EPISODE #928 How to Revamp Busy Work, Overcome Boredom and Fix Burnout Jenny Blake

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about free time. It turns out that there is a way that you can consciously create free time and therefore free energy, because time can be converted to energy. And our guest today is a new friend, someone I met at the TED conference at one of John Levy's influencer dinners. John's been on the show talking about how he does those where you sit next to someone, you don't really know who they are and you try to guess what their profession is. So when we were going around the table guessing without really any information about someone, what they did for a living. For our guest today, Jenny Blake, who's an award winning author of a book called the Pivot, that's a best selling business book, just came out with a book called Free Time. But having to pretend that I didn't know that at the dinner I said that I predicted she was an entomologist studying the larval stage of growth, which made everyone laugh apparently, but was not at all accurate with that incredible introduction, other than we met at TED and she's an expert on creating free time in your life and has a new book on it that I'm halfway through. Jenny, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Dave. You're halfway through after one day. So you win the award for speed reading. And you forgot to say that we met by getting lost in the building. And the guy, the super of the building was named Peter Pan. So Peter Pan helped Dave and I get squared away.

You could say Peter Pan introduced us. That's a good point.

That's right. Oh my gosh. That's it. That's our origin story.

Shout out to the doorman. Yeah, who was actually really funny. So Jenny, in addition to being a TED attendee and other stuff, like an author, you spent five years at Google. You co created their career guru coaching program. So you spent a lot of time working with people on this. And if anyone on earth doesn't have free time, it's Googlers. Like, hey, we'll lure you with free breakfast, lunch and dinner and some activities after that. So maybe you could just live here except for oral, do your laundry. So just sleep somewhere else. But everything else is forks. So free time is for all the Googlers I know, pretty darn limited. Was this something that you started paying attention to when you were helping people figure out their career?

Yeah. Well, you and I both share a passion for human potential and what's possible in this incredible miraculous machine that is our Bodies and our mind and our brains. And I just found it so fascinating that when I joined Google in 2006, there were 6,000 employees. And because I was in a training role, I trained over a thousand people in my first year. At that time, Google was so focused and skilled at hiring the best and the brightest from the best universities all over the world, the top 1%. But they didn't have any programs in place of how do you keep them? How do you keep them learning and growing and engaged? So inevitably, about a year into their tenure, all these new hires would come up to me in the hallways and say, Jenny, I'm getting kind of bored and I don't know what to do. And boredom was this dirty word. And yet you have all these brilliant people who, as you said, Dave, it's not, they're not short on money and they're. Yes, it is a very intense environment that can lead to burnout. So that you could say you're short on time, but they're also short on creative expression within that corporate context. So the reason that I started developing these drop in coaching programs at Google, I still work with Google to this day through the pivot method in my previous book, is that I discovered, I call them, you know, we know the term high net worth. People who've accumulated a lot of financial resources. But if you're a high net growth individual, money is important, but it's not everything. And you're not just asking what am I earning but what am I learning, am I growing? And then now with free time, it's also about high net freedom. So I think more and more people, and we're seeing this with a great resignation, don't want to just go to the grind and be in a brick wall of meetings all day, every day in an inbox that never ends. Freedom is about autonomy, who we work with, what we work on, when we work, and so much more. And I was telling you before we hit record, that should be your five. Your fifth F in your framework is for freedom.

I love that. I might steal that. It'll be five Fs, right?

We have food, Food, fear, fertility, friends.

Oh, look at you. You skipped the F bomb. Just so smooth.

Did my homework.

So freedom it is. Friend and freedom. All right, I gotta ask you something unrelated all this. So every time I've met you, you always walk around looking like you're about to laugh, like you're like almost stupidly happy. That's a compliment, by the way. You know what I mean? You're just like everything's like, joyful and entertaining. And some people would be pissed off that we couldn't get up to the 30th floor penthouse and whatever else, but you're just like, this is all fun. Is that just. Were you born that way, or did you just get a lot of fun?

Oh, my gosh. Well, it's so funny because when I was at Google, the trainees used to make fun of me that I snatched smile all day while I'm teaching, and they're like, how do you even do that? How do you smile and talk at the same time? And then recently, someone left me a review for my podcast, and they said, Jenny sounds like she's smiling all the time, even when it's not appropriate to what she's saying. And so, I don't know. I mean, this question is like, I'm just thrilled to be here with you. And this is my favorite thing to just be in deep conversation, talking about interesting things and wrapping our minds around problem solving and potential and what's possible. So, of course I'm smiling ear to ear because I was telling you I wrote my last book entirely on brain octane and with bulletproof coffee. And so I don't know who wouldn't be smiling just to be here in conversation with you.

I think I need to get you saying something like, congratulations on your leprosy. And then I'll make that in your normal, happy voice. I'll make that my ringtone for you. So, you know, because it's one of the. I think I actually am happy I have leprosy now, but I don't know why. And guys, in case you're wondering, I do not have leprosy. I have projectile leprosy. It's a totally different thing.

