#166: How to Be More Productive (and Creative) in a World Filled with Distractions

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com editorial episode 166. Those notes include a summary of our discussion here today, as well as links to any resources we mentioned during the show. Maintaining a high level of productivity is one of the top three challenges my coaching clients face. I'm sure that this is something you're very familiar with if you are a self employed professional. Productivity is just a kind of a day to day issue and that's why we've touched on the subject so many times over the past 18 months or so. I've brought in New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan, who had some great insights to share last year. So did Jordan Baker just a few weeks ago. And my friend Mark McGinnis shared some excellent ideas in a previous show. And I have links to all of those episodes in the show Notes. I've also shared a few tips and strategies of my own in some articles that I've posted here on my site. And again, I have links to those as well in the show Notes. Today I have another expert who will share a different take on productivity. I mean, not drastically different, but he's going to talk about a more holistic approach that I think is going to resonate well with many of you. His name is Chris Bailey and he is the author of Hyper Focused how to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction and the Productivity Project. Accomplishing more by managing your time, attention and energy. Chris is the real deal. He and I are very well aligned. We clicked immediately. He's you'll notice right away he's got to be one of the nicest people he's ever met. He's got this just calm demeanor about himself. You just tell this guy is very, very zen and he totally geeks out on this topic, probably more than anyone I've ever encountered. Chris brings some fresh perspectives to this discussion, perspectives that I'm not really hearing in many conversations about productivity. And that's why I'm excited to share this episode with you because in this conversation he's going to talk about things like the difference between hyper focused and scatter focused brain modes and why you actually need a healthy dose of both. He's going to talk about why daydreaming will make you more productive, more creative, and how to drastically reduce smartphone and social media distractions with just some very simple basic changes. And I know that's an issue for many of us. I know it is for me. He's also going to hit on how to improve your productivity by making some simple changes and adjustments to your work environment, something we can definitely all benefit from. So rather than being hack focused, I should tell you that this conversation is more mindset focused. So if that's your speed and that's a little different from what we've talked about recently here in this episode and in my blog, you're really going to enjoy what you hear today. So without any further ado, enjoy my conversation with Chris Bailey. Chris, welcome to the show. Great to have you on board.

Good day to you, sir. How are you doing?

Very, very well. I'm excited to talk with you. You and I talked offline a little bit about how important this topic is to my audience. So I'm anxious to dive right into your advice because this is going to be very useful, very practical. Before we do that though, I just want to know about this because this is fascinating. You have an unusual story. As you came out of university, you did something very unorthodox. Can you share what you did when you finally got out of school?

Yeah, I'm a bit of a weirdo, as you can probably tell from our preamble chat. Do you ever include the preamble chat as like a post show kind of thing or. No, I never do you thought about.

I thought about doing that, but then I feel bad. It's like, oh, yeah, by the way, we've been recording this whole time.

Yeah.

While you told me about your, you know, IBS or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. The whole 10 minutes before we were chatting, we were chatting about my ip. No, we weren't. But like, it reminds me, I was. Had a photographer that shot me the other day here for some. Some magazine in the uk and his style was a weird one. And maybe it's something like a lesson freelancers can take to heart in a way where instead of saying, okay, stand over there and I'll shoot you, he said, okay, just have a seat, I have to set up my camera here. And then he would just pretend to set up his camera. And so afterwards he'd say, oh, that's great, you're relaxing right there, like with your arm on the chair. Let me take a picture of you in that position. And he would pretend to set up and he'd get these beautiful casual pictures that would never come out otherwise. And I think to some of the better interviews that I've done, or at least in my eyes, they're a bit better and they're more casual in that way where you know, you kind of, you want to ask the host like, okay, when is the interview starting? And here she says, oh, this is the interview. And so I don't know, it just, those two connections kind of were just made in my mind, which has nothing to do with the question that you asked. But it's, it's a fun thought if you can get some, somebody into a, into a situation in which they're disarmed. But the, yeah, essentially when I graduated from university, I guess it's called college in the US you guys say college, we say university.

You like, you like how I, how I made it localized the language for you there, right?

