Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs, creators, authors, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love.
In this video, we're looking back at previous episodes to take the best productivity advice from some of our previous guests.
So without further ado, here we are.
So many people when it comes to distraction, they blame the things outside of us.
We blame the pings, the dings, the rings, all of the things in our outside environment that can lead us towards distraction.
Now, those things can be a trigger for distraction.
Those are called external triggers, but we know from time studies that those external triggers only account for about 10 % of our distractions.
So 10 % of the time that you check your phone, is it because of a pinging or ringing?
But that's what we tend to blame.
What we don't remember, what we don't think about is that 90 % of our distractions, 90 % begin from within.
These are called internal triggers.
What are internal triggers?
Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape.
Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety.
These are these uncomfortable sensations that we look to escape many times with distraction.
So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you are always going to get distracted from one thing or another unless you understand the root cause of the problem.
So if we just keep blaming the external triggers, when they account for such a small share of the reason for our distractions, we don't get to the real cause of the problem.
So that that surprises me, I would have thought that like the reason I get distracted by my phone is the fact that I get all these notifications.
But we're saying it's not actually because yeah, because then I think when I'm on the couch, when I'm on the toilet, it's not a notification of responding to it's just something else.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a feeling. And so that's, to me, this whole question of distraction, and why don't we do we say we're going to do write this ancient question that Plato asked as well.
I think it's a fascinating question.
If we know what to do, why don't we just do it?
Right? We all know what to do.
And today, you know, you could say, okay, well, maybe in generations past, our grandparents had a shortage of information.
If you want to know how to do something, had to go to the library or ask some expert today, it's all here, right?
Google it, it'll tell you what to do and who doesn't basically know what to do.
We know if you want to get in shape, you have to eat, write an exercise.
If you want to have better relationships with your family, you have to be fully present with them.
If you want to do well at your job, you have to do the things that other people aren't willing to do.
Right. We know this stuff.
You have to do the hard work.
We know, but we don't do it.
And so to me, that's a really interesting question.
So in order to understand why do we get distracted, I think we have to actually go a layer deeper and ask why do we do anything and everything?
What's the nature of human motivation?
Most people tell you that motivation is about carrots and sticks.
We've all heard this, right?
Turns out neurologically, that's not true.
That neurologically, the way the brain gets us to act is not through carrots and sticks, per se, but rather everything is about the desire to escape discomfort.
The way the reward system in the brain works is that the carrot is the stick.
Right. Think about that, the carrot is the stick, meaning that even when we want to feel good, pleasure, desire, craving, hunger, lusting for something, the desire for pleasure is itself psychologically destabilizing.
So everything we do, everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort.
So that means if everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort, that must therefore mean that time management is pain management, money management is pain management, weight management is pain management.
And so that's why these internal triggers are so important.
If you don't master these internal triggers, they will become your master.
How do we master these internal triggers?
Yeah. So this is the most important part.
I think a lot of people gloss over, they look for the tips, the tricks, the life hacks, right?
Show me the app, show me the secret solution, give me the nootropic that's going to fix this problem.
But at the end of the day, if 90 % of our distractions begin from within, we have to figure out these strategies to master internal triggers.
So there's a dozen different tactics in my book, Indistractable on how to do this.
And you have to experiment.
You have to see what works for you.
I'll tell you what works for me.
So a couple of techniques that work really well that I use literally every single day come from acceptance of commitment therapy.
I didn't make them up.
They've been around for decades.
One of them is called the 10 minute rule.
The 10 minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, whatever that distraction might be, whether you're on a diet and you're trying to resist that chocolate cake, whether you're trying to quit smoking, whether you're trying to not check your phone every five minutes when you're trying to
be with your family or do a work project.
You can give into that distraction, but not right now in 10 minutes.
And if 10 minutes is too long, make it the five minute rule.
It doesn't really matter.
What you want to do is a couple of things.
Number one, this shows you that you have agency, that you can actually do what you say you're going to do.
You can resist anything for just five minutes.
So by showing to yourself, hey, you know what, I'm not controlled by these distractions.
I can wait a few minutes.
I will do that thing, but a little bit later in 10 minutes.
The other thing that I think is super important that a lot of people forget is that they think that the right path to stop a behavior is abstinence.
And for some behaviors that can be the case, right?
If you can remove external triggers from your environment.