Oh, no. That means it's coming my way.

Let me point at you, okay? That's all I'm saying. So, free time, you're a systems thinker, which is one of the reasons that it was fun to chat with you at dinner, because you're not looking at this as, you know, oh, you know, just do less. Which is what a lot of people say. No, more often. What's different in your approach to actually creating free time? Because people listening are going to want to walk away from this saying, how do I get free time?

Right? And I do mean it in the sense free time can be leisure time. What do we do when we're not working? But I also see it as a verb. Freeing time is a skill, and the skill behind it is systems thinking. A lot of Systems books are incredibly boring. I mean, your community is all about biohacking and systems thinking and tips, tricks, hacks. And I think we've all learned so much from you over the years. Of what have you tried? What experiments have you run? What shortcuts have you discovered? Or as Shane Snow calls them, small because they're not always short circuiting something, they're just the smarter route to get results. So for me, freeing time as a verb is continually asking. It's almost an agile development mantra. One of the mantras I live by is each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it. That if we can actually get out of the Sisyphean infinite loop of things like email and messaging and the day to day grind, then the steps that we do take, if we just do a little bit more work up front, we don't have to think about it ever again. And then we put this big beautiful brain that we all have to work on. The bigger problems, the more interesting work. So I'll give you the most simple example of this. Toilet paper, paper towels, like this is a household thing that you could just put on subscription, look at a cadence. How often do you need to order these things, put it on subscription, and not only do you then get faster and better at ordering paper towels, you never have to remember to do it again. And that's very simple. But that's the reason I share something like that. Because if we can think at that level, then all of the systems we do put in place are just going to exponentially generate free time into the future.

So I'm a computer science guy and I admit that I had a problem with being an automation fetishist. I'm like, I hate doing things more than once. I am just going to automate everything. And pretty soon I realized I spent way more time managing my automation system than I spent actually doing stuff. So my home automation, it's this amazing technology that you don't change the batteries, you hit a fricking switch when you walk in the room and it always works. And it's zero maintenance. And it feels like, oh, my credit card is going to run out of my subscription and I'm going to get them when I'm on vacation. And I have too many, I don't have enough. So for that specific problem, like I've got a thing for this, we have centralized facilities. We also have this thing in tech called caching, where a lot of the data people see, they don't know this, but you're not going Back to Google to actually see something, you're going to pieces of Google's code that are sitting on other servers closer to you to make it faster. It's called content distribution. I was an exec at a company in that space, so I just cash. So I just buy a shitload of that stuff and throw it in a closet. And yes, I have space. I'm on a farm. I have almost infinite space. But then I think about it once a year and that and I'd have to fix my subscription twice a year. Do you spend like half your time managing your automation or do you. Did you automate the management of your automation? Like, how do you really not just get burdened by a bunch of subscriptions?

That'd be amazing to have, like, create a bot that manages the automation for the house.

I want that.

Yeah. I live in New York City, so I can't really cash. You know, in New York City, you gotta be real strategic about every inch of space.

You get two sheets of toilet paper. That's your cash.

You can't use toilet paper anymore. There's no room in the closet. So, yeah, my husband jokes. He calls me the CTO because I'll just install tech around the house just for the joy of it. Of, like, I know you were an early advisor for tonals. We have a tonal, we have a peloton. We have all these things. And of course, Alessa Alexa's listening to everything. Well, systems, anything. Think about an old house. Every system, every organism is subject to entropy, which is just the slow descent into chaos. So, like, anything systems do need maintenance. Like, I don't know about you, but I love geeking out on Zapier. So I set up zaps, these really intricate zaps that will handle a lot in the business, so that no one on my team has to do busy work or minutiae. So if somebody registers for my community, there's a zap that adds them to a recurring calendar invite. It adds them to our circle community. It subscribes them to the podcast, it puts them on my mailing list, so no one person has to do all that. But just like any website, any house, things break and they fall apart. And so I do think that it's important to check in at some interval. It doesn't have to be that often. What I like to do is a lot of your listeners are probably using project management software of some kind. If you work with a team, I will tag things, fix it. So as I notice things that are broken or out of date or Just subject to that entropic descent of just kind of starting to fall apart. We'll just tag it, fix it, and then I haven't been so good about this lately with writing and launching the book, but creating, like, a fix it sprint either once a quarter or twice a year where we just two days fix all the little stuff. The same thing in a house that you just don't really want to focus on every single day.

That's really smart. I think I should hire you to fix it.

Hashtag fix it. Yep. Just tag me, call Jenny. Hashtag fix it.

I may be guilty of that as an entrepreneur, but it's sort of like, all right, I don't ask how can we do it? I ask who can do it with the assumption that they'll automate it because they're strategically lazy. Like, why would I do the same thing every day? That's boring. I'll automate it, and then I'll spend my time learning how to automate other stuff and learning and developing and figuring out something more valuable to do and someone who's just happy to sit there and be like, every day. My job is to insert a hashtag here that could have been automated. Like, maybe you're not a good fit.

