How long did it take me to book this with you, John?
How long did it take?
- I, should we, it wasn't that long.
- It took a very, very long time
'cause I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it.
And you know what I did?
I kept snoozing your email to the next day
for probably a month.
- That's okay.
- It was, no, no, no, it's not you, it's me.
I'm the one who's broken inside.
- Welcome to Pragmatic.
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I'm your host, John Tidgey,
and today I'm joined by Merlin Mann.
How are you doing, Merlin?
Merlin Mann: I'm doing great, John.
So nice to be here.
Thank you for coming on the show.
I've just always figured that I'll do a show.
I'll do the procrastination episode tomorrow
or when I get the perfect guest.
So, and I think I've finally found the perfect guest
to help me with this one.
So, thank you for coming on for this.
I guess, just to kick it off, I sort of,
the older that I've gotten,
and gotten is not really a good word, but still,
the busier I've become,
the less that I can keep my head in sort of in one moment.
And so when I start losing track,
I start to write things down the list,
which is I think perfectly natural
and helpful and healthy probably.
And new things come up, then you add them to that list.
We cross off a few,
and I always seem to be adding more than I get done.
And so my list kind of keeps growing
and growing and growing and growing.
And eventually sometimes you hit list bankruptcy
and just throw it away.
And sometimes that's your excuse to change to-do list tools
and just say that that's perfectly fine,
but I've come to think about why the list keeps growing.
And in my particular case, a lot of it,
I think there's a recurring theme of procrastinating.
And it's something that I find is very, very insidious,
and I struggle with it.
Is that something that you've come across in?
- No, not at all, never.
- Okay.
- Never a problem, yes.
Yes, of course, it's the worst.
I do it, I've always done it.
I have finally, I don't know, 10 years ago,
got diagnosed with ADHD.
And for me, it's mostly the A for me.
I have a brand of ADHD that's a very garden variety,
boring version of ADHD.
It's not the famous kind of 80s and 90s kid ADHD
where you run in circles and hit things with a stick.
It's the kind where I have,
I can finally realize that I have had, historically,
difficulty focusing my attention where I would like.
Before we even get to, can I focus my attention
on the good things I would like to do,
I have to get to the point of acknowledging
that because of my pipes and wires, at least in part,
and then the behavior that spun out of that over the years,
the habits I've built, there are certain kinds of things
where it's improbably difficult for me
to get certain tasks done,
even if they are to any neurotypical person an easy task.
So I'm, you know, that's,
the reason that I've become a teacher
is that I'm still a student.
And I do struggle with that.
And I would love to talk to you about that
and all the ways you end up
putting yourself in that condition.
Why is that list getting bigger?
Are you picking the best stuff?
Are you, is anything allowed on that list
that you think you're not gonna do?
We've got a lot of angles we can work from,
but it's a real thorny problem
and we'll take it anywhere you want to go.
- Okay, so basically I thought I'll start off
with a definition because I like to start off
with definitions, I guess,
but I was digging around about different definitions
for what procrastination is.
And the one I like the most,
'cause there are multiple, I suppose,
is to put off intentionally the doing of something
that should be done.
Kind of generic, but what I think is,
I guess, that procrastination doesn't have to mean
I'm sitting on the couch, not folding the washing.
Washing needs to be done.
The couch doesn't need to be sat on probably,
but it could be something like
straightening the pictures on the wall,
not folding the washing,
which could mean that straightening the pictures on the wall
was an item on your to-do list,
but it wasn't as high a priority
as doing a head off folding the washing.
So if you had like a little fancy scenario,
and what I didn't mention in that scenario, I suppose,
is that you got some people coming around to your house
at five o'clock for dinner.
Let's say that, you know, some people still do that.
There's five laundry baskets waiting to be folded
in the way, making a mess, gonna be very embarrassing.
So I've had to choose a to-do list item to do first.
It'd be do the washing first and then pitch is second
because, you know, they probably won't care or notice
if the pitch is crooked, unless they're really observant,
maybe some would notice.
And the thing that gets me is that those are two items
on my to-do list, but that's still a form of procrastination
because I'm not doing them in the right order.
- Wow, yeah, there's a lot there.
You've got three or four hours of content right there
because there's, so as far as defining
what procrastination is, I think it's something
where maybe perhaps like the Supreme Court
in pornography, you know it when you see it.
I have some quibbles with that definition
because as somebody, that's what procrastination
looks like to someone who doesn't procrastinate,
in my opinion.
For someone who does procrastinate,
it's not about priority, unfortunately.
It's not about priority.
It's not really about intention.
It's an extremely irrational response to life.
So the rational response to life is
to figure out the things you need to do,
decide which things are most important, and then do them.
And that's extremely rational.
And for a huge amount of things in life,
I'm totally OK doing all of those.
But for a person who procrastinates,
it's much uglier than that.
It's-- I feel.
And that is that regardless of how much you want to do the thing, regardless of how much
you need to do the thing, right?
The problem is that for whatever reason, you're still not moving closer to accomplishing that.
And why is that?
Well, we'll get into that.
There's a million reasons.
But let's start to me.
Let's start with my definition, anyhow, would be something more along the lines of despite
your rationality, intelligence, best intentions, energy, enthusiasm, time, attention, all the
the big nouns, regardless of what you know you should be doing, for whatever reason,
you're not getting closer to that thing.
Now I'll mention as a quick side note here, I think part of the problem, I said before
about building a habit over the years, I think the fact that you haven't gotten killed yet,
despite repeatedly not doing the thing, unintentionally builds that terrible habit.
And I can, for somebody with ADHD, I can peg that right to dopamine.
Sometimes it takes a real scary event to get me to fold the laundry, let alone straighten
the photos, right?
Sometimes at least for people with ADHD, it's not everybody, it takes a "whoa" moment to
make you go take care of the thing.
Because you just have not reached the level of what you need to accomplish this thing
that for whatever reason, mentally, emotionally, maybe physically, you can't get there.
So there's so many ways that we can talk about how this happens, and then I hope we'll get
to some of the ways that you can address it.