So for example, if people are trying to stop a substance abuse, if you can remove those triggers from your environment, sure, abstinence might be able to work for you.
But how do you remove the triggers for technology?
Right? It's all over the place.
We need our devices in order to stay connected to work, to family, to loved ones.
That is part of the moderate spirits.
Food, same way. You can't just stop eating food.
You need food to survive.
So in those cases, strict abstinence, telling yourself no, can backfire.
It's called psychological reactants.
Psychological reactants says that when you are told what to do, when your agency is threatened, the natural human response is to rebel.
So when your mom told you, oh, it's raining outside, put on a coat, and you said, don't don't know what to do, or your boss tries to micromanage you, that feeling of being controlled, that's reactants.
Now, the crazy thing is that the human brain will elicit reactants, even when we are telling ourselves what to do.
So when you tell yourself, don't check TikTok, don't watch YouTube, you are literally making yourself want it more.
So instead to disarm psychological reactants, a much better approach is to say, I can do whatever I want.
I'm a grown human being, I can, I can make my own choices.
I choose to delay this by 10 minutes.
I will do that thing in 10 minutes.
Now, what's the next step?
When you do that, you want to explore that internal trigger with curiosity rather than contempt.
A lot of people, they beat themselves up.
So when people think about distraction, we find they fall into two buckets, two categories, we have what we call the blamers, and then we have what's called the shamers, the blamers.
They blame things outside themselves.
They blame technology, they blame the news, they blame the modern world, they blame all this stuff outside of them.
Those are the blamers, and that's futile because you're not gonna change that stuff, right?
People have always been distracted by things happening outside them.
So that's not an effective strategy.
The other category is what we call the shamers.
They take it on the inside.
That's what I used to do.
Oh, there must be something wrong with me.
If I was a real writer, I wouldn't have this urge to constantly get distracted.
Maybe my brain is broken somehow, I would shame myself into thinking there was something broken about me.
And of course, shame is a very uncomfortable internal trigger.
So what do we do in response to shame?
We're more likely to look for distraction to escape the shame that we're feeling.
So we don't want to be a blamer, we don't want to be a shamer.
We want to be what's called a clamor.
A clamor claims responsibility, not for how they feel.
So this was a big one for me.
Turns out, we don't control our urges.
We don't control our urges.
People try and control their urges.
You cannot control your urges.
Think about the urge to sneeze.
When you feel the urge to sneeze, it's too late.
You already felt the urge.
All you can do is to decide what you will do in response to that urge.
Hence, we can claim responsibility.
Responsibility comes from how you will respond to that urge.
So what do you do when you feel the urge to sneeze?
Do you sneeze all over everyone and get them sick?
No, you take out a handkerchief and you cover your face.
That's the responsible thing to do.
And the same goes for our urges around getting distracted.
It's not about shaming and blaming.
It's about claiming responsibility for having a plan for what we will do when we feel that discomfort.
So the 10 -minute rule allows us to say, okay, I will give into that distraction in 10 minutes.
Now, what do you do for those 10 minutes?
What I do is I use this technique called surfing the urge.
Surfing the urge acknowledges that these emotions are like waves.
They crest and then they subside.
But that's not how it feels in the moment.
In the moment, when you feel bored, or anxious, or uncertain, or lonely, you feel like you're always going to experience that emotion.
But that's not true.
Right? And if you acknowledge that in a short, a very short period of time, that emotion will crest and subside, you can ride it like a surfer on a surfboard until it's gone.
And so what I do, you know, I write every single day.
And writing never gets easier.
Like, there's no such thing as a writing habit, by the way, you know, people try and make everything into a habit these days.
And by definition, that you can't write a habit is defined as a behavior dealt with little or no conscious thought.
How exactly do you write with little or no conscious thought?
Right? I don't know how to do that.
Right? How do you exercise habit?
That's a misnomer, because habit requires little or no conscious thought if you're trying to break your PR, that requires effort that requires thought.
So, so you can't just, you know, habit it away, you have to put effort towards these things.
These are the things that people tend to get distracted from.
So while I'm writing, oftentimes when I'm about to say, Oh, let me just check email real quick, or let me just Google something, right, what I'm doing is I'm trying to create an excuse for me to to get away from that internal trigger of, of is this writing gonna be any good?