I know. And then what's interesting is that, you know, because I started blogging in 2005, taught myself how to code websites from scratch in a text file just for the fun of it. But there's now software and tools that exist now that didn't even exist a year ago or two years ago. So it's also interesting to try to keep up with. Oh, a person used to have to do this, but now it's automated. Even transcription is a good example. You probably remember a time when you would just pay a dollar a minute, and that's how you get a transcript for something like this podcast. Now there's software called descript, where you throw in the audio file, and within two minutes, it can detect speakers. It can transcribe the audio pretty well, and they have a find and replace for filler words that within two minutes, you just do find and replace. It might find 100 ums and remove them from the audio itself, not just the written transcript. So something like that is incredible. What's possible now that just. I mean, that's what's so exciting about tech and innovation, but that sometimes people in their role at the company get used to doing something and they don't even realize that software has evolved or that there's now new services. SaaS of course is such a growing industry to do that kind of stuff.

It's funny. Chris is my technical engineer for the show and he's done audiobook sound engineering. Because, guys, I actually think it matters that the show sounds really good. So you'll want to keep listening and it just doesn't subtle itch to hear it. And so I invest a lot in audio. And he's hearing this right now and he's going, this means I don't have to do my job. And I'll just sit here and Dave's gonna pay me and I'll, like, do some videos instead for him. And so there you go, Chris, we just did your job for you, so let's find something more fun to do. Just kidding.

Well, Chris is. Chris is amazing. I can vouch for Chris. What's interesting is it would get Chris out of the weeds of having to listen for every single. He could just do a find and replace and make us sound way more brilliant than we even are. And so Chris can do what Chris is uniquely skilled and talented to do. So I like this exercise. I tell my team, I don't want you to hate your work. I don't want you to feel drained and bored by your job. And if you do tell me, I don't take it personally. I think of it as a systems problem. So how can we work together to automate or get this off your plate or subcontract, whatever. But I also think I call it the Fiji Test. I want every single person on the team to try to make themselves replaceable every day. And the reason I call it the Fiji test is because I kept envisioning what would happen if I got hit by a bus. And that was just so grim that I decided what would happen if I got whisked to Fiji for three weeks with no devices and no ability to even tell my team, could somebody step in? Could the business stay afloat? Could it be okay? And not just me, the owner, can anyone on my team get whisked to Fiji and we step in, or someone outside of the business who knows nothing about what we do can step in and fill in for them. And I think that just helps with engagement, with creative thinking, with onboarding, and with turnover, which is inevitable. Someone's going to leave and you don't want them to leave with all your best IP about how to run the business with them.

It makes a lot of sense. I run that question myself. What happens if I get hit by a bus? And I know that the bus is going to wrap itself around me and just kind of bifurcate into two and I'll just keep walking. But I know that's not the case for everyone. So we do that regularly with my senior leaders. It's like, okay, are there people in the company where we would die as a company if we didn't? And in that case, maybe we need to have a second doing that role because they're mission critical. And it turns out there aren't that many mission critical roles in companies. A lot of times we think there are, but there aren't. And so if automation increases quality of life for employees, that's the way to do it. And you talk in your book about how time is not money, time is a life force. Tell me why you think it's life force, because I don't know if I agree with you, but I want to hear your point of view.

Yeah, well, I'd love to hear your take on this. Benjamin Franklin is the originator of that line, time is money. And it's so perfectly capitalist because, well, time is money, so we all need to work. And here in America, I know you're in Canada, but in the, maybe North America, but particularly the us we're kind of obsessed with work and work defining us. Yeah. And like it's who we are, it's what we do, it's what we talk about. And I love my work, so there's that. But money is. Well, it depends how you think about money. We have tremendous inequality in society, but on some level you can generate more money. And money is asymmetric. You can have hockey stick growth. You can usually, especially someone like you, Dave, and your listeners can figure out how to make more money. And time is just so different. So time is not money. Money is infinite. On some level, money can be abundant. Money can be a creative thought exercise. Money can be problem solving. It is figureoutable. But time isn't time. We are. I mean, some would say time is nonlinear, but time is ticking and it's finite. It's not necessarily a renewable resource. Energy is renewable within the time that we have. So the reason I say time is not money, time is life force, is that I think time is far more precious than money and that we should be far more considerate with how we're spending our time, who we want to spend it with, how present we are, when we are choosing our activities and the people that we're with. And so yeah, I think just time is way more precious than money. Time is life force. Time is, you know, if we really want to get existential with it. So I'm curious to hear your take.

