efficiency is often seen as discipline but efficiency means you do a lot of stuff but effectiveness means you do important stuff if you're someone that believes you waste a lot of time or maybe you're just not productive enough maybe you don't get enough done maybe you're overthinking procrastinating or don't know how to make a plan
this video is for you because i'm going to show you the eight ways that i save more time make more time and create more with my time let me ask you a question how many of you believe that you're good at multitasking now studies show that only two percent of the world's population is actually able to multitask and researchers say that when people hear that they always
assume that they're in that two percent maybe you're sitting there at home thinking the same thing the truth is most of us are in the 98 say researchers and therefore we have to focus on something called single tasking or mono tasking this is the idea that we focus on one thing at a time this sounds counterintuitive a lot of people say well if i'm doing less things
that's going to take more time the truth is when you focus on one thing at one time not only does your productivity and your efficiency go up your fatigue goes down and your stress goes down as well next time you get lost in that battle of trying to do loads of different things at the same time press pause take a step back take a breath and just focus on that one
activity this applies to eating it applies to driving it applies to texting it applies to speaking on the phone or a zoom call just do that one thing a few years ago i read a study that changed the way i live you can't be logical and creative at the same time your brain and mind is using different faculties and different abilities to do
different types of tasks imagine you're in meetings all day about numbers and data and analytics and all of a sudden you're asked to do something creative maybe write a speech or give a presentation it can be really really difficult to switch from one side of your brain to the other side in a matter of seconds with very little organizing and planning we're literally going like
a pendulum swinging from one task to another which is requiring different parts of our brain and the abilities that we have the way i solve this is that i start every day by first writing down my to-do list i look at all the activities that i have to do now in the examples i give in this video i've simplified my task to make it easier but
know that i do this with a lot more detail you want to draw a line down the middle of the page on one side of it write logical and on the other side of it write creative you now want to plot and mark where these tasks on your to-do list fit either in the logical category or in the creative category the question you're asking yourself is is this task
largely structured focused does it have certain boundaries is it quite a logical step-by-step process or is this creative is it more of a brainstorm is it somewhere where you need to feel free and expressive after you've divided these tasks you now want to write down the time estimate that that specific task is going to take what
ends up happening is you start to plot your week by saying monday is going to be creative tuesdays are logical wednesdays are logical thursdays are creative and fridays are creative or you may also divide your day up into logical mornings and creative afternoons or creative mornings and logical afternoons this division this time blocking allows you to get really
immersed into the activity really focus and be more productive and effective so this might be unpopular opinion but i live by this and it has truly been a game changer in my world if it's not in the calendar it won't get done it's not really a priority right you have to make sure that it's in your plan it's in your day so i'm going to show you quickly what my
calendar and schedule look like that is my life this month as you can see it's color coded it's beautifully designed and as i flick through this what you realize is that every single day i have everything from workout time to meal times uh to scheduled off time all in my calendar what this allows me to do is it helps me prioritize both personal and
professional commitments and helps me see both things in the same place if you haven't put something in your calendar even if it's something social i promise you you'll either forget it or you won't plan effectively around it when i know i have a really big podcast or a really big interview or if i know that i have a big deadline on a day i don't then
surround that day with other difficult and challenging tasks sometimes i'll start my day with the most challenging task of the day because i feel that i need to start with a challenge and sometimes i'll actually put it as the last most challenging task of the day because actually i want to build that momentum when you have a schedule you get context
around how you feel that way you manage your mental health and well-being a million times better and you do more with less time tell me how many times you've experienced this you check everything off your to-do list but you still feel unfulfilled you've used your time wisely you've managed to accomplish every task but you still end the day when your head
hits the pillow you still feel like you failed you still feel like you didn't quite achieve something i realized that this happened to a lot of top performers and it was because they weren't asking themselves what do i need to do today that will make me feel like today has been a good day you don't think that today is a good day because you did everything you wanted to
do you have to feel like it's been a good day so i do this activity every single day when i ask myself the question what do i need to do today that will make me feel like today has been a success for you it may be reading your children a bedtime story it may be making sure that you made 10 minutes to meditate it may be that you had got a
workout in or you had your green juice it has to be something simple that's easily repeatable on a daily basis but that you prioritize doing it writing down what you did every day gives you ideas for the future as well and plotting it out in this way makes it really really simple to remember what you could try on another day how many of you feel like the months are
just passing by and it's crazy to believe there were over a quarter of the way through the year but this is what happens when we don't have really clear goals targets and tasks this approach has really helped me manage my time better i have big monthly goals i have four weekly targets and i have one daily task the one daily task is the baby step
towards the weekly target and the weekly target added up all four of them leads to the big monthly goal so what you're doing here in essence is breaking down something that feels quite unachievable impossible to do and quite challenging into small manageable chunks sometimes you can be sitting there thinking wow i don't know how i'm gonna get that done
by the end of this month if you've ever felt that way use this model first come up with how can you break that big goal down into four separate tasks once you have these four weekly targets now all you need to do is divide each weekly target into a daily task so basically you end up working on something daily that you achieve weekly which helps you
achieve something monthly now you've completely deconstructed this impossible unachievable idea into something very simple and manageable now i know i said to you earlier that you should focus on single tasking not multitasking but here's a way that you can actually get more out of the same time i learned this from my good friend ariana huffington who speaks about habit
stacking now we all have habits in our life that we do every single day without even thinking about it we're driving around town we're cooking every single day we may be on a walk these are great times to immerse in those activities for sure when you're driving to be fully present if you're going on a hike to be really there within nature and if you're cooking to
be really present with the scents the sounds and and all of the different colors that may be there but if you're someone who can do some of those things pretty comfortably you can also add a stack of a habit so for example you may be someone who listens to an audiobook while driving you may be someone that listens to a podcast while cooking or while you're on
a hike or walking the dog it's okay to have it stack in those scenarios to get more out of the same amount of time i wrote about this in my book it's called location has energy time has memory when you do something in the same place every day at the same time every day that space builds an energy and that time builds a memory what does that mean
when you've done something in one place like meditated in the same place for a considerable amount of time that space takes on a meditative energy and frequency it becomes easier to do that activity in that place and similarly when you do something at the same time every day that time has a memory your body your mind remember that and therefore it becomes easier to do
divide your home even in corners i remember when my wife and i lived in a 500 square foot apartment and literally every corner of that room was divided into a meditation corner a social corner a work corner and an eating corner even that differentiation allowed you to keep the energy of that space sacred and appropriate for what you want to do the
challenge today is we eat where we're meant to sleep we sleep where we're meant to work and we work where we're meant to eat so we've confused the energy of our environment that's why we're sitting in bed and can't sleep because we do so many different activities there remove that energy from the bedroom place it where it needs to be and allow
yourself to see how you use your time more effectively in that place a lot of people think sleep is a waste of time i don't getting good quality sleep is integral to making more out of the time you have when you're awake i consistently sleep for eight hours a night and i'm really really happy about it because i know that it allows me to perform better
mentally and physically throughout the day one of the things i will add though is that you want to be sleeping before midnight the sleep before midnight is extremely powerful and is really critical for the hgh the human growth hormone to be activated so if you're sleeping at 9 00 p.m and you're getting those three hours before midnight that's
extremely powerful or even two if you're sleeping at 10 p.m so getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night is critical to being productive with your time when you are awake don't fall into that trap or that habit to believe that you should be sleeping less to do more with your time how many of you find it difficult to start something new or
maybe you find yourself spending hours waiting around for that perfect idea or maybe you're someone who just feels confused about doing anything and everything if you can relate to any of those statements this video is for you i always thought that we wasted time because we were lazy or we were indecisive and while some of these things may be true for you there