And it's kind of boring, and I'm not sure where it's going to go.
And is anybody gonna read this all this down uncertainty?
What do I do? What I do is I take a pause, I set a timer for 10 minutes, I put my phone down, I say, Okay, I close my eyes, and I just surf that urge.
And so for me, a useful technique, another one that I talk about in the book is to have a personal mantra.
And so you can create your own mantra, I'll share with you my mantra.
So in those 10 minutes, I have a choice to make, I can either get back to the task at hand.
And whenever I'm ready to get back at the task at hand, get right back to the writing, or I can surf that urge by just taking a few seconds to repeat my mantra, my mantra sounds like this, I close my eyes.
And I say, this is what it feels like to get better.
This is what it feels like to get better.
That's just my personal mantra, you can create your own.
To me, that reminds me that it's supposed to be difficult, right?
If it was easy, everyone would do it.
That's part of the struggle.
That's part of a craft is pushing through that discomfort.
And what I find nine times out of 10 is that before those 10 minutes are up, I'm right back at that task at hand.
And what happens over time is that the 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule becomes the 15 minute rule becomes the 20 minute rule.
And now you're proving to yourself that you actually do have control, you do have agency over these distractions.
Traction timeboxing, what is that?
Sure. Okay, so let's start a little bit in the beginning with what is distraction, right?
So this is important to understand what does that word even mean?
And I mean, I think this relates to productivity, but I don't know if it's exactly productivity, because I'm trying to help people get the things out of their way, right?
So much of behavior changes about what you should do.
And I think maybe we should focus more on the things that get in our way from doing the things we know we should do.
So let's start with what is distraction?
So the best way to understand what distraction is, is to understand what distraction is not with the opposite of distraction.
So most people, if you say what's the opposite of distraction, they'll tell you its focus.
But that's not true.
The opposite of distraction is not focus.
If you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction.
Right makes sense when you look at the next two traction and distraction are opposites.
They both come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull.
And they both end in the same six letter word, a CTI, when the spells action reminding us the distraction is not something that happens to us.
It is an action that we ourselves take.
So traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that move you closer to your values, helping become the kind of person you want to become.
Those are acts of traction.
Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you said you were going to do away from your values away from become becoming the kind of person you want to become.
So this is this is super important.
It's not just semantics because the difference between traction and distraction is one word and that one word is intent.
So as Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time.
So there's nothing wrong with scheduling time for video games.
That is traction. If that's what you said you were going to do in advance, conversely and more dangerously, is when people don't even realize they're distracted.
So my work day routine used to look like this.
I would say, okay, I'm not going to procrastinate.
I've got that big project I have to finish.
Nothing's going to get in my way.
Here I go. I'm going to get started.
But first, let me check some email, right?
Let me just scroll that slack channel real quick.
Let me just do this easy task on my to do list, right?
Those are productive things.
I'm doing work related tasks.
I'm being productive, right?
But if it's not what you said you were going to do in advance, it's just as much of a distraction as, you know, playing Candy Crush or something.
So it is all about what you said you were going to do in advance.
That's traction and distraction.
So how do you put this into practice?
You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.
So if you have big open white space in your calendar, what the hell did you get distracted from?
You can't tell me everything is a distraction unless you plan your time.
So unlike a to do list, which is just a register of things you want to have done.
When you time box, and I didn't make up this technique, it's been around for a long time, it's called setting an implementation intention.
It's the most widely studied technique that far too, too few people use.
It's basically saying here's what I'm going to do and what I'm going to do it.
Now, the difference is that the metric of success, what I added in my book, uh, which is, is unlike a to do list, which is about checking cute little boxes.
It's about finishing things.
That's a terrible metric because you don't control the output, right?
You don't control the output.
How, how long is something going to take you out when you're doing a YouTube video?
Sometimes it takes you a few hours.
Sometimes it can take you dozens of hours.
You don't always know what you do know is the input.
What's your input? It's time and attention.
And so when you budget those things, your time and attention, the new metric.
Isn't did I finish the new metric is did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction, whether that's being with my family, whether that's playing video games, whether that's working on a big project.
Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction, because that is the only way to have a feedback loop?
So the reason that it takes people on average three times longer to finish a task than they predict is because they have no way of knowing how long things take.
So when you have a time box calendar, you say, okay, I'm going to work on this task for one hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, doesn't matter.