Well, there's kind of two aspects to it, but the biggest one is that in my mind the energy that you produce and the energy that you have is life force. Because if you're out of energy, and as a former 300 pound guy with brain fog, if I had free time, it was for sleeping and it wasn't valuable time because I didn't have the energy to use the time. So if you have enough energy, you can make more time and you can make more money. But if you don't have energy, and if you don't have energy, you'll spend all your money to get it back, which is pretty much what I did. So you got to have the energy and then you've got to have freedom and space, which involves time. Right. And I used to believe that money equals freedom. So I'm 26 years old, I make $6 million, I'm like, woohoo. And I was busier than ever and I didn't increase my happiness really or my freedom, but I could buy cool sunglasses. And then I lost the $6 million and I was equally unhappy as I was when I had it. I'm like, money isn't it? But time is so precious and I just never took time off because I was too busy working to have money, to have freedom. And it seems like a lot of people are doing that now. The gig economy and you know, drive for Uber after you finish your job and you gotta get ahead. What do you say about time management if you're still building your career?

Yeah, it's, and I, I, it's so powerful to hear your story as you were telling it. I mean, of course, I think a lot of us could say that at least money can solve some problems. I mean, it doesn't give you everything, but there's a lot that money can do and not once you get your basic needs met. Money can do a lot of good. You can support family members who need it, you can support people in the community and society. You can build things. I mean, money is really helpful to have. As you said, if you have money and no energy and no life force, you're going to be miserable. So sometimes I think we pursue money or we pursue career success and accolades and we, you know, startup companies pursue venture funding and then it becomes this devil's bargain in a way of all of a sudden it's not the creative building process that they love. The money has corrupted something essential in the process. Not always, but that it can. And so I just want us to ask the question, what if money isn't everything? And how. I actually don't think that money and time have to be opposed to each other in a zero sum way. So I'm always asking. You know, you mentioned I worked at Google and I was so afraid to leave. I was just so afraid to walk away from the six figure salary in my mid-20s. And also the cachet of Google, the big fancy brand. I was worried no one would want to be my friend anymore if I left. Because I used to host authors to come speak at Google.

There's always Facebook, which is like MySpace 2.0 at this point, but maybe they would have been your friend, right?

Oh, God. Well, so I started to ask, instead of what if I go broke? I started to ask how can I earn twice as much in half the time?

There you go.

And then later I tacked on with joy and ease, because I realized twice as much in half the time, still wasn't it with joy and ease. And then later, while serving the highest good. So I'm asking not should I choose money or time? And by the way, I think autonomy, you mentioned that as energy, energy is so crucial, but also autonomy, because I think we want, at some level, human beings. This is why I loved your episode on freedom. We want to feel a sense of autonomy, just that we can choose, that we have enough money, we have our basic needs met, but autonomy over our time, autonomy over how we spend our time. And so that's what I'm always asking, almost as a creative inquiry, is how can I generate abundant time, money and energy, or what can I do that's at that intersection of revenue, ease and joy. And then I feel that's where the really interesting ideas happen.

My friend Joe Polish runs a genius network and I've been a member for a long time. And he teaches a thing called elf. Easy, lucrative and fun. And if it's not that, maybe it's not what you want to be doing with the majority of your time. And people say, yeah, Dave, you know, you're some kind of privileged guy. Guys, I put auto parts in boxes for five years to help pay for my college. I also sold the first thing ever sold over the Internet to try and not put auto parts in boxes. And I scooped ice cream at Baskin Robbins. So those are all zero autonomy, intellectually boring, horrific jobs. So I'm highly motivated to not do that. Right. But at the same time, everyone, at every level, if that's your goal, I've got to make what I do at work, even if it's not intellectually challenging because you didn't want it to be, but at least you have an element of fun in it and some degree of flexibility, whether it's after you get off work or with what you do during work. But how realistic is that? I mean, half the people in the United States right now have negative net worth. Literally, if they paid off what they owe, they have less than zero. How do you go from there to, I'm having fun when I work. Oh, and I have enough.

Yeah. I mean, it's so tough, and it can be so despairing. There's an incredible book called Scarcity on the way that our brain changes when we do have scarcity. That actually, when we don't have enough resources, it gives us a sort of tunnel vision. And it actually is harder to think creatively and have more energy. And a lot of our energy is getting sapped by stress. So, I mean, on a. On a. I was so lucky, like, relatively speaking, with the pandemic, but it did wipe out 80% of my income in two weeks for two years out into the future. And I could feel that sense of narrowing of that tunnel vision of stress. And at that point, it's no longer, oh, yeah, like, what should I do for fun? It's what do you do when your back is up against the wall? I do think that we can expand our definition of fun and easy. What do these things mean? Yeah, it's not just for privileged people that have already, quote, made it. What I find so fascinating is what one person thinks is fun, another person is just. It's their nightmare. And then my dad was used to bag groceries. He also used to be a songwriter, still is. And he has a song called Baggin Groceries for the FBI. But that when he was bagging groceries, he would think about Zorba the Greek. And he would try. And he was in the army, and he would be cutting potatoes or on patrol in the military. And he just said that he always tried to find the joy in what he was doing, whether it was bagging groceries or cutting potatoes. And that for his upbringing. His upbringing was so chaotic that he said every day since he turned 18 and was out of the house, didn't matter if it was basic training in the army, every day felt like heaven, like a vacation. But I just think looking at the work that we find fun that comes easily to us, truly might be something other people dread. But then we do it with so much less friction and so much more flow. So that's how I think of fun is like, what puts you in the zone where you actually do your best work that does create disproportionate value in the world that will help you climb out of that hole where you feel despair because you don't have anything and you need to bounce back like you've done.