actually is a deeper reason why we feel that way and today i'm going to introduce you to three ideas that are going to help you break through them one of my favorite books is called flow i was recently rereading it on the blinkist app flow talks about flow state which is experienced by musicians rappers singers athletes when they're in the zone when they're performing at such
a high level they even forget space time and everything around them and you get to see art or magic in real life now there are a lot of amazing lessons inside flow but one of my favorite ones is this discussion when you're looking at skills versus challenges how many of you have ever felt that you don't have the best skills in an area and the
challenge feels really high chances are if you've experienced that you end up feeling frustrated or stuck and disappointed in yourself and that's one of the reasons why you start overthinking and procrastinating you don't have the skills you have a challenge or a goal that set really high and now you feel overwhelmed and overburdened by the height of that
target that you just give up and stop working sometimes we have the opposite experience where our skill is really high but actually we haven't looked at our challenges we've been doing the same thing over and over again we've been repeating the easy win and in that situation we sometimes feel bored lost or confused we feel like our life
doesn't have meaning it doesn't have purpose and there's nothing exciting or thrilling about the work that we do the author goes on to say that flow is achieved when our skill meets our challenge so when we really want to experience that flow state being in the zone feeling that momentum feeling that energy thriving we have to make sure
that our skill and challenges match are we feeling frustrated and stuck because our skills are too low and our challenges are too high or are we feeling bored because our skills are too high and our challenges are low in either case we want to focus on either increasing our skills or increasing our challenge that helps us focus on the area that we
actually need to have an impact and we stopped wasting time with all the distractions so now instead of procrastinating and overthinking we start focusing on a list of things that can help us improve our skills you have books coaching mentors communities courses all of these are phenomenal ways to start learning now if you're someone who needs
to increase your challenge your challenge can be increased through networking i remember when i used to speak or get invited to speak at colleges and schools i love that experience i still do it today whenever i can but at one point i realized i wanted to stretch my comfort zone then i started working with corporate companies because i really wanted to help organizations
build new models of thinking today i work with so many fortune 500 companies and enjoy the experience deeply but i also wanted to extend my challenge beyond that i started speaking on stages i started speaking at my own events what i found is that you can extend your challenge by increasing your goals or targets or by changing the scale or the depth
sometimes we challenge ourselves by trying to affect more people do more things and sometimes we challenge ourselves by going deeper in the areas we're already in and finally a new way of challenging yourself is a new industry when you think about someone like michael jordan who went off to play baseball or you think about steve jobs who went into movies and pixar and
animation people have challenged themselves across industries when they've truly mastered their field so the question i want you to answer is this instead of procrastinating and overthinking do you need to work on your skills or do you need to work on your challenges and you'll know where to start another book that's had a big impact on the way i think is called the
organized mind by daniel leverton now i read this book a long long time ago but i've been using the blinkist app again recently to dive back into the key themes of this book and the blinks have been so useful what i love about blinkist is that i hadn't read flow or the organized mind for quite a while whilst i do have the real books i also
wanted to get a quick summary and a quick update again so i went on and found flow and realized that i could read it in 18 minutes and 10 blinks they simplify the book into these blinks that make it really really easy to digest one of my favorite concepts from this book that truly changed the way i think is around decision fatigue now i want you to take a moment to just
jot down what are the decisions you make every morning before you've got out of bed before you get into your commute or start your work day chances are you spend a lot of time thinking about what to wear what to eat that morning you might even think about what to eat for lunch what to eat for dinner you might be wondering around what movie you're
going to watch tonight what episode of which show you're going to watch when you get back you may even be thinking about what meeting do i have what person do i have to connect with today what do i even have to do today these are very common things for a lot of us the concept of decision fatigue teaches us that so many of us are making so many
insignificant decisions in the morning that by the time we start our work day we're already exhausted from making decisions we overthink about the smaller things that should be easy and now we have no energy for the bigger things that do require our attention and our awareness i want you to create a table of decisions to make the night before
and decisions to make the day off what that's going to help you do is give you something to focus on the night before so you can be prepared and well ahead of schedule before the next day and be really clear about what you can only do on that day now the night before you want to be doing that either at the end of your work day or just after dinner the reason is because
at the end of your work day you can set yourself up for success the next day for those of you that want to leave it till after dinner the reason why i say after is because we make better decisions when we're eaten and when we've nourished so what we're essentially doing with decision fatigue is that we're stopping ourselves from over thinking about the
smaller irrelevant to some degree insignificant decisions to the more significant decisions now i'm not saying that eating food is not important i'm not saying that what you wear every day is not important i take pride in what i eat and what i wear but when i've meal prepped when i've made a plan a week in advance when i've made it simple for
myself my brain gets capacity and space to make these big decisions a really great example of this is mark zuckerberg barack obama and others who've been known to wear the same suits or the same clothes again and again on repeat now this is something i personally had firsthand experience of living as a monk every day we woke up and we wore robes
we had two sets one to wear one to wash it simplified that energy in the morning now today of course i don't wear robes i'm not a monk anymore and i have a wardrobe that i enjoy but inside of it i have many different things but i have them in many different colors that way i still have somewhat of a uniform that simplifies that or i make a decision the
night before this third model changed my life the first time i heard about it it's called the disc model the disc model was founded by william marston i believe in 1928 what it does is that it breaks down all of our personalities into four types dominance influence compliance or steadiness you can do a full test online but i'm going to give
you two questions to help you figure out which category you fall into are you more outgoing or are you more reserved now neither of these is an advantage or disadvantage neither of them makes you better or worse we all just have a natural inclination an outgoing person is the life of the party they're dragging everyone onto the dance floor they're the one directing the
conversation a reserved person may be as confident but they're more likely to get into a one-to-one discussion they're more likely to have an intimate conversation on the side they're observant and listening carefully the second question is are you more people-oriented or task-oriented people-oriented people are thinking about people's experiences are people
having a good time are they engaged are they enjoying themselves task oriented people are like jay you've got five minutes before this video ends and the camera battery dies and uh we're not so sure if this mic's gonna last right like they're thinking about the task they're focused on making sure that everything about the task is taken care of i think
about people and tasks but i think about people first you are one of four things you're either outgoing in task which makes you a d-type you are outgoing in people which makes you an i type or you're reserved in task which makes you a c-type or you're reserved in people which makes you an s-type so d-types are doers they get stuff done
they make plans they keep schedules they have deadlines they get results fast the i type the influential these people are ideators they're inspirers they influence people they persuade people they're great negotiators they're great speakers and these people are really good at talking now we have the compliance these people are cautious
they're calculative they're quality oriented they want to make sure that things work and that things happen on time and that they're as perfect as they can be they focus on being perfectionist these are the people that send you emails telling you you have spelling mistakes in your emails we need them they make things work and finally steadiness these people are supportive
they're helpful they care about people they have a high emotional intelligence and a high sensitivity towards people's feelings what i love about this model is that it shows us how everyone is needed to build an effective team to build an effective company to have an amazing family without the d types we'd never get things done without the eye types we'd never be
enthusiastic and energetic without the c types things may not work best and without the s-type people wouldn't feel satisfied and content it's so important that we understand all four as einstein said everyone's a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life believing that it's stupid many of us overthink and procrastinate
because we're operating in a different lane we're trying to be an eye type when we're a detox we're trying to be a c-type when we're an s-type we're trying to be something we're not and that drains us focus on your strengths outsource your weaknesses and develop the skills in between and watch how your life changes there's a great conversation between steve jobs and
steve wozniak steve jobs the brand of apple steve wozniak the tech behind apple and in this conversation steve wozniak looked at steve jobs and he said what do you even do you're not an engineer you're not a marketer what do you even do and steve jobs in steve jobs fashion replied musicians play their instruments i play the orchestra
