Solving Huge Problems In Less Time w/ Jake Knapp

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Today'S cool fact of the day is that Einstein said that if he had one hour to save the world, he'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. And in the journal Science, researchers came to the conclusion that thinking things through exaggerates the importance of different facets of your decisions and actually harms your judgment. So to put that really clearly, simple decisions don't get improved by conscious thought. Complex decisions are not. Wait, I said that backwards.

Wait.

To put that concisely and clearly, simple decisions are improved by conscious thought, but complex decisions are not improved by conscious thought. And that is not what you would necessarily expect. But I found that to be the case throughout my career as well.

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Today's guest is none other than Jake Knapp. He's a writer and design partner at Google Ventures. He's also a former Googler where he helped to create a few things you might have heard of. Things like Google Hangouts. And he supported a bunch of startups with product design so started looking at the ideas and problem testing process to develop a a well known and efficient process that's now called Sprints. He's conducted sprints for a hundred startups including companies like Nest, Slack, 23andMe and then he wrote a New York Times best selling book about the process along with his other Google Ventures partners Braden Kowitz and John Zyratsky. It's called how to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. And the reason that Jake's on the show for you today is that a lot of us have problems. Big Problems in our lives, in our careers, and sometimes the problems feel insurmountable. I know I've dealt with this many, many times. You feel like it's overwhelming. This is a chance for you to learn a technique that you can apply not just in a business setting, but to yourself, to really, really push yourself and to maybe get huge results in a small amount of time. And as a longtime listener to Bulletproof Radio, you know, that's really what I'm all about. Same thing happens biologically, same thing happens in your life. You basically want to figure out, how do you cut a lot of the pain and stress and struggle out so you can make it easier. That's why Jake's on the show. And, Jake, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

All right, we got to start out with the most important things first. You have claimed publicly multiple times to be the tallest designer on the planet. Is this true? How tall are you, man?

I claim to be among the tallest because the Dutch have a lot of designers and they're tall people. So I'm sure I'm not the tallest, but I am six, seven and a half, and that's good. In most company, that's usually the tallest.

Six, seven and a half. You've got me, I'm six, four. And guys like you, I gotta tell you, not a lot of things piss me off. I do this 40 years Zen meditation thing, and you know what I'm talking about here. Because everyone's shorter than you, so you don't really notice how tall people are. At least I don't. Whether you're five, four, or six feet, you're all below. And when I have to look up just to look at meet someone in the eye, it's so weird, man, because I never do. So when I'm hanging out standing next to you, I'm going to be like, this feels so weird what's going on here. I feel like something's wrong with my center of gravity or something.

Right. It's that weird feeling because for you and I, that happens once out of 10,000 times. We run into somebody and you look up and you just think like, oh, my gosh, my whole worldview is tilted. Yeah. So I apologize right off the bat. Apologize for edging, you edging out there.

I apologize to everyone else that I've done it too, as well. So sorry we're not tall on purpose. And every time you're sitting in economy looking comfortable, we look at you with insane jealousy. We'll just put it that way. All right? What's a sprint?

A sprint is a chance for a team to solve a big problem that they're working on. This could be a team at a business. It could be a team anywhere and sometimes even an individual. But the idea is that you clear a week, you get the team together, you run a specific step by step process, and by the end of the week, you've got a realistic prototype of your solution. And on Friday, you're testing it with your customers or you're testing it in the real world in some way. So you've got data, and so it forces people to move quickly, and it gives you a lot of tools to do that in a fast and efficient manner. But what we've seen is it really helps people like you were talking at the beginning about those problems that are just hard to get started on, hard to get moving on. It gives you a way to a recipe to start.

So I'm going to push you in this interview to think about customers, as we'll call them, stakeholders. Some of the early work that led up to Bulletproof. I was in business school at Wharton, and one of my professors who's been a guest on the show, his name is Stu, and he wrote a book about this. And I just blanked on its name, of course, because I hadn't thought of going here with you. It'll come to me. Anyhow, what he wrote about, his name was Stu Friedman, and he wrote about this idea that you have customers or stakeholders for different domains of your life, and that one of the things that was missing is that we're putting a huge amount of effort into some things and getting very little results. So he's like, what if you measure the effort and results you get with your friends and with your family, with your health, with your career, with everything else, and just realize, well, I'm spending 80% of my time where I hate everything, so maybe I could stop. The attractiveness to me of Sprint for everyone listening, not just entrepreneurs and business people, is that your customers may be your family, your customers may be the community that you serve in some way through your volunteer activities. So there's a way to take your Sprint process and use it with different sets of customers, even if they're not necessarily the ones writing, writing a check for you. So I'm going to keep asking you questions like, how do I apply this to a situation that might not necessarily be a business? And see what you think about it.

You cool with that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The big idea is to get real at the end of the week, you know, not to just sit off in a corner and think philosophically with, you know, on your own or with your team about what might be the right solution or what might be the right course of action, but to put it to the test and show it to people and get their honest reaction. If you want an honest reaction, you have to make something realistic. And that's, that's where the sprint gets you.

That is beautiful. The name of the book, by the way. It just came to me and I did not Google. You guys saw me the whole time. It was total leadership. I was just waiting for my aniracetam smart drug to kick in there. At the end of Stu's process, which takes more than that amount of time, you go to each of your customers and ask them for their feedback and all that. I just see that this might apply to people who maybe don't think it applies to them. So if you're listening right now going, oh, this is a business episode. No, this is how do I solve complex problems episode. And it may work in business, but you may find it works elsewhere. So walk me through the sprint process. What do you do on the first day of this five day process?