I like that you talk about friction versus flow. One of the design ethics behind what I do, all the advice that I give, it's like, what's the least friction? Because we can tell you, oh, every morning, here's a list of 72 things you can do to be a perfect biohacker. And no one's going to do it because the friction's too high. And even at upgrade labs on my franchise, okay, how do I make it so it doesn't suck to come in and you get so much done that the equation saying, I had to drive there, but once I got there, I just did everything and I never sweated and I got measurable, quantifiable results. Lowest friction experience possible is my goal because I hate friction. I think everyone does. And when there's no friction, it is flow. What is your specific process, though? And you read about it in the book. I've gotten that far through it. You just gave me your book, like, yesterday.

I'm so impressed.

But you talk about what to do when there's too much friction. What's your process, your recipe for that?

Yeah. Well, here we are geeking out about systems and automation and even for you, biohacking. And I think a question a lot of people have is, where should I start? Or I'm so overwhelmed, there's so much to do. Or I'm not a systems thinker, or this stuff makes me cringe. You know, whatever someone's thinking. And so the primary diagnostic that I look at is, where are you in friction? And where are you in flow? And we know friction, whether it's friction about your diet, friction with your energy. Friction is tension. You feel drained, dread, you're procrastinating. Things just feel so much harder than they need to be. And then flow is that state of effortlessness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes it as almost ecstatic bliss. Time is passing and you don't even realize it. And so much of what you do. I know Dave is helping us find a flow state and a flow state with our entire being and our entire mind, body, spirit, spirit system. And we know. And research shows. McKinsey Research, research shows that executives are five times more productive when they're in a flow state. And I think, I think we all have a visceral experience of that. So if you just notice and you know you're only as strong as your weakest link, the these kind of things that sound cliche, but it's true. If you look at where in your life, whether it's work, it's at home, it's with health and fitness, where is there the most friction that I think is the biggest opportunity to move toward flow. So I say look for a friction area. Maybe you want to start really small. And then in the book I talk about the free time framework. So align, design, assign that first you want to align that area or realign it. What is important to you? What values does it connect to? What strengths can you leverage? Is your energy aligned? Sometimes we are doing things as legacy that we shouldn't be doing anymore. And you know, I quote this other author in the book. He says, are you ordering off yesterday's menu? Which I just think is so powerful. Like where in our lives are we just ordering off of yesterday's menu? We're not even seeing what's right in front of us today. So then only once you've aligned it with your energy and who you are, which I think a lot of systems and optimizations books, a lot of them miss, especially in the business realm, is always about optimizing, but it's not actually saying does this person align with your energy and your vision and your goals. And so then design is kind of the optimization and assign is on purpose. As you said at the start. How can we get this off our plate? Who can help step in at that point?

All right, I'm going to go back to earlier in my career. So I used to put all of my energy into the things that were highest friction for me because I didn't want to be weak at any area. And I realized after some epiphanies that the things I suck at are hardest for me. So I had to put all my energy into those. So I didn't know about your process because I could have aligned better there for like, do the stuff you're good at and then design. Okay, what do I want the future state to look like? You know, what's it going to do for others, et cetera. But then you talk about assign and under your assign thing, you have three things you assign. What are those three things?

Well, assign, figure out who, what, when, who will do what by when. And also you can assign to technology, so you can assign figuring out the weather to Alexa. I mean, that's a really tiny example. But the reason I have a sign as part of the framework is that I think a lot of us resist. So I talk about the four horsemen of the business. Ambition, apocalypse, money, power, and fame. We know can be hungry ghosts. We're aware. But I think that a lot of business owners, the fourth vice is control, and we want to keep control and micromanage or, oh, I can do it faster myself. So the reason there's a whole part of the framework on assign is to challenge all of us to say, once we design a process and we design the ideal outcomes and the ideal impact, and that vision is crystal clear. Now the challenge is how can you continually double how much you delegate, what is edgy for you to get rid of? And if it's on the home front, it could be as simple as somebody to come clean the house. But in terms of work, and I know if you're at the entry level, you have probably less ability to delegate than somebody who's further along in their career. But. But it's still a good thought exercise because again, you can delegate to technology, you can delegate to a system, to a process. But to think about, what if it wasn't just me here? And because that's not really sustainable. And that's where we do become the bottleneck. And the single point of failure is when we hoard and we keep too much on our plate. And that is what leads to burnout.

