Time and Attention is a podcast that will help you become more intentional and productive. Hosted by Chris Bailey, the author of two productivity books, and Ardyn Nordstrom, a nerdy economist, the show covers topics as diverse as productivity, focus, procrastination, time management, money, happiness, gratitude, and disconnecting. We occasionally also welcome a bestselling author onto the show to talk about a book they wrote.
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Takeaway:: Make a list of everything you’re worrying about, and divide it into what you do and don’t have control over. Then, deal with the items on your list accordingly. Estimated Reading Time:: 1 minutes, 35s. Podcast Length: 22 minutes, 42s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
Believe it or not, it’s possible to worry more productively. On this week’s podcast, Ardyn and I dig into one of my favorite productivity tactics for crazy times like these: the worry list.
The name pretty much says it all: a worry list is just a list of what you’re worrying about; problems in your life or the world that are causing you anxiety.
Making the list is straightforward:
1. Capture all of the things that worry you over the span of a day. Just get it all of your head and onto a sheet of paper (or into some digital document, if that’s your preference).
2. Categorize all of your worries into two groups: what you have control over, and what you don’t.
After you’ve captured it all, make a plan to deal with what you have control over. If you can, you can also delegate items on the list—this instantly frees up mental bandwidth for more important things. You can also eliminate worries, by eliminating the underlying commitments or habits that cause them. (One example: if a lot of your worries are fed by constantly checking the news, subscribe to a physical newspaper instead, to get a daily update, instead of an hourly one.) However you can, just make a plan to deal with every worry that’s controllable.
With what’s outside of your control, keep in mind that your mind is predisposed to pay attention to, and worry about anything you perceive to be a threat—throughout the day, recognize when you’re worrying about something, while understanding that some worrying happens subconsciously. Schedule time to worry about these things if you feel the need to, so that they don’t bleed into the rest of your day.
Right now, there’s a lot on our minds to worry about. If you’re anything like me, creating a worry list will help. Especially in overanxious times like these, thought patterns of worry only ever obscure what’s important.
42: Time and Money
Tuesday, January 5, 2021 • Duration 26:41
Takeaway: In her book Time Smart, behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans digs into the fascinating relationship between time, money, and happiness. While making more money is an easier goal to chase, Ashley’s research shows that making time-first choices ultimately leads to greater happiness. Time Smart outlines strategies to do just that, including tactics to save us time and ones we can use to buy time back.
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 55s.
Podcast Length: 26 minutes, 41s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
It’s one of life’s classic quandaries: what ultimately makes us happier, more time or more money?
Ashley Whillans’ research points firmly at time. Ashley is a behavior scientist and Harvard Business School professor who is fascinated by how time, money, and happiness influence each other. Her book, Time Smart, is a fantastic and concise read on this very topic. She’s also my guest on the podcast this week.
A central theme of the book looks at how we’re more likely to chase money with greater drive than we pursue having more time. This is for three simple reasons:
Money is generally a necessity in our society.
The prevailing narrative is that money and success are synonymous with one another.
Psychologically, it’s easier for us to track money and feel satisfied when we have it. Having $500 in your bank account is objective and tangible—gaining three hours of time on a Saturday? Not so much.
This is why we give up our time more readily than we give up our money. But this loss of time comes at a cost, and Ashley argues that it’s critical for us to value our time to the same extent that we value our money. According to her research, people who even just that they put time first report being happier, less stressed, and more satisfied with their social relationships. People who value time over money also tend to be more productive and creative because they take the time to build new relationships and recharge. These are concrete, positive outcomes that come with making time-first decisions.
41: The Holiday Spectacular
Tuesday, December 22, 2020 • Duration 15:17
Takeaway:This year, try giving yourself a non-material gift. Three ways to do this: think about something in your life that’s missing; look at the habits you want to pick up again; and take your vacation days or use up your benefits. Estimated Reading Time:1 minutes, 57s. Podcast Length: 15 minutes, 17s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
Happy holidays, everybody! We’re nearing the end of a weird year, and the thing we might be celebrating the most is the fact that 2020 is almost over. If you’re anything like us, this December looks a little different.