And I'm going to do nothing, but now you have a feedback loop.
Now you can say, okay, well, I need to make this slide presentation and it's going to be 30 slides long.
And I did about three slides.
That means I need a total of 10 time boxes to finish the entire presentation.
You can start being a better estimator of how long things take, as opposed to someone who uses a to -do list and say, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to finish that task today.
Here I go. I'm going to get started for five minutes.
They work on it and they say, Oh, you know what?
Uh, let me get a cup of coffee real quick and Oh, Janice is at the water cooler and Oh, you know what?
I need to do this. I'm thinking, wait, what was I working on again?
So this is why time boxing eats to -do lists for breakfast.
It's a much, much better technique because it allows you to understand for the first time, what is traction, anything that's actually in your calendar and everything else is a distraction.
What other productivity techniques have helped you in your marriage?
My marriage, my husband, girlfriend.
Um, so I talk about, okay, this is kind of personal, but, uh, you asked.
So let's talk about our sex life.
Why not? Um, so we found a few years ago again, been married for 23 years now.
And a few years ago, we found that our sex life was really suffering.
And the reason it was suffering was not for a lack of, of not loving each other or lack of intimacy.
It was that every night we were going to bed later and later and we were just exhausted and part of that was that every night I would go to bed and I was caressing my iPhone and she was fondling her iPad and we weren't being intimate.
And so it wasn't until I started writing in distractible, I decided to take on this challenge.
And one of the best things we did was that I went to the hardware store and I bought us this outlet timer and this outlet timer will turn on or off anything you plug into it at a set time of day or night.
So in my household till this very day, every night at 10 PM, our internet router shuts off.
So, uh, we probably don't even need it anymore.
Cause we've been doing it for so long, but what that means is that everybody knows no internet past 10 PM.
My daughter knows that my wife knows that I certainly know that.
So as opposed to, uh, checking email to the wee hours or scrolling social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever, Hey, got to wrap everything up because 10 PM the internet's going to shut off.
And so that, that that's called a, an effort packed.
Now it's called the effort pack because it takes a bit of effort.
It puts some friction in between you and the distraction.
Now, could I still get on the internet?
Of course I could. I could use my cell phone.
I could unplug the internet and then, you know, take out this timer and replug it in, but that takes work.
That takes effort. It, it proposes this minute of mindfulness.
When I say, wait a minute, do I really need to stay online here or is it time to go to bed and maybe be intimate with my wife?
When you sit down and start a task, sometimes it can be very hard to begin.
And something like procrastination, for example, where you can't take action.
That's caused by low dopamine levels.
And when you start a task, so let's say cleaning your home, because that's an annoying task that we all have to do.
It's not like super pleasurable, especially at the beginning.
You start the task and you also put it off for ages because you can't be bothered.
Then eventually you start the task and at the beginning it's like so much effort.
You maybe have some music playing on in the background and think, Oh, I can't bother to do this, but I need to do it.
A good example is something like cleaning a bathroom because there's a particularly annoying task at home.
What you'll find is the first five minutes pretty annoying.
And gradually you begin to what's called gain momentum effectively.
After 10 minutes, you might start getting more and more into it.
And then what can happen is the opposite can occur rather than thinking I can't even bother to do this.
You actually get more into it than you even expected to.
And that's because you're effectively entering cleaning flow state.
Flow state is when our brain gets hyper focused on something.
It takes an average of human brain about 15 minutes to enter flow state.
Brilliant psychologist called gold discovered this whole flow state and dopamine connection.
And effectively the beginning of a task, very, very challenging as you engage the effort, the brain starts to realize, Oh, this human is in the pursuit of some kind of goal.
They need the dopamine vesicles to help.
They need the dopamine vesicles to help.
And it's why whenever you sit down for tasks, cleaning your home, completing a specific annoying work project, going into the gym, it's so important to understand the first 15 minutes are always going to be the hardest.
Cause at that point you're sitting at baseline dopamine.
You might even be sitting below it because if you've just got ticked 10 minutes before you're actually now in a dopamine deficit state.
And you've got to climb to this high dopamine in order to get into a highly motivated driven experience.
So beginning hard, battle through 15 minutes.
That's where flow state begins sick.
Um, what are the enemies of this dopamine system in our modern world?