When I give talks to young entrepreneurs, I literally will say, all right, poll in the room, how many people wash their own socks and, like, half the hands go up. And like, you, you're terrible entrepreneurs. And you just stop right now. Because I promise you that if you ask for help washing your socks and doing your laundry, you can take that hour that you saved and do something with your business. And if you can't make more from your business than it takes to pay someone to wash your socks, then you either started your business yesterday or it's not working. And that's just a very simple example of assigning. But talk to me about to do lists. Do you organize your life by lists?

I do. I do have lists. I mean, so I was telling you before we record, I run my entire business on notion. It's this incredible software that's almost overwhelming for how customizable it is. It's almost no code software where you can create an entire intranet for your business or your mind and externalize your mind. Get it. I think I take a page out of David Allen's book is that your mind is for having ideas, not holding them. So I do like to have to dos. I do them in a Moleskine notebook as well. So I'm not only digital. I just had a podcast episode, a listener submission. Liron, she lives in Israel. She has a mess page. So I like that too. I like that outside of a neatly ordered to do list, I also like the idea and have a bunch of these of just mess pages or an inbox where all the ideas, all the little tasks go and then later you can just in a big batch kind of sort and filter them. So yeah, I have a little bit of everything to answer your question. How about you?

Well, I went through about four years of getting things done, which is David Allen's organization framework. And I realized in my heart, I think David Allen needs some trauma therapy because the system is based on someone who is so afraid of missing something that he's willing to spend an inordinate amount of time putting everything in a list, everything in a filing cabinet, filing cabinets up to the ceiling, folders all over my email. And one day I said, I'm spending half my time making sure that I don't miss anything. What if I just realized that my email had a search function and I never filed a thing again? And that's what I do today. And when I have lists, they create chronic stress. So what I do now is I am time based. If I'm deciding to do something, I open my calendar and then I say, this is when I'm going to do it. Or I open my email or a messaging system, whatever, and I say, hey, team member, please do this. And there is no list. And it creates a huge amount of freedom because it's cognitive freedom. It's not just free time. It's I don't have these like stacks of honeydew lists. And everyone knows if you have a list, the bottom half of the list is never going to get done. And most people put their health in the bottom of their list. It's on. Yeah, I should exercise. Like, yeah, when are you going to do it? Put it on your calendar. Right. And better yet, have an accountability partner for it. So I completely abolish lists and I learned I might miss something. And I just said, I'm going to do my own trauma work with neurofeedback around fomo. Yeah, I might miss something. I'm not even going to name the exceptionally top rapper in the world whose people reached out and said he wants to do a diet book with you. And I didn't see it for like three months. Oops. Right. But it's okay, right? It happens. And I think Tim Ferriss was really good at that too. He finally said, you know, I'm not going to answer my emails because there's too many. So I have help answering my emails. I do my best. Sometimes I answer texts, sometimes I don't. But everyone else I know is like that too, but they feel guilty.

Oh, the guilt. The micro guilt, yes. Well, what I, what I'm hearing you describe is more of a flowing relationship to your work, that you're not as rigid and following all these rules and that. That in fact had a diminishing return of your time and attention and it actually created more stress. So I love how your working is more flowing with your time and your calendar and that you're, you're. In a way, you reached a point where you trust yourself to know what's important. I think sometimes writing something down is helpful if it's keeping you up at night and you just gotta get it out of your head. But, like, similar to what you just described, I stopped having goals. Like, and I know that's kind of shocking to say to a biohacking, you know, the father of biohacking. My life became so much happier when I dropped a lot of my professional and business goals. And the crazy thing is that amazing things still continued happening. So, like, when my last book, Pivot, came out in 2016, I said I was going to market it with serendipity and magic, and I didn't really set goals. I mean, I have a goal with free time to free 50 million hours. Like, I want the book and the podcast to reach as many people. I just envisioned setting 50 million hours free. So that's like a big mission.

Isn't that just your ego?

I guess so. I kind of get happy thinking about, like, okay, okay, what's possible in the world if I helped you, Dave, free up five hours a week? Like, oh, my God, you're going to solve nuclear physics. Like some. I don't know. You're going to.

Look how excited you are. I totally called you out on an ego thing and you're, like, laughing and getting more excited. Like, you have weird wiring in there. That's awesome. By the way, I'm complimenting you and, like, look at you. But I like what you're saying. It feels good. Wow. I'm the same way. Like, I don't have a set number of pounds. I want people to lose, but I know it's way more than a million. And I just. Right, you know, I know that I'm never going to know for sure. And I started my whole blog with if 5 people read this and don't go through all the shit that I went through. I have the ROI on the thousands of hours of work it's paid for. It's done.