Yeah. Do you usually do that for, for guests or is this something.

Yeah, half my staff is Canadian and I co wrote a book with two Canadian friends. So I'm just, I, I say niche instead of niche and oh, look at you.

Do you say Zed or Z?

No, let's, let's that far.

Okay. We don't want to push the boundaries, but yeah, okay, I'll say you're an honorary Canadian. Yeah. So when I graduated I got a few full time job offers, but I thought, you know, I've always been into this idea of productivity, you know, not productivity in the cold corporate sense of just becoming an efficient automaton, but just getting more done every day and getting more accomplished and getting the things accomplished that we set out to do. Because so often we set out to do things and distraction gets in the way and procrastination gets in the way and inability to focus maybe because we don't have a deadline, gets in the way. So I thought, I'm going to take a year out of my life, I'm going to decline these jobs and run a series of experiments on myself where I want to become as productive as humanly possible over the span of one year. So I said no to the jobs. I lived off of my savings. In Canada, you can defer your student loans a bit. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, I wrote as much as Alexander Hamilton in that year, hundreds of thousands of words about productivity and how, you know, how we can disseminate the advice and filter out the productivity advice that works from the stuff that doesn't. Because There's a lot of BS out there in the productivity space, a lot of fluff that's fun to read about, but that you don't necessarily earn the time back that you spend on it. And I think personally that's the gold standard of good productivity advice is for every minute you spend listening to a guy like me talk about it or reading a book about it or an audiobook about it, you have to make that time back and than some or else you're just consuming just worthless advice that's fun to read about but doesn't necessarily make an impact. So it was a year of running weird experiments on myself, like living in isolation for 10 days, using my smartphone for just an hour a day, meditating for 35 hours over the course of a week. And when the year was done, that turned into a book contract, which turned into a second book contract. And now I'm just, I feel like we're, you know, we were chatting about this before in addition to the IBS conversation, like we feel like, like the most grateful people on the face of the planet because we get to do what we do for a living and hopefully help other people along the way. So that's kind of the Cliffs Notes or as we have here in Canada, the Kohl's notes version of May 2013 through today.

I love that. I'm curious. So you to take a year off and experiment on productivity. I mean you got to have something to do. You said you wrote, you wrote on productivity. So this is kind of meta, but.

It'S kind of circular.

It is, it is. It's like you're writing about the thing that you're experimenting on. But how did you, I mean, in a way you don't. These self imposed deadlines, I mean when there's nobody hovering over your shoulder, how do you create the, the restrictions and the constraints that force you to experiment and have a real live experiment with some of these productivity ideas?

Yeah, it's kind of like researching research in a way. You know, maybe it's not that circular, but it's, you know, least an oval shaped thing where I was essentially productive about writing. In my eyes, it was first and foremost a research project and writing what I learned and sharing those lessons with my audience. So that was the end product were the words that I was writing for my audience. And really that was what I measured. As folks know who are listening to this, who are also writers. Just because you wrote a bunch of words doesn't necessarily mean that they're good. But most of us have Difficulty measuring our productivity when we do knowledge work for a living. Coders are the exact same way. One person can write 400 lines of code and another person could write 800 lines of code. And the 400 lines of code could have double the features, half the bugs, and be twice as efficient. Even though you wrote more lines of code doesn't mean they're better. The Gettysburg Address was, I think, 400 words or something along those lines. And so it was kind of a rough measure of productivity. But the way that I thought about it was how many lessons can I glean from these experiments that I conduct? How many interviews can I pour through with some of those preeminent productivity researchers and experts around the world? How much can I write and share with my audience over the course of that time? So it really was the words that I was creating that. But were the lessons from all these different sources and places? Does that make sense?

It does. It really does. Yeah. Yeah. In some of your work, I know you talk about this idea that the brain has two powerful modes that can be unlocked when you use your attention effectively. Can you speak to that? Can you explain what those modes are and how we can use them?