Yeah, sure. So you've got, first of all, you've got your team together and it's, we advise. Seven is a perfect number of people to have involved in a sprint if you're in a company, but you can do it quite well with fewer. And the first thing you do on Monday is to. You're sharing information and making a map of the problem. So you can imagine this for all kinds of problems in business and outside of it. But there's some kind of a list on the left of the actors, so all the people who are involved in this problem. So to give you a concrete example, I'll tell you the story of a hotel delivery robot. It's a company called Savioke who we invested in, they make a hotel delivery robot. They wanted to test the idea of giving the robot a personality before they launched. And if they launched, the robot with a personality and people hated would be devastating for a new startup. People were frustrated or aggravated with the robot, thought it was annoying. So they really wanted to test it in this low stakes but fast way. So on Monday, the map includes all the people who work in the hotel, the guests, and then as the map goes across the board, it's all the spots where a guest might encounter the robot, not suspecting that there's going to be a robot and encounter that personality. And then you choose One spot on that map that you're going to focus on. In the sprint, you come up with a lot of questions, all the things you think might go wrong. So then to go really quickly through the other days, on Tuesday you're going to see sketch solutions. Every person on the team sketches their own solution for that one spot on the map.

Like separately from each other?

Separately? Yeah, it's not, it's not a group brainstorm. We can dive into that later if you want. But I'm a big, a big hater on group brainstorms. After a lot of bad experiences with them myself and then with those individual. And actually there are anonymous solutions that have come from each person. On Wednesday, we've got a sort of a really detailed process to come up with a decision. At the top of the show, you talked about how a lot of times you can make a decision really fast, you can make a really good decision. And we basically want to give what we call the decider on the team all the information that she needs to make a great decision really fast. So we make that decision, then we put together a quick plan and on Thursday we're building a prototype. We're trying to make a realistic prototype.

On day one, you choose the decider.

Well, you usually know the decider going in. So sometimes in rare occasions you're like, okay, who should decide? Maybe a startup that's really early on, hasn't really formalized it, but in most cases, you know, it's about. Yeah, sometimes people have like, it's a good conversation to have for sure. Because sometimes it's a little ambiguous.

In any decision, even if you're talking about, you know, a family decision, if you don't know who owns the ultimate decision, and by the way, the answer isn't we. Yeah, someone does. And you know, even if you have two parents, you know, you guys may decide that you're going to have agreement, but one of you is ultimately going to make the decision, the other one's going to agree with that decision. You might as well know who that's going to be ahead of Time.

Time. It's very important. After doing this a hundred times, it kind of happens like second nature for me. Now I have kids. I have a 13 year old and a 5 year old son. There are situations in my life and I would say, okay, look, Luke, that's our older son, you're the decision maker on this. Once you have the information, you make the call, but it's always there. Things work easier when you know who makes a decision. Everybody Feels better. So that happens on Wednesday. Then we make the plan for the prototype, and then on Thursday we're building the prototype. So we just have eight hours to make a prototype.

The prototyping, all of you get together and you work and you work on the number one idea from day three on the prototype.

Sometimes there. So we usually go for two or three ideas.

You take the top three or two.

Yeah, the top three. Yeah. And what you're doing sometimes is combining those into one prototype. So in the example of the robot personality, the ideas that Savioke chose, where the CEO chose were face for the robot, which is actually more controversial than you'd think, because as soon as you put a face on a robot, people want to talk to it and the robot can't talk back.

So what does the face look like? Like, what race should the face be like? That's a real question, right?

It's a big deal. Yeah. And one of the ideas was, should the robot be able to, like, play games like Follow the Leader? That was another idea that he chose to test out. And another idea was the robot do a dance at the end after the delivery. So that was, you know, that slate of three ideas could fit together into one prototype. But sometimes we'll have competing prototypes. So one of the stories that we tell in the book is about Slack. You mentioned Slack a minute ago, and in this sprint that they ran that we talk about, they were testing different ways to explain Slack to customers on their website when people signed up and they had two totally different ideas and they just prototyped both of them in one day. And then on Friday, they could test two totally different, you know, one with a fake brand name, even versions of the. Of the product. So then on Friday, you're going to run the test.

All right, and now what does the test look like on Friday?

So the test is with five customers, but one at a time, not all in the room at the same time. So another thing on my list of things I hate, along with group brainstorms, is our focus groups. So focus groups is often what people think when they say, we're going to go talk to customers. And they really often bring out the worst of group dynamics and group things. What we want to do is show people a prototype in a way that it seems realistic to them and they just react to it. And the team is watching over video and gets to watch customers just react and draw their own interpretation about what it means. So again, in the case of the robot, that meant bringing people into a hotel room and asking them to call and ask for a toothbrush to be delivered. And then when that delivery came to the door and they opened the door, it was a robot. And we could see on a drop cam that was stuck in the hallway how they reacted. So if you do five of those tests actually in a day, you'll get a really good preliminary set of data.

All right, that makes good sense. I remember my first time really digging with focus groups. I was head of strategy for the virtualization group at a company called Citrix, and we were looking at some remote virtual desktop things. This is going back 10 years or something, where virtual desktops still were a word. And we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and offered people, whatever, a gift card to Starbucks or something. And we got this room full of 10 IT executives. And I think three of the guys were there just for the Starbucks gift card. So what do you use your technologies for? And they're like, management and stuff. They had no idea what stuff did, but they got their Starbucks card. And, like, that maybe wasn't the most effective group I've ever done. And everyone else was trying to agree with everyone else.