Yes. And I think, I do think that it's less about my ego. Like, oh, I want Jenny Blake. I mean, every. Don't get me wrong, I'll come to a conference. You mentioned we met at Head. And it's like, sometimes I'll have imposter syndrome. Or I'll think, well, if I sell a million books, then people want to talk to me instead of the other way around.

I noticed you didn't. You didn't really make the cut for dinner. I thought you were like the charity.

I know, I snuck in. I was the seat filler. I was the last minute seat filler. And the thing is, sometimes I'll feel bad that, oh, let's say, Dave, I met you in the elevator and I go, I wish I had something to offer you. You know, like, you've been so generous sharing your platform in this podcast with me. And so sometimes the ego, I will say the ego part of it is I just do want to reach a level where I can do what you do for so many other people.

So the not giving back enough kind of syndrome.

The other. Well, no, the other thing I'll say on the. Just real quick, on the goalless thing. I didn't come to this conference saying, like, oh, I have this goal to meet J or like to do xyz.

Anyway, there's a lot bigger people there.

I mean, no, I'd rather. I'll take you. Meeting you 10 to 10 over. 10 over meeting Bill Gates.

Well, thank you.

But it's like, I don't. I didn't need to set a goal in order for something awesome to happen. And I just think that there's like so much obsession in the business world of goal setting. And that's great. And some people do really well with it. And I did all kinds of goal setting in my early 20s and it definitely all transpired and then some. But I also think that life can be so surprising and delightful and I like the element of surprise. I guess in serendipity.

My primary goal these days is just to use my time for the highest good. And that's it. Right. And I don't have to be the person who defines highest good. I'm not saying who is defining it. But whatever it is, when I allow, which is that kind of friction versus flow, when you have allowing, it works. And you talked about stuff that keeps you up at night. I'll just say it. If anything keeps you up at night, you haven't done enough work on yourself. There aren't things that keep me up at night that you go to sleep. Right. And if there's something in there that's just your body trying to keep you alive from some threat, that's not a real threat. So your lens on reality needs an upgrade. And that's why one of my companies does a lot of work on cognitive stuff and eeg, because you can figure that stuff out. So how many nights per week do you have something that keeps you up with all the systems you have in place?

I don't have too many, I think just.

I wouldn't predict it. You seem pretty chill, right?

Yeah, I mean, sometimes I'll get. I also run my business with a lot of intuition. So sometimes people say, oh, you need to. It's the data. Data is everything. And only look at the data. But I actually think what is intuition is actually a thousand or a million data points that is just operating in our subconscious. Sometimes my intuition will kick in and I will lose sleep over a decision I need to make. Like. Or red flags that I suddenly have almost an aha moment right before my head hits the pillow or I fall asleep where I go, oh, I need to do something about that. Or oh, I start. It's that pattern recognition of I might need to back out of this group I just joined or shift this relationship or drop this client or something that might have certain consequences but that I get that instinct. So those are the kinds of things that would kind of keep me up or jolt me awake. It's more of like an insider intuitive hit. Like, ooh, I gotta take action on this.

Got it. I do get some of those. I wouldn't say they keep me awake, but sometimes. Oh yeah, I just, you know, dreamed a solution to the problem. I'm gonna write it down.

That's the best. If you're like, oh, thank you. Mind, you just worked in my dreams. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Thanks for doing the work for me. I automated that, right? Yes, you do. Something else though, that seems kind of unachievable. Two hour wind up and a two hour wind down on either end of your day. How does that work?

See, the. My logic here is that for those of us who are in creative or leadership roles or you run your own business. I run A very tiny business that our brain and our energy is so vital to everything else going well. So yeah, my two hour windup is coffee bulletproof, of course. And now it's going to be danger now I'm so happy that I had got to try that here. But yeah, I read, I feed my mind in the morning. I love to read nonfiction, I love to kind of warm up my mind. And so coffee, reading. And then I don't check email. I certainly don't check first when I wake up. I don't even check until closer to 10 or 11am Because I don't want to know that time is for me and that's when I'm at my creative best. So I want to work on my biggest projects and problems at that time. And then I work five very focused hours. So I'll work from 10 to 2 or 11 to 3. And I don't take breaks, I don't go on social media, I don't procrastinate in that window. I just get it done by three. My brain is mush as one of my clients said to me. I don't even know my own name. So it's kind of pointless for me to work after 3pm so yeah, I will exercise, I'll do a peloton ride or yoga or take my dog out for a walk and then I'll make dinner and then I spend time with my husband. So everything that happens after 3pm is very important to me in my life. And there I think I could work twice as much as I do and be good at email. But instead I choose to be bad at email and unresponsive and spend that time with the things that really do nourish me.

It's, it's interesting. I had more of that until I had kids and then there was like a seven or eight year period, like two hours of free time, whatever. And what I ended up is I don't do meetings before 10 and I don't check messages until right before then if I even if maybe I check them during my first meeting, depending on the meeting. And then I, I stopped my work day around 5:30 because I want to have an early dinner because that makes you sleep better so then you have more energy the next day. And then after that it's you know, family time, relationship time and some reading or whatever. But I found that injecting kids subtracted huge amounts of time. And I'm guessing you don't have kids?

