Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from?
Like what's the history behind bacon -wrapped hot dogs?
Hi, I'm Eva Longoria.
Hi, I'm Maite Gomez -Rejón.
Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back.
And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history.
Seeing that the most popular cocktail is margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba and the pinocola from Puerto Rico.
Listen to Hungry for History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's so much beauty in Mexican culture, like mariachis, delicious cuisine, and even lucha libre.
Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre, Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre.
And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, Emperor of Lucha Libre, and a WWE superstar.
Listen to Lucha Libre, Behind the Mask, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you stream podcasts.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning, this is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is a longer one, and it is part of my series of interviews with people talking about how they take their days from great to awesome.
Today, I am excited to have a conversation with Chris Bailey.
Chris is the author of several productivity books, including The Productivity Project, HyperFocus, and How to Calm Your Mind.
He lives in Canada, writes about a variety of topics, podcasts, and all that.
So Chris, go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners.
Hello. How's it going?
When you say good morning, I want to say good morning, Laura.
I feel if I listen to this podcast, I would be talking back to it.
Well, maybe people do.
I don't know, in their car, I would say good morning back.
It's a two -way podcast, definitely.
Yeah, so my name is Chris, and I'm your Canadian productivity pal, I guess.
This is just this topic I'm a huge nerd about.
Some people like you, some people have normal interests, like I don't even know, cooking, literature, sports.
I've always been into this idea though of becoming as productive as possible every day.
And maybe it's partly because I want to extract more out of what limited time we have every day.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm a fundamentally lazy person and just want more time to lay on the couch after work and relax and listen to songs on repeat one.
Whatever the reason, I've been into this idea of productivity for quite some time.
And my whole approach is just productivity is about intentionality.
It's not about doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster, that's a recipe for stress, for burnout, for anxiety, for all this noise in our head and in our life.
But I think productivity is about doing the right things deliberately and with intention.
And it's that idea of intentionality that should lie at the core of how we're productive, how we become more productive.
And so we can invest in kindness along the way for ourselves, for others, and have a happy day, happy life.
Sounds good to me. I mean, were you into this in school as well?
Like young, teenage, Chris, like sitting there with your planner in high school?
I mean, was it like that?
I remember, and this is kind of sad to admit on some level, but I remember when we were growing up, my friends and family would be on the beach like playing volleyball and stuff, but half of my suitcase would be books.
It would be productivity books.
It would be just things to digest and dissect and connect with one another.
And this opens up a whole other discussion of how much productivity advice is worth consuming.
If you spend all day consuming productivity advice, there goes all your time.
You're not gonna be that, but there is that point of diminishing marginal returns with this stuff.
But I don't know if I hit it back in high school.
So I would always be obsessed with this, investing in these strategies.
Again, for that kind of laziness idea, I suppose, how can I get great grades while putting in a minimal amount of effort so I have more time for the things that are more enjoyable to me?
And so it's very much, and I remember picking up a copy of Getting Things Done as a young teenager that kind of set off this whole journey for me.
The driest book in the store, probably, but for me, I just ate it up.
You were drawn to it, drawn to it as a B -trade.
And you kind of turned this into your own job then.
Like as a 20 -something, you undertook this productivity project where you tried out all these different strategies and wrote about that.
Yeah, so we can fast forward from high school up until the point when I graduated from university, over a decade now and over a decade ago now.
And I received a few full -time job offers at the time, but I remember thinking, if there's ever a time to do something that I actually find meaningful to me, might not be meaningful to other people, but it was meaningful to me, it was then.
So I declined the jobs, which looked like a ridiculous decision to most of the people in my life.
But it just felt right.
And I declined them to spend a year of my life trying to devour as much as I possibly could about productivity advice.
Because, you know this, you wade through a lot of this stuff.
There's a lot of advice out there and not all of it is worth our time.
Some is fun to read about, some is fun to try on for size, but a lot of it just makes us busier instead of actually allowing us to move things forward in a meaningful fashion.
And so I thought, okay, I'm gonna spend a year and try to get my sifter out.