So you're right.

There are big limitations on those things.

And part of the whole idea with the Sprint, the selling point is really, you can move fast, you can start a project that's hard to start. But there are a lot of group dynamics with humans that don't work great on their own, and you need a little bit of help to make those work well. So making decisions in a group, not. Not easy. Getting information from a group of people, not easy to do. Well, if you. If you change that stuff a little bit, you get a lot better results.

So now, if I wanted to run a Sprint, I've got, we'll say a group of four people. I got my wife, I got me. I got my two kids. And we want to decide to do something nice for the community around us. Yeah, that's our challenge. Is this really going to work? Could I do that?

Well, the biggest question at the beginning of a sprint is what is the question? What do you want to learn before you go ahead and take action? Is there a risk? Is there something that you're not sure whether to work or not?

Maybe want to learn the most effective way that we could insert feed the homeless or provide a service for older people or something like that. The brainstorming side of things, where we want to decide what is the most. What's the most effective way we can serve our community.

Yeah, that's a great frame. You totally could so what you do on Monday is you'd be sharing the information that all of you had. So what do we know about what our family can do, the sort of skills that we have, and then making a list of the options. What does that map look like for your family? What's in your community? What are the places you might go or the services you might go? And then you'd pick the one that you thought like, this seems to us at the moment as the best opportunity. This is where we're going to focus on the sprint. And maybe you choose that we're going to focus on trying to get some food to homeless families in our community. And then on Tuesday, each person, you, your wife, your kids would each come up with your own solution. So you'd think, you know, you'd think it through. And it's not just sketching all day. So there's a step in the morning where you look at patterns, where people have solved an analogous problem, done something interesting elsewhere. So you might spend some time looking at where small groups have come up with interesting solutions for, you know, providing food for people or maybe helping people connect with services that are already out there. The afternoon you sketch, and then on Wednesday, you would decide. So you'd go through this kind of critique process as a family, talking about each idea, but not letting the person who drew it give you a sales pitch about seeing what you can understand on your own about how it works. And then the decision maker and whoever that is in the family will make the call about which one or two they're going to try out. Then you guys would prototype it. So you have to decide, how are we going to test this on Friday? And you know, what you might end up with is we've got one idea that's actually bringing food to people. We're going to set up a spot and we're going to cook meals and see if we can serve people. And maybe another idea where you think what we want to do is test whether we can actually get the information to people about where. Where we're going to be distributing groceries, for instance. And so what you might do is then basically prototype. Maybe one of those things can be prototyped with a paper brochure, with a flyer that goes up somewhere. Maybe one of them has to be prototyped by actually doing the service. So actually finding a space, setting it up and doing it. And then the idea is that on Friday you'd actually do it in a really small batch. It's like you'd bake that small batch of Cookies to see if the recipe works well, you would see when people reacted to it, it. And you know what I think is cool about it is if you imagine your family doing that and you might do it if you were doing this kind of project, you might spread it out over time, you might compress it, but you get to see the idea. You don't have to commit at first to doing the whole thing. This is the way we're now delivering groceries, we're now cooking meals forever. This is a permanent commitment. You're saying we're going to try it once and see how it works.

It seems like this approach inherently embraces failure throughout it, which is really important and something that maybe is avoided in most business environments.

Yeah, it's hard to take risks even when you. The culture of Silicon Valley talks a lot about taking risks and failing, but in reality, nobody wants to fail feeling is that great. I think what people really want is to be able to move fast. But when you think the only way I can learn is to launch something, to get something out in the world, and then, you know, well, I have to build something in order to be able to launch it. That takes time. People naturally become more risk averse, they become more careful. And I mean, you know, that's just. It's smart to be. To be careful, but people avoid risks. And so the Sprint allows you to take a lot of those risks in such a short period of time that you're not out much if you fail. And the funny thing is that we've seen companies are more likely to succeed when they take those risks and take them fast. They're more likely to hit on that thing that's wildly successful than they are if they take a longer time figuring out the safe path.

Do you mind if I ask how old you are?

No, not at all. I am 39.

Okay. I'm basically 44. My birthday's in a few days, so.

Happy birthday in advance. Thanks.

Although by the time this goes online, I'll be 44, so there we go. Happy birthday in Retroverse. Anyway, so I'm asking because we're about the same age, I can tell you. I'm the last year at the University of California, Santa Barbara winter school that didn't have ethernet in the dorm rooms. I saw the dial up modem.

Yeah, I had dial up. Yeah, you had dial up.

You didn't have Ethernet in your college?

Yeah, yeah, University of Washington. I don't know. I don't want to dis.

That explains a few things.

We were all too drunk. To remember how we used to do email. So that was kind of cool.

Pine and Elm. There you go. I actually did work on a book by Dave Taylor, the guy who wrote, I think he wrote Elm or Pine, one of the two. I think he wrote Pine, the author of Pine, by the way, for non geeks listening, these are the original ways all of us did email before Gmail. Just so we're all clear on that. And since Jake worked on Gmail, we're just going back through memory lane here. But the reason I was asking that is that your Sprint process here that first day would not have worked when we were younger. Like when you did research, you didn't even have Alta Vista, did you? Or maybe you're a little bit younger. I was one of the first people to use that in my university, so I always got A's and no one knew why because I was doing searches online instead of in card catalogs and microfiche. But you couldn't do a one day process of fact finding the way you can now thanks to Google and thanks to the Internet and all these other tools that just seem like they're part of it. But if you were even five years younger than you, if you're 35 or younger, the world's always had information at your fingertips and your process is a new thing in all of human history. Because data gathering and analysis couldn't happen fast enough.