Normally we’d be bouncing around between parties with inlaws and friends. While that’s not happening this year, there are still ways to treat yourself over the holidays. I’m not talking about physical gifts—I’m thinking about all the intangible gifts you can give yourself in order to get the most out of the days to come.
For example, I’m giving myself the gift of disconnection. For a week over Christmas, I’m deliberately disengaging from all things online—turning on my email autoresponder, changing my social media passwords, and putting my phone in Grayscale mode to make it less appealing.
I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit this year refreshing Twitter and watching YouTube videos. With this gift, I’m giving myself permission to be bored. If you can’t think of the last time you were in this state, then this might be a good gift for you, too.
Here are a few ways to approach finding what gift to give yourself:
Think about something in your life that’s missing or has fallen to the wayside. Maybe you really enjoyed taking a brisk morning stroll at the start of the pandemic. The holidays are a great time to re-examine and reset.
Look at habits you want to double down on. You don’t have to wait until the new year to change your habits and routines. Try spending some time reflecting on what these habits are and then start them up again.
Take vacation days or use up your benefits. Don’t let these go to waste! The end of the year is when the clock chimes midnight on many benefits packages and vacation days. If you’re able, take some days off over the holiday and relax.
40: Three Breaths
Tuesday, December 8, 2020 • Duration 14:21
Takeaway:Before switching between tasks, take three deep breaths. It’s a super simple way to reset your focus and set a quick intention for what comes next. Three techniques you can try: box breathing, the 4-7-8 technique, and the 5-5-5 breathing technique. Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 28s. Podcast Length: 14 minutes, 21s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
Breathing is something we all do but rarely think about. And yet it dictates whether we feel anxious or calm, tense or relaxed (and not to mention keeps us alive). Harnessing the power of your breath is one of the most simple and powerful things you can do for your mental and physical well-being.
That leads to one of my favorite new productivity tactics: the next time you switch between projects, meetings, or return to work after answering email, take three big, deep breaths.
That’s it.
This simple half a minute is a great way to transition from one task to another, and it helps your mind reset and focus for the next thing on your plate. This tactic also helps you clear your mind of some “attention residue,” a phenomena I write about in Hyperfocus.
Coined by Dr. Sophie Leroy, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Washington, attention residue is the term that describes the fragments of a previous task that remain in your memory after you shift to another activity. If you jump immediately from task A to task B, your mind will still be thinking about that previous work, preventing you from fully engaging in whatever is going on at hand. This phenomena is just one of the reasons why multitasking makes us less efficient.
Taking three deep breaths between tasks will serve to dust out some of this attention residue. Consider it a bit of mental housekeeping—clearing the table before eating your next meal.
While three deep breaths of any length will do, you can also try your hand at a few different techniques.
If you want to dig deeper into the fascinating art and science of breathing, I highly recommend the book , by James Nestor. We chat about it a bit on this week’s .
39: The Pre-Mortem
Tuesday, November 24, 2020 • Duration 18:29
Takeaway:A pre-mortem is a ritual that helps you account for all that could go wrong with a project—in advance of those mishaps actually occurring in real life. Three steps to do a pre-mortem: identify the projects you want to go well, imagine the worst case scenarios, and create a plan to make your project more resilient using the knowledge you collected. Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 39s. Podcast Length: 18 minutes, 29s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
You’re probably familiar with the idea of a post-mortem—the debrief session that happens after you wrap up a project. For projects that haven’t gone as planned, a post-mortem is a chance to figure out what went wrong and how to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen the next time around.
A pre-mortem is similar, but instead of picking up the pieces after a project finishes up, you think about what could go wrong before a project starts, so you can anticipate problems before they occur.
A pre-mortem ritual is great for any project, and takes just a few steps.
1. Identify the projects you want to go really well
This can be anything in your life, big or small, individual or team projects, stuff going on in your home life or at the office. You can do a pre-mortem on projects you haven’t started yet, or ones you’re in the middle of completing.
