Episodes

On this episode, we chat about five productivity experiments you can try out while stuck at home—including how to wake up early, reset your caffeine tolerance, and replace TV time with books. Topics covered include: How our wakeup time doesn’t affect our income or success level The downfalls of caffeine How to optimize your caffeine consumption The ways we borrow energy from tomorrow How many years of our lives we spend watching TV How mental stimulation has become the enemy of focus Iden...

On this episode, we chat about how to avoid “all or nothing” thinking—also known as the “eff it” effect, or the abstinence violation effect, if you want to get technical about it. Topics covered include: ⁃ Not being satisfied by partial success ⁃ How the effect plays out across different time scales ⁃ The idea of “sunk costs” ⁃ How awareness is key to behavioral change ⁃ The downfalls of black and white thinking You can listen (and subscribe) to the podcast below! The post Podcast: All or Som...

Takeaway:Some problems are best solved by continuously chipping away at them. For others, there’s a real benefit in letting your mind wander. This allows us to connect the future, past, and present and come up with new ideas and be intentional about our goals. Capture mode, problem crunching mode, and habitual mode are two ways to strategically mind wander. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 17s. Podcast Length: 23 minutes, 06s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). A couple weeks back on...

Takeaway:Capturing ideas helps us log what’s on our mind and think more clearly throughout the day. What you capture can be super broad, from tasks, to follow-up reminders, to actual insights. The ways of logging those ideas are equally diverse, and include digital and physical notepads, task managers, and messaging tools. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 40s. Podcast Length: 25 minutes, 56s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). A couple of years ago, I chatted with productivity author...

Takeaway:: Make a list of everything you’re worrying about, and divide it into what you do and don’t have control over. Then, deal with the items on your list accordingly. Estimated Reading Time:: 1 minutes, 35s. Podcast Length: 22 minutes, 42s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). Believe it or not, it’s possible to worry more productively. On this week’s podcast, Ardyn and I dig into one of my favorite productivity tactics for crazy times like these: the worry list. The name pretty m...

Takeaway: In her book Time Smart, behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans digs into the fascinating relationship between time, money, and happiness. While making more money is an easier goal to chase, Ashley’s research shows that making time-first choices ultimately leads to greater happiness. Time Smart outlines strategies to do just that, including tactics to save us time and ones we can use to buy time back. Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 55s. Podcast ...

Takeaway:This year, try giving yourself a non-material gift. Three ways to do this: think about something in your life that’s missing; look at the habits you want to pick up again; and take your vacation days or use up your benefits. Estimated Reading Time:1 minutes, 57s. Podcast Length: 15 minutes, 17s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). Happy holidays, everybody! We’re nearing the end of a weird year, and the thing we might be celebrating the most is the fact that 2020 is almost ove...

Takeaway:Before switching between tasks, take three deep breaths. It’s a super simple way to reset your focus and set a quick intention for what comes next. Three techniques you can try: box breathing, the 4-7-8 technique, and the 5-5-5 breathing technique. Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 28s. Podcast Length: 14 minutes, 21s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). Breathing is something we all do but rarely think about. And yet it dictates whether we feel anxious or calm, tense or relax...

Takeaway:A pre-mortem is a ritual that helps you account for all that could go wrong with a project—in advance of those mishaps actually occurring in real life. Three steps to do a pre-mortem: identify the projects you want to go well, imagine the worst case scenarios, and create a plan to make your project more resilient using the knowledge you collected. Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 39s. Podcast Length: 18 minutes, 29s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). You’re probably familia...

Takeaway: Last week I challenged you to go as many days as possible without charging your phone. Some practical tips to help you do that (especially during this anxious time): rethink which jobs you hire your phone for, rearrange your home screen, take advantage of your phone’s many modes, and opt to get news alerts from a single source. Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 48s. Podcast Length: 30 minutes, 1s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). It’s been a uniquely crazy and anxious f...

Takeaway:A few tactics to help you inbox with intention: track your email usage, adopt email sprints, take an email vacation, suggest phone calls for longer discussions, and send less email. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 38s. Podcast Length: 26 minutes, 8s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). While the idea of Inbox Zero is sexy, the reality is that most of us don’t get there. Even if you do manage to tend to every message in your inbox, it’s only a matter of time before a new one ...

Takeaway:Cait Flanders’ new book, Adventures in Opting Out: A Field Guide to Leading an Intentional Life, explores how we can step away from the default and choose a life guided by intention and purpose. A number of ideas to think about: how our culture and the stories we’re told shape our values and goals; using intuition to identify what we really value; signs that we should opt out; and how to respond to critical judgement around your choices. Estimated Reading Time:4 minutes, 1s. Podcast Len...

