Mindstorm Ep. 6: Defeating Productivity Guilt - How to Work Smarter & Happier

Hi, welcome to Mindstorm. I'm Adeo Ressi, CEO of the Founder Institute. I'm joined here by Josh Whitton.

Hey everybody, I'm Josh Whitton, founder of MakeSoil.org.

We're going to be talking today about something that a lot of entrepreneurs deal with, and that's productivity guilt. And I'll take a stab at defining it. It's a concept that— and I'm experiencing it right now, so I can speak firsthand— that if you are a busy entrepreneur with tons and tons of things to do and all of a sudden you have a moment of downtime, or you consciously decide to take a moment of downtime, you almost feel a sense of guilt that, oh, I'm not working hard enough, or I'm not doing something. I'm instead enjoying myself, but I need to be productive and with this time. And I don't know if you feel the same way, if that's how you would define it, but I feel it less than ever.

But I remember as a younger entrepreneur being plagued by it. And I think when you say when you take downtime, you feel guilty. What we also see is that people just never take downtime because they feel too guilty to even take it.

Well, and on that point, even when I was like imploring you to come out, we're here at Life is Beautiful, a festival in Las Vegas. Run by a very good friend of ours, Tony Say. And even you said, oh, I had second thoughts because I had a lot to do, and you would have just sat in a house in San Francisco working on email. Now you can sit in a recreational vehicle at Life is Vehicle and do your— Life is Beautiful and do your email. So, you know, we all have it, right? We all think we have more important things to do.

Yeah, it feels wrong to go like really enjoy ourselves.

Right. Well, because you have so much pressure, so much responsibility, so many things, so many emails. I mean, but what I'll say and why I think it's important we talk about this openly is that taking time for yourself pays dividends to the business. And if you feel guilty about taking time for yourself, it makes that time for yourself less effective at making you a more effective leader. So it's actually The guilt itself is a problem because on the few moments that you get to be by yourself or do something you want, but you feel guilty, you lose the benefit, right?

Yeah, a couple, a couple ideas. Like, one is like, where does this come from, right? And maybe it comes from watching our parents or not feeling good enough or childhood experiences. But I think another place it comes from is just nobody really knows what it takes to create a startup. Right? Like we, we maybe we succeed and we look back and people say, well, how did you do it? And you think, how did I do it? I did like 8 million things to get to this point. Right. And really, you don't know which ones of those really mattered. It's probably kind of a Pareto principle thing. Right. There was a lot of it that didn't matter, but we felt we hustled. Right. So I think of what the default a lot of people fall into entrepreneurs is I'll just work myself to the bone insanely hard so that if it fails, I'll know that I did everything I could, right? But if it would be a better answer would be if we actually did the stuff that we had to do to make a company work.

On the Pareto distribution, yeah, the like one task that you did that actually had 90% of the value, and then 90% of the tasks that you do add very little value, right? You know, and that, and that's a reality.

And that's not anti-value. Yeah, well, making work where there isn't any, right?

Well, we, we talked about that, and like, we're, we're entrepreneurs actually, if they don't feel busy, right, that guilt of productivity comes in and they might unconsciously make themselves busy so that they feel fulfilled in the role. So not the guilt of productivity comes into play both when you're trying to take time off but also when the business is going well. I mean, you know, I It's not in every culture though. I've met some Brazilian CEOs and some CEOs in other cultures, the companies are doing really well and they seem busy but relaxed and better able to cope with it. You see it more in the Americas and in Europe where, you know, oh my God, I'm successful, I need to be busy, I need to do more, there's more things I have to work on. And it's a sickness really. So, you know, maybe we could go through some tools that we use to cope with it. And you know, you had an experience today. I'm having experience right now. I've got a lot of stuff going on in the business. Things are going really well. They're all being managed, but it's a Thursday afternoon and I'm at a festival not working, and I have productivity guilt, right? I'm like, I should be more productive. But in fact, it's totally psychological. Everything's going well. I'm not needed for anything right now. So how do you overcome it?

I gotta be honest, where I am in my journey after having an exit, it's like all the work now is self-chosen. It was before as well, but I also just needed to make income, right? I had, I had no money. Um, so now it's like, if I don't find a better way to work, that is not just flogging myself for another decade of entrepreneurship. I'm just not willing to do it, right? So for me, it's like, it's kind of a non-negotiable in that I have to find a balanced way to live or else I'm not gonna work on these companies anymore, right? And yet I want them to be successful. I want to be as more effective than I've ever been in my entire life. And so for me—

And you care.

Yeah.

Because that's another thing that I think—

I can't just chill out and do nothing for the planet.

Right, right, exactly. But let's go into the care thing for a moment because the first thing that came across my mind when you said that is like, ah, you made a lot of money and you don't care. At least that's the stigma, right? And it's like, but you do care, right? You just don't want to work yourself to death.