But as with so many of these things, whether it's social anxiety, whether it's just garden
variety anxiety, there's so many things that are misunderstood by the folks who don't have
it.
And it's not that they're not being sympathetic, empathetic, they're trying to understand it,
but it's especially difficult to understand a problem that you don't have if you're not
motivated to really understand it.
So I think social anxiety is something where it's become more okay to talk about that.
Some people, it's just extremely difficult to deal with other people.
A friend of the show, John Siracusa, he does not like talking to strangers.
He would prefer not to.
And how do you get that way?
I don't know.
But I'm glad it's becoming more okay to talk about this stuff.
And when we get back to procrastination here, we do have to talk about all the barriers
real or imagined or suspected that keep us from doing that thing.
And that can include things like anxiety, that can include, it can just be, it can be
pipes and wires, but why do we not do it?
I'm not sure why we don't do it exactly, because it can vary so much, but I do know there is
a way in to get better at it, but it starts with being honest about where we are to begin
with, right?
I mean, you don't want to go to a doctor who starts giving you medicine for the wrong thing.
So, alright.
Wow, okay.
So, there's a lot to unpack there.
I know.
I'm sorry.
We could even get straight to the tips and tricks, but you know me, you're going to get
a really nice dessert, but first you have to eat your vegetables.
And the eating your vegetables part of this, as I hope we can talk about and learn more
about your situation, is that we have to first start, let's just go step zero, as you like
to say.
is that this is not rational.
And we need to understand and accept that it's not rational.
A rational person knows what to do and does it.
A person who is less rational knows that they need to do it
and still don't do it.
And why is that?
You know, I feel like that's a really interesting
jumping off point.
- So a couple of things
about having the vegetable source and everything.
So peas and corn, yes.
Potato, yes.
Beyond that, I struggle, especially with broccoli.
But I'm sorry, but anyhow.
- Do you like Brussels sprouts?
Have you ever roasted Brussels sprouts?
- No, I don't think I actually have roasted them, no.
But I hear-
- See, that's the thing.
A lot of people cook Brussels sprouts wrong.
Their first Brussels sprouts exposure
was to terrible boiled, overcooked Brussels sprouts.
And it's just basically sad cabbage.
If you roast it, you know, with some sea salt
and a little bit of balsamic vinegar,
it can be really quite delicious, just for what it's worth.
- Okay, I'm gonna note that down.
And I'll get back to that at some point in my future.
I promise. Okay, so there's that. One of the things that you said that really just struck a chord with me is this, the idea of like a threshold, a consequential threshold, that is to say, if I don't, so I'm just paraphrasing, but the idea is you have a to-do list, I mean, you know, you need to do it, but you're procrastinating about doing it. And the consequences of not doing it have not escalated to beyond a threshold whereby you can break through that, that procrastination barrier, or for the want of a better way of putting it,
it. And yeah, I guess my observation has been is that sometimes, I mean, it's a great way
of thinking about it because the consequence threshold of a lot of these tasks that we
know we should be doing, in some cases, it doesn't increase with time. As time passes,
it's like, well, I still haven't, you know, painted the walls. Okay, fine. Well, I could
probably wait another year before I deal with it. Whereas I've got people coming over at
five o'clock. So, that's a real deadline that's actually going to have real consequences.
Hence the threshold will escalate the closer I get to that point in time, which is an interesting
way of thinking about it.
Yeah, I mean, let's stick with your party for now because I think that's a nice, pretty
neutral example that will suit us nicely.
We'll talk about whatever you want, but let's talk about your party.
Straightening the pictures on the wall, you know, I get that you're citing a minor example.
That's an extremely minor example.
Let's make it slight, let's raise the stakes a little bit.
Let's say, as you say, they're coming over at five for what?
They're coming over for a dinner party.
Have you done the dishes, right?
Are the pots clean?
Did you go to the store to get the food that you need?
Let's take it maybe a thousand times further,
and let's say you're somebody who has a disorder
that a lot of people call hoarding.
Can people get into the house?
Is there a path?
You committed to this a long time ago,
but you got what, piles of newspaper and Amazon boxes?
When are you gonna deal with those Amazon boxes?
I don't know, it's just, I don't know where they're gonna go.
Right?
So that to me, that is stakes that even though
you can understand, there's extremely low stakes
to the crooked photo and there's extremely,
there's higher stakes to not having any food
or a kitchen in which you can prepare it.
But those stakes can go all the way up to,
like I say, is my house in a condition
where I'm okay with people coming in?
And there may be something, believe it or not,
listener, this is not you, but there's somebody out there, believe it or not, who's not going
to achieve that threshold motivation until maybe a few minutes before the doorbell rings.
Which is not rational, but it happens.
It happens.
And so, I think your example will suit us just fine.
How do you get to where you can achieve whatever threshold motivation you need to get that
stuff accomplished without needing to panic. Absolutely. All right. So when it comes down to
a lot of this, you say we talk about the consequences of not acting on these items
and some of that's therefore will drive the prioritization. So, and I guess to some extent,
you know, the whole getting things done, GDD, David Allen sort of suggestion about, you know,
processing to-do list items and so on and so forth and setting some of those priorities.
I suppose when you do set those priorities based on the relative consequences and you stack everything in a list, it's it seems so thoughtful and well thought through, so obvious and so clear at the time that you do it.
But what I've observed is that sometimes the time changes the priority of those items, depending upon what they are.
And maybe that's because of the consequence threshold changing as time moves forward closer to the event you're preparing for.
And, and I think that where procrastination kills me, where it really does drag me down is that I look back at things like
interruptions, which we could we'll get to, and things that spontaneously make you re-evaluate those priorities, and you
don't do it as thoroughly. And you then feel this, this, this little, I'll just do this quick thing. And it's like, but this
quick thing is a quick thing, but it's not an important, prioritised quick thing. And that's then slowing me down from the
the bigger tasks that still need to be done.
And so I'm essentially sabotaging myself,
and yet I'm still getting a dopamine rush
from doing this one little thing and checking it off.
