Welcome to a special edition of The Knowledge Project.
I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
I'm the curator behind Fernum Street, which is an online, intellectual hub of interestingness covering topics like human misjudgment, decision -making, strategy, and philosophy.
The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're at what they do.
It's more conversation than prescription, and this is a special episode.
Call it an in -between episode.
On this episode, Jaffanello and I, who started writing for Fernum Street last November, have a fascinating conversation around a piece of content on Fernum Street recently discussing whether we're too busy to pay attention to life, whether we're too busy to live.
To find the piece of content, just google Fernum Street and Too Busy to Live.
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Tweet out with hashtag TKP and let me know what you think.
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One of the most recent popular posts on Fernum Street was talking about Einstein's dreams by Alan Lightman and the concept of whether we're too busy to pay attention to life.
What did you think?
I liked it a lot. It's a very interesting concept because modern life is very different than probably the world that we evolved in.
I have found myself thinking about it a lot because what we have now that you probably never had in the past, in the distant enough past, is that you could keep your brain engaged consistently throughout the whole day with no brakes if you wanted to.
And most people, and a lot of people do.
You can start your day and literally, I think there's a lot of people construct their day is that they wake up, the phone wakes them up, you have an alarm on your phone.
First thing you do is check your email.
First thing you do is check your email.
You check your text messages.
I don't really use social media very much.
We have our Twitter accounts and I do some stuff with that but I'm pretty infrequent on it and I only follow like 20 people on Twitter who are pretty well curated.
People I'm interested to hear from but I don't use Facebook and I don't use Instagram itself but I know people who the first thing that they do when they wake up is they check their email, they check their text messages, they check their Instagram account, they check their Facebook.
They literally go from A to Z on all the social media just to get caught up on I don't know what happened overnight and then they get their day started.
Where does that need come from do you think?
This need to be up to date on everything that happened?
I think that the success of these companies is because we have a social species so those things are deeply part of us.
I think that most of these services have evolved in a very natural selection type of way so that the only ones that are left and that are thriving are the most addictive ones that play on some of our deepest desires and provide our brain with the most.
I don't know how much I trust brain studies.
I think that science has a long way to go but I think it's probably true that when you check your Facebook account regularly that you're getting a hit of whatever drug that is comparable to dopamine.
I think some of that stuff gets a little sciency or it's not real but I believe it enough to say that I understand that it's like a drug like an actual drug for the brain.
We can't even stand in line anymore like even at the coffee shop.
I'll give you an example.
We're recording this in Austin, Texas and we both flew in here and one thing that I make a point of noticing now is when the plane touches down, you just look around immediately, literally before you even taxi up to the gate, people will have their phones out and I was sitting next to this girl on the way
in here and I think within a minute or two, she had checked her text messages.
I wasn't reading them but I could notice what she was doing basically.
She was sitting right next to me, her text messages, her email, her Instagram account, her Facebook account and another social media thing.
It was like Snapchat and something that I didn't recognize because there's so many things now, it's hard to keep up with all of them but the point was that she had checked six different services in a period of a minute or two and then she turned her phone off and put it in her pocket.
It was almost in what I thought of immediately was, it reminded me of someone who has been stuck in a restaurant all night and as soon as they get outside, they pull out a cigarette and smoke because they've just been cooped up the whole time and then they release that need immediately.
I think that now I see people do that with their phones or whatever, it's just like they have this pent up need to connect and when they're able to, they take a quick hit.
In some sense, it's not as much anymore because you can get Wi -Fi and a lot of planes but if you don't, if they're charging for it and you don't pay for whatever, you've been disconnected for a couple of hours.
We can't even do that.
A couple hours is just so much now.
It's like we're unable to be bored or unable to be bored.
Well, I would agree with that totally.
I think that that's kind of what I was saying before was that it's just you can now, I don't think that even in the recent past, you could go through a whole day being engaged the way that you can now unless you were an extremely busy person, the average person in the world and we forget too, the majority
of people used to work on farms and your brain is just doing very different things now than it would have when the world was agricultural and even before that when the world was more of a hunter -gatherer.
I think that affects our learning too and our ability to concentrate for long periods of time and all of this stuff is just a byproduct of that.
I noticed even in line at the supermarket, if people don't pull out their phones and distract themselves, their immediate response to having more than two people in front of them is almost disgust.
Oh, yeah. There have been a lot of articles written now by people who basically say, I know I'm addicted.