Yeah, although actually a lot of the things on Monday, there's very little, there's actually very little connectivity on Monday. And one of the premises of the Sprint is that the phones away computers off almost the entire week. Except for if somebody is giving a presentation on Monday they might share information in that way. But actually on Monday we try to share information that people already have.

So the gathering happened before.

The gathering happened before. Well, or like a lot of companies, a lot of teams or just people in general will come at a problem with a lot of information. And so if you can do research before, I should say it's wonderful, it's excellent to do that. But I don't think teams should wait to start until they've done the research because you'll do, you'll. In the matter of the Sprint, you'll end up doing research and by the end of the week you'll know more. So you can always do another one afterwards with that information in hand. But yeah, so it's actually laptops pretty much off. They might be on Tuesday morning when you're looking at sort of inspiring solutions from other domains and then they're not on again until Thursday when you build the prototype, if you need it, unless you're making a service or making a physical object. So it's an old school. It actually could have worked in almost any time in human history.

Okay, cool. It just might have taken longer to do data gathering the week before the Sprint process really happened.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Good deal. I feel like the speed of everything is sped up just because when you don't know something, you don't have to go to Encyclopedia Britannica and look it up like it's just such a different thing. Or even better yet, that old was that nasty thing from Microsoft, Encarta, was it called?

Are you putting me on right now? I am.

Because you worked. You caught me pretty good.

I was like, no. Should I defend myself? Yeah, I was trying to get an.

Ugly look from you.

So for people listening. Wow. Yeah.

If you remember Encarta, Encarta was the first CD ROM encyclopedia that absolutely decimated Britannica because Encarta was available to search on your computer instead of thumbing through in a book. So Encarta was a huge jump forward in our ability to access information. So thank you for working on that. And yeah, I was totally yanking.

Now, if you search for Encarta online, the top result is on Wikipedia because Encarta's gone and the second result is Britannica. Britannica came back. They did. So it's sad. But there was. It had its moment.

It did indeed. And by the way, a lot of times the speed of tech has happened so much that unless you were there, like, you might not recognize what a world changing thing some of these things have been. Like in Carta, it really did change the world of research almost overnight. It was a matter of three years and all of a sudden we were all shaking. But now I think that happens about every six weeks now, in the Sprint process, you've also talked about something called design thinking. What is design thinking versus the Sprint process?

It's a good question. Design thinking is sort of a philosophy. It's an approach to doing things. And I think that you'd find if you were someone who had studied design thinking. Does design thinking work at a design agency? Whatever. You would read our book or do the Sprint process and say, yeah, this is design thinking. What's often challenging is that people don't know how to put it into practice. And so one thing that's different about the Sprint book from a lot of experiences people have had with design thinking is that it's really specific. You do these things, you don't need to come in with any expertise in advance. If you follow these steps, you'll be doing design thinking, which is really a focus on the customer, on the human being at the end, and then also willingness to try a lot of ideas and use a prototype to learn about things. And so I think the big benefit of design and as a tool set for solving problems is that it can loosen people up to fail. They can move fast when they're. When you get into that mode of I'm going to build something fast, I'm going to make it real really fast. And you can do that today that's almost one of the biggest technology enablers lately is how fast you can bake something, then design really frees you up.

How would I incorporate this into bulletproof? Let me give you an example here. I come from software in Silicon Valley and cloud computing and all that. You know how long it takes a rapid prototype, A frickin collagen bar.

I can imagine it's not real rapid.

I'm like, product guys, I want 90 day product cycles where we come up with an idea, we munch some stuff together and we roll it out. And they're like, yeah, try 90 day microbiological testing before we could ever roll it out. And it makes me want to stab pencils in my eyes because I'm like, we could do better.

Yeah.

So how do you make this work in meat space?

Let's do it, let's talk about it. So like I mentioned earlier, the big thing is figuring out what question is most important and what, what's challenging about something. Like, I mean the bars is a great example because right there's like, there's packaging, there's production. You've got to, you've got to like, you've got to mix the, you got to get the flavor right, you've got to get the thing right. There's so many pieces of it and you' sell it. You've got to figure out how to tell people about it, get it to people, deliver it, whatever. All that stuff is complicated and when you do it, take it all at once. You're like, there's no way we can do that and you know, prototype that in a day. But if you have one question, that's the most important question to answer. There is a way to prototype it, even if the thing doesn't exist yet. So if the question is, will people be able to understand what it is if they, if they come across it in. I don't Know, just a example, if they come across in a Facebook ad, would they be interested enough to click through? Would they maybe order it? Would they try a free sample or whatever? You can test that. That's an easy thing to prototype. You can recruit people who are in a target audience. You can build a prototype that looks like their Facebook feed, that looks like an ad, take them to a marketing page that doesn't exist yet that has pictures of how you think the product might look, describing it the way you think you'd do it. All those things you can do actually really fast. And you can answer that, that one question, unlock some of the unknowns that exist around it. Or if it's about the physical object, you prototype the package, or if it's about the flavor, you just test that. But that idea of isolating is sort of. It's the scientific method, right? You isolate one question and then you try to answer that one question. And I think what's kind of magic about the Sprint is that it's a way of. It's sort of problem agnostic, but if you follow through this system, you can get an answer to a question in a week. And for many questions, that's fast. For some it's too slow, but you shouldn't use it to figure out where to eat lunch. But for other things.

Yeah, unless you can have lunch there every day for the rest of your life, that's true.

If it's a big commitment.

