettes in his pocket. And he struggled for weeks until he decided he just carried Lifesavers in the same pocket. And every time he wanted a cigarette, he'd get a Lifesaver out and stick it in his mouth. And he said that just doing that was enough to like satisfy it,

you know, just going through the steps. Yeah. It's that whole, you know, in the power of habit, I think it's called, Charles Duhigg talks about the three parts of a habit. There's the cue that sets off a habit. It initiates the habit. There's the routine, which is what we do as the habit. And there's the reward after, which we kind of need and which propels us to do the habit in the first place. So, yeah, the cue probably stayed the same for your dad, whether it was an uncomfortable or a craving or whatever. The routine changed, became a lot healthier. Lifesavers are far more delicious than a cigarette, I think. And the reward,

it still was there. So yeah, finding those patterns with the experiment is really helpful. You mentioned the calm that comes from the dopamine fast, and you used a word, And you used a word, savoring, which is very intriguing. What do you mean by that exactly? And how does that fit with the whole idea of calm? Yeah. So I think people might be able to read between the lines of our conversation to try to glean what the next book might be about whenever it comes out down the line, which I'm excited about. But savoring is another topic that I am absolutely fascinated with as it relates to

that idea of calm and cultivating a presence. So, savoring something. We've all heard the word, but there's actually a body of research related to this topic, the science of savoring. And curiously, you know, I mentioned that drive for more accomplishment, which often manifests as a drive for greater productivity when that is the intention behind it. The curious thing is that the more successful somebody is, the less likely they are to savor their lives. That kind of took me back when I first encountered it. And wealth may, in fact, fail to deliver the happiness that we expect. And researchers posit that this is because of the expect. And researchers posit that this is because of the detrimental effects that money has on our ability to savor the present moment. And so, savoring is just the process through which we

convert positive experiences into positive emotions. And so, we just enjoy something. And when our mind kind of trails off to doing something else, we bring it back. And it's like that song, Vienna, from Billy Joel. You guys know that tune? Yeah. Oh, so good. We take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while. That's what savoring is, where we just, instead of rushing past the most beautiful moments of our life, the things that we have to enjoy that are the fruits of our success and our productivity in the first place, we enjoy them. We notice them. And it's odd how much of a challenge this can prove to be. There's actually three kinds of savoring. The first is present moment savoring, so where we savor what we do

in the moment. So I'm savoring this conversation with you guys right now. Hopefully you guys are too, maybe a few listeners. I don't even know if the listeners would be, but it's just enjoying what you're experiencing in the present moment. But it's also possible to savor things from your past and from your future. Oddly enough, we can savor the past and the future in the present moment. We savor the future when we anticipate something. And so when we count down the days to an event or a retreat or a gathering with friends, and we savor the past. It was that moment with the iPad miniphone that I was mentioning combing through pictures. We savor the past when we practice something called a reminiscence, where we reminisce on something that happened, and we

experience the pleasure of something all over again. And in this field of savoring, it's kind of an up-and-coming, not an up-and-coming, but it's a fledgling, let's say, field of research. They've actually shown that anticipation, when we anticipate something or we count down the days to it, we get excited about it, we journal about it, we reflect on it in some way. Whatever we anticipate, when it happens, we end up enjoying that thing more than we would have otherwise. And this is kind of some of the room we have to gain with regard to this idea of savoring. If you find that savoring is a challenge for you, maybe if you came to the podcast originally because of that drive

for greater productivity and accomplishment and success, it's possible to counterbalance that so you can actually enjoy the fruits of that success on a daily basis. One of my favorite ways of doing so is to make a savoring list. So I'm a fan of lists. So this might work for you, this might not. list. So I'm a fan of lists. So this might work for you. This might not. But on this list is everything that I savor. And I make sure to pick one thing from the list every day. So there's a fancy cafe down the street where my office is. And so I like to go down there and get myself a macadamia nut milk latte. Oh man, there is no drink that I savor more than this fancy-ass macadamia nut milk latte. There's a forest near where I live, so I savor the walks through there. I savor any book, basically, by my favorite authors like Elizabeth Gilbert, Stephen King,