Takeaway: The next time you reach a strong impasse with a problem, sleep on it, by writing down the problem before heading to bed. Incubating unresolved problems overnight lets your mind wander, rest, and unearth insights you might not otherwise have had. Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes, 13s. Podcast Length: 18 minutes, 34s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). If you’re anything like me, you occasionally find yourself staring down what could be several more hours of work at the end o...

Takeaway:Many of us want to read more but are unsure of how to do it. A handful of tactics to try: set specific times to read, create a comfortable physical environment, identify less meaningful activities and replace them with reading, read shorter books, have multiple books on-the-go, put down books you’re not enjoying, make reading a social activity, know which reading format you prefer, and schedule a reading day. Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes, 19s. Podcast Length: 31 minutes, 58s (link ...

Takeaway:Change is inevitable and we need to learn to embrace it. Four tactics to get you started: have an awareness for change and how it interacts with your expectations, see every data point as part of a broader trend, shift your mindset to view change as the default state of the world, and meditate. Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes, 50s. Podcast Length: 21 minutes, 8s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). We’re going through a period of rapid change. Maybe your kids are going back...

On this week’s podcast, my cohost Ardyn and I cover the biggest lessons we’ve learned from our experiments for the podcast, as well as our favorite nuggets of wisdom from the guests we’ve had on the show so far. Just in case you’re curious to dig into them, here are the 10 favorite interviews we’ve conducted to date—I’ve bolded what you’ll get out of each conversation above the link to play each episode. There’s a link to this week’s episode at the bottom of this post, too, where we share a bun...

Takeaway:Kelly McGonigal’s latest book, The Joy of Movement, is an ode to the value that movement can bring to our lives. Kelly shares how exercise of any kind and for any length of time can help us not only feel physically healthier, but also more connected with ourselves and our communities. She says that group movement is almost always better than individual exercise (even if it’s online!)—unless you’re spending time alone in nature. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 38s. Podcast Length: 45 ...

Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 24s. It’s pretty skimmable, though. Podcast Length 29 minutes, 30s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). The Amazon links below are affiliate links—I get a cut of sales. I’ll be donating what I make to the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The best productivity books more than pay for themselves: they teach you how to save time, so you more than earn back the time you spend inside them. So which productivity books will help you out the most? Her...

Takeaway:Idleness, when practiced properly, can actually make you more productive and creative. Podcast Length 22 minutes, 56s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). Today I wrote a piece for CNBC.com on how it’s okay to be a bit lazy right now. Of course, not all of us have the luxury of being lazy during a pandemic. But regardless of your situation, I hope you check the article out. Even if you have less time than usual, right now we deserve a break more than ever—and we also deserve a bi...

Takeaway:Henry Emmons’ book, The Chemistry of Calm, is a practical and tactical deep dive into what makes us anxious and what helps us find calm. In our interview, Henry talks about how flexibility and acceptance—with ourselves and with the world around us—can help us find calm in these stressful times. Estimated Reading Time:1 minute, 26s. Podcast Length 28 minutes, 45s (link to play podcast at the bottom of post). We’ve spent the last few episodes of the podcast talking about calm—and how it...

Takeaway:We procrastinate when a task is boring, frustrating, difficult, ambiguous, unstructured, or lacking in personal meaning or intrinsic rewards. By reversing these triggers—a few suggestions for how to do this are below—we can overpower our urge to procrastinate. Estimated Reading Time:1 minute, 41s. Podcast Length 23 minutes, 24s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). Procrastination is a fascinating topic—and just as fascinating is the science behind it. Research suggests that there...

Takeaway:Calm is elusive right now. 5 ways to find it: become engaged with something every day, spend more time in the analog world, meditate (or journal), write down what you’re grateful for, and find something to savor every day. Estimated Reading Time:3 minutes, 23s. Podcast Length19 minutes, 53s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). These days, calm can feel elusive. Anxiety comes and goes in waves, and, as I wrote about a couple of weeks back, it’s hard to be productive right now. It’...

Takeaway:Working from home isn’t easy during the best of times—let alone during a global crisis. Below are some tips for working from home when you find it difficult to focus. These strategies should help you do two things at once: both focus, and become kinder to yourself. Estimated Reading Time:7 minutes, 11s. (But it’s skimmable.) Podcast Length27 minutes, 45s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). These days, it can be tough to strike a balance between staying informed and staying focus...

Takeaway:Not all tasks in your work are created equal. To identify your most important tasks, make a list of all the activities you do over a given month, and then pick the most important one; the one through which you accomplish the most. Then, pick your second and third most important activities. Estimated Reading Time:2 minutes, 35s. Podcast Length2 minutes, 35s (link to play podcast at bottom of post). Not all tasks in your work are created equal. Here’s how to weed out the tasks on your p...