It reminds me of Alcoholics Anonymous or something where the journalist starts by saying, I know I have a problem, this connectivity problem and I'm going to take 30 days to be clean and sober basically.
It always reminds me of someone who is like, I know I have a smoking problem but I'm going to try to stop smoking for a month.
Then they write this expose about their time without social media or whatever.
There's two things that seem to happen with all these people.
One is they find when they detach that they get a lot of those powers back that they missed.
They're like, well, I can focus more and I don't feel so jittery all day and so on.
The second thing, which is maybe even more telling is that in all cases, they go back to it.
They go back to the life.
Yeah. Why do you think that is?
Well, we miss it. I think that people are all very unwilling now to dare to be different.
If you truly disconnect from those things, what you have to understand is there are network tools.
When you turn your network off, their network has some homeostasis.
There's going to be a homeostatic response.
Let's just say that you're someone who is a very active texter, a very active Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or whatever, and you just decide, I can't do this anymore.
I'm destroying my ability to focus and be bored and so on.
In the first day after you turn those things off immediately, people are like, I sent you this thing and you didn't respond and are you mad at me?
What it is, it's just a homeostatic response.
It's like you've disrupted the system and the system notices.
I think that it's one thing for a journalist to be able to say, I'm writing a story about it so that you can tell the network I'm going to be turning it off for a while.
On a day -to -day basis, you can't get away with that.
I think part of that has to do with our ability or our fear of culturally, it's almost unacceptable to say, I don't know.
I don't know can be an answer to a question about what's going on in the world or it can be a question about deep learning or your job or how to apply something, but we just have this inability to appear misinformed.
I think that manifests itself in these soundbite type opinions where we're reading the Twitter feed and then we talk about it at the water cooler.
I'm sure we're informed because we read the 144 characters and we know exactly what's going on.
We're not doing the deep thinking that we used to do.
These subjects are so transitive.
They pass so quickly.
Even though you're getting the headline, you're not getting the information or facts necessarily.
You make a judgment and then you're on to the next thing and then you always have an answer to whatever comes up in whatever situation no matter how shaky that foundation is.
Yeah, I almost feel like people feel that they don't have an excuse to not know anymore because the information is so ubiquitous for you to say, I don't know anything about that.
People are like, do you live under a rock?
If someone says, what do you think about Trump's XYZ?
I don't really know much about it.
You probably heard about it, but you just say, I'm not an expert or not.
I don't know. I don't have anything useful to offer on that topic.
The people are like, yeah, but you know what I'm talking about.
People almost can't accept that.
If you say, I don't know, you get a lot of weird looks because you're expected to know something about it because it's there.
It's so easily available.
I think a lot of people have a trouble differentiating between knowing the surface thing and actually knowing in a deep sense.
One of my favorite stories about the difference between those two things is from Charlie Munger when he's talking about the physicist Max Planck going around giving this complicated lecture in the early 20th century.
He had given this lecture so many times that he eventually, who knows if this story is apocryphal or not, but he eventually said to his chauffeur, I want you to give the speech.
The chauffeur gives a speech on this complicated, detailed topic.
Someone in the audience asks him, hey, some complicated technical question, follow -up question on a technical lecture.
He goes, I'm surprised such a smart person like you would ask a question like that.
It's so easy in fact that I'm going to pass it over to my chauffeur.
Munger tells that story as a way to say, are you Max Planck or are you the chauffeur?
Ever since I heard that story, I've thought about it very regularly because if you are an introspective person, you will realize, and I certainly did, that a lot of the things that you think you know, you only know at the chauffeur level, you don't know at the Max Planck level.
Right, we have a post on that called The Two Types of Knowledge.
It actually talks about Planck knowledge and chauffeur knowledge and goes into it.
It was from Rolf Doble's book about the art of thinking clearly, which there's some interesting thoughts in there, and there's some interesting connotations about where he got the sources and all of that stuff, but leaving all that aside, I think it's an interesting concept to distinguish between when you
know something and when you don't and when you're fooling yourself and Feynman said, I mean, the key is not.
You're the easiest person to fool.
Key is not fooling yourself and you're the easiest person to fool and then mapping that kind of to our concept of circle of concept or circle of competence and how we go about making decisions and operating within those bounds and then having strategies and ways to overcome.
There's no way that you can live a life in today's day and age and only make decisions in your circle of competence, only make decisions where you have Planck knowledge.