- Yeah, partly because it's something you can understand.
It's doable, and again, for somebody who's afflicted as I am,
now it's not that you have no attention,
or it's that you don't have much of a governor
or a steering wheel for your intention.
And so you've now, you go do this deep dive,
maybe you're gonna go update your homebrew,
Like maybe you're going to play with your bash profile, but there's something that on
the sort of Chixet Mihaly matrix is something that is very, you have high skills, but a
small challenge, right?
The kinds of tasks where you're like, "Yeah, I can do this all day long."
Meanwhile, you've got this pile of flaming stuff over here that you're avoiding for some
reason and that's rough.
Yeah, it's interesting.
- And one of the other comments you mentioned too,
is like with the ADHD thing,
it's like some people have that lack of governance
or there's less, how should we say it?
There's less governance for some reason.
And it's just, it is what it is.
And some people have a better, I'm not trying to,
it's hard to put it into words.
It's like some people understand,
you said before, it's like,
it's hard to understand an affliction of a certain kind
if you don't yourself have it.
It's one of those things I found frustrating when I was,
when I was, before I was married, before I had kids
and people would say, well, you know,
you don't have kids, you don't understand.
And I'm like, well, like, but I can try to understand.
And I always felt like, what were you saying?
That I can't understand this until I have children.
And the funny thing is that if you now fast forward
to my present self and I think back to my past self,
I think, wow, I really had no idea
'cause I didn't have kids.
And I don't mean it in a bad way,
- No, no, but look at a crying baby on a plane.
So when I was in my 20s, I would wanna,
let me speak to your manager.
I paid to have a quiet flight.
Why can't you go take care of your baby?
Flash forward to now, and like,
that's all I can do not to say,
do you want me to walk the baby up and down the aisle?
Like a total creep.
'Cause now I've been in that situation,
whereas before I got it, now I really get it.
So yeah, I think that example works.
One more thing in passing, just because I don't want to let this go by.
Again, this is to your point about finding that motivation and how it's irrational, and
you talked about prioritization.
And one of the things I feel like it took me a while to get my head around is that for
certain folks, prioritizing can be extremely useful, especially for a neurotypical person.
It's something where you can prioritize and say, "Well, this is giving me some clarity
about what I need to do."
If you struggle with stuff like procrastination, prioritization ends up very much not being
your friend.
Because prioritization starts with something, to me it ought to start with something as
simple as I like to say, what is the priority?
You can't really have, you can have maybe two priorities, but when you get to the point
where now you have six priorities and you have four different levels and you have color
coding and you're bolding it, is that really even a priority anymore?
It's closer to force ranking, maybe, but at the point, this is why I've always pushed
back against applications that encourage
endless levels of tagging and prioritization,
because all the time that you're tagging and prioritizing,
guess what you're not doing?
The thing that you think is important.
That is a huge honeypot for the distracted person.
So one of the problems when we talk about prioritization
is that for the person who has difficulty
finding the typical motivation to get something done,
get something accomplished,
I find it does not, it does not help to over prioritize and add all those tags.
And in fact, the more I feel the need to taxonomize that I've learned, the more I
need to really examine why it's not already done.
You can tell something as I again, like to say, you can tell it's a priority if it
got done and it got done well, right?
Do you follow?
Yeah.
And so, and so the, the trouble for the person who procrastinates is that a better
use of your time at that point.
If you're not gonna do the task, let's stop for a second,
and let's look at what you've done here, right?
So, in a very getting things done sort of way,
well, okay, how did you phrase this task, right?
Are there, so importantly, it's a huge piece
of getting things done that just changed my world,
is if you're procrastinating about something,
I think a good first question is,
am I ever really gonna do this?
Is this a thing I'm gonna do?
And if it is a thing, if it's not a thing you're gonna do,
why is it on the list?
Get rid of it.
Hard as, difficult as that is, get rid of it.
And if you are going to do it, let's talk about why it's not done.
So there's some reason that you will have resistance to doing that.
This is classic David Allen.
I think one of the biggest things you need to look at is, does this task that I've set
for myself have built-in work that needs to be done before I can do this task?
And again, straight out of getting things done.
So often, from a practical standpoint, one reason to-do lists don't work is folks tend
to make lists of projects when they really should be figuring out tasks or as David Allen
says next actions.
So is that making sense?
Like when you look at that list and you have all that prioritization, you can taxonomize
those things within an inch of their life, but they're still not going to get done.
If you have something on there, the classic example from David Allen, if you have a thing
that says call Merlin Mann and you haven't done it, why haven't you done it?
Do you have Merlin Mann's phone number?
Oh no, I need to get that.
Do I have a way to ask him what his phone number is?
So to me, that's from a practical standpoint,
that's a super practical way to look at it,
is like, am I gonna do this?
And if I am gonna do this,
what is the resistance that has kept me from doing it?
And that way you can slip
into a more rational state of mind,
but it does require being very honest with yourself
about your intentions, your actual priorities,
and the motivations that will cause you
to do or not do a thing.
- Wow, okay.
Yes to all of that.
Yes.
I think that when you do settle on what priority or the priority, I think with my, God, I'm
trying to think of the right point to continue on here because there's so much in that.
I feel like you have to respect that decision.
You reached a conclusion based on, I've done all my pre-qualification or pre-tasks in order
to execute this task.
I have decided that it's past the threshold of I actually need to act on this or the consequences
will be too dire if I don't.
And once you do that, you have to respect that and you have to say, well, a series of
rational decisions and full knowledge of consequences have led me to this is now what I'm going
to do.
No matter what happens right now, I have to then focus and just get it done and push through
it and execute on that priority because that is the priority at that moment. And I feel
like procrastination is the, is just, it completely erodes that because essentially you stop respecting,
I think, the decision you've made with the, the agreement you made with yourself.
You're not, you're not, I mean, you're also describing something that I think is fascinating,
which forgive me if I'm not using this word in the correct way from a CS standpoint, but
modality where I feel like we do operate in different modalities.