And as if I was on that beach again reading these books, filtering out the golden nuggets of productivity advice, the stuff that actually allows us to earn back time and separate those nuggets of wisdom, of advice, of research from the things that are just fluff and don't necessarily allow us to earn
back time. And, you know, I experimented with basically as much as I could get my hands on.
I wrote about it on my website at the time which was called A Year of Productivity.
And that eventually led to the book that you mentioned that the productivity project, where I kind of, you know, said, okay, these are the tactics that are worth your time.
Not all of them are, but a lot of them are.
Well, let's talk about one that you still use now.
I mean, if you're gonna choose one that, like, you know, you've stuck with because you found it useful, what would that be?
Oh, man. I feel as though I'm a broken record because I repeat this one strategy so much, basically everywhere I go, but I do it every single day.
I've done it every single day for a decade and it's called the Rule of Three.
So essentially the idea is, so if productivity is about intentionality, like, that's an idea that sounds great.
It's like, okay, that's great in theory, but how does the rubber actually meet the road?
You know, how do we actually make progress toward this ideal of what productivity should be?
And for me, that's where the Rule of Three comes in.
So it goes like this, goes like this.
At the start of the day, you fast forward in your head to the end of the day and you ask yourself, by the time that this day is done, what three main things will I want to have accomplished?
And, you know, you do other stuff too.
If we did only three things, most of us wouldn't have a job after much of a period of time.
We need three kids, right?
Yeah, yeah. Sorry, other two.
And so, you know, there is the minutia of things to keep up with, but these become your three most important priorities, right?
So, you know, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir talking to you.
Obviously, if everything is a priority in your day, nothing is a priority.
It's all equal to each other.
So the idea behind the ritual, you can only pick three, and so you have to weed out the things that are most critical.
So I like to do this across the different contexts of my life.
So I do three with work, three at home.
And so, easiest to illustrate this with an example probably.
My three work ones today, enjoy a few media interviews there today.
Hello everybody. That's what we're doing now.
Structure a speaking event that's coming up and spend one and a half hours just hunkered down writing the next book that I'm working on.
So there's email, there's other stuff, but these three things are what I want to pour my heart into today.
And with home, oh, there's a, okay.
This first one, I don't wanna get off on a tangent.
We only got 25 minutes.
But so my wife knows, if she wants to get me to go to something, she just has to make sure there's snacks where we're going.
And so there is a snack festival.
Oh no. A snack festival, Laura.
Okay. In Ottawa that we're going to later today.
Well, that's exciting.
That's the first priority.
Priorities can be fun.
I'm gonna devour a lot of snacks later today.
The second one is spend some quality time with her after, we both had a big week with stuff.
And third is to wash our cat, Eleanor.
So it's random. It's a potpourri of things.
But when the day is done, these are the three things I wanna do.
You will have snacks and Eleanor will be washed.
Oh, life will be good.
Life will be good. And so the idea is, you have these three daily priorities and you can do the rule every week too.
And so in those ways, our longer term goals can filter and funnel down into our shorter term goals.
So we can do it every month.
We can do it every year.
So that our intentions funnel down and trickle down into where the rubber actually meets the road on a daily basis.
This is probably my favorite tactic.
Awesome. Sorry, I felt like I talked for like 10 minutes.
No, that's okay. But we're gonna take a quick ad break and we'll be back with more productivity tips from Chris.
I felt too seen, drags.
I'm NK and this is Basket Case.
So I basically had what back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown.
I was crying and I was inconsolable.
It was just very big sudden swaps of different meds.
What is wrong with me?
Oh, let me show you me therapy girl.
Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies.
On Basket Case, I talked to people about what happens from what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in.
Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with.
But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you.
And it will call you a Basket Case.
Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and culture richness of Lucha Libre.
And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar.
Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport, from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture.
We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring.
This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask.
Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my cultural podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.
Well, we are back. This is one of the longer interview versions of Before Breakfast.
I am interviewing Chris Bailey, who is a productivity expert, the author of several books, including the Productivity Project, Hyper Focus, How to Calm Your Mind.