Yeah. So the latest book that I wrote is called Hyper Focus how to be More Productive in a World of Distraction. And the fascinating thing about this writing project was when I sat down to write the book, I really intended to write a book about how we can focus all day long. And along the way, you know, often the hard way, trying to focus all day, I came across the conclusion that the worst thing that we can do for our productivity, for our attention, is to focus on things all day long. Because we have, like you said, these two modes that make our attention kind of like a seesaw in a way, where we're either in one mode or the other, and we can't be in both at the same time. So there's the mode in which we're focused on something. In its best case, I call it hyper focus, when we bring our complete attention to something. And then there's the mode where our mind is wandering. It's daydreaming. And when we do this deliberately, I call it scatter focus. And so essentially the nut of this is that in any one moment of the day, we're either focused or unfocused. And these two mental modes are even anti correlated on a neurological level. So that when the brain network that supports focus is activated, the one that supports unfocusing and daydreaming is deactivated and vice versa. And so in other words, we can't reflect and focus on something at the same time. But of course, as we all know, reflecting on things is what lets us do proper things in the first place. It lets us decide how we're going to spend our time, it lets us think about the future. One study that really illuminated this whole mode for me, well, there are a few of them, but one found that we spend 14 times as much time when we're daydreaming, focusing about the future and thinking about our goals as we do when we're focused on something. And so when we're focused on something, in other words, we move our work forward, we push our work forward because we're doing the work. But when we're unfocused, we think about what we want to focus on in the first place. And it's the cross pollination of these two modes are frankly quite beautiful. You know, we collect experiences and information that we can reflect on later when we're focused, when we're reflecting later, we can connect those experiences to come up with ideas, like when we're taking a shower, for example, because when our mind wanders, it wanders to mainly the present and the future, as well as a bit to the past, but less than we might think. And when we connect these three destinations, this is when our best ideas come to us. And so focus gets all the attention. But I think unfocusing is just as powerful if you think to when your best ideas strike you, you're rarely focused on anything, you're rarely in front of the computer. And writing. This is something that I found in writing two books. Now is for every hour that I spend writing something, I need to spend about three or four hours thinking about what I want to write in the first place. Because there are so many interconnected nodes on the web of ideas that you're spinning as you piece together something as complex as a book. And so, you know, the way that these two modes work together, when we balance them the right way, we're able to focus a lot deeper because we get to rest when our mind is wandering. But we also focus on the right things and in a smarter way. In the first place, it's, you know, it's the most fascinating thing. I intended to write one book about how we can focus intensely. I scrapped it when I uncovered this. I followed the trails of this idea. I don't know if you've ever watched one of those crime shows or somebody's got a map in their office or in a police station. And they have strings attached to the map, attached to newspaper articles, attached to pictures of suspects. This was the state of my office over the course of writing this book. But I think this was so worth the mess when you realized how beautiful these, these two attentional modes are.

No, I love the idea. And for anyone listening, I mean, who's. We're all doing creative work here. And I know. Yeah, whether you're consciously thinking about these two modes or not, I know this is resonating right now with my listeners. Now I'm curious. And what would be. And I know you go deep into this, but what would be one practical application of this idea? Like, what's one way we can practice this kind of balance so that we are able to get our best ideas to bubble up to the surface and then be hyper focused when we need to be?