I want to help. I want to help as much as I can. But I think many entrepreneurs know it's easy to have an unsatisfying entrepreneurial journey where you're hitting milestones, there's no celebration, there's no enjoyment, you're off to the next task, right? I've spent years living that way. And at some point you just say, look, I'm not willing to live that way. What's the alternative?

Well, so, so, right, you just brought up one tactic, right? Taking the time to take a break and celebrate achievements. And, you know, at least in that time where you're celebrating the achievements, say to yourself, oh, uh, I don't need to feel guilty. So Josh, what way are you willing to live?

A great article came out a couple weeks ago, a friend sent me, and it was by, um, it was by Deepak Chopra, and he was talking about the difference between intelligence and awareness. And I would, I would say that when we're in that mode of just cranking and cranking, just revving the engine and working and checking things off of to-do lists, like, yeah, we're busy, but I think our awareness is actually quite low in those situations. And I want to live— to answer your question— I want to live with more awareness.

So, right, you become kind of robotic. And I think a lot of CEOs become robotic and they get busier and busier and busier as the company gets busier and busier, busier. Then they attribute the success to them being busy and they equate success to being busy.

Yeah.

And then what happens is when you're not busy, all these fear of failures and like having to fire people and lay people off. Oh my God, I didn't work hard enough. Ergo, the company started suffering, ergo. And by the way, this isn't like a problem of new entrepreneurs. You know, every great entrepreneur I've ever met, from Elon Musk, etc., have this exact problem. They have a real— I mean, I guarantee you that Elon works harder than most people can imagine. I guarantee you that Jeff Bezos works a lot harder than most people can imagine. And it's this trap of of like, oh, I got successful by being busy, and you equate the two, and that, that's part of where the guilt comes from.

Yeah.

Um, and so celebrating successes, so you're like, oh, I am actually successful. But you know, I think being aware that taking time for yourself and being a happy and balanced person is actually both good for you and the company is another very important thing.

Yeah. And so that's true. And getting to the place where that feels okay is part of what we need to do though, right? And so I remember dealing with this and I think it was maybe reading a, maybe it was a Peter Drucker book about time or something. Time is your most precious resource or whatever. And I remember this epiphany I had that work was endless. The amount of things to do was truly endless.

It's endless.

And I had, I had this sort of falsehood in my mind, which was that I was going to get it done. I was somehow getting this stuff done. I was getting some things done, but I was getting some amount of an infinite workload done. Right. And it really sunk in that there was no end to this. There was no end. You could never, you could double your productivity, you could quintuple your productivity, and you still would not get all the things done. And that was very sobering. I think that started to sink in. And break this kind of subconscious myth that I was somehow going to get it done.

Well, and you know, I get everything. So, well, and that begs the question, like, what should you be working on?

Yes.

And, and then if you're mentally healthy, balanced, and in a good spot, and you walk in the office and you're like, hey man, how's it going? And like, yes, I'm really excited to be here.

That's a productivity boost, right?

People feed off that positive energy. Whereas if you come in the office, you're like, why isn't this done? Where's the stuff?

That's right.

And then this, that kind of negative culture of— and it persists in the culture.

And like, it can make a CEO resentful, it can make a founder resentful, right? You stay there 18 hours a day and everybody else is only there for 10 hours a day, right? I've seen that too.

I'll tell you a great story that illustrates this in a very real way. So a friend of mine is scaling out clinics all around the world, and these are general practitioner clinics. And he interviewed tons of people to try and figure out retail stuff, and he studied tons of things, and this is what he discovered from operating experience. If he goes in and he puts like beautiful layouts and like nice carpets and big exam rooms and all this stuff, um, patient happiness is average, right? If he goes in demolishes an exam room, turns it into a break room for the staff, gives the staff really good benefits, makes sure they have flexible time, treats the staff really well, the customer satisfaction goes through the roof. And so much so that he's like, it doesn't— I can take away exam rooms, I cannot decorate it, it could just be a kind of rundown old place, And the reality is, if the people working there are happy, the metrics of the business go through the roof because the customers are happy, the customer retention goes up, they come back more often. All the metrics of the business go way up because the people working there are happy. And if the CEO is running around like a stressed-out monkey pounding on the table trying to get people to work harder, the, the team just is not going to be that happy.

Which— and that highlights another part of the dysfunction we're talking about, or the trap here, which is that it's so easy to get a twisted idea of what productivity looks like, right? Or what, what wall are you trying to climb the ladder of, right?

Right.

When really, like, this, this employee happiness thing had the biggest dividends. That, that could be completely in your blind spot if you're just cranking on some other metric that's robotically— right.