So we're talking his favorite productivity tips.
I would love to hear about your current morning routine, Chris.
What are you doing when you wake up for people listening to a podcast called Before Breakfast?
Yes. Yes. This would be kind of on message, wouldn't it?
So, okay, there's, we're chatting over videos.
People can't, people can't see this, but this is what wakes me up.
Do you see this thing?
I see it, but you're gonna have to describe it.
Yes, I will, yes, we are in an audio medium, I suppose.
So this is, it's shaped like a smartphone, but it doesn't have, it has an e -ink screen.
And so this is an e -reader that, it's called the BooksPulma, B -O -O -X.
I have no affiliation with these people or anything.
But this little device, it runs Android.
I'm usually on iPhone, but this is my Android thing.
And it has an alarm, it has, you can download apps.
Remember, it's an e -reader screen, so it's terrible.
You don't even wanna use the apps, which is great.
That's ideally what you want, but it's got Bluetooth, it's got wifi.
And so this is what wakes me up in the morning.
I don't wanna be woken up by my phone because then I'll be in bed for like half an hour, however long I got, I'll be there.
I'll just be like tapping around, I'll be checking the news, I'll be doing this, doing.
I don't want any of that stuff cluttering my mind first thing.
And so the only distraction that, but I do like some of the functions of a smartphone, right?
Like listening to music, there's a great sleep playlist that I love on Apple Music.
And Apple Music's available on Android.
And so I use this as kind of my sleep phone, if we can call it that.
This sounds kind of pretentious to say that.
That's all right, you can have a sleep phone.
Okay, all right, I got your blessing.
So I'll keep running with it.
So this wakes me up, it's got the alarm, it's got the Bluetooth functionality for headphones.
And so I can read a bit first thing in the morning if I want, but I can't really do anything else.
I have to get out of bed.
And so my routine is quite boring.
I'm not gonna lie, it's quite simple because I do so much travel for work and I find that when there's so much travel, I have to reduce that morning routine to its most essential elements, so that it's portable, that I can bring it on the road with me.
And there's enough travel in my life that it disrupts most of the routines that I have.
For better or for worse though, I kinda like a lightweight morning routine for the flexibility.
So let me just visual, I go downstairs, I do a workout pretty much every morning.
I give myself, I have a whole complicated kind of system where I give myself points depending on the workout that I'm doing.
So I get a reward that I can redeem for things.
I'm such a nerd. So I do the workout this morning, for example, I went for a run outside, then I shower, then I eat a little something small, then I just work.
And so it's simple, but I find I have a lot of energy and a clear mind without my phone by my side.
I see my phone when I go into my office and it's on a stand in here, in my home office.
Gotcha, so you read a little bit, do a workout, then start your workday.
Yeah, I wanna start my day connecting ideas, not just consuming things.
I find it really sets my mind up differently.
That these slow mornings lead to more deliberate days.
And I love the slow mornings more than the really fast.
It's not always possible, obviously, but when it is, it's nice.
So you mentioned that you're on the road a lot.
I wonder if you have a few travel tips, ways that you can keep your life running when you are on the road that you would like to share with our listeners.
Oh, yes, okay. This is something that everybody should do if you travel on a frequent basis especially.
So one of my favorite strategies for travel is to have a standard packing list.
So there's an app called TextExpander that I use on my computer.
So what you do is you type a little snippet of text.
And so for me, it's pack list, all one word.
And what that does, but you can store this text anywhere obviously, what it does is that prepopulates kind of a document for everything I could possibly ever want to bring on a trip.
Whether I'm traveling internationally, whether I'm traveling domestically, for personal, for regardless of the context.
And so what I do after that is just delete the things that I don't need to pack.
And so it kind of overcovers what I could possibly pack.
And I don't want to jinx it, okay?
And I probably will by saying this, but over the last maybe five or six years, I have not, now it will happen.
But over the last five or six years, yeah, I hesitate to say this, but I have never forgotten something that I needed on a trip.
But now I will. A great many things can be purchased in places that you were traveling to.
That is true, yeah.
So it's not the end of the world.