You can imagine that with a graph, anything that requires effort like hunting or building shelter would take a long time for the dopamine to be experienced within the brain.
So you can quickly access it.
You suddenly have to engage like two hours of effort.
Dopamine would slowly increase with the brain.
You get this really pleasurable, rewarding experience and that would motivate us to do that action again in the future.
Anything in the modern world that has developed the ability to get that level of dopamine increase, but immediately is effectively what's hijacking it.
Because the brain is always seeking for homeostasis, that balance experience.
If you suddenly get super high tick tock spike of dopamine, you then put the tick tock down and you're suddenly like, I feel like, shit, you're apathetic.
You can't take action towards anything.
And it's because your brain is just so confused by the unnatural spike that it crashes out effectively.
And the way to identify if something is unnatural dopamine is just how quickly does it give you pleasure?
A simple comparison would be reading a book versus scrolling on Instagram.
When you open a book and start reading a book, it's not like, wow, this is so enjoyable.
I love reading this.
It might be for some, but I think for the majority it's like, okay, I got to get into this and your brain begins to put in more and more effort as you read the lines and the pages and you try and get into it.
Gradually after 10 or 15 minutes, when you kind of enter that flow state type experience with reading, it does become a very pleasurable experience because the dopamine has been slowly add an increase in a natural way.
When you open Instagram, immediately you feel good to get some notifications, you get likes, comments, a message from a girl, you're getting loads of stimulation off all the videos, whatever it might be.
And then the dopamine spikes extremely high and then as a result of going so unnaturally high, the brain seeks for that balance and crashes it out.
And so many of us are struggling to take action towards our dreams because we're just constantly crashing the system that's responsible for getting us towards them.
So what I'm hearing is that really the pursuit of pleasurable things that involve a level of feeling as if you've earned it is important here.
Like you're not just getting the free pleasure from just doing the thing.
I wonder if sort of, I enjoy playing video games on like very hard difficulty playing Horizon Forbidden West at the moment.
And there's like, you know, people would look at me and be like, we can, you spend the last three hours on the same boss fight, like why not just tune down the difficulty level, but there's something about doing the hard thing that feels way more rewarding than just like, I don't know, killing the boss
on story mode or on easy mode or whatever.
I think similarly, I used to go to these wilderness medicine trips at university where it was like, um, we'd, we'd, we'd spend the whole day hiking and then we'd do like medical scenarios of like, this person's like broken their leg and you end of the day.
We would all have a lovely big dinner in the cottage and play some board games.
And there was something about the fact that we had to do a whole day of hiking to feel as if we've earned that, that really made it way more rewarding.
The compared to if we had just sort of randomly started playing board games, is that this sort of idea of like feeling as if you've earned the thing?
A hundred percent. That is exactly it.
And if you had just immediately woken up in the morning and done the board game, it wouldn't be as nearly as pleasurable.
And you just have to imagine surviving was so hard for 300 ,000 years.
Like if you actually think about suddenly being put out in a forest and you've got to suddenly survive out there, it would be insanely difficult.
So the brain has to be so deeply programmed to seek for effort.
That is exactly how it's designed to operate.
If you look at that gaming example, when you're playing horizon, did you call it?
When you're playing horizon, the fact that you have the desire to put it onto the hardest level is probably why you're actually in the position you're in, in your life right now, in terms of your career and your business, because you've actually chosen the harder path in life.
And it means your brain, because you've consistently chosen the harder path when you're at university making your YouTube videos while also studying all of these things, the fact you chose the harder path means your brain has had to work harder throughout your life.
And therefore your brain will have a greater capacity to generate dopamine than the average brain.
So then you're going to be a more motivated individual.
You can imagine if you're two hunter -gatherers and one had an easy time at surviving because it was like warm and there was an abundance of food around, and then you had one that was trying to survive in the cold with no food.
This one is going to have to work way harder, so they're going to need more motivation.
So suddenly they're going to have to require so much more dopamine in order to survive.
And if you start pursuing the lane of effort in your life more regularly, generate more dopamine, your capacity to pursue effort in all lanes, whether that's being more attentive with your partner, eating healthier food, being more disciplined in your home, working towards your goals, whatever it might be
becomes actually easier and easier because you've got a ton of the chemical.
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But I spent time in the US.
I'm always just like surprised by how much conviction people have for saying stuff, even if I know they actually don't know what they're talking about in that specific context.