now although that statement was very bold what it was talking about was this really subtle point that he understood his role he understood that he was able to bring it all together and get it to work in harmony to create magic this understanding and recognition that you have a genius you have potential you have a skill that only you have and that
you can bring so don't over think and procrastinate about who you're not like or how you're not like that person that's doing what you want to do focus on the skills you do have and start there every weekday i wake up at 6 00 a.m i haven't set an alarm for a long time but i know that my body will naturally wake me up based on the routine that i've created i usually
sleep for about eight hours a night and i'm very grateful to have that much time and i prioritize sleeping at about 10 p.m every single day when i'm up the first thing my mind wants to do is say something like i feel so tired i've got so much to do today and i as soon as i wake up in that moment rewire and reprogram it to say i am happy i am healthy and i am healing that
simple internal affirmation and statement rewires how i feel about what i have that day i'm grateful for the opportunities in the work i have i'm healing with the challenges i have and my body is healthy because i'm able to get out of bed i don't look at my phone in the morning trust me i don't always follow this i've broken that rule many
many times i'm not perfect i've failed at it countless times but i keep trying to rise back to this rule why because i feel amazing the amount of clarity in my mind the stillness that i experience when my phone isn't the first thing that i see is inconceivable and i highly recommend that you try it out just for seven days don't look at your phone first thing in
the morning and see how different you feel for the rest of the day i promise you you're going to feel more energetic more productive and more creative than you've ever been before now i've been practicing something for a long time now called mindful brushing i brush each tooth for around four seconds before i move the toothbrush this mindful process
allows me to start the day at my own time in my own pace so often before i used to rush brushing my teeth not only would i be damaging my gums and damaging my teeth by the way dentists will tell you about that i actually was starting my day off in a panic with stress slowing down the first activity of the day allows you to start and move at your own
pace in your own time the next thing i do after a shower is meditate meditation has been a part of my daily practice for the last 16 years where i've meditated for at least two hours a day often this is broken up throughout the days on a busy day on an amazing day i get to do two hours first thing in the morning sometimes i'll do
one hour in the morning one hour in the evening or sometimes i'll do 30 minute slots four times a day this really allows me to find that center to find that alignment and find that balance throughout the day my meditation practice includes three types of meditation breath work visualization and mantra for those of you that have read think like a monk you know that i break
down these practices inside the book so that you can practice them at home as well breathwork is a phenomenal way of calming and centering my body visualization is a great way to prepare my mind for all the meetings and events and everything i have to do throughout the day and the mantra is for my soul it's to help me feel connected to my purpose
make me feel connected to divine energy and the supreme source so that i can be an instrument of that joy of that happiness and of that love in the world with everyone i mean recently i've updated my morning meditation using the aura ring app where i take a moment to check my body status what this does is that it helps me measure my heart rate
my breath rate and my skin temperature just for a moment just to take a status check just to check in with myself and say how am i feeling how am i doing right now it even asks me if i'm feeling better or worse after the moment and that allows me to get that really critical piece of insight into how i feel right now when you bump into someone you always ask them how are you
doing how are you feeling take a moment to ask yourself that with the moments feature on the aura ring app after my meditation practice i literally take two to three minutes to set my intention for the day and my attention for the day i found that this activity allows me to create the energy and the mental space i need to try and live by higher values now again i fail
at this all the time i can go through the day and then realize i haven't been loving i haven't been kind i haven't been the nicest person that day but the thing is when i write it down in the morning i promise you i'm more likely to be what i write on the page i'm reminded to be what i write on the page i also take a moment to write three things i'm
grateful for and no matter how hard it is they're at prom i promise you there are some days where i'm like i've just got complaints i've got nothing to be grateful for and even on those days i will push myself to write down something i'm grateful for and i'll always find an answer starting your day off in this way gets this right so that now every action
can actually be inspired by that intention everything that you do externally will be created by how you feel internally and now you can take that energy out into the world we are headed to morning tennis so this is something that i do around four times a week i realized that i just missed playing sport when i'd wake up in the morning
and i'd head over to the gym or with the trainer i always found that slightly stressful the idea of just being there with one person and trying to do a bunch of exercises that were meaningless or purposeless at least to me but going to play it's just incredible to play tennis every morning i feel like i'm back at school and i'm starting my
day with some great energy some positivity a little bit of healthy competition so for the past three to four months i've been wearing the aura ring and it's been amazing to have it on truly because for the first time i can actually verify what i'm doing how powerful and impactful it is on my physical and mental health and i can actually track record
and look back and plan and i realized this because there's so much thought in business and in technology all around how you can't improve what you don't measure and the truth is we never measure our sleep we kind of take a guess i've been getting around six hours or seven hours of sleep this week it's a guess it's random it's made up
you're hoping you kind of got it right you're like oh yeah but last week i i i worked out a lot and you don't know it's just an assumption it's just an idea whereas now i can actually look back i can look at how the week's been i can understand why i feel tired i can understand what i need to do this weekend play has become such an important value to me there's a
beautiful quote that i believe was said by richard branson where he said that we don't stop playing because we get old we get old because we stopped playing and i realized that play was such an important value for me it was such an important principle for me that i had to start my day off with play a bit of healthy competition feeling like i'm
learning a new skill feeling like i'm building a new athletic ability allows me to start the day off feeling like a learner and someone who's growing so usually after game of tennis i sit down to look at my stats it's a great way of keeping that measurement thinking about what's coming ahead for the rest of the day and i can see that it's automatically detected that i've had a
506 active calorie burn i've got an activity score of 79. i've got a total burn of 2357 calories and i've already done 4 000 steps for the day so i love starting my day off with that data it helps me feel like i've started on the right foot and now i know what i've got to do to hit my goals it's also told me that my training volume is optimal my
training frequency is optimal as well and i've got to still stay active today because i'm still in the red so that's telling me that i need to move around regularly and avoid long periods of inactivity which helps me stay healthy and keep my metabolism high this is a great reminder because throughout the day it will keep reminding me the active whether i'm
sitting at my desk for too long or whether i'm sitting there writing scripts it will tell me to get up and move around and until my activity reaches optimal i'll know that i still gotta keep moving as soon as i get back from tennis i have some breakfast my current breakfast of choice is a chia seed breakfast bowl it has blueberries and raspberries inside as well and it's
been amazing for my gut health i find that figuring out the food that's right for your gut is so important and it's so personal and unique it's taken me a long time to figure out what to have for breakfast that didn't leave me feeling bloated didn't feel me leaving uncomfortable throughout the rest of the day and a chia seed breakfast bowl has
been the best thing that i've had as i'm coming to the end of breakfast that's usually when i look at my stats from the night before i look at the quality of my sleep the quality of my rem sleep my deep sleep i look at what i need to do today and what i love about the auraing app is that it guides me and coaches me throughout my day it will tell me what
time i should aim to be asleep it will tell me what to avoid it will even tell me to stay active for me it's really useful having this guide in my pocket and helping me make my choices throughout the day and then i sit down for my favorite cup of herbal tea usually it's a fresh mint and for me having a warm cup of herbal tea allows
me to again start grounded i love the scent i love the feeling of the warmth inside of my body and i love the cleansing effect that it has and so this is where i am now all of these habits have had a huge impact on my life and that's why i'm sharing them with you again i'm not getting them all right all the time there are days where things get changed
or missed or skipped but i'm always trying to get back to this idea in this video i'm going to guide you through the six productivity habits for working from home or if you're back in the office either you're someone who finds it hard to get motivated and productive and be effective throughout the day you get distracted or stuck or lost or maybe you're someone who's ticking off
everything from your to-do list but are feeling drained fatigued and dissatisfied at the end of the day if either of those are you this is the video to watch the first piece of advice i'm going to give you is really simple plan for a commute now for those of you that are working from home you may be wondering this doesn't apply to me jay well actually it does
what i find is that if you create a 10 to 15 minute commute in your day and instead of diving straight into work waking up out of your bed walking to your kitchen table you actually take a walk around the block you're basically tricking your mind to feel like you're going somewhere one of the reasons why we're all feeling so encaged and so