I'll have one for this toothbrush or fleece.
That is true. Anything else could come up.
Cable organizers are another really, do you have one of these things?
No, I don't, but tell me about it.
It's a thing that you open, and it has all of the cables that you could possibly need neatly organized into their own little pockets.
And whenever I open this, it costs like $20, I think.
Whenever I open this thing, I see it as like this beautiful butterfly, you know, opening its wings.
And there is the cable that I need, and everybody kind of looks up.
So, oh, what is that?
Where'd you get that thing?
It's just a cable organizer.
Every cable you could possibly need fits into it.
It's very cheap. Highly recommend it if your bag looks like spaghetti on the inside.
Sounds good. Well, we're gonna take one more quick ad break, and then I will be back with a few more tips from Chris Bailey.
When you think of Mexican culture, you think of Avogado, Mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, Lucha Libre.
It doesn't get more Mexican than this.
Lucha Libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment.
Lucha Libre is a type of storytelling.
It's a dance. Its tradition is culture.
This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 -episode podcast in both English and Spanish.
About the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre.
And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar.
Santos! Santos! Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport, from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture.
We'll learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring.
This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask.
Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts.
I fell to a scene. Dragged.
I'm NK and this is Basket Case.
So I basically had...
Back in the day they would call a nervous breakdown.
I was crying and I was inconsolable.
It was just very big, sudden...
swaps of different meds.
What is wrong with me?
Oh, let me show you me therapy girl.
Finally, a show for the mentally ill girlies.
On Basket Case, I talk to people about what happens from what we call mental health is shaped by the conditions of the world we live in.
Because if you haven't noticed, we are experiencing some kind of conditions that are pretty hard to live with.
But if you struggle to cope, the society that created the conditions in the first place will tell you there's something wrong with you.
And it will call you a Basket Case.
Listen to Basket Case every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Well we are back talking all things time management and productivity with Chris Bailey.
So Chris, what is your biggest time management challenge right now?
Ooh, that's an interesting question.
I would say the pacing of the different elements of my work.
And so what I find is that I write more clearly and more effectively when there's a lot of space around what I'm writing.
So if I have a writing day, I can go for walks, I can just kind of wander around town or around the house, stuff like that.
But then, of course, that's an ideal.
Then you have everyday life that is a much faster pace.
Then you kind of come home.
Other elements of work too, they pull you faster and there's less space around those different elements.
And so I find that some projects in my day need a lot of room to breathe, like book writing for example.
But if I look at last month when I was on the road for quite a bit of it, there wasn't a lot of space around the different things I had to do.
I had to be waiting for a flight or on the flight or after the flight trying to get to the hotel.
There wasn't a lot of space around it.
So I would say that some things need room to breathe to do well but there isn't always that breathing room.
That's probably my biggest challenge right now.
Although I have to ask because if you have a writing day where you're just supposed to be writing and you're like I can go for walks, I can do all this other stuff, what prevents you only going for walks and not actually getting around to writing the thing in question?
The fact that I always need a lot less time to write than I think I do.
So for me, maybe you have a different ratio.
I'd be curious to hear.
But the ratio is like two to one.
So I need like two hours of wandering time for every one hour of actual writing time.
So if I wander for let's say an hour and write for half an hour, I can write a lot in that half an hour of time.
I don't have to write like vigorously or in a super focused way or anything.
I'll just casually crank out maybe 500 words in half an hour and having thought about the structure of those words for longer.
So yeah, what do you find the ratio is?
Well I definitely write quickly because I wind up writing a lot of different things.
And so generally, it doesn't take me much time to write something if I know what I'm gonna say and I have my material for it.
And I write a rough draft and then I have other time where I go back and make it better.
But the good news is that maybe the going back and making it better doesn't require as much open space.
And so that's something that could fit in in a shorter block and different things.
But I will say, I like the idea of thinking about space to breathe around certain creative working processes.
And I mean, I'm very efficient.
But when I've been at the final editing stages of certain of my book projects, I do in fact need to get away from my house for a couple of days.