Yeah, well, one. One method that I love is writing a paragraph. And maybe it's a complex paragraph, it's an idea you've been thinking a lot about. And stop right in the middle of a sentence. Don't finish the paragraph. Don't spin that little web of ideas. Stop right in the middle. And when. Because our mind has a tendency to keep unresolved problems at the front of our. Connect them naturally to the cues that we encounter, both from our wandering mind. So our mind wanders to different ideas, and we connect those to the problems that we're incubating and facing, but also to external triggers in our environment. We connect, you know, a leaf blowing down the sidewalk to a memory in a park we had last year with our friend Jim, who happens to be a physicist. And then we think about a physics analogy that we can connect to the thing that we're writing. Sometimes our brain just needs a tiny little nudge in one way or another. And so when you stop right in the middle of writing something, you keep that unresolved problem front of mind and then go for a walk. Go for a walk through nature. Leave your phone at home, but take your notepad with you. Capture the thoughts that come to you. Walk through the library, walk through a used bookstore. Just get your mind into a place where you go from focusing on something to just unfocusing in an environment where you're likely to encounter cues that spur these beautiful creative thoughts about ideas that you would never piece together otherwise. You know, it's a simple example, but, you know, we can have these moments throughout the day. If you're in an office for an example, and you're on your way to a meeting, leave your phone at your desk, in the drawer, if you have to lock it up or something. If you work with, you know, people like that, but leave it at the desk and you'll find that on the way to the meeting, your mind automatically goes to the future. Our mind has been shown to wander, to think about the future 48% of the time when we're daydreaming. And so your mind will go to the meeting, it'll go to what you want to accomplish. It'll go to the conversations you want to have and what you want to get out of that commitment and that experience. If you're running the meeting, even better, you need more of that time so you're not just treading water for the whole time. So, you know, I think we need these little moments in which we scatter our attention throughout the day. One of my favorite topics, in addition to productivity that I'm a big nerd about, I could read about this topic all day long, is traffic flow. So how traffic moves down a highway. And if you look at what allows traffic to move forward at a proper speed, what allows it to do that isn't how fast that individual cars are moving, as you might expect, but what allows traffic to move forward rather is how much space exists between the cars. You know, it's this space between the things that flow throughout the day on the highway, whatever it might be, that really allows us to move things forward. And I think our work is the exact same way. There's that great quote from JRR Tolkien where he says that not all those who wander are lost. And I think this is especially the case with our attention. If, if you want to become more creative, if you want to become more strategic and thoughtful, you need to wander more often than you already do.

I couldn't agree more. I tell you where I see the benefits for me is when I, when I take the time. And when you become like crazy productive, crazy, at least you're trying to be that way. There's a tendency to want to discount what you just said. No, I got to get this stuff done. I got it. I got to be productive. But I think one thing you've made a case for here is that productivity is really a holistic thing. And you can't just look at the kind of cognitive, you know, task related work that feels like you're getting things done. There's that, the daydreaming or scatter focus like you mentioned, work that's just as important. And sometimes it's easy to discount that. I will sit on my reading chair. And I'm trying to make more time for this. I'm trying to be mindful about it and just sit there and just not meditate, just really daydream. And I've come up with some of the best ideas and solutions to problems just by doing that in the shame, and I'll be completely honest with everybody here, is that I don't do it enough. And, you know, that's something that I. That I need to work on. So I'm with you.

Well, yeah, it's something that frankly, I need to work on too, especially. And I think this is, you know, if any productivity quote, unquote expert pretends like they have every single thing they write about mastered, first of all, they wouldn't need to write about it in the first place and explore their ideas. But second of all, that's a good way to spot somebody who's just again, BSing you into, you know, buying their book or their consulting plan or whatever it is. You know, something that I struggle with and that, that a lot of people struggle with, who are freelancers, who are in this space who have work that's less structured, is guilt. Because it's so hard to measure our productivity when we do knowledge work for a living, as I was talking about, because we can't really measure our productivity throughout the day. We can look at how much money is coming in if we're a freelancer, but it's kind of a shallow measure of our productivity. We so often look to how busy we are as a proxy measure for our productivity, which is, you know, if we're being busy about good things, it's fine. But I think we more often use busyness as a badge of honor. But what happens when we don't, we're not in a state of busyness is that guilt comes flooding in when we take a chance to slow down. And this is, I think, you know, we talk about the costs of not taking breaks and things of that nature, but I think this is one of the big cost of taking a break that people don't really talk about because people are, I don't know, they're afraid or they don't want to be vulnerable with other people maybe. But most of us feel guilt when we take a step back from our work because we're not busy, because we feel unproductive, even though this is one of the best things that we can do for our productivity. You know, again, the gold measure of productivity. I would say that for every minute you spend mind wandering, you make back two in how Much more clearly you think in fragment your ideas, in how you think about the future and how you think strategically, and how much more energy you have because you rest in being able to connect ideas. Of course, one of the wonderful mysterious, not so mysterious if you dig into the science, but one of the wonderful benefits of this mode, but one kind of way to combat this idea is to be super intentional about when and where you let your mind wander. Because guilt and doubt and worry, you know, these are kind of curious emotions that come flooding in when we're working with a lack of intentionality behind what we're doing. Because when we don't have an intention about what we're doing, we doubt what we're doing in that moment. You know, doubt is an uncertainty with our work in the moment. Guilt is an uncertainty with how we spent our time in the past. And, you know, this worry is sort of this tension that comes from a place in, not only in our mind, but also in the future. But when we have intention behind what. What we're doing. I'm a big fan of having intention before attention. So, you know, that deliberateness of focus when we have that behind what we're doing, we're confident that whatever it is that we're doing in the moment is exactly where we need to be, that what we're doing is we can become immersed in what we're doing in the moment. So if you find that guilt comes up as I do, I almost always look to whether I chose to take that break in the first place. And in the cases when I do, it evaporates. I realize, oh, you know, okay, this moment is for me, this moment is my creative time, this moment. And I reflect afterwards on how much it allows me to accomplish this moment makes me a better writer. It makes me a better person, it makes me a better fiance. Because we get to reflect on our relationships and the meaning in our lives, and we get to notice that meaning in the first place. And sometimes that's what it's all about, is that intentionality that has to precede whatever it is that we do.