By the way, the Bulletproof coffee shop offers lunch in Santa Monica. So if any of you want to come to that as a solution, I'm okay with that. What about constraints and deadlines? This has a really tight deadline. What effect does having a constraint like that have on the team?

Well, this is kind of born out of the realization, thanks to my colleague Michael, who pointed out to me many years ago that I just so happened to get a lot more work done when there was a deadline coming up, and perhaps I should start setting those deadlines so I would get more stuff done. And he was right, actually. And I reflected at some point back on my career and I realized that there were these short bursts of time. And sort of one of the early projects that led to Google Hangouts is a good example where I was working on this thing with a couple of my colleagues in the Google Stockholm office. And I was only there for a couple days. So we had to work really fast. We had to make something that we could, you know, that we could actually use really fast. And that deadline forced focus. It forced us to cancel all our meetings, get in the room together, hash it out and you know. So as a big time procrastinator, I'm probably at the leading edge of meeting deadlines to make progress, but I think everyone benefits from it and it is remarkable to see and I've seen a lot of teams go through this process, how it helps people to focus, you know, when they're, when their laptops and phones are off and they know that we're all in this together. We have people coming in on Friday. It's remarkable what you can accomplish and it feels really good actually to have that clarity.

Yeah. I remember back in studying college, I, I couldn't imagine writing a paper until the night before it was due. Why would you do that without a deadline? And I would get really good scores on my papers, but I would oftentimes be up all night just like you said, the forcing function of a deadline. And you're reflecting back on my career and I imagine people listening. Same thing. When you just don't have much time and you do your very best, sometimes it really is your very best even if you have a lot more time. Right?

Yeah, that's right. More time doesn't always make things better, but more time is comfortable and it gives us more time to do the thing that we know the best. And if you're a, if you're a software engineer, it's writing code and if you're a designer, it's designing. And if you're a salesperson, it's selling to people, having those conversations with people. The Sprint forces you out of that comfort zone. But that clarity of the deadline is pretty powerful.

It is indeed. And I, looking back on my career, I probably should have had more deadlines. It would have been more helpful. And a six week deadline isn't really a deadline as far as I can. Like six weeks means later. So it's a tight deadline, which seems to me.

Yeah.

So I've talked about using this in a family, which is like the world's smallest and slowest growing startup. It always takes about 18 years for the first product to come to fruition. Version 1.0, that we call that even.

Then you don't know. Even then you don't know. It's.

That's a fair point. They might come back. There's a return in RMA process after college. But what's the difference between doing this in say a small startup versus Google's not exactly a small company these days. And although sometimes it acts like a group of small companies, if you were to do this at a larger company versus a smaller company. What would the differences be?

Yeah, so I actually started doing this at Google and I was working at Google and thought that a, a new method for the way we did design early on in projects would be helpful. But it is, to be honest, been very much forged at Google Ventures and with my colleagues there and this experience of working over and over again with startups. So the startups we work with would range in size from two people to a few hundred, but they're not these massive companies. What's different at a massive company and still talk a lot with colleagues at Google who are continuing to run these Sprints. And also it's been adopted at a lot of other companies, so hear a lot of stories about it. I think one of the big things that's different at a big company is that you have maybe less access to that decision maker. The real person who decides what, what goes on may be hard to get into the room. So that's a challenge for people. Again though, it's a healthy challenge to figure out who that person is, which is often not clear, and to get, you know, to get her or a representative, a duly appointed representative, just so there's clarity about who makes the call on this project is a big deal. And sometimes it helps people realize this isn't what we should be working on because nobody cares. Another problem is often that there are, you know, there's sort of different groups that need to work together, collaborate. There may be politics involved and that can be a challenge. It can also be a good thing because the Sprint can give you a, a way to bring, you know, somebody from another group into the room and actually work together on, on the problem instead of sort of hammering out your differences later on. You get to do that right in the Sprint. And you know, I think the other thing is just that the more, the bigger the company, the often the more meetings there are and the harder it is to say we're clearing the schedule for a week to do this. That's a, that's like a radical thing to say. Well, you're not going to have our status meetings, our one on ones, our brainstorm meetings, our projects, our divided attention between A, B and C. We're not going to do that for a week. I think when it's succeeded, when it started to take root at bigger companies, it happens because somebody says let's try this as an experiment and see how it goes. And then when it works, it starts to spread.

There are companies around things like hackathons and things where you have a really focused two or three, 24 hours or 48 hours to do stuff. And quite often there are performance enhancing substances involved there. Like there's a large tech company in Redmond that might have eight bulletproof coffee kiosks on campus for their developers. During these Sprints, do you tell people to take smart drugs or use any other things like that?

So during the Sprint, I think that the way people manage their caffeine and what they eat is really important. And in fact, I'm a big believer outside of the Sprint also in, like, how you sleep is important and all these things matter a lot. I don't want to dictate to anyone that they, you know, if you're not a caffeine drinker, that you should drink coffee or whatever, but it's okay if.

You want to do that. It's okay to just.

Yeah, maybe we should. Maybe you guys should work out a little system here because I feel like everyone could win. But actually, like, quite honestly, one thing that's important for us when we're hosting a Sprint in our office is to have coffee available at the right times and to have food that is going to keep people charged. And one of the big problems that a lot of companies, startups, wherever, is that when they do have snacks, they're not. They're happy, they're horrible. Right? I mean, they're sugary or there's just nothing to them. There's like potato chips and things. Candy is like a really common. There's this big mythology around brainstorming, group brainstorms, which are bad enough on their own, and then let's eat candy while we do it. And it's just like bad things happen.