enclosed is because we don't feel like we're changing environment we don't feel like we're moving from place to place like we were before so if that's your case i want to make sure that you find 10 minutes at the beginning and the end of the day to go to work and come back from work and use that as time to actually dive into a podcast an audio
book or a blink on blinkist whatever works for you to give yourself some time to prepare for work now this second tip i've recommended to a lot of corporations and they've found it life-changing and so useful i want you to start creating a five-minute gap between each and every meeting in your schedule so if a meeting finishes at 10 a.m the next one starts at 10 05 i don't
want you to schedule any meetings back to back from this point onwards you may think five minutes is not a lot of time but that five minute gap can be life changing here's how when you take out time between each meeting you get that really important time to decompress and prepare for the next meeting you're now not shifting your energy from one
thing to another thing to another thing straight away and feeling like you're just stressed in between not even getting time to comprehend what the next meeting is about i've got five habits for you that you can do across five minutes that are going to keep you feeling productive effective and focus on your well-being throughout the day
the first one is water it is so important that we take a moment to rehydrate between meetings it's so important to stay hydrated because we need to be drinking around two to three liters a day and when we're doing that it boosts our brain function it allows us to feel clearer it's fantastic for making us feel energized throughout the day the second thing you're going to
do in your five minute gap is walk around this could be in your bedroom in your kitchen wherever you get a moment it's really really important to get moving so many of us are feeling so stagnant and stuck at the moment because we're sitting at our desks all day long we no longer have a lunch to get up to or a meeting on the other side of our
offices to meet someone we're in the same place this is causing a lot of issues with our posture the way our body feels the way our muscles are it's not natural for us to be locked into a sitting position throughout the whole day the third is to watch by watch i mean watch a view a window look out of a window look into the sky take a step out for a moment and get
some fresh air it's so important that we look out into the distance we've got so used to just staring at screens and devices and books and schedules that are right up in our face that we're not giving our eyes the opportunity to look out into the distance now this fourth one's a little more interesting and you may need a little bit more time for it
but it's the idea of wonder allow your mind to wonder allow it to think of a new idea to be creative to think about something unrelated this is where creativity comes from this is where that feeling comes from that you're innovating that you're allowing your mind to connect dots that otherwise you might seem as disconnected and the fifth
and final thing that you can do in those five minutes is to wind down and one of the best ways to wind down is through your breath allow yourself a few moments to breathe in for the same amount of time as you breathe out a very simple way to do this is breathe in for a count of one to four and breathe out for a count of one to four how many of you ever felt that your
mind is ahead of your body your mind is racing around but your body feels sluggish and tired if you want to bring your body and mind back into sync back into alignment you want to breathe in and breathe out for the same amount of time doing this breathing practice allows you to walk in with a clear mind with a relaxed body and reduces your anxiety throughout the day
now some of you may be using your car to commute if you're back in the office or you have a job that relies on you being inside your vehicle now if that's the case i have loved the fact that blinkist allows you to listen to the blinks so you may have heard me speak about before how blinkist summarizes books into blinks well instead of just reading the
chapters and the sections and the highlights you can also listen to them this has become one of my favorite new habits because in around 10 to 15 minutes i can understand the essence and a book in summary one of the books that i'm rereading right now that i'm absolutely in love with is called measure what matters it's huge because it talks about how if we're not
measuring something we can't improve it if we're not focusing on something we don't know how it can become better so for me being able to listen into these blinks and learn at the same time while i'm on the go while i'm on the move is such a refreshing way to stay on top of my growth and my focus i really find that using my car time wisely is a game
changer this next one is all about shifting from what we call small talk to big talk or deep talk i first learned about this through dan o'reilly and his irrational labs where at an event they encouraged us to ask more vulnerable deep and bigger questions how many of you are tired of small talk how many of you start every meeting in
the same way hey how's it going yeah it was good yeah you know same old weekend yeah you know it's it's been a lot all right let's get to work we literally have the same conversation on repeat almost seven times a day in every meeting and guess what neither you nor the other person enjoys that conversation now this point also applies whether you're working on zoom or
whether you're meeting in person again with people we're so used to asking someone how are you and it's kind of a throwaway question people usually come back and give us one of these five answers good bad okay fine or we don't learn anything about the other person we don't get an opportunity to deepen our relationship and it's almost
like we didn't even care when we asked the question but what if we ask someone hey what's the challenge that you've been working through lately how can i help you through it or what's something that you're trying to overcome that you may need an insight on this type of question gives the person an opportunity to really share what's happening that vulnerability allows you
to build a deeper bond and deeper connection and now you're actually engaging with someone in a refreshing way now if you're like me and you're still spending a ton of your time on zoom i mean i'm recording podcasts and interviews with some of my favorite authors we recently had oprah on the podcast about a new book what happened
to you and when i'm speaking to people on zoom i found that it's even more difficult to build rapport a connection especially if you've never met them before in person one of the ways i've been able to cross this bridge is by being curious but not creepy now what i mean by that is about asking someone about something that's in their background i think by now everyone
knows their zoom shot and their zoom location they have a few things in the background maybe a piece of art and maybe a picture of their family and this is such a beautiful conversation starter especially if you're trying to build a new relationship recently i was on a call with a client and i asked him about a really interesting thing that he had
hung on his wall behind it it was a paintbrush i was so fascinated that i had to be curious not creepy and ask him why he had it there he said my first ever job when i was around 14 years old is i used to paint fences and after painting fences i got to paint rooms and after painting rooms i got to start painting homes and now he's an executive and a director of a large
company and he said that he hangs this paintbrush on his wall to remind him of where he started give the person you're speaking to an opportunity to tell you a story i promise you'll be memorable and meaningful and if not hopefully it makes one of you laugh and this final point is something that we probably already know and do but i've
seen it work wonders for me turn off your notifications and turn on chill relaxing work music i've done this for such a long time where i have a playlist that i listen to that allows me to just get into the zone what i find music does especially instrumental music that's what i focus on i try to stay away from popular music that i may listen to in the car or while
i'm in the gym what that does is it gives the mind enough distraction enough rhythm enough pattern enough momentum so that you can actually focus your mind on the activity at hand now some of you may prefer silence or working to chatter and that's fine too you can even put that type of music on but for me instrumental beats and rhythms are a fantastic way of
getting into the zone turning off your notifications is just a no-brainer if you're really trying to do some deep work time is one of those things you know how we use time spend time create time what we make time for like time is one of those things that of course is and the way we use an essential essential essential part of all of our
lives and i think when we're talking about simplicity or clarity i think one of the biggest things we lack simplicity and clarity on is time uh and and for me i've definitely noticed how over life especially when your book came out i've tried to remove people from having to live their life based on a timeline or an expectation and and i realized
that because my life went in a completely different direction whereby i became a monk at 22 and didn't have my first job until 26 uh and today lead one of the most meaningful fulfilling lives in the world thanks to out all my experiences and so it's just it's fascinating there were times in my life where i felt like i was behind people that i should be in line with
there were times in my life where i felt i was ahead of people there were times when i felt like i was trying to figure it out and i think a lot of people usually feel like they're behind a head or equal to and that's kind of how we make sense of stuff and that's why when this book came out which i know was like maybe a year ago year and a half ago
maybe if a couple is gonna it's to me that was i was fascinated that you were able to pinpoint you know and go so deeply into time which i always thought was so much more fluid and so i guess the first question i want to ask you and and please take this wherever you like like don't feel uh constricted at all because i like what we're kind of co-creating right now
what fascinates you about time the most that you were so deeply drawn to actually write a whole book about timing yeah uh so so that is actually um i'm gonna put the answer to that in more of the mundane category um the reason for the impetus for it was just frustration um more than anything else it wasn't any kind of deep conceptual fascination so so here we are uh you
know i'm talking to you from this is this is my office here in washington dc it's the uh refurbished one-car garage behind my house i live there like right there um and so you know i i would come to my office and and do stuff do work um and at a certain point i realized like i would have a i'd have a to-do list uh and maybe i would have appointments on