One of the things that I really wanted to hit on here in our conversation was practical strategies for improving focus and productivity. When you work from home and you've just given us a really, really big one. But I wanted to see if maybe you can share maybe two or three other ones. We don't have to go deep into each one. When you're work at home, professional there, you don't have somebody looking over your shoulder, and we have more distractions than we've ever had before, not only on the screen in front of us, but also in the screen in our pocket and all kinds of things going on. Can you maybe share? I'm looking for the 10% of things that are going to make 90% of the difference. Right. Because there's a lot of things we can talk about. But what were. If you have to pick two or three, besides what we just talked about, what would they be?

Yeah, I think something that most freelancers struggle with is the fact that the work that makes them the money is focused work. You know, it's work that requires a deep level of attention, but at the same time, there's this other side of the work that we do where it involves being super responsive to whatever emails come in, to whatever, you know, whatever emails we're waiting on. And so one that I would offer is doing email sprints. So at the top of each hour, you set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes. And in that time, you blow through as much email as you possibly can. And so at most people have to wait 40, 45 minutes for a response, which they have to do anyway. If you're at a lunch, if you're in another commitment, it's not a ton of time. People don't need a response quicker than that usually. But at the same time, you have the other 40, 45 minutes of the hour to do work that actually brings home the bacon and allows you to earn the income and, you know, get more focused in less time without the distraction of email, mind you, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And I would layer another strategy on top of that one, and it's to get a distractions blocker. They're amazing ones for the computer, for our phones, but ones I use and recommend for the computer Freedom is one that I love. Cold Turkey is another one that I love. Self Control is another app that I love. These are cross. I think a couple of them are cross platform too. But a cursory Google search will help you out there and layer these strategies together where you give yourself essentially no choice but to focus on what you want to do when one of these distractions blockers is enabled. Because here's the thing, if you want to go to a news website, you have to restart your computer. If you want to get out of the distractions, blockers hold. And so you have a choice but to write or do nothing. One more. Because our smartphone is so often attached at our hip, there's a few modes that we can enter into. A couple of them we're familiar with one of them not many people know about. But that make us more focused as we're, as we're working, as we're writing, the ones that people are familiar with. Airplane mode and Do Not Disturb mode. I'm in airplane mode about half of the day when I'm reading, when I'm writing, when I'm working, when I'm focused, when I'm chatting with you today. And so these are moments when I want to bring my full self to something that isn't my phone. But the mode that people don't know about. It's one that I find makes me spend about half of the time that I usually do on my phone, but at the same time doesn't change any of its functionality. And that's the grayscale mode of our phone. Gray scale. And so if you go into the Settings app on your phone and you search for grayscale and you enable it, it's usually under the accessibility panel on your phone. It makes your phone screen black and white. And so it's like you're looking at a newspaper instead of this shiny object that's so stimulated and releases so much dopamine in your mind each time you focus on it. And this alone will lead you to spend less time on your phone. And so I highly, highly recommend it. And it won't really change its functionality. Sometimes you'll turn it back on, maybe if you want to take a picture. But besides those moments, it's worth keeping on. So put your phone on grayscale mode. Get a distractions blocker. Do these email sprints. Maybe one last one. Do we have time for one quick.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