It's good for like 20, 20 minutes of productivity and then a crash. You remember Sun Microsystems, like one of the big. The big server manufacturers before Oracle bought them. And way back in the day, 20 years ago in Silicon Valley, they used to have a rule, no pasta lunches because pasta gives you a coma later. Except in their corporate briefing center during a negotiation. If they wanted their competition to be foggy, they would give them pasta so they could close the deal. How bad is that?

That's amazing. Well, there are no devious rules in the Sprint, but there is a. In the back of the book, there's literally a checklist and we talk about the kind of snacks that you should have on hand. And we also talk about what kind.

Of snacks is it that you're.

Yeah, actually, let me. I'll read to you from The. I have a little book here. I'll read to you from the checklist. So we talk about things like, nuts are good, dark chocolate is good. It really needs to be real food, you know, for some people. Some people like to have cheese or. We basically want to have something that is not. It's not like, foreign to your diet. Because if you have a bunch of people from a team and we don't want to, like, say, like, look, you're going to have to eat this. Everybody has to eat the same thing. But we want, like want food that's real food, that. That feels natural to you to eat so that you're not thinking about it. But then you're going to have energy as you go on throughout the day. Because if you want, you know, the sprint is not a long day, actually, it's like basically six hours. But that is a long time to focus. And you got to eat well to keep that up. And we. No pizza and no burritos at lunch, or the energy just tanks.

I absolutely love it that you put that in your book. That's not a typical thing that you would write about in a business process like this. But it so matters, like, if you're kind of numb and you're trying to do this brainstorm thing. I don't know how to brainstorm when all I can bring up is a drizzle because I'm tired.

Right. Yeah. It's a huge deal. And you also have to end before people get burnt out. You've got to. And we have the chance to watch so many teams go through this and see when it was too long when we ate something. What happened one time. There's a. There's a restaurant in San Francisco that's great, called Curry up now that has Indian food burritos, and they're delicious. But when we had that for lunch one time, everybody was kind of exhausted in the afternoon. And you see that happen.

That's msg.

Yeah.

If you go to a traditional Indian household and living in Silicon Valley, it's happened lots of times. If you buy an MSG spice mix, they'll be like, oh, that tastes like restaurant Indian food. And they know the tastes because that's what the restaurants use. But when they make the food at home, they use higher quality greens, but they don't use msg, so it tastes different. And there's a little zing. Kind of like what you'd find in Chinese food.

Interesting. All that stuff, it ends up playing into the work. And that's something that I think the Funny thing is that office work is such a dominant part of so many of our lives, but it's been very unexamined how it's structured and what you should do to optimize your performance in the office, to make it fun, to make it match why you signed up to do your job. And so at least for one week in the sprint process, we think we can optimize it. The rest of the year, you're on your own.

I appreciated that part of your book, Tell me about Sleep, since we're talking about personal productivity hacks here.

Yeah, well, yeah, this is not in the book. This is kind of just about you. Yeah. So actually my, my colleague, my good friend John Zyratsky, he's one of the co authors, he has written a really popular post, so you can search for this, about how he became a morning person. He's not naturally a morning person, but his wife was getting up early to go to work and he wanted to have more time with her. So he kind of figured out all these things he needed to do at night to get wound down, go to sleep. And then he found that that morning time could be really productive for him once he sort of got into the right cyc. And similarly, I've thought a lot about what's the best time for me to go to bed and how can I make the best use of that time. But with kids, waking up early is not, as you probably know, it's not guaranteed productive time. Anything can happen in the morning.

It's so easy to talk about being a morning person until you have kids.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And you know, John gets that a lot. But what I've taken from him as inspiration is just this idea that, you know, if you're really intentional about how you go to sleep and when you wake up and if you. For me, I have to keep it on a very regular schedule, so I can't all of a sudden go to bed much later or much earlier or that affects me a lot the next day. I can't, you know, I can afford like a little less sleep maybe for a night or two, but it's going to catch up with me. But for me, the key working time, and this has been really important for me as a writer is late at night after everybody goes to bed. And I know that there's this window between like maybe 9:30 and 11, when the house is pretty quiet and I can write. And if I stay up Too much past 11, I know that affects me the next day. So that's. I got to get to it and in order to really like optimize that time. And actually I was listening to your interview with Nir and Nir Eyal, he does the same thing. We actually found out that independently we had come up with the same solution, which was a vacation timer on the Internet router that goes off at 9:30 and then you can't use the Internet. And all I can do is write. I'm not going to be distracted. So that's it for me.

That's really cool. You might enjoy a book by Michael Bruce called the Power of When. Or you can check out the powerofwenquiz.com by the way, he's just a friend. I have no, like, I'm not trying to stuff for any reason other than just it's cool. But there's different windows of circadian timing and about 15% of people are night people, 15% are morning people, 55% are middle of the day people. And 15% of people, by the way, that doesn't really add up.

Are just.

Basically never going to sleep. Well, he's a sleep doctor. But I found so much knowledge because like you, I made myself a morning person. I Woke up at 5am every morning for about two years before I had kids. Even though that's totally not right for my biology, I do my writing from my books between 11pm and basically like 5am like that is my productivity window.

5Am is a bit late.

Yeah, exactly. He calls them wolves in his book. And the morning people are lions.

Right.

He's like, night owl is too, too vague. Yeah. And so these morning people, I'm like, screw you guys. But apparently we evolved in caves so that some of us would take the night shift, some of us would take the morning hunting shift, some of us would like keep one ear to the ground all the time and the rest of us would like get up and pick tubers or something. I don't know what those day people do.