the calendar but i wasn't intentional at all about when i was doing stuff well i would write when i felt like writing i would make phone calls when i felt like making phone calls i would do interviews when i felt like doing interview you know um and i wasn't intentional about it and i said that's that's great that's that's crazy like like i i end up i i'm
actually a fairly kind of rational i like to think i am at least a fairly rational evidence-based guy and and i'm making these decisions about when to do things i'm not even making decisions i'm just kind of stumbling my way into it um and so i said well there's got to be some guidance out there on on like when we should do things and i found to my
surprise that there wasn't uh and that got me really curious i said well i wonder if there's anybody's ever researched this so i started looking around for research and internet there was a huge amount of research on this question but it was splattered all over the place uh it was in literally two dozen different domains so it wasn't like you say oh there's a sociologist
who studies timing well there might be there is there are but there are also biologists who do that there are economists who've studied that there are microbiologists who have done studied epidemiologists there's a whole field called chronobiology and so what you had was you had literally two dozen different fields asking very similar in some cases
identical questions and what i said is like maybe you know it was painful but if i go wide enough and deepened up into this research i can begin to piece together the evidence-based ways to make better smarter decisions about when to do things when to do things in a given day but also to your other point jay um uh when we think about our lives our our
lives are episodic episodes have beginnings the episodes have middles and episodes ends this whole idea of the journey metaphor you introduced earlier is like journeys have beginnings they have middles and they have ends and it turns out that there is some fascinating research on how our cognitive abilities change over the course of a day and then more
episodically how beginnings affect us how midpoints affect us how endings affect us there's research on how groups coordinate in time there's research on how the way we think about time affects our behavior there's research again all roads lead back to linguistics there's research based on the way that languages configure their verb tenses
it can predict people's savings behavior as crazy as that sounds um and so um so it ends up being something that is going back to another one another one of your words it ends up being essential it ends up being fundamental uh because uh we are temporal creatures that is we have we talk about colloquially about biological clocks uh about about a biological clock but
but essentially what we have we know from from biology is that especially chronic biology is that we essentially have clocks in every cell in our body i mean we are walking time pieces and again depending on your notion of time sort of philosophically existentially we are in some ways moving through time at the very least our conversation began
in the past um that right it's going to end in the future right the people who are going to listen to the recorded version of this are listening to something that happened in the past but they had but those people haven't done anything yet because that's in the future and and so we're sort of swimming in this essential element of our lives and
so what i was just trying to do is just make it understandable yeah and i think you did a phenomenal job and so i want to dive into different parts of it i guess my first question is like there's actually there's a few things so the first one is i think the most common relationship and of course i'm making a huge assumption here but i think maybe we'll agree maybe
your research will say something else but i'd say my assumption is that the most common relationship and i believe everyone has a relationship with money we have a relationship with time we have a relationship with uh anything knowledge wisdom et cetera and so our relationship with time for most people is i always feel like i don't have enough
right that is a very clear relationship that we all have every time it's like i don't have enough time i can't make enough time i can't find time like we say all these words which are all about making finding creating having what does that do what is that mindset toward time how does that actually affect our behavior our relationship with time we can think of it as an ally
we can think of it as an enemy in some ways that's over that's oversimplifying in that case but i think if what we're trying to and one way to make time your ally rather than your enemy is to recognize the effect often invisible that it has on your life um so if you look so so i'll give i'll give you an example uh uh what we know from let's just take the
unit of a day what we know very clearly from a whole array of research is that our brain power does not remain constant over the course of a day our brain power changes over the course of the day so doing something at 9am is not the same as doing something at 3pm period full stop now there's some complexity underneath that but the main idea is
that our brain power doesn't remain constant over the course of a day and the best time to do something depends on what it is you're actually doing so once you understand those kinds of hidden invisible rules you can begin to make time your ally rather than your enemy and end up mitigating some of those feelings that you never that one never has enough time
um so so i think that's i think that's part of what it is people who feel like they don't have enough time this is not something i write about but i'll open about it anyway in many cases people who don't feel like they have enough time sometimes not always sometimes it's not a time it's not a a sufficiency of time issue it's a sufficiency a priority issue but they
they actually don't have any clarity about their purpose or their priorities and so they're moving in all kinds that's not always the case but i think that's that's partly the case the other thing that we know is that when time becomes extremely salient in our lives we underperform uh and i'll give you uh in certain circumstances or we're unhappy in
certain circumstances so i i a great example of that is in professional services but particularly in the practice of law is the billable hour um what we know so if you are a lawyer practicing in a law firm not working for the government or doing that or or non-profit or something uh you bill yourself out by the hour and so what you do is that you have
you know a way to well i mean going analog here but you you have on your computer or you know scribbled down an account of what you're doing literally in some cases in six minute increments uh and what we know from research there is that that makes people that is incredibly thwarting to people's sense of autonomy um and so um so there are all kinds of things in
our relationship with time that if we reconfigure it we can feel a little bit better do a little bit more and better yeah that's that that's that's put on i think that makes uh that answer and all the parts would make a lot of sense i think the the part that i get really interested by when we start talking about time in the way you just did now where you talk about priorities
you're talking about uh the you know the the ally versus the enemy and i i i love that is productivity even the goal of time because i feel like today one of the biggest challenges that i get asked at least and maybe your children experience this or maybe what i see outside in the world of social media is a lot of people today spend a lot of
time overthinking and procrastinating and that's seen as a negative thing and people are often like scared of overthinking scared of procrastinating or they judge themselves and then they start getting into this kind of like you know uh vicious circle and cycle of feeling like oh like i'm wasting a lot of time here tell me about what you found or
even your thoughts on on productivity as a goal of time versus the the effective use if possible of procrastination and overthinking uh procrastination and productivity okay let's talk about what productivity is i'm going to be literal if you look here productivity is the amount of units you produce over a given amount of time so it is inherently time
based because time is in the denominator of productivity okay so so again i'm not sure that productivity is necessarily the best measure i say that as a writer okay so i could be like like i could be a product like suppose i wrote more words per hour today versus yesterday i would literally be more productive but am i am i a better writer i i don't know it's
probably it doesn't matter like what are the words right um and so and so in some ways productivity is the notion of productivity in that very literal sense is an artifact of our being an economy where we were producing identical mass-produced goods and so efficiency was the was the highest value because everything was the same and so
what you wanted to do was in a given denominator make the numerator larger okay that's how you increase that that's a way to increase productivity or keep the numerator the same and shrink the amount of time in the denominator so um so that's what that's what that's what productivity is i think a way to um you know a looser way to measure things is is quality and
quality contribution impact those sorts of things uh and certainly for certain kinds of professions like like being a writer writing more words is no measure of my contribution to the world yeah so if anyone's listening or watching right now and it's like dan i'm i just feel like i procrastinate a lot i overthink a lot and i waste time what would be your
response to that okay so let's okay so so that's the product so that's a productivity thing now let's go let's talk about let's not let's talk about procrastination because we know a lot about procrastination okay okay two big ideas here one procrastination is not always bad okay sometimes you're procrastinating for a reason because you haven't worked
it out because you're still incubating an idea okay so it's not inherently bad it's not like all procrastination is bad the second big idea here is that procrastination is basically in general the downside the darn the doubt negative procrastination is just an emotion regulation problem right it has nothing to do with time it means that you are
unwilling to confront something and therefore are not something so disturbing to you that you would rather actually sabotage yourself than confront it that in some ways you're making a quasi-rational decision that the pain of confronting man can i really write this is greater than actually not writing it in the first place um and so so we know this from a lot of
research procrastination is an emotion regulation issue and so what you have to think about is what is the emotion that you're avoiding and is there a small step is there a way in some ways to trick yourself into either confronting it directly or to do something to just get yourself going and that in that the action ends up confronting the the