And you know, obviously again, in getting things done, a classic example is, well, you
shouldn't have to think about your work all the time.
You should mostly be doing your work.
That's why you should set aside time to think about your work so you don't have to think
about it.
You want to make you treat yourself like an idiot and you crank widgets, right?
I mean, but that's when you talk about honoring that, I think that's really interesting because
when you say honor, you know, what you agreed to or what's a priority.
Well, first of all, I almost feel like when we say priority, I almost want to say, can
we try instead to say, what's the best thing I could do right now?
Because priority is a very nebulous idea, and people use it in so many different ways.
Especially honestly, in the world of developers, you hear people talk about what are Apple's
priorities?
What are these things?
Well, for yourself in the moment, in any modality, you can always ask yourself, what's the best
thing that I could do right now?
You could say what's the best use of my time, but no, I want to go further than that.
What's the best thing that I could do right now?
Given where I am, given all of this, I get the big bucks for making these decisions in
life whether that's as a parent or a developer.
What's the best thing that I could do right now?
And then, okay, so further here, when I talk about modalities, I've mentioned this before,
but back in the days when Netflix was a company that basically you sign up and it's a certain
amount each month and you can have three DVDs at a time.
And it takes a day or two, we're pretty near where they are and they'd arrive pretty quick.
But there's a funny thing what happened.
My friend Catherine calls this not flicks, which is when you start you paying $7 a month
or whatever.
And you get these DVDs and you don't watch them.
Well that's crazy.
Why am I not watching these?
Well, I'll tell you one reason I wasn't is because of modality.
There's day Merlin and there's night Merlin, right?
There's way more Merlins than that.
But I'll tell you, here's one to start with.
Day Merlin is very alert and awake and having coffee and reading things about film.
And you know what?
There's so many new movies from the new wave movement that I've never seen or haven't seen
recently and so I'm going to get some Truffaut.
I'm going to get Breathless, AlphaVille.
I'm going to get all these movies and they're going to arrive and then when they arrive,
I'm going to sit and watch these.
But here's the problem.
Now Night Merlin has these three DVDs with subtitles to read.
And I just want to watch a reality show.
Night Merlin has very different motivation than Day Merlin.
Do you know what I mean?
The person over here who said,
this is what we're going to do,
we're going to do these things.
And when you talk about not honoring
these two kind of modalities or your priorities or whatever,
that to me is a pretty clear example.
Both those Merlins are me.
They're both the same dude.
But why is it that in this one case,
I think I have this appetite for reading subtitles
for six hours versus over here,
I just wanna watch girls have a pillow fight or whatever.
And that's, I think we need to acknowledge that.
And so when we say, respect it or give privilege
to your better angels that come up
with all these good ideas,
I think you also have to be clear about
when you're setting those things for yourself
and you are well caffeinated
and everything feels bright and you want to get it all down.
You also need to be honest about the person
who's going to have to implement that, which is you.
If you keep biting off more than you can chew,
or you keep, in the case of a developer,
you don't have to be super into Agile,
but you can look at yesterday's weather.
You can say, "Wow, if I look at all this stuff
that this Morning John suggested, my goodness,
this would require a level of productivity and flawless development that I've never had
on my best day. Is that a realistic way to start? So those two or more modes that you
have do have to have a conversation with each other and do have to be honest. But remember,
write this on a card. Put it on a piece of tape like Fellini. Put it over your camera.
Remember ask yourself what is the best thing I could do right now.
- Wow, okay, so I, okay, I love that.
I think what I'm, the epiphany I had
as you were describing that is the person you are
in the morning, the person you are at night.
When I'm in my J-O-B job kind of thing
and I'm doing an estimate, so people come to me and say,
hey, we need this feature added,
how much is that gonna, how long is it gonna take,
whether or not you use points or,
'cause you love Agile for some reason,
or you, you know, would do it without.
stories or whatever. Yeah, tell me a story. So anyhow, I... and you never mind, don't
get me started. Casey and I went through that a while back. The point is, what was the point?
Oh yes, the point was that... Day you and night you. That's right, thank you. Move,
moving your cards across the board. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I, I've got this, this
problem where I need to think about, well, what's realistic? And realistically, people
get sick, people have lots of distractions from BAU or business as usual activities,
whatever people want to call it. So, you look at an average person's week, 40 hours a week,
38 hours a week, whatever it is, standard JIB job stuff, and they're only going to be
productive on your little project for at best, maybe 40% of the time, let's say, being like
super really pessimistic. And so, when I'm doing an estimate, I factor that in and I
say, you know what, Ian, it's not going to take like three months to do this, it's going
to take six, because I realistically understand that there are going to be so
many distractions and so many other interruptions, planned unplanned things
that realistically I'm not doing my job from a project management perspective if
I'm not factoring that in. So the epiphany that I had when you were
describing the whole day and night thing is that I don't do that when I'm
evaluating my own tasks for me. I've only ever seen me as me and maybe that's one
of the things that I've been doing wrong all this time. Wow. Yeah, because yeah,
It's it's it's it's it's so similar to me of like, you know, I
When when I'm talking to a friend who's having a having a rough patch
I pull out the most sort of stupid California notion that I really believe in which is like if if you
If you were the person
Listening to about this problem. What would you tell somebody you care about to do and
It causes you to think so differently, right?
Because if you have a good friend who came came to you with the problem that you have
Maybe it's a form of rubber ducking.
So you have this problem, but the problem is it's your problem.
And that makes it different and special.
How would you deal with it with another person?
Also, as far as what you're describing here,
I feel like part of--
well, part of a huge amount of my interest in this stuff
really blossomed at a time when I was doing freelance project
development.
And I wasn't particularly good at it,
as I've talked about on Reconcilable Differences,
but I did try hard.
And I did learn a few things.
And something I don't think I would have put it in these words in whatever, 2003, but the
way I would put it now is that there's so many reasons that we get estimates wrong.
And there's endless sayings about this, whether you're talking about the mythical man month
or whether you're talking about it takes nine months to make a baby regardless of how many
women you put on the job, or you look at the rational developer guy, I forget his name,
but that book everybody loved in the '90s.