No. And 100% the parents that I know, especially with young children Especially those who just navigated these last few years of homeschooling. Oh, it's a completely different relationship to time, energy, and attention. It sounds like it's a gauntlet.

What that means for parents, though, is that automation is ten times more important.

Yeah. And delegation. Yeah. Getting help. And I don't have to tell you that because you've lived it. You. I mean, I'm curious, Dave. I mean, you've probably talked about this a lot, but sometimes I think when you're doing all that and you're raising kids. Yeah. It's no longer just about time optimization and freedom. You have this mission, you're raising two tiny humans, and it's almost like some of the other things go into survival mode a little bit. I don't know. It just seems like a phase of life that is so intense and almost no one can totally prepare you for it.

People all tried to warn me. And when my first child was born, I'm like, I get six weeks of paternity leave. I'll take a consulting gig during that because that's so much free time. And I just didn't understand the energy drain and the lack of sleep and all that. And I felt bad. I called the guy up. I'm like, yeah, I know. I was going to design your fundraising deck for your data center power management company, but I'm not going to do it. I simply don't have the mental abilities right now. It was crazy, but now I realize that it's interrupted time. The younger they are, the more interruptions there are. So you think you have 10 minutes, but you really had six minutes. And that means, well, if you don't automate, you don't get the little things out of the way, they will eat you alive. And so it drives efficiency or it drives chaos. So you have to become more effective as a human being. So I'm more conscious of a lot of things because it's like going to boot camp. There's stress conditioning that happens, and that's part of being a parent. Especially if you're in a house where both parents work, which is the norm these days. It's like, man, you come home, did you want to pick up the toilet paper? Did you want to automate it? And the answer was, spend a little time automating, even if it's midnight time when you're tired, because you know you're going to get that time back later. The other thing that you kind of touch on in the book is quality time. And as a parent, like, okay, I could Measure the amount of hours I spend with the kids. But if it's, you know, making them do their chores, it's actually not really good time. So what I did is I automated making them do their chores with shock collars. And then when. Okay, but when that time is done, it's like, how much time do we have where I'm spending one on one time with one of my kids and oh, let's schedule on a calendar where it's a dinner. So it turns out that I've benefited from scheduling quality time, not just with kids, but quality time for myself. Oh, I'm going to plan ahead. I'm going to get a massage on this day or I'm going to do whatever it is. I'm going to plan this biohack at this time because otherwise something else will always eat it up. So how do you go about protecting your free time from just being swallowed by life?

Oh, yeah, I know. And apps and like our phones are designed to be like slot machines in our pocket. It was Nur Ayal, by the way, who in his book on Indistractable. Maybe you've had him on the show.

He's been on the show.

Yeah, yeah. He talked about how he and his kid have this little wish, like suggestion bucket that they put ideas in a jar of what they could do together and then when it's time for their quality time, they pick something out of the hat, basically. I think that's such a great idea of just having this little wishing jar where you have all that, those kind of activities. I also hear a lot of parents say they become incredibly discerning. They're like, I didn't know what prioritization was before I had kids. And then they just get absolutely unapologetic about saying no. And I'm curious, I mean, I'd be curious maybe for the next part of the conversation, but your relationship to saying no, because it's an interesting paradox of success, is that the more success that you have and the more things are working and the more recognition, actually, the more overwhelmed you could get and the more that the systems that might have worked at the previous level are going to break once you cross that next threshold of awareness and attention and success. And so I think it's interesting as well, looking at people who have to continually transcend send their approach. Because it's almost like the punishment for success is now you're gonna have even more good opportunities and you can't possibly do them all. And the FOMO is going to be 10x what it was prior. So I think protecting your time is also knowing, you know, another F for you is focus. So I think freedom. Yes. And focus. I think so many of us desperately crave focus. And focus time, what Cal Newport calls deep work. And so for me, when it comes to protecting my time, I like to know what am I focused on? And I said, I don't have goals, but I'll have one big focus, like write the book or launch the podcast that comes above so many other things. Not my health and not my relationships, at least the close ones. And I do think that there is a process of being very disciplined and trying to drop the guilt around saying no to everything else.

There's a book called the Road Less Stupid.

Yeah. It's so good.

Yeah. Who's the author?

It's Keith Cunningham, I think.

Thank you. It's Keith Cunningham. I've met him, and I'm like, what's his name? What's his name? And he's been a chairman and a founder of multiple companies, and it's like an hour a day. He has a special chair that says Thinking Chair. He's like, I just make sure I have a special notebook. And that's where my thinking works. Kind of like Cal Newport's deep work. I don't know that I'm that disciplined on that, but I do have times, usually on airplanes or something, where I got nothing else. I'm just going to think for a little while and good stuff happens. So there's something to be said for.