emotion but a lot of times but again i just in certain circumstances it's hard to say the fact that you're not ready to start is a signal that it might be a very very positive signal it could mean that hey it's i'm still incubating this yeah that's that's a great answer i i i love that perception because i think i think as soon as you start labeling
and going oh my procrastination's bad and this is not a good place to be in you're right you just every all of that is just avoiding the actual emotion which is a signal or a sign or an alert that's kind of trying to get your attention and and you just keep putting it away and i think what that leads to and this is something which i found fascinating book it's like starting
things like i feel like you know knowing when to start a business or knowing when to start a project is like the hardest thing in the world and you know i'm sure you get asked this a million times but like tell us about the research behind starting something and and what you found was most critical there again there's no there's never there's
very rarely prospectively a perfect time to start something all right but there are ways to give ourselves a little bit of a different it's like a lot a little bit of a psychological edge uh and this is the work of katie milkman jason reese and hangchen die they did it at penn university pennsylvania and uh they had this idea of of um what they call the
fresh it's called the fresh start effect and a way to understand the fresh start effect is like this that certain dates certain days certain dates uh are what social psychologists call temporal landmarks temporal landmarks that is they are they stand out in time the way a physical landmark stands out in space so again back to the journey metaphor
you're navigating your way you're trying to find your way oh there's a landmark i know where i am oh there's that building i have a sense of where i am temporal landmarks are navigational tools in some ways but certain temporal landmarks have a peculiar psychological effect what they do is essentially they they operate as kind of a restart what they
say is that on certain days that are fresh start days you essentially relegate your previous bad self to the past and open up a fresh ledger on your new self all right and so there's certain days that actually are more you're more likely to start something and you're more likely to succeed while starting it so what does this mean let's let's be concrete
here you want to start something you're probably better off doing it on a monday rather than on a thursday you're probably better doing it on the day after your birthday rather than three days before your birthday you're probably better doing it on on the uh like uh the first day of summer rather than three days before the first day of
summer uh let's say you're uh if one is a religiously observant you know uh you know the day after uh or the day of a religious holiday rather than four days before that religious holiday uh and so you can in some ways use have that sense of where you are temporarily and pick the right date to start something yeah i i can so relate to that and my my
problem is i'll try start something on a monday i'll fail on tuesday and then i wait till the next monday it just started well okay so so that's that's that's a mixed bag that's a mixed bag it depends on it depends on on how deep the failure was on uh it depends on how deep the failure was on tuesday now there's another strategy for all of this yeah please is
with which we've done all of this i mean it's reasonably well known and in some ways it's interesting because i think it's analogous to our conversation about simplicity and the opposite of simplicity or simplicity and complexity uh in that i do think that in many cases we have been um seduced into the idea of moonshots and big hairy audacious goals
i think that they're important but i think that they're oversold in a way and what's undersold just think about it just think about it as a pricing issue okay so the so so the big hairy audacious goals moonshots i think they're overvalued and i think what's undervalued is small winds and once again there's a lot of there's a lot of evidence of that starting from
carl like 30 years ago small winds are enormously important because what small winds do is that they small winds can overcome that procrastination problem small winds can then lead to other small winds and other small winds that cascade into something into something bigger so a strategy for overcoming procrastination a strategy for many things is to go is to
go for small wins let me give you an example of that so so uh the one strategy that i um that i've heard of i i mean i just i called it this it's not originally for me it just sort of you know out there i call it j5 not j y but j letter j and uh that's just tha and that stands for just five more okay and so if you don't feel like doing something
you say okay you know what i'm gonna do uh man okay so i'm so i'm doing some research right now okay i have these papers some of them are incredibly boring okay you know what i can't stand it i want to quit you know what i'll just read five more pages just five more pages i'll read that okay oh my god i got a boatload of email here
oh i can't deal with it i just want to go inside and have a drink you know what i'm gonna just do five five more five more emails and we'll do that um uh you know what i'm tired of writing okay just five more sentences that's it and that you know that can get us going give you a small win and what happens a lot of times is that just five more becomes just 10 more just
20 more something like uh something like that i really like that one that's that's an awesome strategy i think that's good it's very simple i use it all the time i'm not joking around i use it today i use it today when i looked at my email file and i was like oh god i can't bear that it's okay i'm just gonna i've already answered enough email i'm
like okay just five more and you know what i did i just i did that and i got it done and i probably ended up answering eight or something like that another one a very well-known technique i use it i have no shame in using it you're probably familiar with it your listeners are probably familiar with it is the pomodoro technique um which is which is bit you know
pomodoro is italian for tomato uh and so um you know you set a a timer i i have one on my computer uh that i use in on very dark days uh i set a timer for whatever i do it for 25 minutes and i just can't bear this okay i can't research this anymore i can't read this anymore i'm sick of writing okay here's what we're going to do is 25 25 minute i'm not going to do
anything else i'm just going to do it for that 25 minutes and and that can um yeah and that can and i think let me let me extract from this as always a large theoretical lesson and it's this all right that a lot of times in our understanding of what makes human beings tick we think that belief precedes action that you have to convince yourself and then that
is the impetus to act and in many cases more cases than we realize the arrow runs in the other direction that getting yourself to act can actually trigger the belief yes and that's a very very important that's a very very important lesson that that's so true and that's really it's kind of like when we're like i can't make my mind up right like even that saying
is exactly in that belief where you're just spending so much time trying to make your mind up and decide something and and what i love about what you just said is is around that whole the small wins element of just i always feel like when you can get into a good rhythm and pattern of keeping promises to yourself and keeping small
commitments to yourself you start to trust yourself and when you start to trust yourself you can then trust yourself with bigger tasks the problem is like you said is that we go for these moonshot goals and naturally we fail at them and therefore we don't trust ourselves and i feel like self trust is like the big issue when it comes with time is
that you're like well do i even trust myself with this much time do i even trust myself to complete that uh and you're right about the small wins whether it's making your bed or just five more or you know all of these principles that you're laying out like that just builds trust with yourself i'll give you something else uh that that builds trust with yourself that
that's related to this concept which is uh again it's research based it's built on uh talked about i've written about this i wrote about it in that book um i've talked about it before is um the work of theresa mobile at harvard business school and she found that the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and
meaningful work okay so the days we're making progress the days were motivated we come back the next day feeling motivated uh but one of the challenges is that is that we never have a good we often don't have a good sense of how much progress we're making um and so one of the so one of the things that i've done for this is now for like eight or nine years now
is um at the end of every day i have a program what you know called a progress ritual and all i do is i just basically say what i g what would you get done today and i just list what i got done today and i keep a record of that uh and i have to say i almost never look at the list but it's the act of doing i mean seriously i almost never look at the
list but it's the act of doing it so i so i just take a moment it's it's a it's a it's a it's a ritual all right and you know i don't have to tell you former monk the importance of rituals in in in human understanding right so it's a it's a ritual it's a punctuation mark at the end of the day what did you get done today dan okay this is what i got done okay
what what i love that how do you do that for other people so if you're leading teams if you've got a small team a big team a company how do you kind of help people realize the progress they're making yeah there's something you can do for yourself but yeah how do you do for others i mean you could do it you can do a ver you can do a version of what i'm talking
about for your for your team i mean what i would want to do is is i would want to get i would want to build that habit in others rather than have them rely on me for that i would want to build that habit in others so what you could do is you could have you could ask your team send you that at the beginning not as a way to monitor them but as a way to
um just as a way to build that habit and then eventually have them continue to have it without sending it to you um yeah absolutely i'm gonna try i'm actually gonna try that out i'm i'm 100 gonna try that out what'd you get done today just write down the things you get done i mean i mean it's a very simple concept we always we often have a to-do list at
the beginning of the day like have it done list at the end of the day and it's almost like gamifying your mind right because you know that if you got three things done yesterday you might want to get four done today so you push a bit further right i think a lot of times also when we're scrambling around we don't have a sense of what we what we've accomplished