You have to go outside of that, but the strategies you employ when you go outside of that are incredibly important and those are kind of the tools that we want people to build up.
But I wanted to come back to something you said.
Before you joined Farnham Street, you were working in an organization, an office culture.
How often did anybody in there actually say the three words?
I don't know. I think it has a lot to do with the person and their ego in a sense that there are certain topics that everybody feels comfortable saying.
Not everybody, but each individual person feels comfortable saying, I don't know.
If I were to ask you about gymnastics, you would have no problems saying, I don't know, because none of your ego is wrapped up in gymnastics.
But when I was working in finance, if you ask somebody a financial question, their ego is wrapped up in that because that's their profession.
Even though they may be operating in a very narrow area of finance, let's say you're an analyst focusing on Canadian insurance companies or something, which is a niche, and I ask you about Coca -Cola company that may be outside that circle.
It's a financial question, and you feel like you work in the finance industry and you are a business person and you understand investments and so on.
That part of your ego is wrapped up in understanding things like that.
You feel like you have to answer that.
You give me an answer about that, even if you know nothing about it.
You go, oh, well Coke is that.
It's not the same as if I asked you about gymnastics because no one expects you to know anything.
You don't expect that of yourself.
A lot of it, in my opinion, people are perfectly willing to say, I don't know, if it's something that they'd have no skin in the game on at all.
But if they do, then you get all these weird nonsensical answers where people, it's kind of related to their field of understanding.
Do you think we've wrapped up our self -worth then in keeping up to date with our friends on Facebook and World News up to the minute, almost the second?
Is that because we have some sort of self -worth in terms of being up to date?
I don't want to stretch the analogy.
I think the two things are different.
The social media thing, I don't think is an ego thing so much as we're wired to want to know things about other people in our network where we've been gossiping since we developed language.
It's no surprise that the most valuable social media tools are basically tools as much as we gossip about one another.
The problem that I've seen beyond the concept of being busy all the time and connected all the time is that the tools we have now are also the biggest envy generators that have ever been invented.
Something like Facebook, I think is destructive to happiness in a big way because people are unable to see those things and not feel tremendously envious.
Envy has been part of the human DNA for as long as we've been human.
That's part of who we are.
I'm sure there is an evolutionary reason why that's true.
I wouldn't pretend to be able to give you a good answer on that, but it was in the old religious text for a reason and so on.
I think as much as there's value in the connectivity it gives us, that's a huge downside.
When you combine the effect of being constantly connected and unable to be bored and struggling with focus with the envy generation, I think, I don't know, I just question whether the tools have been weighed.
We've weighed the pros and cons of the tools.
What do you think the solution is?
I mean, we both heavily curate and reduce the influence others have on our lives.
Yeah, it's hard for me to say because I don't have any problem.
I didn't have any problem.
I'm picking on Facebook and if anybody from Facebook ever listens to this, I'm just using it as an example because you're the most popular so you won the game.
I had my Facebook account when I was in high school and in college and then when I probably right after I left college I got rid of it.
At the time, there was that homeostatic response and people were like, I don't know how to invite you to things.
We use Facebook to organize things.
I remember missing out early on on a few important events that people assumed I knew through Facebook, like people getting engaged or having kids and announcing they were pregnant or whatever.
The way that they would tell people is to put on Facebook.
There were a couple of those things early on that I missed out on because people didn't realize or forgot that I wouldn't find out through Facebook.
But then what I noticed in a pretty short period of time is that when there was an event, a person would let me know directly.
It was a little bit of resentment.
They'd be like, you're not on Facebook so I have to tell you this directly, but eventually everybody got used to it and I haven't looked back.
It's whatever, seven years later and I haven't looked back at it.
Then as for the other networking tools, social media tools, I just didn't, it was early enough that I just didn't pick them up.
But you use Twitter to get information.
I use Twitter in a very targeted way.
You filter it, but so these tools can be valuable then.
It's not that they don't have value.
The person who put this well was Cal Newport wrote in his new book about deep work.
He has something in there that resonated with me that he put into words better than I had been able to myself before, which is that it's not that the tools don't have value.
It's just that we're not weighing the pros and the cons as we would with any other tool.
Right. I think Cal is exactly 100 % right on this notion that it would be a mistake to say the tools have no value.
It would also be a mistake to say that the tools are perfect and that on balance some of the tools may be worth less than zero, that they may be an average a detractor.