One more. Okay, cool. Yeah, one more. And I don't think people think about this enough or step back from this enough is really, really think about the environment in which you work. Think about how many distractions might come up as you're doing your job over the course of the day, as you're trying to focus on something that you're writing, something that you're cranking out. Are people barging? Can you hear sounds coming from another room? Sometimes it's as simple as buying a pair of noise canceling headphones so we can hunker down on something. Sometimes it's as simple as if our kids are hyper and our spouse is wrangling them. We can go to the coffee shop and work out of there. Paying attention to your environment and how many distractions stem from it that you can control either by taming the distractions or, or moving To a different place where you can focus a bit deeper is something we don't think a lot about. But you know, again, it's like you mentioned that holistic approach to productivity. So many people think of time management when they think of productivity, but I think that's a bit old fashioned. You know, we need to manage our energy by recharging. We need to manage our attention by disconnecting and minding our environment. We need to manage more than just our time if we want to actually accomplish more over the course of the day.

Couldn't agree more about the environment. I find that it takes me, and I know you were very much aware of the science behind this. It takes me a good 10, 15 minutes just to get back into it. If I've had an interruptions and that's not only does it, is it very unproductive, but there's a high probability that in those 15 minutes I will get distracted by something else because I'm not yet in the flow. Right. So it just creates a vicious cycle of low productivity and just frustration. Yeah, the wrong kind of feedback loop that I'm looking for. This is, yeah, this is really, really practical. I hadn't really thought of some of these things, especially with the blockers and the grayscale. The daydreaming I think for me was a huge hu. Takeaway. Especially when it's, when it's intentional because you're looking at it as not a waste of time. This is, this is really part of what's going to make you more effective, more productive. So that's, that's a love that. Tell us a bit about your, your book. You mentioned it a couple of times. Your latest book, Hyper Focus. So who would this be for? What is it that you really focused on in that book?

Yeah, I slipped in a few low key plugs over the course. I love that of the conversation. Very low key. You know, you got, it's like subliminal almost. You know, who's it for? I think if you find you don't have the time to read a book, this book is for you. Because you know, so often, you know, you ask somebody, somebody says, oh, I don't have time to meditate is a good example of this. But then you ask, okay, do you have time to watch an episode of Friends with me Me. And they almost always say yes. And so if you have time to watch an episode of Friends, you have time to meditate or read a book. It's just that you don't have the attention for it. And so I think this is for anyone who wants to regain control of their environment, who wants to, because so often our environment has control and guides our attention. An email notification comes in, and that's what we pay attention to. But it's also about a bigger idea that. Not to go into a sales pitch or anything, but, like, I think this is something we all need to think about, that the state of our attention determines the state of our life. And so if we're distracted in each moment, those moments build up day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, to build up to a life that feels distracted and like we're overwhelmed. What one study that I find fascinating was conducted around the Boston Marathon bombings. And the researchers. Researchers analyzed two groups of people. The first group of people watched six or more hours of news coverage about the Boston Marathon bombings. And they compared that group who had watched the news coverage against people who were in the marathon. And what they found was that the group of people who watched six or more hours of news coverage about the Boston bombings were more likely to develop PTSD than somebody who was in the marathon and personally affected by it. It's insane. You know, the single biggest predictor of fear and anxiety in our lives is how much time we spend watching TV talk shows. So, you know, the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. And, you know, the argument that I'm on a mission to make with folks is this is something that we need to regain control over because. Because most of the time, our environment has control over it, but we need to get a handle on it. So, yeah, that's what the book is about. It's called Hyper Focus. How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction. And, yeah, thank you so much for having me on. It's wherever you buy your books. You'll find it there.

