On this episode, we chat about the science behind meetings—and how to get more value out of them. Topics covered include:

• The four helpful roles meetings have;
• Questioning your recurring meetings;
• Considering relationship dynamics in meetings;
• Becoming a good steward of other peoples time;
• Designating a meeting leader;
• Not attending meetings without an agenda;
• “Modalities” for meetings;
• Making meetings more interesting (and actually enjoyable);
• Whether asynchronous “meetings” are worthwhile;
• Ending zoom fatigue through oddly-timed meetings.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Research paper: The key features of workplace meetings: Conceptualizing the why, how, and what of meetings at work

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: Tactics for meetings appeared first on Chris Bailey.

On this episode, we chat about the science behind meetings—along with the value and annoyances they bring. Topics covered include:

• Chris’s review of the Staples coworking space;
• What makes meetings so draining;
• The four main purposes of meetings;
• How many meetings we have a week;
• Collaborative versus focused work;
• The incremental cost of meetings;

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Paper: Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings (Mroz; Allen; Verhoeven; Shuffler)
• Paper: Virtual Work Meetings During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Good, Bad, and Ugly (Karll; Peluchette; Aghakhani)

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: The Value of Meetings appeared first on Chris Bailey.

As a total nerd, one of the things I love reading each year is Warren Buffet’s annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. In 2022’s letter (PDF), he offhandedly mentioned a phrase I’ve been thinking about since reading it.

I’ve bolded the bit that got me thinking, and here’s also the rest of the paragraph for context:

The disposition of money unmasks humans. Charlie [Munger] and I watch with pleasure the vast flow of Berkshire-generated funds to public needs and, alongside, the infrequency with which our shareholders opt for look-at-me assets and dynasty-building.

The phrase “look-at-me assets” crystalizes a lot of what bugs me about the consumption-driven habits that drive so many people. I’ve written in the past about avoiding hedonic purchases—material purchases that are “associated with fun, pleasure, and excitement,” like perfume, luxury watches, and nice cars. Research shows that once we get used to the stuff we buy—which doesn’t take much time—we inevitably settle back down into our previous level of happiness.¹

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with nice things—there are far too many Apple products in my field of view right now to throw stones. (Plus, imagine all that shattered glass!) But it’s worth remembering, especially as far as our happiness is concerned, that we extract more lasting happiness out of spending money on experiences—not out of consuming things that we will inevitably get used to. We get used to nice things—especially the ones that call out “hey, look at me!” The things, in other words, that we buy for the purpose of status projection.

Once the initial novelty of a new thing wears off—and we settle back down after buying the oversized house, overpriced car, or ridiculous watch—we’re left with whatever tangible difference it makes in our lives.

When money is a finite resource, we’re best off pouring it into experiences with others or things that serve a function or purpose in our lives.

Once you begin to see all the “look at me” purchases people make, it can be hard to unsee it all.

1. Source: Consumers Emotional Responses to Functional and Hedonic Products: A Neuroscience Research. ↩

The post Look-at-Me Purchases appeared first on Chris Bailey.

On this episode, we chat about strategies for time blocking your day—including the ones we use. Topics covered include:

• The benefits of time blocking;
• The “rolling” time blocking method;
• How long our blocks are;
• How autonomy interacts with time blocking;
• Making time blocking sustainable.

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: How We Time Block appeared first on Chris Bailey.

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting author Cal Newport on the podcast to talk about his terrific new book, Slow Productivity.

In the book (and in our conversation), Cal breaks down the three principles of slow productivity, which are:

1. Do fewer things;
2. Work at a natural pace; and
3. Obsess over quality.

As part of working at a natural pace, he talks about a new spin behind the concept of “quiet quitting”—an idea that went viral over the pandemic.

The idea behind quiet quitting is simple enough: you no longer go above and beyond in your responsibilities at work, while doing enough to get by with your workload. For example, you may no longer:

• Work past 5 pm;
• Volunteer to do extra work or take on additional projects;
• Say yes to anything above and beyond your job description; or
• Stay constantly accessible over email and chat after hours—or even while you work.

The ideas behind quiet quitting are simple—and in many cases, reasonable ways to define boundaries around your work.

That said, most of us don’t have the desire to “quiet quit” all of the time. For example, I’m lucky to love what I do for a living and also have the chance to help others out through my work. I’m not planning to quiet quit any time soon. On top of this, some of us value achievement quite highly (though I don’t personally fall into this camp).

For these reasons, quiet quitting has never felt like an optimal way of working for me—and maybe for you. I also care about how productive I am every day and find great joy in working hard to build something great—especially alongside others.

Adding Seasons

This is why I love Cal’s unique spin on quiet quitting in the book. He writes, “at the core of quiet quitting is a pragmatic observation: you have more control than you think over the intensity of your workload.”