Like if someone's, if I'm at like a conference or something, as someone that I talk to talking to me about YouTube and I've seen their channel and I know they've got like 300 subscribers and they've been doing it for like a month.
And the way they speak about, about like content creation and like growing on social media with such conviction, I'm like, wow.
I didn't know what that confidence in my life.
Most of us, 99 % of us are way too far on the wrong scale in terms of conviction.
Like pretty much all of us.
And then there's a select few who could do with, with dialing it down a little bit.
But I think we're also afraid of being that select few that we dance around the very, very much not enough conviction area.
Cause we're so afraid of going a little bit too far.
And I would love to see everyone just wake up, go to the office today and go too far just for one day, see what it does.
You know? Yeah. It's a good experiment almost.
Yeah. Um, in my team as well, like occasionally I get a, I'll get a message from someone being like, oh, hey, you know, sorry about that thing that I said.
I think I might've gone too far.
And I'm like, what?
They did didn't even vaguely register me because to them they're like, oh my God, I, it was too direct with that thing that I said.
And I'm just thinking it was, it was just totally normal.
Like it was so normal to the point I didn't even notice the thing, but they're all in their head thinking like, Oh, I said it too directly.
Yeah, cause the line is here, right?
And they're like, they're usually here and they went here and then, oh my gosh, that's way further than I usually get.
The line is here. You can always do what you just said.
You send a message afterwards.
If you really think you've gone too far.
Sorry, I went too far.
You'll be forgiven.
Yeah. I rarely heard stories of someone because conviction is not an energy that is anger or aggression or it's not a negative energy.
It might have negative connotations if you're afraid of it, but it's not like, it's not something that you are aiming at someone else.
I'm not like, you must believe it's just, it's just more belief in what you're saying, more energy and more certainty in your beliefs.
I think lots of people, myself included, will be interested in almost the beginning of the story.
So why you landed on working on productivity and how that sort of came about for you?
Because that's been sort of a fascination for you through the YouTube thing.
And how did it all begin?
Yeah. So I've been, I've been obsessed with productivity for quite a while.
I found that when I was at university going through medical school and trying to build my first business on the side, I realized that I had to find ways to become more productive and ways to work harder and work smarter and learn how to study efficiently and stuff so that I could have the time to do
the things that I wanted to do.
But then, and so that worked throughout university.
But then when I started working full time as a doctor, that was like a step up in terms of like, oh, you know, I didn't think I had free time at university.
Now I really don't have free time.
Because like at university, even even in medical school, going into the hospital is kind of optional.
You wake up in the morning and you're like, I don't know if I feel like going in today or yeah, I'll go in for a few hours.
I'll leave at lunchtime and then do my own like self -study when you have a job that, you know, that's just that's unfeasible, like you have to show up.
And so all of a sudden, like 10 to 12 hours of every single day, which is being blocked up by work.
And I was trying to grow the YouTube channel on the side and I had lots of periods of where I felt pretty overwhelmed and pretty stressed by the demands of work, plus the demands of the YouTube channel.
And so that was when I was like, okay, I need to change my approach to productivity.
That's where this idea of sort of feeling good, like positive emotions and stuff landed.
Because I didn't really want to be in a position where every day felt like a grind because I was in that mode for a while.
I was like, okay, what if being productive and like doing the things I wanted to do didn't have to come at the expense of my like physical and mental health?
What if I actually could feel good while also being productive?
And then I went on this whole like research rabbit hole and found that actually feeling good is one of the keys to productivity and actually the more positive emotion we feel in our work, the more productive we become, but also the more energy we have to give to the other important things in our life.
And so to me, feel good productivity became this sort of like holistic philosophy that I, you know, I use every day when I whenever I'm doing something and it feels bad, or I feel blocked, or I feel like kind of the negative emotions getting in the way.
I remind, I sort of remind myself that, okay, no, there are ways to make any situation feel better and the way ways to experience the positive emotion and everything.
And it just means that I can flow through life flow through life.
I mean, it means I can go through life feeling better about the work that I'm doing while also being pretty, pretty effective at the work.
And it's interesting, I guess, because you have both types of experience.
So, you know, when you were working as a doctor in hospital where when you're dealing with people who are really unwell or really highly stressful situations, it must be really hard to find the pleasure in that kind of work in comparison to, you know, a YouTube life and where you can kind of choose
your hours a bit more or do things that you're interested in.