sometimes it can be and sometimes it can be um it can be affirming so i know that many days where i feel like i haven't gotten anything done during the course of a day i stop and i do my little progress ritual again we're talking like jake 30 seconds yeah not anything elaborate um i'm like oh oh okay i actually got more done than today and then on the days where i
didn't get much done you're like oh come on man you gotta you gotta do a little bit better than this come back yeah you're coaching yourself you're coaching yourself yeah that's a good way to put it you're in many ways you are what you're doing is you're just giving yourself you know you're coaching if you think about it like a like a like a
sport it's like like uh like in in in in track and field or in swimming or something like that your coach is there with a stopwatch thing here was your time today okay uh or you know here's how much you lifted today um you have a sense of you know are you making progress so you're not making progress yeah one i love that one thing i want my audience everyone who's
listening right now or watching i want you to be aware of is that literally down in this book breaks down everything from like productivity i've done some of the tests with you guys before and i've shared the book when we talked about um you know all of the different productivity times for different types of people based on what time you sleep
and what time you wake up the naps breaks i'm not going to ask dan all those questions because they're in the book and that's why i recommend the book i i want to ask dan stuff that isn't in the book or is extending the book and and par i think one of the biggest questions i do get asked that that i do want to talk about is relationships because i think dating and
getting married and knowing when to either pop the question or when you should expect the question like these are like these are like some of the biggest challenges in the world for on a personal individual level for people and so tell me about some of the work that you found when it came to not just like when's the best time to get married but
it's almost like when did people when did or what did you find when people said they knew or they felt they'd found the right person yeah that one is that one is more inscrutable i have to say um uh i wrote about that only very very tentatively because i wasn't sure about the the research and that i mean it you know what what it says is that um in general
in america marriages are more likely to last if people get married after age 25 and before age i think 34 somewhere around there uh but again that doesn't mean if you get married at age 35 you're going to get a divorce you get married at 28 i mean it's just like there's a slight there's a slight effect there uh there are some interesting effects on um
especially in america today uh people with more formal education are more likely to get married and stay married uh people with less formal education are less likely to get married and less likely to stay married if they are uh and there's also seems to be an effect whatever your level of education on getting married after you complete
your education rather than before but again i don't think you take those large population insights to make a decision about whether you're going to spend the rest of your life with someone you love i can recommend a book that is um well one of the leading scholars of of of marriage um really the social psychology of marriage is at northwestern his name is eli
finkel uh he wrote a very good book called the all or nothing marriage about how marriage has about how marriage has changed uh so a lot of what we know about healthy marriages and also how marriage has changed in america over the last uh 200 years it's a it's a really really i it's a very very interesting book all or nothing married
yeah the all-in-one marriage by eli eli finkel which uh and you know there's a lot of really good research uh in there and there there's some relationship advice in there too um you know among the most important things are um you know what do you attribute to someone's inherent personality and what do you attribute to circumstance so if you're so if your spouse snaps it you
say uh you say oh my god my spouse is the biggest jerk there ever was or do you say oh my spouse is having a bad day and people who make the attribution that it's circumstantial not surprisingly end up better off than people who say you know attribute the behavior to someone's inner jerkiness right yeah no it would be fascinating also to look at things like
amount of time couples spend together but amount of time couples spend arguing on useful arguments maybe two yeah yeah there's other there's other there's other research out there right there's a guy i'm spacing on this there's a guy named gottman i think yeah john gottman yes yeah yeah yeah he's done some research on on marriage and you know one
of the not this is not surprising one of the biggest um things that you see is i if i'm not if i'm characterizing it right is not arguing per se but how people argue yes um and um and so somebody has to do with the attribution the other thing one of the biggest signals i think in gottman's research is uh when people express contempt for their partner not surprisingly that's a
marker of things gone awry adam i want to shift from like your mind and your ideas and the way you think to how you live can you take us through a day in the life of adam like how does it start how does it end what does it look like what's been your routine more recently what are some things that you've changed over time that have actually created momentum and
acceleration so it's funny because my schedule is completely different than i'm sure yours in in most in general and i think this again becoming comfortable with who you are this it was a process and i didn't have the ability early on in the journey i do have much more of an ability of it now but i go to sleep at nearly four a.m
every day and i will wake up closer to 11am so i think a lot of times they think of entrepreneurs and people in my position they think you're up at 5 or 6 a.m you're beating the sun but i'm the exact opposite and i found that my greatest point of inspiration and joy is typically during the night time when there's less activity because i can focus on where we
want to go what we want to do and also on myself and back to inherently knowing who i was and my brother as well we've known since we were 15 or 16 that the the night schedule worked better for us but we didn't have an ability to implement it because we were in high school we were in college and then we're starting the business you have to be on
other people's more traditional i guess like calendar schedule and so as we got to higher levels we were able to continually shift it and obviously we have people on our team that supplement the early mornings and whatnot we worked the late nights but i really embraced what my natural predisposition was for my schedule is that and i knew that i would be better
if i could operate on this schedule just like morning people love to be up in the morning i love to just push it as far as i can late into the night and i think there's nothing wrong with it and a lot of times uh it doesn't get glorified because it's it's a difficult schedule it doesn't work for everybody it's it's not essentially normal but for me it's
been the absolute best thing and being able to build my schedule the way that i want i believe is the ultimate luxury because again i've if you can control your time in and not necessarily what happens throughout your time but control how you allocate your time most people would rather have ten minutes of you at a hundred percent than three hours of you at twenty percent you can't
even though you spend more time you can't give them all of you and so one of the things that i identified as i was building my schedule this way and really leading into it is i can give people 100 of my effort when i'm on a schedule that aligns with when i want to go to sleep and when i want to wake up and also when i want to work out if i can if i can
anchor those specific things i can give everybody much more of myself in a shorter period of time and again like i've heard you speak about it before and you said it beautifully and it's true like most of the people in your life jay they would prefer for you to have be with them for 10 minutes give them a hundred percent of jade it's an amazing
experience and for you to be sitting in the room on your phone dozing off and not giving them the energy that not only they deserve but that you deserve to give them and so i think that that's something that i identified through how i built my schedule now i mean i work out every single day and i think that's for me it's a really important thing because
discipline has been something that is been pivotal to our journey too and i believe that with discipline if you anchor yourself through specific things it gives you more freedom it's discipline is something that that opens you up and gives you more opportunities first to be spontaneous more freedom is because you have clear pillars clear
anchors it's like if you're playing a video game and you get to the checkpoint you can be more brave in your action because you know you can always go back to the checkpoint so like that's the way i live my my day-to-day life i try to have specific windows where i'll do calls but then i leave everything else essentially open because i love i love
the chaos in a positive way and i love the spontaneity in a positive way and i think that um if for me at least this is the way i found my schedule if it's too back to back to back to back and scheduled out there's no there's no real opportunity for the spontaneous excitement which i think that we all need to have in one way or another and i don't think that it's the
same for everybody but i think that you have to leave yourself the ability to discover something or to discover a relationship you didn't think was gonna happen or a partnership you didn't think was gonna happen or a friendship or things of that nature and i think that being able to anchor myself knowing i'm doing this these few things that these few times
leaving this window open um so that i can try things and again like the greatest opportunities i've ever had have come from taking a chance on something and then anchoring it in the way that i i live my life through my schedule and so again it's it's something that i've had to work towards it wasn't like that on day one it's as you get further in the
journey you hone it in more you have more opportunity to try things and you have more control i think like again one of the key things for me in terms of success is control over schedule and control over time you don't get to you don't know how much time you have but if you can control how you allocate that time that's truly the greatest luxury and
that's something that i think is pivotal success and i think again when we're thinking about our team in in specifically in the headquarters everybody has different schedules because everybody works differently and i've seen how positive it's been for ryan and i and so we try to translate that to the team as well i love hearing about how different your schedule is to