He continues: “This got me thinking. What if we stopped positioning quiet quitting as a general response to the ‘meaninglessness of work,’ and instead saw it as a more specific tactic to achieve seasonality? What if, for example, you decided to quiet quit a single season each year; maybe July and August, or that distracted period between Thanksgiving and the New Year?”

When our work is not seasonal—it doesn’t have rhythms of both intensity and rest over time, and stays intense most of the time—we need to define better boundaries around it to practice rest. This technique can be a great way to define boundaries around work so you can benefit from greater rest when needed.

Cal suggests not making a big deal of the decision. Simply adopt tactics like the ones I listed in the section above to simulate an offseason for yourself—a slower period of work that lets you recharge and invest in yourself again. Remember, this is a flexible approach that can be tailored to your needs and circumstances. He also recommends, as an advanced tactic, to “take on a highly visible but low-impact project during this season” so you can both deflect new projects and project outward signs of busyness—signals of productivity.

This strategy is simple, and it may not work in every role. However, I personally find the idea of adopting it as a way of introducing a slower season into an otherwise busy schedule appealing. It’s a great tactic for finding more time for reflection, calm, and deliberate slowness, which can ultimately lead to a better work-life balance and increased productivity.

The post Using “quiet quitting” to add seasonality to your work appeared first on Chris Bailey.

On this episode, Cal Newport hops back on the show to talk about his great new book, Slow Productivity. It’s a great, fascinating new book (and interview!), both full of actionable insights on how to slow down in order to become more productive.

Topics covered include:

• How “slow productivity” came into being;
• The three ingredients of slow productivity;
• “Engineering simplicity” at work;
• The idea of “administrative overhead”;
• Narrowing the “missions” you have in your work;
• Avoiding “task engines”;
• Why the pace of knowledge work has become so frenetic;
• Cal’s unique spin on “quiet quitting”;
• Studying related fields to yours for boosting creativity.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Slow Productivity book
• Cal’s New Yorker columns
  • Including: Why Do We Work Too Much?

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: The art of slow productivity appeared first on Chris Bailey.

For each minute you spend on a task, how much do you accomplish?

One of the fundamental truths about productivity is that not all tasks are created equal. With some, we accomplish hardly anything despite the minutes they drain. Watching YouTube videos during the workday, repeatedly checking email, or scrolling social media are examples of such tasks. (You probably have some examples of your own—some may even be part of your job description!)

On the flip side, there are tasks that lead us to accomplish an extraordinary amount for every minute spent on them. These activities may include planning our day, preparing an update for our most profitable customer, or participating in training that expands our expertise.

Over time, one productivity goal should be to spend an increasing amount of our day on the tasks that lead us to accomplish more with each unit of time. Let’s call these highly productive activities “high-leverage tasks.” Identifying these tasks and spending as much time on them as possible will make you significantly more productive. (Here’s how to calculate them.)

This is where artificial intelligence can come in: over time, AI will “abstract away” much of our day-to-day work so we can accomplish more with each unit of time. In other words, the tasks we used to labor over will become so automatized they disappear into the backdrop of our work.

This idea of abstraction is easiest to explain with an example. Think about the field of software programming. When your code runs, it goes through a bunch of steps to eventually become the 1’s and 0’s that the chips inside your computer use to make calculations. For a program to run in the past, we had to code actual 1’s and 0’s. This was time-consuming, though it was still possible to create something great.

Things got simpler—and software programmers more efficient—when sophisticated programming languages came along. Those languages let us write code in more natural and readable ways, which the computer could then translate into 1’s and 0’s. Essentially, the computer did the hard work for us, and code began to resemble real sentences rather than a jumble of numbers.

Over time, computer programming continued to create even more “layers of abstraction”—and our time became more productively spent in the process. Instead of hours spent coding, we could use application programming interfaces (APIs) to do something simple like turn on a phone’s flashlight. It’s incredible how far things have come.

AI will take this even further. The other day I wanted to prompt my computer to automatically eject an external hard-disk after 60 minutes—giving enough time for a backup but preventing the disk from always being  attached to my computer.

For this, I turned to ChatGPT. In 20 seconds, the app generated a bunch of code in AppleScript that accomplished my task—and then walked me through how to install the script on my computer. What was once manual computer programming became abstract.

Similar examples of abstraction and layers of leverage exist beyond the world of programming:

• Project management software and methodologies abstract away the minutiae of asking your team for daily status updates.
• Electronic health records abstract away the paper-based recording and storage of patient information, which saves time updating patient records.
• Automated data cleaning tools (including ChatGPT!) can help data analysts organize data so they can dedicate their expertise to form decisions and insights about what they’re analyzing.