Any of those things.
There is one thing that it's difficult to talk about, it's difficult to explain, and
it's almost impossible to apply.
But something I think that Syracuse and I have talked about is when you make an estimate
about something, you make an estimate of let's say a range.
And you say that based on the factors that you've given to me, the task that you're talking
about, the way I would phrase it is, let's put it this way.
The task you've given me, it would be impossible for it to take less than an hour, and it would
be pretty unlikely to take more than a day.
And maybe you can, your boss wants a better estimate than that, and you can narrow it
down further.
I think the thing we forget to apply so much of the time is perhaps how certain we are
about the information that we got to make that estimate.
And then how likely is it, the thing that's almost impossible to apply, you talked about
the rest of the world and getting sick and stuff like that.
Like have we tempered that estimate?
How do we temper that estimate with an idea of how likely something else is to intervene?
Which is like, as they say, like shooting a bullet with a bullet.
But your estimates won't get good until you are certainly honest about it, until you are
candid about lots of factors.
If you got a project from BizDev,
they did not write a spec,
and you know there's an acquisition coming,
there's all kinds of stuff
that are going to affect your answer to this.
You don't want the servers to go down
because you guessed wrong
based on what the necktie fella said.
And then of course,
when you start applying that to yourself,
it gets a lot more difficult.
So I just said a lot of words.
How does that comport with your real world experience
those issues? I think that there's definitely when you're doing estimates to understand that all of
the different inputs and understanding that those inputs may also have errors in them which will
then lead you to have errors in your estimates. I think that that's definitely a real thing and
I guess I'm sort of thinking about this trying to like circle back a little bit to the whole
concept of like understanding what the priority is and whether or not you ask someone else,
of what would you tell that other person, sort of putting yourself outside of yourself and being
honest with what you're the sort of person you're going to be when you're actually going to be
executing this task. And then of course, being being fair to yourself and sticking to that
priority. So, these are all these are all really good things to that people can do to help to sort
of like set that and to avoid the procrastination. It's almost like a lot, I guess, a life hack,
I guess it's sort of the expression people use, but it's just being fair and honest with
yourself to try and stop yourself.
I think it becomes part of your toolbox, is maybe one way to put it.
Is that the more experience you get in whatever you're doing, and I'm not a developer, thank
God, but I've been exposed to some developers, and I think you learn, especially when you
have to start managing people, projects, and yourself.
You have to learn some tools for getting at the soft skills of this stuff.
And before I got into all this stuff, and boy, I was such a dingaling, my dot-com job,
I was in 1999, I was hired as what we used to call a web producer.
And so my job was to, I mean, what they really needed was production.
They needed people to cut up buttons and stuff like that.
But I was doing design.
I was doing the very, very lightest of cold fusion development, but really I was there
to work with the engineers to make a website.
And I was the, there was somebody over here who did the high level graphic ID stuff and
setting the sort of style book.
And I was kind of in the weeds and doing this stuff.
And as I got a little further along, it became part of my job to try and improve how the
site worked and looked.
straightforward stuff. But I in 1999, I got the best. I worked for two years with this
guy named Richard, who was amazing. And I learned so much from him. He was my boss.
He was the head of all the engineers, this huge team of ColdFusion engineers. And I used
to go in there. I was just the biggest douche at the time. I would just go in there and
say like, Hey, I got this really great idea. He's like, Okay, what's your great idea? Because
like, got a lot of stuff to do. Okay, so my great idea is that we're gonna have like a
of my functionality.
Like where you go in and you get to set these settings,
and then there's this thing called a cookie.
Look it up.
There's going to be this thing.
When you do searches, all your stuff will be applied.
And you go, OK.
So just write up even just the basic spec,
but just go define the functionality.
And I'd say, well, Richard, the functionality
is that you could say, are there certain areas that you do
or don't want to search for houses in this area,
there's a realestate.com.
You go, yeah, yeah, I understand, I understand,
but just go define the functionality.
So you see where this is going, right?
Further and further through this,
I did not realize that I,
I did not realize the extent to which I was coming in
with a large noun that I thought I understood
that I did not realize consisted of hundreds of verbs
that I did not understand.
And by Richard constantly demanding that I define the functionality,
he was, first of all, saving himself from having to guess what I meant,
bless his heart, smart guy.
But perhaps more importantly, in a way that he--
I don't even know if he even realized.
I don't think I'd earned enough respect from him to be helped at that point,
'cause I was such a ding-a-ling.
But what he was really doing was making me turn that giant noun
into-- to basically excavate all the verbs that were inside of that.
-Yeah. -And then what happens with this case?
And when you do that and click there,
what's that page look like?
'Cause I need to know what that, right?
So I feel like that is something that then,
that's part of why getting things done
made so much sense to me.
And why I've started to understand
more about procrastination.
A lot of times we don't know what is a noun
and what is a verb, and we certainly have not walked through
how that noun turns into verbs.
That's procrastination in so many ways.
That's how to be a permanent ding-a-ling,
is that you are stuck in this state of not understanding
why people won't accomplish your nouns
when you haven't taken the time to figure out
what verbs constitute that giant noun.
- It's an interesting way of putting it.
I sort of see a lot of what you just outlined there
as being very much a case of I have a project to execute,
but I haven't taken the time to break it down
into all of the individual tasks that I need to figure out
precursors to me actually delivering on a final product. And if I don't break it down,
then that actually could be a form of procrastination. It could lead to essentially a non-result
because I don't really understand everything that I need to do in order to deliver on that.
And breaking it down-
- Exactly right. And this is, again, this is day one David Allen, which is retirement
is not a, retire, is not a verb.
It's many, many, many, it's, that's a big noun
that is made up of many verbs.
So like, and you don't have to break down
to the tiniest verb.
That's another form of procrastination.
But you do need to figure out,
if I'm not getting closer to the big noun,
what is the verb that I'm not doing?
What is the verb that I need to do that gets me closer?