Beverly, Cleary, Neal Stephenson. I have a morning matcha green tea ritual that I savor. I savor the walks downtown with my phone on airplane mode where I listen to lo-fi hip-hop, which is actually a great soundtrack to work to if you're ever interested in one. But the idea is every day pick something on that list and savor it entirely. And the research shows that savoring isn't just some thing that we're born with that we can either do or we don't. It's very situational, first of all. It's related to income and how much scarcity we have in our life, because the more scarce that different elements of our life are, the more we tend to savor our life. So for example,

one study gave two groups of participants, I think five chocolates or something, and the group that knew they weren't going to get more chocolates later on enjoyed the chocolate that they got considerably more than the group that thought they would just get more later on, where they knew there was some scarcity. So having a budget, actually, no matter how much money you have, having a personal budget can allow you to enjoy your experiences even more. And it's such a remarkable, remarkable field of research because we become happier through this process. And it is this skill that we can get better at over time. And high savoring ability does lead to more engagement. It leads to less anxiety. It prolongs the positive experiences that we have in our life.

It leads to less depression, less social anxiety. We have also been shown to experience less family conflict when we savor, and we just feel better about ourselves and our lives. And man, I can't think of a better habit for cultivating presence and also productivity at the same time because of that engagement. I'm curious about the relationship between savoring and intentionality. And just to give you a couple examples, I was at a Zen retreat once and my teacher said, David, you're not eating your food, you're eating your problems, just watching me eat. And that was really insightful for me. But then I also think about like, to to me when you say savoring the thing that immediately comes

to my mind is like memories and experiences and there have been several times in my life like the first time i held my daughter when she graduated from college where like i planned ahead of time like this is going to be a moment that will be in my brain as I'm laying on my deathbed. I want to absorb it entirely. And it's like, it's almost like putting like a marker in the timeline of your life. And I find it very easy to savor those things that I went into with the intention of holding onto them. I find it harder to savor something in terms of memories unless I actually kind of set the marker in the moment. I don't know how it all ties together, but it feels to me like there's an intentionality angle to it. Yeah. And I think it's entirely possible to kind of tie the different

time periods together where you can anticipate something. And so you look forward to holding your daughter in your hands, and then you experience that present moment savoring where you enjoy that experience completely. And then you can practice that reminiscence of that memory. And it's funny how many people would just gloss over an experience like that, right? Savoring is the art of enjoyment, essentially. It's enjoying the good things in our life. When we convert these positive moments into positive emotions, how we get that joy, that awe, that pride, that pleasure from our life, which is hopefully why we do the things that we do. I think intentionality is key with regard to savoring, especially at the beginning where we should be seeing savoring as a skill that we need to deliberately get better at,

deliberately get better at, because it leads to these profound benefits in our life. And it should come after intention, I think, but an intention should kind of reside with us in the moment, I think, while we savor something, so that we can remind ourselves that there's so much to enjoy in what we're doing. If we're drinking a cup of coffee, for example, I know, Mike, you love the, I know you have your fancy coffee rituals. Yes, I do. Having that, yes, it's fascinating to observe your coffee ritual and quite delicious to observe the rituals too. But holding that intention in your mind as you experience something with your full consciousness, that is beauty. That is just pure, good energy in your life where if your mind drifts to something else, it's not worthwhile for it to drift because you're

experiencing something which makes life worth living in the first place, these positive experiences. And so I think intention is, I think it would have a curious relationship with savoring in that when we have that intention before we savor, we can enjoy something so much more. And when we have that intention as we savor, And when we have that intention as we savor, but had this revelation that I felt a compulsion whenever my kids were doing something ridiculous, for now try to savor the moment. And I find that I remember those moments a lot more because instead of trying to capture it digitally, I'm really just focused on capturing how I feel in that particular moment internally. And I'm kind of curious how you balance that because I think the case could be made that by capturing it digitally, you're able to savor via reminiscence that event that happened. So how do you balance,