So I think it was impossible, I found for me personally, it was impossible to use something like Facebook in a balanced way.
It was detracting so much.
You're all in or all out.
Yeah, I couldn't just use it in a judicious way, so I had to get rid of it.
I didn't pick up Instagram or Snapchat any of those, so I can't say, but I suspect that I probably wouldn't get a whole lot out of those either.
Twitter is, I can use Twitter in a very targeted way, which is I can follow exactly what I want to follow and click the links I want to click and save them to read them later or whatever.
Then if I have any things I want to tweet out on behalf of us for Farnam Street and stuff, I'll do that, but then I just turn it off.
I don't have Twitter, the app installed on my phone, so I don't go through it on my phone, I don't have it on my iPad.
The only time I really use Twitter is on my actual computer.
I'm limiting myself to when I'm able to access the tool.
I'm trying to control my own impulse.
We take this to a different degree too because we try to have an incredibly high signal to noise ratio on the stuff we do disseminate on all of these channels, including Facebook and Twitter.
A lot of that, I think, comes from our natural respect for readers.
We want people to have Farnam Street as part of their lives and not encroach too much on the nonsense aspect of it, but I think these tools, for me personally, I use them differently than you do.
I think that they're useful for me to receive information, for me to curate.
I don't read the newspapers anymore.
It's a good way that information gets filtered.
I don't follow a lot of people on Twitter.
I think I have like 60, and not a lot of them are repeating the news, but when anything big happens, it always finds its way to me, no matter how much I try to avoid the news or I don't follow any of the news channels on Twitter.
Then the other thing is just using it and knowing why you're using it and cutting it off.
I follow the number of people on Twitter that I can go through in about 10 minutes, the day's feed.
That's the way that I do it, and it gives me ideas for posts and cross connections.
What I find the biggest problem for me personally is the multitasking aspect of it.
I'll be learning something, and then my inclination when I'm learning or reading is like, oh, that's really cool.
I should tweet that out, or I should, and that immediately takes me from the moment where I'm focusing and concentrating, and then it puts me in another space.
Then that's as we know, the internet is this big rabbit hole, so it's so easy.
On that topic, something that I did recently that I recommend that everyone go through this exercise to see.
The next time that you're working on something or reading something, have a pad next to you, but don't give yourself the ability to connect to the internet.
As you're reading that thing or working on that thing, it doesn't matter whether you're writing something, doing a presentation, doing a piece of work, reading a book, it doesn't really matter.
Anytime you need to be engaged.
When you think of something that you would do on the internet, for example, you're doing a research project and you're like, oh, I want to look up this guy on Wikipedia or something, or like you said, I want to tweet that out, or I want to send an email to somebody.
Instead of doing the thing, write it down on the pad and do that for a couple of hours or whatever, how long it takes you, and then when you're done, look at the pad.
I guarantee you, you will look at the pad and be like, holy shit, I would have been distracted 20 times.
At least. I found that I would literally fill a piece of a yellow legal pad from top to bottom with stuff.
It would be like, look up X, look up Y, send chain email on this.
All these things, one after another, and if I had indulged on each one of those things, I can't imagine that I would have ever gotten the thing done.
It would have taken me at least twice as long to actually finish, even if I'm just working on a post for Farnam Street or whatever.
So something that I do now is I'll write out the whole post without any links, without anything I would need to look up or need to link to or whatever.
I do it all at once at the end, and I download all of my thoughts first, because what I've found is that if I do all of that stuff while I'm writing it, it just delays me so long, because the internet is just this hyperlinking machine.
The whole internet is built on the idea of hyperlinking.
That's the core of the idea, is that everything links to each other, and then Google built their search algorithm originally on these things that are being linked to.
If it's something that has a lot of inbound links, it's going to end up at the top of the search rankings.
They've refined it since then, but they had this major insight about what a popular website was.
It was linked to most frequently, which is a great insight and made them a lot of money.
Obviously, I'm ridiculously oversimplifying Google, but the problem with that is that when you log on, we have posts about it on Farnam Street, Garrett Harden said, you can never merely do one thing.
That is his first law of ecology.
I think that's the first law of the internet at this point, which is that you can never merely do one thing.
You can't use it like a saw or a hammer or some tool that in the past where you pick it up and you use the hammer and then you put it back down.
You go on and you link and you link and you link and it just goes.
It literally is infinite.