So I can just sit with it and like experience the whole book, like read through the whole book or see exactly how one chapter follows in another without pausing because something else needs to happen in between chapters.
And you know, in the life with five kids, there's a lot of other stuff going on.
So there's not as much opportunity for the schedule to breathe.
And so I desperately need those days away when I'm at a certain stage of it in order to get that mental space.
So yeah, I definitely see the importance of that.
Love it. So Chris, I wonder if you could talk about something you have done in this past week that has taken a day from great to awesome.
That's kind of our tagline here at Before Breakfast.
Maybe you could talk about those exercise points you give yourself and how that makes your day and your workout more awesome.
Yes, yes. So I have, okay, and this is gonna expose me as the nerd that I am, but I have this whole habit point system with my basically my entire life.
And so for any positive habit I'm developing or want to reward myself for, so back to back up a little bit.
My wife and I, we got this spreadsheet.
We love, she's a big data person like I am.
We have our joint budget in there.
We have our personal budgets in there.
So the way we divvy up money, we have like most of it goes in the joint, but we have a bit for the personal stuff.
And I don't allow myself access to any of this money, but what this money becomes is a reward for following through with the positive habits that I wanna have.
So I'll give myself eight points, which is $8 for sticking within my calorie allowance for the day.
I'll give myself six points for going for a run.
I'll give myself three points for getting my daily steps in.
If I lift weights either that day or three times in the last seven days, I'll get another three points.
If I weigh myself, I get a point.
If I do yoga on a day, I get two points.
And if I don't have caffeine, I get one point because I find that that's a habit that really helps me.
And so my budget is a result of the positive habits that I have developed.
And then I can spend it on whatever the heck I want, usually take out food as kind of a counterbalance to all these good habits.
How does that work by staying within your calorie limit for the day then?
Yeah, so you get less points.
So some days you wanna stock up on points, but then other days you wanna just blow right through whatever points you've accumulated.
So this is my little system, habit points.
It's a nice self -reward for any behaviors that you wanna reinforce, whether it's working out, whether it's any other habit.
It's basically bribing yourself and I do it every single day.
That's fun. So instead of just being like, okay, my personal budget is 500 to $600 a month or whatever.
It's like, okay, I'm gonna earn that by doing these little things and then you know, spend it as I wish to do.
That's funny you say 500 to 600 cause my budget every month is $550.
Cause I can do math in my head, Chris.
Yes, oh, look at you, wow.
I assumed your point totals were in fact all of them of the things you added up and so on.
Yes. Put it in my head.
There we go. Whatever falls away I put towards the mortgage or something.
Just something that isn't a reward for me and is kind of boring, whatever I don't earn.
Excellent, Chris. Well, this has been great.
Why don't you tell our listeners where they can find you?
Well, I'm in Ottawa, come find you.
Okay, well, let me go show up at his door.
I mean, we're in general, Chris, on the internet, in bookstores, where can we find you?
You don't want my address.
Yeah, so my website is chrisbaley .com.
My books, you've been kind of plugged them a few times throughout this.
But they're the Productivity Project, Hyperfocus and how to calm your mind.
They're available in, oh, I think we're in 41 languages, wherever books are sold in the language of your choosing, you can have it.
Awesome. Well, be sure to check that out.
Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you to everyone for listening.
I would love to have your feedback on this interview series, whatever you would like to hear more about, different people you'd like me to have on.
That would be great for those suggestions.
You can reach me at laura .lauravandercam .com.
And in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas or feedback, you can reach me at laura .lauravandercam .com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
There's so much beauty in Mexican culture like mariachis, delicious cuisine and even Lucha Libre.
Join us for the new podcast, Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha Libre.
And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, Emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar.
Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts.
Señora Sex -Ed is not your mommy's sex talk.
This show is la platica like you've never heard it before.
We're breaking the stigma and silence around sex and sexuality in Latinx communities.
This podcast is an intergenerational conversation between Latinas from Gen X to Gen Z.
We're your hosts, Viosa and Mala.
You might recognize us from our first show, Locatora Radio.
Listen to Señora Sex -Ed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