I'm just going to be here and get as much as I can out of this moment versus I want to document this for later? I think there's a balance to be struck between that present moment savoring and reminiscence. Because you're exactly right. You know, we can savor a memory just as much as we can savor a photograph. And, you know, we all have a lot of data points at our disposal with how much we can, we're able to enjoy the different experiences of our life in the past. If we, you know, I love looking back at photos,

for an example. But my rule for photographs now is if I'm trying to capture a moment of my life, I know that capturing that photo will take me out of the moment because you can't fit an experience inside of a picture frame. But if I capture a memory, I make sure I reminisce on it later on. Because why wouldn't you want to? It's an incredible memory. There's some essential element, some essential component of it that led you to feel compelled to capture it and immortalize it in the first place. And that is probably worth revisiting. I love looking back. I take pictures of a lot of the things I eat for this very reason. Because when I look back on old food pictures, I feel like I'm tasting everything all over again. But I think it's worth capturing memories insofar as it supports us in reminiscence, if that makes sense. Because what's the point otherwise? And this is, I think, speaking of

dopamine, speaking of social media, speaking of things that pull us out of the moment, speaking of intention. If your intention in capturing something is to share it, if your intention in capturing something is to share it, that's not very fruitful, I have found. You know, if I'm taking a picture of some delicious meal that I have only to post it for likes, that chasing of dopamine is going to compromise how much I can savor my life overall. Because when we savor something, we have a balanced mind in the moment because we're able to develop and cultivate this presence that leads us to become essentially one with what we're doing. And so I think that intention in the capturing matters. But if the intention is reminiscence, I think that can be quite powerful, quite profound, especially with food pictures for me.

The food pictures is interesting. That gives me something to think about. But one of the things that my wife started doing, and I really like this, is we have this big hallway between our garage and the rest of our house. And she started putting up pictures of extended family members, like great-great-grandparents, and she's creating this generations wall. And what I've noticed is that this generations wall, yeah, it's really awesome. And the thing that surprised me about it is these are just like single pictures of these people. But every time I walk by them, it triggers memories and stories that we're able to communicate to our kids.

And it's not a picture of the thing that happened. It's the memory because I was fully present and savoring the moment that that picture triggered. And I'm realizing that's really the stuff that's made a difference in my life. It's not the cute little videos that I recorded when my kids were small. And yeah, I know I'll want something to go back and look at later, but it seems to me like the people are the important thing. And the thing that I appreciate most about them is not a digital copy of a moment, but just the trigger of the emotion and the experience

that the picture is triggering. Yeah, I love that. I love that. Kind of that luxuriating in the memory. And that's something. Fred Bryant is the fellow that I chatted with in preparing this book that'll be out in like 10 years probably, as I mentioned. But he's kind of the man who coined the term savoring. And we mentioned, I think we chatted a bit about coping earlier in the episode, but savoring is the positive side of coping. So, you know, coping is how you overcome a negative experience, the feelings that a negative experience engenders, whereas savoring is how you enjoy the positive experiences that something engenders. It's kind of the positive psychological construct of coping, which I think

is a beautiful thing. And there are so many different ways that it can manifest itself. Luxuriating is one of them that Fred identifies, but also marveling at something. That's what comes to mind with that. I love that idea of the generations while marveling and feeling awe and wonder about where you've come from. And another one that comes to mind, another manifestation of savoring is Thanksgiving. It's appreciating the good things in your life and just recalling the things that you have to be grateful for. Each night when my wife and I are falling asleep, or before we fall asleep, not as we fall asleep, we share the three things that we're grateful for from that day.

And doing this, it's interesting because it allows you to enjoy them all over again. You scan through your day and look for those shining, bright lights of experience that you can look back on as markers in time. That's why we crave novelty, by the way, because our mind looks back and sees novelty in the present moment or in the past as kind of a marker in time. This is why life moves faster as we get older too, because our experiences become a bit less novel. But when you look back and you see the novel positive experiences of your day, that's true wonder, isn't it? You know, you see, I'm really into this stuff right now, as you can probably tell, but it's so fascinating to look back and see the good in the day when there are so many novel threats directed our way.