You can go forever if you want to.
You could die linking.
That's a hard habit to break.
The only way I found that I can do it for me, some people are probably much better at this than I am, but I definitely have a monkey brain when it comes to this.
Do you think we can actually multitask?
Do you think anybody can multitask?
I think they've pretty well proven that you can't multitask.
There's really no such thing as really doing two tasks.
At some point, there comes a problem of definition what multitasking is because what the neuroscientists are saying, well, you're not actually doing two things at once.
I can kind of see a response where people are like, well, I'm not saying literally doing two things at once.
In an existential sense, I just mean that I can watch TV and hang out with my kids at the same time.
You could say that's multitasking.
You don't want to necessarily take the idea too far that multitasking is not real, but I do believe the idea that if you are trying to watch TV and write a paper at the same time, the paper probably is being sacrificed compared to what it would be otherwise where you were totally focused.
It's also popular now to listen to music or something while you work.
The most amusing one I heard about that was from Ryan Holiday where he's like, he would listen to the same song like 100 times in a row while he was writing, which I would never do to myself because I love music to him.
He's like, I can't even listen to music anymore because I've ruined it, which I thought was amusing and it works for him.
That's fine. I would never want to do that to myself, but basically the way most people do it is not like that.
There's more novelty.
If your brain is hearing the music and then processing it and enjoying it, and you're also trying to focus on whatever the work is.
I think that one of those things is probably being sacrificed.
Basically, what I find for myself is in order for me to do my best work by far, I have to do one thing at a time pretty much.
I've learned to batch things into groups.
In the next hour, I will do all the stuff I need to get done on the internet, all the linking, all the emails I need to send and respond to, and all that, or whatever, which is going to vary by person.
Some people have a lot of email and a lot of networking to do depending on your job.
I'm fortunate enough that I can put that into certain parts of the day and leave it there.
Outside of multitasking, in the sense of it's hit on productivity and our ability to learn, there's also the thing that we come back to in the original post, which is that we're missing out on life through all of this busyness.
A perfect example is when you walk into the lobby of a famous hotel.
Instead of admiring it, people immediately pull out their cameras and they start taking pictures.
Instead of being in the moment, they want to take a picture of the moment and share the moment with somebody else.
Look, I was here. It's not quite a one -upmanship sort of thing, but it's like, oh, I was here.
That's great. You're not actually experiencing.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Some people would argue that, but I don't know.
I have this pet peeve about that where it's like, if you get so busy documenting everything, how could that be the same as experiencing it?
Obviously, the textbook example right now, it seems to piss everybody off and yet everybody keeps doing it.
When they go to concerts, they take out their phone and they're recording the concert.
Literally, I went to see all with their phones that recorded thing.
I don't understand how that's compatible with optimally enjoying the thing.
What I guess I understand at this point is that some people just don't feel that they feel that they haven't experienced the thing until they've documented it.
But we're not recording it for ourselves, are we?
How often do you think those people go back and then watch the video themselves?
What I've noticed is people will do that and then they want to watch it with someone else.
Like, hey, watch this video with some of that.
Just sharing an experience.
Yeah, so it's just sharing the experience.
Some of it, I think, is what you're saying where you're trying to impress other people.
Basically, it's the flip side of what I was talking about before where Facebook being this huge envy generator, people know that they're generating an envy in others and they feel that they have to keep up with that cycle.
If I'm on Facebook and I'm constantly seeing things posted by other people about the vacations they've been on and whatever, well, then I feel like in order for me to keep up with that and feel good about myself, I have to also do that.
So it's another way of keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing.
Oh, definitely. When one car on the street is new, everybody gets a new car within a certain period of time.
You have to document your trip to Barbados because you've seen your friends documenting their trips to Machu Picchu and to whatever.
And I think it would be...
It's almost like your trip didn't happen if you don't.
That's my point. I think that there's like an almost gotten to the point for a lot of people where they don't feel that the experience has happened unless it's been documented.
And that's not a totally brand new thing.
I mean, that's been around at least as long as photography has been around and people showing each other pictures of their trips or writing each other letters about their...
So I'm not necessarily throwing out the whole idea.
I love the concept that bad ideas are good ideas born bad.
And I think that we're at that point with a lot of this stuff where what it started as a cool idea, which is being able to document something and show it to other people later, has gone to this fever pitch element where you can no longer experience it without documenting it.