Once you start thinking about your world
in verbs instead of nouns,
not instead of nouns, but alongside nouns,
Nouns are outcomes.
Verbs are doing.
You know, like in Spanish, hacer, to make and to do.
To make and to do requires verbing
instead of an extensive amount of nouning.
And when you've got a whiteboard that's full of nouns,
well, just understand every one of those nouns
is gonna have to turn into a lot of verbs
and that's the work that you need to accomplish.
You gotta have a good noun,
but that noun will then have to be backed up
by a very sensible collection of verbs.
- Yeah, I mean, you gotta balance your verbs and your nouns
and get that ratio right.
And I think that the funny thing is, okay, I guess I'm,
so looking at this from the perspective of,
so we've touched on a bunch of really, really good points.
And I think that it's probably a good idea at this point
to sort of like say, well, when you're stuck in that mode,
when you're stuck in that mode of,
I'm gonna break this down to the most ridiculously small
verb, no matter how small it is.
'Cause I just, I feel like I just,
I need to keep going a little bit deeper,
a little bit deeper.
sub-task for the task for the sub-task. And that is essentially a form of procrastination. It's like
identifying that and stopping yourself from doing it. It's like, I kind of feel like when I'm stuck
in that mode of I'm over analyzing how much I need to break down a project and hence I'm no longer
getting any value out of the exercise, feeling and I guess getting your head inside that fact and
recognizing you're doing it, that can be really hard.
- Oh, absolutely, 100%.
And so again, see also, what's the best thing
that I could do right now, right?
That's definitely part of it, but there's a quote
I learned about from Annie Lamott
that's been attributed to E.L. Doctro.
It goes something like this.
You can only see as far as your headlights,
but you can make the whole trip that way,
which I think is very wise.
And so what does that mean to me?
What that means to me is, yeah, I mean,
at a high level back in the day,
you'd have a road map, right?
And you'd say, well, this is where I start
and this is where I end.
I don't magically appear in that other city.
I have to get there.
Well, how do I get there?
I get in the car and I go on the road.
Okay, is there gas in the car?
Hey, yes, there's gas in the car.
Okay, to quote Steely Dan.
But now I need to start driving.
Well, oh my gosh, my headlights can't see
all the way to Houston.
How will I ever get there?
Well, don't worry.
The map is what helps you get to Houston, right?
The headlights are what helps you get out of the driveway.
What is, what is, what does your,
what do your headlights need to be today?
What illumination do you need today
to say what's the next thing I need to do,
as David Allen would say, the next action,
or the blocking task, perhaps, in project management, right?
The gateway, the milestone, or whatever it is.
What is the thing I need to do to get or keep this in motion?
And so that's, to me, that's the value
of something like Getting Things Done.
one of the many values, is that it enables you
to be able to undertake or accept many projects in life
and then always know what the next thing you need to do is.
It's nice to know all of the things,
but really what you're looking for
for anything you're doing is the headlights
that let you move forward.
Does that make sense?
- Yeah, it does make sense, makes perfect sense.
And I've never heard that expression before,
at least I don't recall hearing it before.
It's a very interesting way of looking at it.
I love the concept, and this is one of the reasons
why people in, how should I say,
I don't want to sound like a douchebag,
but you know, like upper management positions,
talk about mission and vision and so on and so forth.
It's like, but as a younger engineer,
I'd look at that and I'd sort of like scoff
and it's like, yeah, okay, whatever, roll eyes now.
But actually that is the map that gets you
where you're trying to get to at the day-to-day tasks
or the distraction.
So long as they're aligned with where you're going,
then you have a chance of getting there.
'Cause if you don't have a plan and a map
of how to get there, then it's pretty much
a one in a million chance you'll actually get to where you want to get to because you
don't know where you're trying to get to. So statistically, it's possible to get there.
- I kind of agree, but to me, it's so difficult for me to get away from this noun and verb
thing. And so I've been in places or I've seen places where there are mission statements
and that you talk about values and all these things. And that is and can be, as they say,
well and good, but those are nouns. Now the question becomes, for anything that you want
I don't want to get us off the nominal topic of procrastination, but in my travels as a
sort of kind of productivity-interested person, I would more and more see, what are they saying
in companies now, in the enterprise?
Misalignments.
We're saying this thing about this noun, but our verbs in the company are not supporting
that.
you that we want you to have work life balance because that's part of our mission. It spins
out of our mission and our values. But all you see is people being promoted for working
all the time, right? The nominal douchebag who gets the good parking space and shows
up late for everything and sends one sentence emails with six months of work in it. Wow,
that guy keeps moving up the ladder in spite of all the things that we're saying about
how this company works. So I'm not against a mission statement. I'm not against values
for the love of God. No, not at all. As your company grows and your teams grow and the
number of teams grow, though, it gets more and more difficult to not be seen as being
horribly hypocritical. When your company goes public, like you don't get to decide stuff
based on just your values anymore. Now you've got shareholders, right? So it's the trouble
is that like this is not dissimilar to a concept in my own pantheon that I call composting
in the crisper, which is like if you buy
like a bunch of really nice organic produce
and put it in the refrigerator,
but then you throw like a dead fish in there,
like you're not gonna want any of that produce
regardless of how good it is.
It doesn't take that much dishonesty
to harm things like values and mission statement.
That stuff can be super valuable,
but you need to make sure that everybody's executing
on this same idea and that you, for every,
how can I put this, for every value
that you want to put up on the board,
show me 10 verbs on how that is being supported today
in the room.
Now we're getting into management and stuff,
but John, isn't that also true for us on the day-to-day?
Where if we put the big thing up on the board
about what we say is important,
but then all the verbs of that day
are not aligned with getting that accomplished,
I hope that doesn't feel good
because you're not walking in the right direction.
- Yeah, that's actually an interesting,
that's a really good point,
and it's an interesting way of strategizing,
And maybe that's one way when you do have something you really need to get done is to
put it up and so it's highly visible.
And then ask yourself that and challenge yourself and say, "Are the verbs I'm now executing
actually contributing towards this end result?"