I love that idea of the generations wall. It's interesting. We all have relationships with our wives that is something related to this. But I still struggle with the idea between intentionality and savoring. My wife and I often, in the afternoon when we're both home, I'll make tea for us. I'll make a pot of tea and we'll sit at the table. And there's kind of an unwritten rule that there's no phones out. We just take 20 minutes to look in each other's eyes and talk. And I always thought of it as an experience of intentionality. Like we both are super busy,

but we do have this moment where the only thing that matters is each other. And, but it's also could be considered savoring. I just, you know, I am still trying to figure out that relationship and I guess I need to ponder that more. Yeah, they're definitely separate constructs in the research. And that's the interesting thing about savoring and ideas like, I would also think of that in the terms of flow because you're immersed in the moment and mindfulness. But flow is different because it implies less conscious attention to the experience as savoring does. And it also implies working on a relatively challenging thing. And mindfulness is a bit more restrictive in a way where you're focused on, you know, where savoring

is far more positive because you're focused on what's positive instead of seeing things through a non-judgmental awareness. And intention, I think, is related to savoring, but definitely a separate construct. It can lead to savoring for sure. But I think it is kind of an independent idea, if that makes sense. Yeah. And in relation to Mike's earlier comment, to me, I find that not taking the picture and just being present for things with the kids or just things in your life. It's not even close. I feel like I get so much more value out of it when I don't take the picture. And if you're listening and you haven't tried that, I think of it because I'm a nerd.

I think of it digitally. I think of it like, okay, I'm about to do this thing. I'm going to set a marker here. I'm going to be, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to set a marker here. I'm going to be, and I'm going to experience it fully. And it just, it's a little game I play in my head and it works for me. But like we said, everybody's a little different. Yeah. And even taking a mental photograph, you don't even have to get your phone out. Just, you know, but my wife started doing this when we were kind of nerding out over the research on savoring together. She blinks for a long time.

She like squints her eyes. And that's her way of taking a photograph of a situation. And, you know, it's a novel enough behavior that you kind of look back on it as a meaningful memory. behavior that you kind of look back on it as a meaningful memory. The tipping point for me was when I looked at my photo roll and I had 46,000 images in photos and I did not, I could not recall a single one in the moment that I was like, oh, that was a really happy experience. But I get those memories triggered every time I walk past the 12 to 15 pictures we have hanging up on the wall every time I go to get in the car and go somewhere. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com

slash focus to get a free $75 credit to upgrade your job post. If you're ready to turn passion into profit, you'll need the right team to make it happen. Indeed makes it easy to hire and build a team with just the right skills to make those thoughts you've had about growing a business a reality. If you're hiring, you need Indeed because Indeed is the hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. And Indeed is the only job site where you're guaranteed to find quality applications that meet your must-have requirements or else you don't pay. Instead of spending hours on multiple job sites hoping to find candidates with the right skills, you need one powerful hiring partner that can help you do it all. Indeed partners with you on every step of the hiring process. Find great talent through time-saving tools like Indeed Instant Match, assessments, and virtual interviews. With

Instant Match, as soon as you sponsor a post, you get a short list of quality candidates with resumes on Indeed that match your job description, and you can invite them to apply right away. Plus, you only pay for quality applications that meet your must-have requirements. Here's a stat for you. Indeed delivers four times more hires than all other job sites combined, according to Talent Nest.

And you'll be in good company. You can join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. So start hiring right now with a free $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com slash focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D. This offer is valid through March 31st. Go to indeed.com slash focus to claim your $75 credit before March 31st. That URL one last time, Indeed.com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply.

Do you need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Chris, we talked earlier about the Productivity Project, kind of your first big book. And the thing I liked about that book is it had a lot of ideas in it, and you tried a lot of experiments. But when did that book publish? It's been over five years, hasn't it?

Oh, man. I'm going to have to look through the beginning of the – January 2016. Okay. Well, that's a long time ago. Or at least that's the copyright inside the book. Yeah. I think it's 20. Yeah, that sounds right.

But you started the productivity project a few years before that. I mean, it didn't just show up one day. And what I was thinking is, as somebody who's been through it, what really stuck with you out of the book? What are the things and techniques you talked about in that book that you still really rely upon? Yeah, it's interesting because you were kind enough to warn me about this question ahead of time. And so I pulled a copy of the book off the shelf.