So were there quite different challenges?
Yeah, this is the thing.
So when I first started, started working, I found it very like stressful and sort of these high, high stress situations.
And most of the doctors around me also had that approach where it was like, there was this sense of like, uh, kind of tension and stress in the air, but not everyone was like that.
And I had a few seniors who I really looked up to who were just like, they were really good doctors, but they were, they were also happy.
They were like, they had a smile on their face.
They would crack jokes.
And it kind of helped me realize that actually there is another way, like approaching work as if it was really stressful was actually a choice that I was making.
And so I did also make a concerted effort in my day job to enjoy the day -to -day a teen who would have smiles on their face and stuff started.
It sounds weird, but approaching it with more lightness and ease, almost as if I was playing a game kind of, um, and it's not playing a game in the sense of, you know, people's lives are at stake, but there was a line from Grey's Anatomy that I often thought about, which is when, uh, Derek Shepherd,
the neurosurgeon, when he starts his operation, he says he puts a music on and he says to his hit and he says to his team, it's a beautiful day to save lives.
Let's have some fun.
And obviously, you know, that's a fictional, fictional drama, but there's something about that, that even when you're doing neurosurgery, even when it's just like, like life and death is in the balance, it can still be a beautiful day to save lives.
You can still have fun along the way.
And so much of that I found is a choice that we make ourselves rather than a thing that's foisted upon us by the environment.
Yeah. And I guess with any job, however difficult or kind of emotionally taxing is, there's always something to be grateful for or something to find in it that we feel thankful for or find even the slightest pleasure in, I guess.
I think, I think gratitude is a, is a really major part of this.
Um, the other one is, uh, you know, this is the first chapter of the book is the idea of approach, approaching work in the spirit of play where yes, even, even when the thing is really stressful, you can still choose to approach it in the spirit of play and, you know, there's so many stories of Nobel
prize winners who found, you know, the key to their productivity and the key to their creativity was kind of treating it with a little less seriousness and heaviness that we tend to approach work with, even when it's heavy and serious like working in medicine or being a therapist and things, just choosing
to approach it with a little bit more lightness and ease.
So I tried to kind of, I, I tried to do that when I was in the day job and especially now running this business and having a team and stuff.
Again, a lot of people, I know a lot of business, I know a lot of business owners, I know are pretty stressed because of the demands of running a business and managing payroll and having all these people depend on you.
But at the same time, it's, it's a bit of a game approaching it in the spirit of play.
Yeah. That the, the, the idea that, that joy is the most kind of import, important factor when it comes to being productive.
Is that at the core of this whole thing?
So it's sort of that's where you start?
Yeah, sort of. Um, so the, the scientific basis for this is a theory called the broaden and build theory.
Um, so there's this researcher in the early 2000 called Barbara Fredrickson who kind of coined this theory to basically explain the fact that when we experience positive emotions, it boosts our performance in almost everything, it boosts our creativity and it lowers our stress.
And, you know, her theory very loosely is like, if you imagine back in caveman days, cause we're still operating with caveman brains back in the caveman days, if, if life is good, if you're feeling positive emotions, it means that you're not in danger of being eaten by a lion.
The group is surviving life is good.
And so you're more open to exploring and you go out into your environment and you forage for new stuff.
And you see if you see if you can make some new alliances.
Whereas when you experience negative emotion, like fear or stress or anxiety, it's like, Oh, my life's in danger.
A lion could be around the corner and you, your entire being contracts and you go tunnel vision for survival.
And when you're in that survival mode, it's a very high stress state because the body is literally kind of trying to survive.
Whereas when you're in that kind of broadened state, it's like broad, it broadens your repertoire of things that you can do and it builds like resources, like alliances and like creativity and things like that.
Um, and so that was like a thing that I came across in my research, um, where I felt that that was really the key.
And so if we can experience positive emotions, joy in our work, it just has all of these benefits.
It generates more energy for us.
And often for a lot of us, time isn't necessarily the limiting factor.
Energy is the limiting factor.
But you know, when you, when you experience joy and positivity in your work, you end up with boundless energy and you as a side effect, you become more productive in your work, but then outside of work, you also have way more energy to give to the other important things in your life.