Because if they're not, then I am most likely progressing.
Is this real?
Is this up to date?
Yeah.
Is this something I'm going to do?
And if I'm going to do it, then why isn't it done?
Well, it's not done because X.
Now you have defined your job.
leading on from that point, then, one of the things that I
find really difficult is interruptions and
interruptions and how they then, they create an environment where
procrastination can take hold, or where it's, it's essentially,
I had a plan, I had it up on the wall, and then XYZ happened. And
and it frustrates me because sometimes when when new tasks
come in and they're unplanned, they are distractions. They may, they're urgent
tasks or rather the people that are, because sometimes they're delivered by
people, right? It's not always just a text. Well, yeah, yeah. I suppose if you broke
it down to the fundamental level. It does, it does happen. We are, we live in
an interruption and distraction rich environment for sure. Yeah, and a lot
of those distractions and interruptions, apart from natural disasters, the vast
majority are triggered by other people. So, someone wants to get
you on Skype or on Messenger or whatever it might be, someone
sends you an email, someone calls you on the phone, you
know, it's like the level of interrupt continues to climb
higher and higher to someone walking up into your face and
simply saying, can you please go straight in the paintings on the
wall? And it's like, well, it's like, well, hmm, I've got this
project I'm trying to work on here, I'm trying to get this
done and I now have a series of tasks that appear to be urgent. I don't have time and this is the
thing is the perception is to yourself you would tell yourself well I don't have time to sit down
and re-strategize and I don't have time to go and break down all the verbs and figure out what I
need to execute now and so we do this this this re-prioritization on the fly and that urgency is
misinterpreted as the priority when it really isn't. 100%
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Can I be just the slightest bit salty for just a moment?
Go for it.
Let me give you an anecdotal example.
Think of something that you like doing more than anything in the world.
For a lot of people, there's a thing we do in our bedroom with our partner over here.
Um, it doesn't matter to me whether you feel that way or not, but whatever it is that you
like doing more than anything in the world, imagine you're doing that and then ask yourself
why you're so rarely interrupted, hopefully, or distracted while you're doing that thing.
Right?
So in the example that I gave, if you are involved in that particular sort of personal
Congress with somebody, uh, whom you love, um, do you find yourself suddenly drifting
away because you remembered you wanted to check your texts? Or do you find yourself
drifting away because you want to see if the Mandalorian is up yet? Do you follow the analogy?
>>Yeah, yeah. I follow. Yeah, yeah.
>>Why is it that there are certain kinds of things where we have absolutely no problem
with interruptions? And that is admittedly the most extreme example I can give, but I
think it's very valuable to look at this continuum. On one side of the continuum is you doing
the thing that you love more than anything else in the world and how is it that you are,
it's so difficult to get you off, pardon my saying, of that thing that you love so much.
Over here on the other end of the continuum is the thing that you despise or fear more
than anything in the world and why are you distracted from that?
Why do you procrastinate about that?
Well I think the answer is somewhat clear.
We really like doing the things we like and we don't like doing the things that we don't
like and we will fight with the world as hard as we need to to be uninterrupted in the things
that we love and to avoid the things that we fear.
And I think that continuum, I admit to you that that is a very extreme example, but whenever
people talk about, especially distractions, because I do think interruptions qualify as
a sort of distraction, but I don't think it's the same thing. Because you don't get distracted
from the things that you love and you'll fight every interruption all the way. Whereas if
you are confronting the thing that you most fear, you will find every reason in the world
to quote unquote be distracted. And then your brain, because of the way we're wired, in
my opinion, the way that we're wired will now find a reason for why you did what you
did. This is a very, you know, sort of neuropsych idea, but like we are, our minds will do almost
anything to persuade us that we've always been how we are for a good reason.
And so that's my jumping off point with distractions and interruptions.
If you cared maybe too much about that thing, you would not allow an interruption or a distraction.
And you would not apologize for it.
If you were in the emergency room, God forbid, you're in the emergency room with your kid,
you're not going to find yourself drifting off to check prices on snow tires.
You're very focused on that, and if anybody calls you,
you're gonna say, "I'm gonna have to get back to you."
Or you might not even answer the phone.
You might turn your phone all the way off
or put it in VIP mode, because here is this thing
that has such clarity about what needs to be done.
For somebody like me, boy, that puts my dopamine
through the roof.
I have 100% clarity and no guilt,
'cause that's the thing I need to do.
But then there's so many more things in life
at the other end of the continuum.
And I say fear, because I think that's a huge part
of procrastination.
Why haven't you done it?
something you're scared about something right so let's we will talk about
interruptions all you want but I think that's a great jumping-off point to give
you some clarity on why certain kinds of things your brain will find every reason
in the world not to do and it will tell you you're doing it for the right
reasons that's yeah you're right it is an extreme example but it does make the
point and the point being that how much we enjoy the either the end result of or
or the execute, so the end result of the noun,
as you refer to it, as the, my project,
my, the priority being the destination,
and all the verbs that lead up to that,
if they're verbs and things that I need to execute
that I'm not going to enjoy,
then that's gonna have a bearing on how much
procrastination can eat away at my ability
to deliver on it, for sure.
- Would it be helpful to focus on
legitimately external interruptions
and how to deal with those, or do we want to talk about identifying the distractions
that plague us?
The ones that plague us, I think.
The thing is, the external distractions is that there are many ways you can manage that.
And you can self-manage that.
Just like you said, I'm going to put my phone in VIP mode.
I'm going to turn it off completely in some cases.
I mean, that's...
Yeah, the external interruptions, the reason I mention it here is that there is a, as I
would like to say, perhaps there's a simple but not easy way to address that.
The simple but not easy way to address that is to ask yourself, "Well, is this legitimately
an external interruption?"
Such as someone banging on the door, someone texting me over and over to ask if I heard
their voicemail about the email they sent.
Is it something external?
Well, that's tough, but if you have...
So we're working through the decision tree here.
So we have identified there's something here that is a legitimate external interruption
that is not getting controlled and it's really,
it's harming your work.