2. Imagine all of the ways those projects might fail
The second step is to imagine that the projects you identified in the first step have failed catastrophically. Ask yourself: what went wrong that led these projects to go so poorly?
While this may seem like a depressing exercise, this step will help you anticipate all that could go wrong—and then strategize ways to avoid such mishaps.
There’s never just a single worst case scenario, and these disastrous situations may come to you over time. Keep a “what went wrong” sticky note on your desk or a running list on your phone for a few days, to capture ideas. This will help when it comes to step three.
Be sure to ask people close to the project for their worst case scenarios, too.
3.
38: The Phone Challenge
Tuesday, November 10, 2020 • Duration 30:01
Takeaway: Last week I challenged you to go as many days as possible without charging your phone. Some practical tips to help you do that (especially during this anxious time): rethink which jobs you hire your phone for, rearrange your home screen, take advantage of your phone’s many modes, and opt to get news alerts from a single source.
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 48s.
Podcast Length: 30 minutes, 1s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
It’s been a uniquely crazy and anxious few weeks (in an already stressful year), and if you’re anything like me, you’ve been glued to coverage of the U.S. election, awaiting all the results that came in over the weekend. Maybe you’re spending more time than ever bouncing between news apps, or texting friends out of excitement and nerves.
With our phones keeping us tethered to a world of worry, there’s no better time to try out the challenge we talked about last week: to see how many days you can go without charging your phone.
My iPhone 11 Pro usually lasts for a day on a single charge, so this was an experiment to see if I could make the battery last for two days, or even three. In the end, I got to 2.5 days before running out of juice.
For those who are interested in disconnecting for a bit during this crazy time, here are some practical tips for how to check your phone less and make your battery last longer. While it can be a fun competition with yourself, the real goal is to use your phone more mindfully—and hopefully less overall!
1. Rethink the “jobs” you hire your phone for
The late Clayton Christensen was known for a bunch of interesting nuggets of business wisdom, one of which was the . The premise is that every product we buy should do a job for us—whether it’s “hiring” Kleenex for blowing our nose or using Uber Eats to order another round of election night chicken wings.
37: Inbox Zero
Tuesday, October 27, 2020 • Duration 26:08
Takeaway:A few tactics to help you inbox with intention: track your email usage, adopt email sprints, take an email vacation, suggest phone calls for longer discussions, and send less email. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 38s. Podcast Length: 26 minutes, 8s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post).
While the idea of Inbox Zero is sexy, the reality is that most of us don’t get there. Even if you do manage to tend to every message in your inbox, it’s only a matter of time before a new one comes in. Inbox Zero is a slippery, competitive slope, and can lead us to think about our email at all hours of the day, obsessively checking and replying to maintain an empty inbox.
I personally like to look at Inbox Zero as a state of mind—getting to the point where you are dedicating zero mental space towards thinking about email. This requires a mindset shift where you bring more awareness into how you interact with your inbox.
While your email behavior will look differently depending on whether your work is more collaborative or autonomous, here are a few tactics you can use to change the relationship you have with your inbox.
1. Track your email usage
Keep a post-it note tally for a day or afternoon to track how many times you checked for new messages. Then, reflect on why it was that you checked. Was it because you were expecting an urgent reply from a colleague, or did you need an excuse to procrastinate?
The latter may be a sign that you’ve reached an impasse in your work. If that’s the case, consider taking a short break so you can return to your most important work with the energy and focus is deserves.
2. Try an email sprint
I love this tactic and use it all the time. At the top of the hour or whenever you have the chance, set a timer for 10 minutes. Take that time to blow through as many emails as you possibly can. When your ringer goes, take the remainder of the hour to disconnect entirely and focus on other work.
3. Take an email vacation
This can be for an entire day or just a few hours when you’re working on a deadline or have a task that demands a lot of focus. Most of us can go for this length of time without having our work fall apart—and it’s likely what you’d be doing anyways if you had an important client meeting or an all-day seminar.