They're important to you though. We can't dismiss them. Yeah, kind of the key to all this for me has been this idea of noticing what happens when you do something, when you eat something or when you sleep in a different way and just noticing what happens the next day or what happens over the course of a week. And it really affects, it affects work. I mean, it affects everything about your life, your life, enjoyment. But people often don't think about that part of work. I spent a lot of my career not thinking about that stuff. And as soon as I kind of led up to it, I Was like, my gosh, this is transformative.

It's like free energy. It's free energy all the time.

Yeah. It's funny how much we think about the battery charge on our phones and we don't think about the battery charge in our bodies nearly as much.

In fact, my next book is about mitochondria. They literally are the batteries in your body. It's kind of funny. And they're hackable like everything else. But what about gadgets? Do you have any tech gadgets for this kind of stuff that you just can't live without?

One of the gadgets that I love, and this is, I think this can be transformative for people even in their personal life, especially if you have kids. Is called the Time Timer. It is something that. It's a clock and it's designed originally for classrooms. So it's a clock. It's like a, an alarm, basically 60 minutes and it's got this thing you pull out. There's sort of a visual chunk of pie. Basically you can see this red chunk of pie that gets pulled and as the timer goes down, you can visually see time elapsing. When it gets to the end, it beeps. We use these all the time in the sprint to time box activities. But for me it's gotten out of the sprint room and into my everyday life. So if I'm sitting down to write, I'll set that timer for an hour and then it just brings a focus to what you're doing. Or if you are going to have a cup of coffee and just relax for a while, but you don't want to go for too long. Maybe I set the timer for 15 or 20 minutes and then I don't have to worry so much. It gives me a bit more intentionality about how I spend my time. And it's really helpful with kids too. If I have a five year old and for him to know what I mean when I say it's going to be five minutes.

It's called the Time timer.

The Time timer, yeah. So if you go to time timer.com you can, you can see it. And I should say that there's a, there is a. We've talked to the makers of Time Timer because we love it so much and there is a Sprint version of the time timer, but I'm not, I'm not making a profit off of that. I really just genuinely think this is a life changing thing. If anybody has kids, probably see it in your kid's classroom, they're this black clock with a white face and Then this red dial in the middle. There's something that.

For getting out the door in the morning for school, I could. It would be so beneficial for like a nine year old. Like, you're like, go to the door and put on your shoes. And on the way, she's like, I just had to draw for a little while. Like, stop it.

But the funny thing is, right, the funny thing is, like, I'll see my kids doing that, but I do the same thing. You know, I'm like, it's so easy for me to see that. Like, well, of course you don't have a concept of time. I don't have a concept of time. I'll be like, oh, I don't have to leave to catch the bus for 10 minutes, so I'll check my email. And then it's like 20 minutes later.

You're totally right. I'm so happy you told me about that. Thank you.

Yeah.

Do you have any other time saving hacks that you use?

Well, one of the big things that I've done for a few years is on my iPhone to remove email Safari. I don't have Facebook or Instagram or Twitter on there. That's a big deal for me because I have a hard time with distraction.

So you have like a Nokia 9600, but it looks like an iPhone.

No, I mean, actually, I even have the new. I have an iPhone. Plus I have a big iPhone because there are all these wonderful things you can do on the phone. Actually, even without those sort of infinite, you know, infinite pools of information. And the phone is an amazing camera. You know, maps on the phone is amazing. Uber and Lyft are amazing. There's a. I have a ton of apps on there that I use, but I try to think of it as a tool. And if I use the phone, I'm using it to get something done. Listen to podcasts on it. I listen to music. Those things are amazing. I still feel like I'm living in the future with the phone, but I'm not likely to get distracted by it and get sucked into it. And I feel a little bit more in control of my time, especially with the family.

But even at work, that's an interesting experiment. I am going to ponder on that one. Thanks for that idea. I think you're the only person who's talked about that on Bulletproof Radio so far, which is really cool. All right, I got one more question for you before we get into our final. Winding down the interview. What does your work setup look like at home and in your Sprint room at Google Ventures. How do you set the environment around you?

Sure, yeah. Well, I'll start at home. It's not super exciting, but at home I've got a laptop basically and a stack of printer paper and a pen. So I like to, whenever possible do work or thinking on paper.

But not lined paper, not a pad, not an engineer use printer paper.

Why? Yeah, you know, I just really like simple tools. So I'm a big fan of like the simplest tool possible and not getting. It's very easy to get distracted with trying to get the perfect tool and get to the end of the day. Like, I am very particular about the kind of pen that I use, but I want it to be simple and good. It's a papermate flare and I love paper mate flares, but that's it.

We're in the same boat there. By the way, I despise paper with lines on it and like, how dare you tell me to color within those lines. And if the pen doesn't feel right, I don't want to write with it. So, okay, so you're already my kind of guy, right? So you have a laptop, you have.