We'll make sure to link to it in the show notes. And I also want to link to the best place for folks to learn more about you and your work. So where should I send them?

Yeah, a lifeofproductivity.com has all of my online writing. I'm not really on social media much. My Twitter is ChrisBailey, but that's about it. I'm very anti. Not anti social media, but I'm very shy on social media.

Well, you know what? That's not necessarily a bad thing. That's something that I'm also looking to not eliminate, but really cut back on in my life. Just a few very simple experiments I've conducted over the past month. The Results have been eye opening for me. So not a bad thing.

Yeah, I find that my attention gravitates to the most stimulating things. And I encountered a study the other day that found that we spend three times the amount of time in apps that make us sad than ones that make us happy. And I thought to the social media that I was looking at, like, it was funny. My fiancee and I were just hanging out in the living room the other day, and she looked really sad when she was tapping around on her phone. And I asked, like, Arden, what are you doing? What are you using? And she said, I'm on Tinder. No, she wasn't on Tinder. She was on Facebook. And I thought, oh, you realize you look really sad, right? No offense, but you look sad, right? And she said, yeah, I guess I am. And so I think this is something that we don't really reflect upon enough, which is how these things make us feel. You know, we don't think about how Twitter makes us feel, how Facebook makes us feel, how Instagram makes us feel. Sometimes they make us feel good, but so often they just show us things to be jealous of in other people's lives and how fit other people are and all the beautiful kale avocado salads that they're eating instead of just like being with somebody in person, exploring a story in a book, encountering new ideas in podcasts or books. And this is something that really, I've been incubating quite a bit. It's like for every minute I'm on Twitter, that's a minute that I'm not writing, that's a minute that I'm not reading. That's a minute that I'm not investing my time in something meaningful, like a conversation with somebody who might love. And I think that opportunity cost of social media is the biggest cost. We stimulate ourselves in the moment and make ourselves a little bit sad at the expense of actually investing in deeper experiences. So, yeah, my trick is that. And if you really find yourself struggling with social media, reset your password. So go into a Word document, just mash on the keyboard for. For 15 seconds, reset your password to that. And so when you, when you have to re log into Twitter or Facebook, you have to go through the whole, I reset my password, what is my password, I confirm my things, and it'll take you long enough that it'll be more aversive in the moment than the desire to check Facebook again. And it's. It's something that I really recommend doing. If you find yourself struggling with this.

Stuff I love that because I think in what will happen is in that the minute or two that it would take you to figure all that out, you're going to become very much aware of. Okay, I get it now. Is this really worth it? I tell you one thing that I'm hearing a lot, and I've noticed it myself too, is that it's not just the time. And here's a scary thought. If you added up over the course of a month and then extrapolate that into a year, that that number is just really, really scary. But it's the attention span. Like, I can't tell you, Chris, how many people have told me I used to be such an avid reader. And it's not that I don't read anymore. It's getting harder and harder for me to maintain that attention. You know, and I don't know, we, you know, this is not a side, this is anecdotal. But, but the belief is that social media might be doing that to us because of the dopamine effect. And before we didn't have that in a book may not necessarily give you that right away. So it's a scary thing.

Well, yeah, I guess. One, two stats on that for you. The first of all, when we're working in front of a computer, on average we focus on one thing for just 40 seconds, seconds before we switch to doing something else. So that is the frequency with which we interrupt ourselves and we don't again, yeah, like you said, we don't just lose time, we lose attention where we transition to doing that thing and transition out of it and into the next thing. And so we check our email for one minute. You look at the pure time you spend on email, it's like a one minute chunk at a time. But when you add up throughout the day that because of that constant, constant switching, you are thinking about it as you transition into checking your email and try to resist the impulse and transition out of checking your email and into writing report or whatever it is that you're writing. That's a lot of time. I would say it's maybe double how much time we actually spend in the email app. The second stat. You know, people always want to live longer, but they don't look at the time that they're wasting that if they reclaimed it would add decades to their life. So one example that I love, I made the conscious effort not to watch any Netflix or any tv. I do the occasional Netflix binge maybe once a month, just like sit down with a beautiful plate of butter chicken and Naan bread that we order from the local Indian place and kind of go to town and maybe some ice cream after too. But if you add up all of the time that the average American spends watching TV over the course of the day and extrapolate that across a given life, we spend, we'll spend on the day that we die 16.9 years of our life watching TV. 16.9 years. You want to live longer? Stop watching TV. The time is there. You know, and this is, you know, one thing that bugs me more than anything is when somebody says I don't have time for that. The average American watches four hours of TV every single day, but yet they don't have time to read books.