The list goes on, but you probably get the idea. Technology can make us more productive by taking care of much of our work. That lets us “rise up” to accomplish even more with our time.

We’re only getting started with AI advancements, machine learning, and related technologies.

Throughout this evolution, we need to recognize our highest-leverage tasks—especially those that can be aided by AI. The way I see it, this involves two steps:

1. Elevate the layers of abstraction in your work by considering the most productive way you could be spending your time. Do the most valuable tasks calculation once or twice a year, while you learn and adopt new technology. Remember that higher-leverage tasks will always be around the corner. Watch for them, learn as much as you can, and experience the joy of accomplishing more with each unit of time.
2. Double down on the parts of your work that are less likely to be abstracted away—AKA those tasks that benefit from a human touch. These are areas where greater efficiency or automation won’t add anything. Caring, connecting, and counseling—activities that involve interacting with other people—are great examples.

These tactics and mindsets will help you navigate the AI developments of today—and tomorrow—with greater grace, ease, and productivity.

The post What artificial intelligence will do to our productivity appeared first on Chris Bailey.

On this episode, we chat about how we use and think about social media. We cover what the problem is with social media (if there even is one), how the “novelty bias” hijacks our attention as we use it, and tactics to use to keep social media contained.

Topics covered include:

• The books we’re reading (and loving);
• Impulsiveness and procrastination;
• How social media algorithms come down to “bodies and comparing lifestyles”;
• Ardyn’s incredibly wholesome Instagram feed;
• “Stimulation loops” and the “novelty bias”;
• Crowding out social media;
• Extracting more meaning out of social media;
• Putting guardrails in place to waste less time;
• Time cues on your phone.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Books:
  • Hyperefficient
  • Slow Productivity
  • A Court of Thorns and Roses Paperback Box Set
  • How to Write a Lot
  • Naked Economics
  • The Future of Geography
  • Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
  • These Precious Days
  • Values
  • After Steve
  • Purr
  • Outlander

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: How to think about social media appeared first on Chris Bailey.

When I was a teenager, I ran a marathon. Well, sort of.

Following the instructions from a great book (my memory is hazy but I’m pretty sure this was the one), I trained for hours on our treadmill at home. By a certain point, I was practically running a full marathon in the basement. The book made it so that, once you got to the point where you could run the distance, the actual marathon was easy—you had already done the hard work in training. (Or at least this was how I felt as a teenager—I might feel differently at 35!)

Reaching this marathon milestone, I did what I usually do in such scenarios: I quit. I stopped running entirely and didn’t sign up for a marathon as I had planned to. Once I had proven to myself that I could run the distance, I had no interest in the follow through. There was nothing left for me to figure out.

Reflecting on this experience, as well as where I fall on the list of 10 fundamental human values (refresher below!), my reaction makes sense.

In the values continuum, I score incredibly high on self-direction and relatively low on achievement. Put differently, I care less about accomplishing things than I do about proving to myself that I can. (While figuring out how to do them in my own way.)

Looking back at my life through this lens explains a lot of my decisions that, at the time, didn’t make sense:

• As a kid I was into magic tricks. But I’d mostly buy them so I could see how they were done—losing interest in performing the trick once I mastered it.
• My favorite TV show growing up was How It’s Made—nothing else came close.
• More recently, I’ve written three books largely because I was curious about productivity, focus, and calm, and wanted to get to the bottom of these topics to help people out (myself included).
• I’ve always thought about achievement as a byproduct of doing something interesting—not as the result itself.)

By default, we make decisions that align with our true nature: our values. There’s always a deeper reason motivating what we do, especially when you find your actions difficult to explain. Values are usually what’s behind this.

When you have the time and space to form your own intentions, you’ll find those intentions typically revolve around what you value. This is a good thing: research shows that our behavior becomes meaningful when our actions are true to what we value. Most of our automatic decisions are the simple result of evaluating our options and considering how they connect with the values we hold.

The next time you can’t explain your actions, reflect on your values. They are probably at play, behind the curtain, pulling the strings of your life.

The post Your values explain basically everything you do appeared first on Chris Bailey.

On this episode, we chat about whether or not you should wake up early—and how our biology and daily constraints dictate when we should rise. Topics covered include:

• Calculating your natural wakeup time;
• How our wakeup time drifts;
• The “sepia toned” idea we have to wake up early;
• Carving out time in the morning to be deliberate;
• How biology affects our wakeup time;
• How the constraints of our day affect wakeup time;
• Having an anchor in your morning routine;
• Whether waking up early makes a difference in our daily productivity.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Russell Foster’s great TED Talk, Why Do We Sleep?
• Nick Lewis’s video, You’re Organizing Your House Wrong!

You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below!

The post Podcast: Should you wake up early? appeared first on Chris Bailey.