Paper and a pen. Paper and a pen. I've got a time timer on the desk. I've got this app called Freedom on the computer which I can use to turn off the Internet. You can see a pattern here. I have a lot of self control problems, but I'll be reading Seahawks news or whatever for an hour and lose an hour easily if I don't shut off the Internet. So I try to be very focused about a task when I'm working at home. Hopefully I'm writing, I'm doing design work, I'm doing something that's, that's pretty focused. And then at the office in our Sprint room, that's also very intentionally designed space. One thing that's funny is if you go into a conference room and even the most cutting edge or sort of forward thinking startup in America, you'll still see conference rooms with conference tables in the middle. It's just this sort of default. We're having a meeting, we need a table. It's not really clear what the table's for, but we have to have a table. And it's, it makes for a strange dynamic in the room. It's not very flexible. So in our rooms we have no table. We just have a bunch of chairs that we can move around because there's different points in the Sprint, there's sort of different configurations. Sometimes we are looking at a screen. If we're working on the prototype or if we're demonstrating some software. But a lot of the time we just want to be in a circle talking to each other and writing on whiteboards. So whiteboard space is really important, and we have as much as we can get. In our Sprint Room here in San Francisco, we've got one wall that has a couple whiteboards on it. We've got a couple rolling whiteboards. And that space is so valuable, that ability to write something on the wall so everyone can see it. It's a little bit archaic, actually. And people are always looking for the perfect software or hardware solution that'll solve their team productivity. A whiteboard that everyone can see is incredibly powerful.

Do you put on the digital things that allow you to, like, draw and project and all that sort of stuff?

No, I don't do that. And I'm sure that at some point that's going to be amazing and that's going to be the way to go. But it is really tough to be a whiteboard marker on a whiteboard. It's, you know, I haven't found a way.

I taught for a long time with whiteboards, and I have the little special things that hold the pen to try and share with the team, and none of it works that well.

It doesn't quite work. Yeah, you know, I just don't know.

Maybe someday.

Yeah, I'm sure it's getting close. I mean, I recently tried the iPad Pro, which is the best stylus speed I've seen. Like, it was very impressive in many ways, but it still didn't for me have that immediacy of paper or a whiteboard. And there's also something so powerful about something being physically in the room. I mean, we're still. You talk about this, we're still. We're basically cave people just walking around in like 21st century clothes. And it's helpful when you're working together or even if you're on your own to have that physical thing, that physical object that you wrote on and you geographic memory remembers. That's where that information is. I don't have to try to hold it in my head. As soon as it's in another window or it's, you know, it's on software, we forget stuff and it makes, it makes it hard to solve big problems.

Very well said. Now, there's a question that I've asked every guest on Bulletproof Radio, and if someone came to you tomorrow and said, look, I want to kick ass at everything I do in life, what are the three most Important pieces of advice you'd have for me, what would you tell them?

Well, you can only do one thing really well at a time. So I think the first piece of advice is to make a list of what's important to you and then make really hard decisions about what the stack rank of those should be.

It's a very Google answer, by the way.

I like it. Yeah, right, Search results. Yeah, I didn't intend it that way, but you're right, it is. No, but I think it's. I think it's accurate. It's really helpful for me because as soon as I'm trying to do two or three things at the same time, I can't really do any of them super well. So that's important. It's also important to think about the. We talked about earlier how you spend your energy and being really mindful about when you do this, what happens when you eat this, what happens when you sleep. This way. You have to keep in, like, we all have to keep in mind that we are cave people. We evolved for a world that's, you know, 200,000 years ago to be hunters and gatherers. And our office environment, all of our, you know, shiny gadgets that we have today that are engineered to distract us, they kind of stand in the way of us having optimal energy, having optimal focus to do the biggest kind of problem solving, to achieve the kinds of things that are going to be on that stack ranked list. You need a ton of energy. And it's incredibly important that people be like, realize that they're not just like Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk. We're not just brains moving around from meeting to meeting. The whole body matters. Your energy matters, how you spend your time matters. So to get really in touch with your energy is important. And it sounds kind of silly, but I think that's really important. And then I think maybe the third thing is to be really honest about what you love and to not be embarrassed about doing the thing that you love, not be embarrassed about being passionate about what you do at work, doing the part that you care about. If you find out that that's not what your work is about, trying to find something else. It's important that people to, I think, wear their heart on their sleeve and really live their lives with passion because it goes by pretty fast. And when you turn around and look back and 10 years have gone by and you've been working on something, you want to know that you were giving it your all. And so that has to. That goes back to that idea of the stack ranked list. But you got to make sure you're doing those things with all your heart.

Very, very well put. Well considered Answers. Thanks for sharing. Where can people buy a copy of your book? I think I saw it at the.

Airport the other day.

It's out there, all over the place.

It's in the airport, but you don't have to go to the airport to get it. You can get it on Amazon. You can get it anywhere. Fine books are sold well. Fine business books. It's not in stores that don't have business books. That's really the key.

You're not going to take down Paulo Coelho?

Yeah, no, no. There's a few authors that I'm like, man, the business book is never going to eclipse John Grisham and Stephen King. But you can find it all over the place. And if you go to thesprintbook.com you can also find out information about it so you can consider whether you really want to buy it. You can see a little bit more awesome.

The whole title is how to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. I would recommend this. If you're listening to this, I tend to recommend good books. You just heard the whole interview with Jake and how he thinks. Even if you're not someone who's solving these problems every day in your day life, you have problems that probably don't have very good solutions and you have stakeholders and you have people who support you. Take it to your nonprofit, take it to your school board, and you might just be amazed at what could happen. Jake, anything else listeners should know?

No. Thanks a lot for listening. And yeah, thanks a lot for having me on, Dave. I appreciate it.

It's been a lot of fun. Have an awesome day. Thank you.

Thanks.

If you enjoyed today's episode, you know what to do. Go out and pick up a copy of Jake's book and while you're at it, pick up your next order of Brain Octane. Or if you've never had them, the new bulletproof collagen bars. Telling you eat one of these things, you're going to think you had dessert and then you won't want lunch because you're so full. They're that powerful. Have a great day and if you love the episode, I always appreciate a review on itunes.

A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.