Yeah, I don't buy that. I don't have time. I can't afford. These are all solvable problems. They have fairly easy solutions. They're sort of simple. They're simple solutions. They may not be easy to break the habit, but totally get it. I mean that's cut that down by half. And you just added eight and a half years to your life. That crazy. We just lost a neighbor here in my neighborhood to cancer with a young girl, a seven year old girl. And I'm thinking, you know, if you're in that situation, what would you Give to get 8 and a half years more with your child? That's, you know, put it in perspective very, very quickly. So Chris, this has been a fascinating conversation. I love the perspective that you've shared with us here and thank you, thank you for your insight.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

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Social media much? My Twitter is Chris Underscore Bailey, but that's about it. I'm very anti, not anti social media, but I'm very shy on social media.

Well, you know what, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That's something that I'm also looking to not eliminate, but really cut back on in my life. Just a few very simple experiments I've conducted over the past month. The results have been eye opening for me. So not a bad thing.

I find that my attention gravitates to the most stimulating things. And I encountered a study the other day that found that we spend three times the amount of time in apps that make us sad than ones that make us happy. And I thought to the social media that I was looking at, it was funny. My fiance and I were just hanging out in the living room the other day and she Looked really sad when she was tapping around on her phone. And I asked, like, arden, what are you doing? What are you using? And she said, I'm on Tinder. No, she wasn't on Tinder. She was on Facebook. And I thought, oh, like, you realize that you look really sad, right? No offense, but you look sad, right? And she said, yeah, I guess I am. And so I think this is something that we don't really reflect upon enough, which is how these things make us feel. You know, we don't think about how Twitter makes us feel, how Facebook makes us feel, how Instagram makes us feel. Sometimes they make us feel good, but so often they just show us things to be jealous of in other people's lives and how fit other people are and all the beautiful kale avocado salads that they're eating instead of just like being with somebody in person, exploring a story in a book, encountering new ideas in podcasts or books. And this is something that really have been incubating quite a bit. It's like, for every minute I'm on Twitter, that's a minute that I'm not writing, that's a minute that I'm not reading. That's a minute that I'm not investing my time in something meaningful, like a conversation with somebody whom I love. And I think that opportunity cost of social media is the biggest cost. We stimulate ourselves in the moment and make ourselves a little bit sad at the expense of actually investing in deeper experiences. So, yeah, my trick is that. And if you really find yourself struggling with social media, reset your password. So go into a Word document, just mash on the keyboard for 15 seconds, reset your password to that. And so when you have to re log into Twitter or Facebook, you have to go through the whole, I reset my password, what is my password? I confirm my things, and it'll take you long enough that it'll be more aversive in the moment than the desire to check Facebook again. And it's. It's something that I really recommend doing if you find yourself struggling with this stuff.

I love that because I think in. In what will happen is in that the minute or two that it would take you to figure all that out, you're going to become very much aware of. Okay, I get. I get it now. Yeah, I. In. You know, is this really worth it? Is. I tell you one thing that I'm hearing a. And I've noticed it myself too, is that it's not just the time. And here's a scary thought. If you add it up over the course of a month and then extrapolate that into a year. That that number is just really, really scary. But it's the attention span. Like, I can't tell you, Chris, how many people have told me I used to be such an avid reader. And it's not that I don't read anymore. It's getting harder and harder for me to maintain that attention. Mention. I don't know. This is not a sign. This is anecdotal, but.