Time Smart outlines a handful of valuable strategies for how we can start prioritizing time over money. I love that many of these tactics don’t cost anything, because it debunks the myth that only the wealthy can afford to put time first. These strategies fall into two categories: tactics to save us time, and tactics to buy our time back.
Tactics to save time are about tackling time traps head-on. Imagine pinging phone alerts and how they disrupt our moments of leisure. That technology pitfall shreds our valuable time into a thousand distracted fragments, which Ashley calls “time confetti.”
Time traps are also caused by the mere urgency effect, the phenomena that makes us prioritize things that are urgent but not important—checking your email non-stop rather than spending time with your family, for example.
To save yourself time, try:
Scheduling Proactive Time. This is a chunk of time when you can focus on your most meaningful but not necessarily most urgent work. Spend 30 minutes at the start of each week scheduling in a pair of two-hour proactive time blocks. Take these blocks to completely unplug and hyperfocus on your important tasks.
Focusing on small, everyday time-first decisions. Living your day more mindfully is one tactic to save time. Whenever we make the decision to clock out of work early, create a boundary between home and work (even in today’s day and age), or treat an upcoming weekend like a holiday, we are choosing whether to prioritize time or money. Reflect on your everyday decisions and pushback against the urge to check your email after hours versus spending time with family or friends.
Tactics to buy back time reframe the value we associate with time and happiness. Because money is a metric we all understand, Ashley conceptualized “Happiness Dollars” which attaches a concrete value to the happiness benefits that come from making time-first decisions. She calculated these values through various surveys where people reflected on their happiness level related to different activities.
Consider that:
People who say they value time over money is equivalent to making $4,400 more each year.
Outsourcing our most disliked task is equivalent to making $10,000 more each year.
Socializing more than usual is shown to make us happier, which is equivalent to making $20-30,000 more each year.
Interestingly, one way to encourage people to spend money in order to save themselves time (i.e. hiring a virtual assistant) is to reframe it as a decision that benefits others. By delegating your work, you’re left with more time to spend with family or to volunteer in your community. Focusing on time is not a selfish act.
Like so much we talk about on the podcast and this blog, choosing to prioritize time over money boils down to mindfulness. As Ashley says, living a time-first life can lead to greater happiness and shape the overall quality of our lives—but we need to consciously decide to pursue that path.
Whatever gift you end up giving yourself, we hope you have a safe holiday season and can start off the new year feeling refreshed and re-energized. You deserve it! See you after the holiday!
P.S. – if you listened to the podcast and want the sweet potato mash recipe Ardyn mentioned, here it is :-)
Box breathing is an inhale hold, exhale hold technique. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and then start again on the inhale. Think of it as constructing a box with your breath, where the “walls” of the box are four seconds in length.
Another is the 4-7-8 breathing technique where you inhale for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, and exhale for eight seconds. While everyone is different, this pattern has been used to reduce anxiety and help you sleep.
The last pattern you can try is the 5-5-5 breathing technique. Studies suggest that a pattern of 5.5 second inhales and exhales is the optimal breathing rate to achieve higher heart rate variability—which has been associated with improved physical and mental well-being.
Taking three deep breaths is an easy, powerful, and completely free tactic that should take no more than a minute, even if you’re taking really long, intentional breaths. Give it a shot the next time you feel yourself frantically hopping from one thing to another.
Draw up a plan to make your projects more resilient
Now that you’ve conjured up the ways in which your projects can go wrong, do all you can to avoid having those visualizations become a reality. Look at the lists that you’ve made and consider the things you could have done differently. Use these ideas to make changes to your work plan or timeline to make it more likely to succeed.
The result will be a game plan that’s more resilient to change—because you’ve already imagined and accounted for those pitfalls.
—-
As a personal example, I did a pretty extensive pre-mortem back in 2018 when I was preparing to launch my second book, Hyperfocus. I wrote out a bunch of scenarios that eventually informed the publicity plan for the book—as well as how I wrote the book itself.