I don't always just have one on my desk lying around. I should actually reread this thing. But what if I end up really not liking it? Yeah, there's a risk there. Yeah, there's a risk there. Yeah, there is a risk. But may we always all look back on our previous work and see where it needs to be improved and how we've improved since that point in time. But the interesting thing is looking through this book, just kind of skimming it, not digging too deeply into it, I didn't really find anything that I disagree with today and no longer do. Which, I don't know if that sounds egotistical or full

of myself or if it just sounds like I picked some good tactics that have actually stuck over the course of this project and continue to stick through today. Well, it's also a testament to the experimental nature of the book, where you didn't just pick something off a shelf. You tried it and stuck with the ones that actually worked for you. And I think that helps, right? And that's the thing about productivity advice, too, is a lot of the advice that sounds good and sounds like it should work doesn't actually work in practice. You know, waking up early is a really good example of this because we have sayings like the early bird gets the worm and I don't know, all that stuff. But there's no difference in socioeconomic standing based on what time we wake up at. It's how we use our time after we wake up that make the biggest difference in our overall life success. And there's a lot of advice that kind of falls into that category.

that allows you to separate out the advice. That at least works for me, but I use that as kind of a lens to share stories about what works and what doesn't. There are several things that I continue to do today, most of the things in the book, but some of the things that stand out as being especially powerful today, the rule of three, where we define three daily intentions at the start of the day. That's something I do each and every day. Number one, today, create a talk. Number two, rehearse the talk. Number three, have fun in a couple of interviews. It's just second nature to me at this point. I think that was the curious part about flipping through this book is so much of this has become second nature to me at this point. I hardly realize I'm doing it.

You know, things have become so habitual that they've become invisible. It's like the best design is invisible. You don't notice it working. The best habits and the most powerful habits are invisible where you don't really realize you're engaging with them. But the rule of three definitely falls into that. Meditation is one that I've continued to discover new depths of my mind through knowing the most important tasks. Another idea that I shared earlier, that idea of separating out what's

important from what isn't, procrastination, cozying up to ugly tasks. It's wild looking at the world around me, the circumstances around me since this book has come out. My work is structured a lot differently. And fortunately, I've been able to connect with some people through these books. But at the same time, looking at the habits, the productivity habits that I've formed, there are definitely ones in addition to the ones in this book, but these kind of form the foundation that started this whole racket. I was going to say journey, but... Journey?

Yeah. Let's go with journey. It feels like a journey. I say that word racket in terms of productivity because some of it is. But this show, if I felt like the show was a racket, we would turn it off. And people that we have on the show are people that I don't believe are in the racket. But I do think that there is something to what you just said about finding techniques that work for you. And that's what they are. They're just techniques. They're not going to do the work for you, but they're ways

to make the journey a little easier and incorporating them so much that it becomes part of your daily routine. I think that's really as much as you can ask. Wouldn't it be great if they did the work for you? Yeah, it would. But I mean, that's like, that explains my angst last night as I was feeling like I was off because I've been journaling for so long that just losing track of it for a few days makes me feel like something is, the wheels are a little wobbly all of a sudden. Wow. And it's just like, And then getting back on it, obviously it's not ingrained enough

because once in a while I do fall off. I think everybody does. Yeah. And that's fine. It's human to fall off our habits. I find this with meditation too. And things like drinking coffee. I love drinking caffeine strategically. And I really try to minimize my coffee intake because of how it

spikes cortisol and adrenaline. But I also love the buzz of a cup of coffee. I'm not going to lie. coffee. I'm not going to lie. Nobody's perfect 100% of the time, but I think as people who, I don't know if advice is too strong of a word, but as people who talk about these ideas for a living, if we follow 90% of the advice we give 90% of the time, we'd be doing better than most people out there who do talk about this stuff. And may we all, hopefully that is the filter that you use to have guests on the podcast, because I think it's a pretty good one. And that goes back to that idea of experimentation. Can you trust somebody who hasn't tried something themselves? Yeah.

I like that, David. Let's use that as a qualifying question. Do you follow your advice? 90% of your advice, 90% of the time? And if they say they do it 100% of the time, they're out. They're probably lying through their teeth. Yeah. One of the things that we've talked about off-air, Chris,

is the fact that your body is constantly replacing cells and you're basically a different person than you were seven years ago. And you wrote the productivity project about seven years ago. David inserted the word journey instead of racket. So as you are on this journey, how are you different today than that young punk who wrote the Productivity Project all those years ago? It was so funny, not to name drop, but David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, he had me on his podcast once and he described me as a productivity hipster. And that was after this book came out. Productivity punk, I like that. I like that it fits in that same spirit. I think having... That's an interesting question, how I have changed. I have changed a lot since writing this book. I think I have more empathy than I had before. I think I have more stillness in my mind to be able to

not only just listen to other people and to react to what they're saying, but also to hear what they're trying to say. I think I have more, it's interesting. That's a really good question. I think I'm very different and also not different at all. I think that experimentation spirit has stuck with me from that point in time. Maybe my ego has grown a bit or maybe it's shrunk a bit. I'm not sure. I'll have to do some reflection on that.