mine because it still represents the same thing to both of us so yeah you still have discipline you still have focus you're still prioritized around when you can be creative it's based on self-awareness and what's good for you and right for you so the values that we're choosing our schedule on is the same like there's a very similar value set
and it just looks different and that's actually the beauty of life like that and i think that's where we go wrong where we go you know in a few years people are going to be saying oh yeah i need to do what adam's doing i need to sleep at 4 00 a.m and you know wake up and it's like well that's not really going to work or people can be looking at going oh yeah i
need to wake up like a you know like i need to go to sleep when jay doesn't work and it's like well that's not really what we're saying what we're saying is if you're self-aware and you create discipline and rhythm in your life and space for spontaneity then you've got to figure out what works for you and where it works for you and so i love hearing
how different our schedules are because it just proves that there are multiple ways that it can look even though there's a depth of why they're created that way and in addition to that what i really appreciated you were talking about is i think we think of discipline as ease of either back to back and we think of laziness or spontaneity as completely free
and what you've actually said is what discipline is is that you've created a discipline where you can be what i've been thinking about a lot lately is you can be effective and efficient and efficiency is often seen as discipline but efficiency means you do a lot of stuff but effectiveness means you do important stuff and and i think that's what i'm seeing
is missing in so many of our lives is that we're trying to be efficient we do the laundry do the dishes we spoke to the team we check this off check this off check this off but then you're like well i haven't had any creative inspiration today i haven't been effective and so i i really glad that you actually explained discipline to be the meeting
of efficiency and effectiveness together i mean i think you said it in an efficient and effective way uh the way that you just like illustrated what i was trying to to get across but it's but it's true like i think a lot of times people think of discipline as something that lacks freedom but discipline is the thread in the in the opportunity that gives you freedom and
so i think and again you as you become more efficient you can become more effective but it's hard to be effective if you're not efficient and so i think again you you said it in an amazing way you took a complex thing and you digested it but it's it's been really paramount and i think it's something that is is the way that my life has has gone in
and again like i think that we have the same theories you and i in terms of what we want to accomplish from our day-to-day lives we do it at a different time like i'm working out at midnight you're doing things early in the morning but it's we're looking to get the same type of result and i think again when you were talking about being self-aware that is the absolute most
important thing if you tried if i tried to work your schedule it wouldn't do the same thing for me if you tried to do mine it wouldn't work but i think the fact that we've both been transparent honest with ourselves and self-aware of what makes us show up as best as we possibly can and then that makes us better for other people and so i think
for us like that's that's the an incredible way to phrase it yeah and i and i respect and appreciate that in you so much because i think there is a noise i mean i get different noise so my noise is hey jay why don't you hang out late like why don't you come to this or what right and then your noise is well if you're an entrepreneur
who's disciplined shouldn't you be waking up earlier and you know and exactly and it's just really interesting how like no matter what you do there's going to be someone who disagrees with it and and that's why it has and that's why i respect what you just shared so i'm so happy to hear that you have this i had no idea that that was your schedule now
i know when to spend time with you and uh you know and and i really like that because i really hope that everyone who's listening you're feeling more confident that you're not doing it wrong if you're doing what's right for you but notice that adam and i are still basing it on values of discipline of focus of creativity it's not that adam's not just
saying i do whatever i want whenever i want and there's not there's no structure he still even has a sleep you still have a sleep routine it sounds like when you're like yeah 4am to 11am right there's still a routine and so that's what i find is really healthy adam this has been so powerful because what i love about the way you talk about entrepreneurship
is that it's strategic and intentional but then there's the spontaneity and creativity and i'm so excited to see what you continue to build it's you know you're 12 years in and i cannot wait to see you just continue to crush i mean you're already crushing it but but for the business to continue to grow and grow and grow i wanted to ask you before we come to the final five around
creativity and innovation and you spoke about spontaneity they're meeting someone random like bumping into an idea i love that so much what has been your secret to creativity and innovation where have you continued to find that that discipline and that connection so i think one of our i guess one of our i don't know secrets is the right word
but again back to my brother like the fact that there's two of us and that we're able to go through life together and we've had similar experiences i mean my brother like to to be fully transparent is more creative than i am and like when we're thinking of color stories and whatnot ryan's always building these beautiful color stories
cody who's our design director is amazing jake and he's our content director he's incredible sam who heads up social she's she's amazing as well and just the whole team like it's i could go on and on but one of the things that i discovered and this actually came from my mom so uh and you wouldn't know it based on what my life has become but until i was
like 25 years old i'm 34 now so no maybe even older this is like 2013. until but let's use 25 as the number until i'm 25 years old i hardly have ever left the country i left the country one time twice actually i went to mexico one time and i went to london one time and it's like each one was for two days and then when i'm 25 my mom basically says like you guys need to do
more and see more things you need to discover more things because we were so laser focused on what we're going to do so a lot of the things that i've reflected on today with uga is things i've learned more specifically over the last six or seven years in terms of like the spontaneity the freedom and i've always had the discipline but it was
almost at a level that was too high and so my mom had said you need to they were going to hong kong and she was it was for this wedding she's like you need you need to come like it's an old family friend you have to come to this wedding and i had no intention of of traveling overseas long story short i end up ryan and i end up going it's the most incredible trip
um just like going outside of the country seeing something completely different changing our perspective and when we're there we get inspired by this bridge and this bridge that never i'd never seen pictures of it anything we get inspired by this bridge we end up creating a shoe based on this we end up going to another another country visit
years later inspired by that and so i think that travel allowed us to change our point of view change our perspective when you're thinking of creativity a lot of times there's things in your day-to-day life that when you're thinking about repetition you don't pay attention to it because it comes almost a second nature it's reoccurring but when you go to a new place
everything is new you have to pay attention to your surroundings because it's uncomfortable not necessarily negative way but in a positive way you get all of the stimulation through your senses you're seeing things you're meeting people and so when i when my mom pushed me out of my comfort zone then it completely changed the way that i was
viewing the world and it made it so that i was much more open to receiving what the world had been just pushing what i wanted to do or what the intention was and so i think like that made it so um it's kind of like i don't know if you remember on the old cell phone signals when you would make it a call going out would be like an
arrow pushing like this but when someone's sending you a message it's going both ways and so that's kind of what that calibration did to how we discover creativity and now like one of the things the greatest things that inspires me is movement whether it's movement in cars movement on foot movement in the air and so i think like movement in general changing your
surroundings not necessarily going to another country or another state but even going anywhere just discovering i think the opportunity for for movement that's really where like the creativity came for us and then again i think that if you can take an idea lean into it and see like and speak to why this makes you feel different you'll find inspiration
in it and i think that for us like we have we have an incredible team that finds inspiration in different places and then we're able to talk about it and the greatest thing you can do is be a great communicator because if you can articulate what your vision is and whether that's through verbal whether it's through art whether it's through anything people will understand and
people will feel it not everybody will but some people will and i think like that's one of the things that's gone really really far for us is that we've been able to take these uh inspirational things like our streamlined shoe which is my favorite one is inspired by japanese souffle pancakes from when ryan and i were in tokyo and like ryan's obsessed with them
and but we took that and we and we made it into a shoe and so it's like you never know where the inspiration is going to come from but if you allow yourself to re receive it you can get it and i think like that's something that a lot of people don't think of they think they have to put it out there and push it but a lot of times just receiving what's around you will
give you a lot of inspiration into what you should do i am so glad i asked you that question i was about to not ask you that question but i am so happy and even though you're giving of course which is wonderful to hear the credit to your team and your brother for being the cr you know creative ones but the fact that you've been able to observe that and see
that that's where it's come from and the example from your mother too i i love that adam thank you so much for watching that video if you enjoyed it here's another one i think you'll love you'll get to where you want in life just not in the way you imagined and that's because the path that's paved up and down is far different to the path we paid