And that leads to these absurdities, like people taking pictures of all their food and ridiculous stuff that most people, I think, even if you're listening to this, I'm guaranteeing a lot of people are be nodding their heads like, yeah, that is ridiculous.
And then they'll do it.
They'll go ahead and do it.
This is funny because wait for dinner tonight.
Jeff and I are going to dinner and I'm going to take a picture of every course that comes.
There you go. So if you're sincere about trying to detach from it, you'd have to come up with some sort of strategy to mentally come to terms with the fact that you don't need to do...
A lot of people do this stuff, but that you don't need to.
You don't need to get fulfillment from other people.
You can enjoy things without other people.
But how do you go cold turkey?
How do you go from somebody who's doing this and do you scale back, do you stop, do you...
Well, that's like asking how to quit smoking.
I think everybody...
The answer when it comes to smoking is probably going to be the same answer when it comes to social media, which is that a lot of people will fail and won't be able to do it, even with sincere intentions.
Some people will be able to quit cold turkey.
And some people will be able to sort of back off slowly with the nicotine patch.
And I would almost guarantee that social media and networking tools, an email included, are going to fall into that same bucket.
So you have to start by being honest with yourself, how bad is my problem and how much...
Again, it's very AA, but how much help do I need, and coming up with a strategy that's going to...
But I think the first thing is you have to understand that it's okay to detach a little bit.
Expect the response to come from the network or whatever and just prepare for it.
It's doable. I think it's doable.
I still live a healthy social life and everything, even though I don't use all this stuff.
It's worked out completely fine for me.
People started telling me when they had babies and stuff.
So you can... And no one expects me to post a picture of my vacations online.
So I think you realize it's an illusion at some point.
These are tough questions that we're grappling with in terms of busyness and its impact on learning, its impact on productivity, its impact on your life.
I think the answers and what we buy is we buy the solution to this problem and we buy that through self -help books and we buy that through everything else, which are very prescriptive.
What we don't buy are this is a tough issue, this is grappling for people to deal with, and each person has to deal with it in a slightly different way.
There's no formula that you can just follow and get the right answer, and it has to relate to the context of your life.
That's part of the work about thinking, is taking the ideas from other people, learning them and understanding them, and they don't apply, and then further understanding when they apply to your life and how they impact your life.
It comes down to things like weighing the pros and cons to using these tools and just being aware of those cons, because we don't think about them, we just think about the pros or the ability to share and disseminate, and I don't have to call somebody, I can just tweet somebody out.
I don't have to email somebody.
All of these things, where we can do massive communications instead of one -on -one communications, make it easier on ourselves, but we also communicate more.
We also share, so there's a cost to this, right?
We're constantly on our phones, our devices.
Can I give a little analogy?
It came to me recently, which is that there's this well -known thing where people think that building a bigger wider highway is going to alleviate traffic, and then what happens is they build the highway and they realize that the traffic is the same, because people start taking more trips.
So this was a huge problem in New York City for a long time.
They would think that when they built the Henry Hudson Bridge or whatever, that it was going to alleviate traffic from the existing bridge, and it turned out that they had way more traffic afterwards, both bridges were known.
So I think when it comes to communications, there's something similar happening where people think that it makes communication easier, and thus I can make it even simpler.
I don't have to write these letters, and it's so much easier or whatever.
But what happened is that the traffic problem happened where a communication just exploded.
Yeah. You almost want some friction, right?
There's a natural stoppage, I guess, too.
I used to have the Farm Street email address up on the website, and I had to take it down because it was so easy for people to email me.
It's not like you're emailing me one or two sentences.
These are seven, eight paragraphs or 30 page documents.
So what I've started asking people to do to add friction is, oh, well, why don't you print that and mail it to me?
And if it's worth your time to print and mail it to me, it's something I'll look at.
And if it's not worth your time to print and mail it to me, you were probably just communicating with me, not because you wanted to communicate with me per se, but because it was easy for you to do, and the cost on you was really low, but the cost on me is really high.
So I can almost put those costs on somebody else.
It's almost like a modern bureaucracy, right?
You think about how the office culture works.
It's not about doing the work.
It's about forwarding an email and shifting it to somebody else.
And we spend all of this time just basically passing around emails, and we think that that is a proxy for work, right?
But it makes me wonder who's actually doing work in a lot of these organizations.
Yeah, and that was my experience.
You asked me before, I was working in the real world or whatever, is that what people call work was not really work.