Interesting question that I don't have a complete answer to right now, but I will. I'll journal on that. I'll savor that question a little bit and think on it. Well, it's interesting to me from an outside perspective, having gotten to know you a little bit over the years and having read that book. One of the things that you wrote in that book that has stuck with me is that people are the reason for productivity. So I could see even from the Chris that wrote that book, the emphasis on the relationships. But I also know as part of the experiments, you were kind of dabbling with meditation. And I feel like having gotten to know you, I can totally see how that habit specifically has led to a lot of the things that we've talked about today. It's kind of a natural arc to me anyways, from looking at it from the outside to see how you started with productivity

and I'm putting words in your mouth at this point, but it kind of seems like you're testing all the life hacks, right? All the things that people have told you, this is the way to do it. And you put it through the paces. And then from there leading to Focus and the second book. And now the whole idea of savoring and calm. I can see the connection here. And I think you're absolutely correct that in some ways you're very different. But also you can see the curiosity and the natural progress down this path and how you're very much the same person too.

And I think that's something we should all aspire to, I think, is that we're not going to be the same person seven years from now that we are today. If we are, we've failed. We've failed to grow. Yeah, thanks, man, for the nice words. A couple to dovetail off of that in terms of how every seven years all our cells replace and we're a different person. I think another couple of ways is I care less about productivity right now than I used to. Because as I was saying a bit earlier, productivity leads us to value accomplishment. Whether it's a chicken or an egg thing, productivity leads us to value accomplishment or we value accomplishment so we try to become more productive. I still value accomplishment. I'm not going to beat around that bush. But there are things that matter far more in my life right now than ambition.

something that I'm just so fascinated by. Going deep instead of just trying to do more and more and more and accomplish more and more and more and build up some list of achievements. I think caring a bit less about productivity, but in a way that's healthy, in a way that you would kind of hope as somebody who follows somebody's maybe journey, racket journey from afar, who writes about this stuff. I think finding that balance over time and realizing that there are values beyond just productivity and accomplishment and reconnecting with what we all value is may our time manifest itself through our values. What we all value is may our time manifest itself through our values. Well, I think that's a great place to kind of end this discussion, but it's also where we really all need to start the discussion. We are at a spot where tips and tricks are not going to cut it. You've got to figure out bigger questions and you need to get focused.

And Chris, every time I have a conversation with you, you leave me with things to think about. Thank you so much for coming on today. So where do folks find you, Chris? Oh, yes. Well, my books. Well, thank you so much for it. What is this? Time number three? Yeah. We're going to get you one of those jackets pretty soon. Yeah. You know, smoking. Is there a card that I can get a stamp yeah i need my stamp i will send you one i'll send you one okay all right thank you i appreciate that uh my my site is called a life of productivity.com that's where i write and my plan is to write a lot more now that this book is submitted um and my books are called the productivity project and hyper focus i feel i've plugged them beyond enough in this episode of the

podcast. I also have an Audible original called How to Train Your Mind on the Productivity Benefits of Meditation. And I'm trying to think of others. Oh, I have a podcast too called Time and Attention that I do with my wife. And we have a good time just chatting about how we can spend our time and attention with intention and more thoughtfully and deliberately. So that's where I can be found. Yeah. And definitely check out Chris's podcast. We're going to put a link for that in the show notes. And we will have you back at some point, Chris. Can't wait to talk to you again about it. In the Deep Focus episode today, Chris has been teasing us. He got rid of his iPhone, and now he has an iPad mini that has become his phone. I want this story.

We're going to be talking through this story in a minute. But in the meantime, I want to thank our sponsors, and that is our friends over at Indeed, Squarespace, and Ahrefs. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focus. And we'll see you next time.