Yeah. And it's interesting because you, there's, um, uh, sort of literature around that idea, but in young children.
So sort of the, you know, if you have a, a young toddler, for example, and they, they are in a kind of threat mode and they'll feel anxious and they'll go to their mother to feel safe and then once they, you know, they get that reassurance and they feel safe or they receive a positive emotion or experience
positive emotion from an interaction with that mother, they'll then go out and take more risks and, and dive into whatever the situation is and play with other children, all they needed was to feel safe and to have a sort of positive emotion and then they're ready to go out again and, and experience.
So does it sort of help with risk -taking and trying new things or creativity is all kind of linked up.
No, I think that's a great, that's a great example with the, with the kids.
I wish I thought to put that in the book cause that's, that's like absolutely perfect.
Come get it, come get it.
No, it's like, yeah, there's just so much evidence.
And so there, there was a, the first study that really tested this, I think it was from like the 1980s.
There's this thing called a, I think it's called the matchbox puzzle.
Oh, what's that effect?
Where you give, you know, they get people in a, in a lab and they give them like a matchbox and a candle and like some like thumbtacks, those are things that you pins put stuff in the wall and you know, the challenge is find a way to get the candle to light the candle, but without any, any wax dripping
onto the floor or something to that effect.
And this is like a classic test of creativity because people who are more creative in that moment will discover the solution where people who are less creative won't.
And they found that if you prime people with positive emotions, like giving them a Malteser or something just before they do the thing, they're like way more likely to solve the puzzle through creativity.
Amazing. And so it was that study that was then I think in the 1980s that sort of helped spawn this wave of research into how even for adults, positive emotions do make us more creative and increasingly in the world that we live in where most people watching or listening to this are probably knowledge
workers or students of some sort.
Productivity is actually more about being creative and thinking broader than it is about just like efficiently cranking out more and more widgets.
So I can eat chocolate all the way through my writing.
Absolutely. Yeah, that's the one.
It's going to help me with our creativity.
Absolutely, yeah. The more we feel good, the more productive we are.
That's a great view of the research.
How about the sort of, you know, the industry so far because I feel like, you know, I've followed your work for a long time and as someone who sort of steered away from the more like sort of hustle culture, productivity where you're just, you know, you just get up at five o 'clock and you just, you know,
don't go to sleep or, you know, you grind and grind and grind because that's what we do.
And it's all for this thing called success.
Your content from the very beginning was different to that, wasn't it?
So it was, it was always this way that you always had that sort of recognition of life is a bit more than that just succeeding for succeeding sake.
We need to look a bit deeper into that.
So what's your take on the kind of the hustle culture and then the sort of productivity industry generally?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So I think I sometimes when people come across my YouTube channel and they don't watch the videos, they'll kind of badge me as like a toxic productivity kind of guy, because it's like, oh, they'll see videos on how to manage your time and how to be more effective and stuff.
And to me, that's always been like, like to me, productivity is about using, using our time intentionally, effectively, and sustainably, like working towards the things that truly matter to us.
And part of the reason, like we almost never use the word success in the book, cause I don't really like the word, the word success, because for a lot of people, success is tied up in kind of traditional prestige or what other people will think, and the experiences that I had working as a doctor like
from the first year of medical school onwards, anytime I'd meet a doctor and would get on with them, I would ask them, Hey, you know, how much are you enjoying your job?
Like if you want the lottery, would you still keep doing it and stuff?
And so often there were these, these like really high achievers who had gone through high school and medical school and everything and gotten to this success, who sort of felt like, uh, I kind of like, I wish I'd had more of a life.
I had all these hobbies when I was younger and then I let them all go because work got in the way.
And so I think success without recognizing the fact that the journey is ultimately what matters tends to be pretty hollow for most people.
Um, and so from fairly early on, I was always in the mindset of like, okay, the journey is actually more important than the destination.
Yes. When your book hits the bestseller list as yours does, you feel like that flash of like, yeah, but if the process of getting there was like a grind and didn't feel good and you didn't take care of your physical and mental health and maintain your relationships along the way, a lot of people say
that like the success is not worth the pain.
If it means your life becomes out of balance.
So I'm, I've always been about just trying to try to make sure life stays in balance, trying to enjoy the journey as well as aim towards some sort of destination.
All right. So that's it for this week's episode of deep dive.
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