Sometimes it was, but of the 10 hours a day that we would spend in the office, maybe two of them would be what you would call work, like actual writing a report or doing research or whatever.
And the rest of the time would be chatting and emailing and walking around the office and things.
And then the person will report that they're working 60 hours a week or whatever.
And I want to say, well, you're at the office 60 hours a week, but are you actually working 60 hours?
And I'm not blaming any of the individuals.
It's just that's the culture now, just the way it is.
And it just expands and expands and it's - Time is not work, right?
And time is not necessarily productive time.
What's the principle that I don't know who's named after, but the work will expand to fit the time allotted?
Parkinson, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah. So, and that's kind of how it is now with the communications infrastructure being what it is.
It's like, I think there's like a subversion of that where it's like communications will expand to fill the time allotted.
I mean, you could literally, you want it to spend your entire time just communicating.
A sub tangent on this is I've noticed a trend that probably everybody else has already noticed, and I'm slow to this, but it's the person in the office environment that creates a half ass draft that is not well thought out, attaches it to an email to like 20 or 30 people and was like, Oh, I did all
the work on this. What are your thoughts?
And then they basically shifted all of that work.
So my father runs an accounting firm and does wealth management.
He calls this office tennis where it's like you do it and then you just, you head into the other person's court and then they hit it back and you know, that's what it is.
It's like it's tennis and but it creates an obligation on the receiver's part to feel like to do work and a lot of work.
And the person who is doing the work already, like the initial person who did the work, they're basically half assing it to like some sort of bare minimum because now they're passing their work on to other people.
And some people do this in a really shrewd way, which is like, Oh, your experience is so much greater than mine.
I think it had a lot of value and insight into this particular thing.
Um, but at the end of the day, they're not doing the thinking, they're not doing the, the, they're not getting it to the quality it should be before doing that.
And then they're not thinking about when they send it out and the impact it has on other people and their jobs.
And it is kind of like office tennis and it's shifting the burden to somebody else, which is so easy to do.
And that's why we forward emails and we say like, you know, these quick, what do you think or for your situational awareness or FYI and all of these things?
We're not actually thinking, well, what is the cost of the person to read this and understand it?
Can I summarize it for them if you're passing something to your boss, which is, you know, something value out is literally just a, you know, a one or two sentence, here's the gist of it.
You can get the context below, but if you know that I'm giving you the gist of it, I've just saved you some time and made you aware of the situation.
Um, but we don't do that.
We're just, well, so it's gonna, so it's not natural to do that because like you said, it costs me nothing.
So my incentive is to just get it off my plate and the most frictionless way possible.
And then you deal with it.
And so in an organization, it would take someone is going to have to come down from high and say, look, we're going to improve our email culture and our communications culture.
And so far it's been going the other way where, you know, the companies are just encouraging more and more email and the tools for communication.
I know a lot of companies are implementing like, uh, or have already implemented like instant messaging capabilities and not, you know, it's come a long way from AOL instant messenger, but, um, there's sophisticated corporate tools, supposedly, but you know, the people who have to use them or the people
who work there are now expected to use them.
And that intrudes upon any time that they may have spent actually focusing on something and working because when the IM window pops up, it's like, it's like email, but worse.
And now it's even more frictionless.
So it's kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, where it's like, the tools have been, we've only looked at one side of the ledger, which is all the frictionless nature of it.
But we've been very hesitant to look at the other side, which is, well, what are we losing?
And it goes back to that quote by Herbert Simon.
We said, you know, what is information consume?
It consumes the attention of its recipient.
And so in a world rich in information, there's a poverty of attention.
I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically what he said.
And that was more that more prophetic than he thought it would be when he said it, you know, 50 years ago, whatever.
So I think that's where we're at.
And I think that as a person, you have to come up with strategies to fight it.
And if you're running an organization, don't expect it to happen.
It's on its own. It's going to have someone's going to have to, you know, kind of come down from high and say, we're going to do this better and, and, you know, put some carrot and stick into it.
Like you have to punish people who are not following it.
So listen, this has been a fascinating conversation.
I think we're going to end it here.
This is a bit of an experiment.
The first time Jeff and I have done a one on one, we'd love to hear your feedback with some level of irony.
You can tweet to us, hashtag the knowledge project and let us know what you think of this.
Thank you. Hey, guys, this is Shane again.
Just a few more things before we wrap up.
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