Sample worst case scenarios for me included things like:
Not doing enough podcast outreach;
The book getting a lukewarm reception;
Terrible reviews;
No big media outlets wanting to cover the book.
These points and others became a catalyst to plan more, do more, and ultimately, to write a better book. While this is just one example, try the pre-mortem exercise out—it’s a gateway to better, more thoughtful planning, and can lead to a cascade of positive effects for your project.
Today, our phone does so many jobs. It’s our alarm clock, GPS, newspaper, video game console, calendar… the list goes on. It’s no surprise we spend so much time on our devices when it’s our one-stop-shop for just about everything. To spend less time on your phone and make your battery last longer, consider switching some of these tasks to analogue devices—i.e. a nightside table alarm clock, physical newspaper, or agenda. Or, even better, cull the ones that don’t serve you (think: social media, video games, Netflix binges).
2. Rearrange your home screen
We’ve all opened our phone to text a friend only to 30 minutes later find ourselves scrolling on Twitter. Changing the layout of your phone’s home screen is one way to make your device less appealing.
Consider the apps that make you feel anxious or unhappy, and either delete them or store them on the second or third screen, buried in a folder. I have social media apps stored in a “Social” folder (which I relabel as “Distractions” when I really want to deter myself from using them!). It’s a small extra tap to open them, but I find it’s enough of a reminder to use my phone with a bit more awareness.
Reclaim your home screen with apps that are meaningful to you—maybe it’s a meditation timer, an audiobook app, or your workout tracker. The less you’re tempted to use your phone, the longer your battery will last.
3. Take advantage of your phone’s many modes
This one’s more of a hack, but it works. Modes like Do Not Disturb, Airplane mode, Low Battery mode, and Grayscale disable various features of your phone that will preserve its battery and make it less appealing overall.
The power of Grayscale mode is especially worth highlighting. It simply turns your screen black and white, which may seem like no big deal until we realize that a lot of apps use color psychology to boost usage. News websites crank the saturation on photos so our screens appear more vibrant and exciting. Grayscale mode is great for your battery life and will make your phone less stimulating.
4. Get news alerts from a single source
This is a turbulent time, and it’s not helpful to be bouncing back and forth between a half dozen news apps. Choose your favorite news app and enable notifications—shutting off the alerts for all others. Being mindful and selective with your alerts will help you stay better focused and less stressed at a time when calmness is key.
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The two-day phone challenge isn’t really about how long you can make your battery last—it’s about how to be more mindful and intentional about what you’re consuming. Remember that the path to better productivity runs straight through calm, and checking your phone less routinely is one stop along the way to get there.
I had an old coworker who would shut down his email, set an auto-responder, and take that time to hunker down on a big project. Not only does an email vacation give you the chance to really hyperfocus, but it can actually give the illusion of greater productivity. Sometimes being truly productive means taking a few days to reply, and that’s okay.
4. Suggest phone calls for longer conversations
This is a simple rule: if you want to write an email that’s longer than three sentences, pick up the phone and call someone. Some things are just easier to discuss verbally, and a phone call is often more efficient and nuanced than an email novella.
5. Send less email
The more email you send, the more you receive—cut your inbox in half by sending less email yourself. Before sending a message, consider its purpose and the people who need to be included. Pausing for this moment will help you be a good email Samaritan and will also avoid the dreaded second email when you realize you forgot a point during your frenzied first reply.
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Attention researcher Gloria Mark found that the more time we spend on email each day, the lower we perceive our productivity to be and the more stressed we feel. Checking your inbox is easy—what’s more difficult is having the time, attention, and energy to read through and respond in a thoughtful way.
Email was created for our convenience and it’s an important way of sharing information with people, especially during these strange times. But we shouldn’t feel beholden to our inboxes, and I hope you can use these tactics to free yourself from the idea that you should be immediately available and responsive.
Chances are your boss isn’t paying you to respond to emails—it’s the focused, specialized work that happens in between those inbox checking sessions that really matters. Reclaim these moments and you will find you’re able to work with greater time, attention, and energy.
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