So like he might not have even discovered it because he went in and was like trying to make these beautiful clinics with like fancy machinery and like automated reception, all this stuff. And the reality was like when, when the people were happy, the business did well, right? And like, you know, that's— it's kind of a truism for the world. Like right now at the Founder Institute, the company I run, morale is high. It's not like extraordinarily high, but it's quite high. And we have no problems in the business. Like, there's no stress, there's no pressure. Of course things happen, right? We're really big in 200 cities, things are bound to happen. But you don't go in the office and feel like, oh my God, it's like command central for some, you know, war in Afghanistan that we're losing. You go in the office and you feel like, whoa, things are running smoothly, people are happy. Like, you know, getting stuff done, productive. And so, and it, in part, it stems from the top because I've been taking the time overcoming my own productivity guilt and trying to be a balanced and good leader and a role model for, for the team that we can accomplish things and be happy at the same time.

Yeah.

And I think that's another kind of place the productivity guilt comes from because you need some negative emotion to motivate and inhuman amounts of action that are required at times. So I'm not going to say that the inhuman action isn't required. If your building burns down or, you know, key team members quit, you might need to put in a lot of—

Sprints happen, probably.

Yeah, exactly. But then you get this cycle of like, oh my God, the world's on fire, work hard. And that instead of saying, okay, and now I'm done, let me go back, you just continue this world on fire, work hard mentality.

And you know, when the world isn't on fire and when people don't have to be sprinting, You know what they start to do if they don't feel safe? They start pretending that they're working. Now you've just introduced something really stupid into your culture, right? And that happens. There's lots of companies like that.

CEOs pretend that they're working. They do things, as you said, that don't matter.

Yeah.

And just like, they're like, oh my God, I need to be busy. I'll tell you a story about doing things that don't matter with me. But this is— so I guess being conscious of everything you do. But I took over multiple areas of the business. And I didn't need to, but it was like I wanted to learn them and optimize them. Some of them had no one running them for some time, no one ever running them. And so I, you know, built structured in and hired people to run them. And, you know, there were times when I was working 100+ hours a week, and it got to a point in some of these where I'd hired people in and and I'm in meetings with them. And we had talked about this earlier, and I was like, why am I in this meeting? Am I adding any value? Like, the person's trained, they know what they're doing, they have a team. Why am I here? And I stopped going.

Yeah.

And was the best decision ever. Brought my work workload down from 110 hours a week to maybe 60.

Totally.

And it was just looking at things that I was attending asking the question, am I adding value? And if I wasn't able to add value, or I added like a very little bit of value, then I could say, as you said in your meetings, invite me in when you need me.

Yeah.

And just leave it.

Yeah.

And I got over the productivity guilt by being conscious and saying like, maybe if I'm a happy CEO, the business will do better. And that's been every— all those things have been true.

Yeah. And that productivity guilt drives a person to show up at every meeting because they— right, it's just kind of— they're not, they're not needed there, they may not even be wanted there, yet they feel the pressure to be there, right?

They need to show that they're adding value. So I mean, maybe let's leave some closing thoughts for everyone. You know, here's what I would say: we've all had it. It's, it's, and you know, it's, it's almost par for the job being an entrepreneur. It comes from a variety of things. We talked about the negative emotions coming in when you need to do a big sprint. It comes in with the guilt of responsibility, and then when you don't have that, you feel like you're not really knowing what's important versus what isn't, right? And so being conscious that it's there and, and maybe accepting an alternative view that if you take time and, and find some balance in your life without the guilt, that might be one of the single best activities you could do for the business.

Yes. And for my closing thoughts, since this is a, a podcast on mindful entrepreneurship, I want to recommend a little book to our listeners called The Tao Te Ching. And this is like a thousand-year-old book of Chinese wisdom. And this is where you get these Zen kind of statements of work without effort, act without doing, you know, this, these— if you've heard these kind of statements. And it's a really interesting book to read or listen to because it is, it is, it is the opposite of the productivity guilt. It is actually saying there is a universal force that you want to embody and align yourself with, and that life force coming through your life is is true productivity. You'll— if you're in alignment with that force, you'll create the number of companies you need to create. You'll, you'll have the right balance between your energy and intelligence going into a venture versus your family versus your personal development. You're in flow with the Tao. You're not just out of harmony with it and just trying random things like a robot or something. So I highly recommend that book, and I can tell you, I listen to it sometimes, and my rational mind is saying, this is insane. How can doing less be doing more? How can you work without effort? Or blah blah blah. And I'll tell you that I believe it now. I believe that there is a state of consciousness whereby acting and not acting feel the same. They feel like the same amount of effort. Sitting feels as restful as taking a meeting. And but it is a— it is an unusual type of consciousness. Very few people find their way to, but I am beginning to believe that it exists. So check out the Tao Te Ching.

Well, and it relates to our manifesting episode, which I recommend everyone listen to as well. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back with another episode soon.

Bye-bye.