So I think that right there, if it is legitimate,
you have to ask yourself,
is this chronic or acute?
By which I mean, is this something where like,
I have a new friend who's discovered my phone number
and they're just texting me too much?
Is this something that is a novel thing?
Is this something related to the nature of the projects
that are due right now?
Is this somebody who's bugging me for money
because I owe them money, right?
and that would go away if I address that?
Or, when I say chronic, is this an ongoing thing
that has become part of what I do and I'm kind of hating it?
Does that distinction make sense?
- Yeah, it does.
It's a dimension I hadn't really thought about.
- Because you would address those so differently.
If it's something, let's be honest,
I mean, if you really wanna fix this,
if there's some ding-a-ling that keeps,
it's added you to a text group,
you could just leave the text group.
You could leave the Slack channel.
Or why can't you?
Well, because people.
Okay, well that's still on you.
You didn't ask for that.
That's an inbox that has now been put into your lap.
And if you don't want to accept it,
you must be very muscular and fearless
about kindly, perhaps, working your way out
of whatever that new inbox is.
You gotta get out of there.
You gotta tell that person to stop.
You've gotta like turn on the spam block
and whatever it is.
Who's gonna do that for you?
There is no nanny that will fix that acute problem.
Let's go to the next level.
Is this a chronic problem?
Is this a, I say problem, but you follow.
Is this something that is a,
has become just part of what happens now?
Is this a thing where the slack has gotten out of control
for everybody probably, right?
Is this something where I have a new boss
who is micromanaging me more than I would like?
That's gonna be a tougher fix,
but you do need to acknowledge that distinction, I think.
You know, and again, remember now,
we are in this very rarefied area right now
of legitimate interruptions.
We haven't even gotten started on quote unquote distractions.
That's a whole 'nother kiddie pool we'll get into.
But that's the thing.
If it's an acute thing, guess what?
That's on you.
You need to go stop that up.
You need to get that thing out of your life.
If it's a chronic problem, that's tougher.
Because if that's teen, if that's culture,
if that's just a thing that's normal in your life now,
that's gonna take probably more effort
and almost definitely more courage.
But you could ask to speak to the manager
or you could start addressing it.
I don't know what the answer is, but you will.
You need to know.
If you've identified this is a legitimate interruption,
it's chronic, well, how do you deal with that?
So it's impossible for me to answer that or solve that
because it's really up to you to decide
how that got chronic, why you accepted that,
or that you accepted that.
And then you need to address that
on probably a person-to-person level.
- For sure, on the chronic side,
I definitely think that there are certain,
you know, chronic interruption problems
that because they are systemic,
either organizationally or,
let's just say that your life has just gone down that path.
- Or maybe you've just got the desk near the break room
and everybody talks to you when they go to the bathroom.
- Oh, yeah.
- That's a chronic interruption.
- For sure.
And sometimes the only way out of that
is to quite literally get out of that.
and you just, you know, you have to physically either,
in some case, if it's a job related thing,
you may have to even, if you can't resolve it through,
well, peaceful means, I guess,
for the want of a better way of saying it,
you, sometimes it is drastic enough
that you may consider a change of employment
if it's really that bad.
- I totally agree.
And now you're understanding
that that is a higher level thing to solve.
If you don't like the chair,
they move your chair or put it in an elevator.
If you don't like the open office environment,
but you need that gig, yeah, I think you're so right.
Now that goes on a different list
about what I want to be doing
in the next six months to three years.
- Absolutely right, yes.
And just on the acute example of interruptions,
just quickly, I actually did have an example
that recently where I was added to a group thread
and I woke up one morning and saw 319 messages
on my iMessage.
Normally, because I got this thing with the red circles and the numbers in them, right?
On Apple devices. It drives an anxiety. Like I look at this number, I have to open this,
I have to see what the message is. And I mean, and that's obviously, that's not a good thing
necessarily. But, you know- - Oh my God, I hate it. I hate it.
I turn it off on every single one unless it's extremely valuable. I updated it 13.3 the other
day. And for reasons I absolutely cannot understand or solve, I've got the, you know,
you know, like when you need a system update
and you get the red one on the settings icon.
I've had that for like, I think three days now
and it's making me insane.
'Cause I can't, usually that means system update,
but it's stuck on there
and it's driving me irrationally crazy.
- Yeah, I'll force quit the app, I'll reopen it,
I'll force quit it again, I'll reboot the phone.
- I can't have it in my life.
It needs to go away. - I know, it's terrible
and people don't get it.
- I once had a calendar program I downloaded.
One of the worst, not one of the worst,
but a terrible design decision.
So, you know, if you've got something like OmniFocus,
an app that I really like, you look at it
and you can choose what shows up on your badge, right?
You could say like the number of like upcoming tasks
or the number of due tasks or overdue tasks,
like you get to pick how that number is generated.
I once had a calendar program.
Do you want to guess what the red badge represented?
- Upcoming appointments today or something?
- That's a good one.
How about day of the month?
- Oh, right.
(laughing)
- Okay. - That's weird.
- So, as we record this today, it would say 12.
- Right.
- Whereas later in the month,
it would say 30 on the red badge.
- That's, yeah, but that's an incorrect use of--
- Shh.
Terrible use.
Do you wanna talk about distractions?
(laughing)
- We should.
Just to finish off on the interruptions a bit,
I wanted to just get to the point
that I was trying to make about it is that, I mean--
- I'm so sorry, please cut that out.
I apologize, you hadn't finished your story.
- No, no, no, it's fine, it's all good.
Look, I, 'cause just the red badge thing
is just people don't understand it.
They don't understand why I can't handle it.
Anyhow, nevermind.
It's fine, it's fine.
I'm recovering.
- No, you, this is a safe space, John.
I'm with you.
It drives me completely bananas.
It's like, there's a reason I called it Inbox Zero,
which is like, if I took the time to take care of this,
I want that stuff all cleared out.
- Yeah.
- I do not, I want a badge to be meaningful.
Like I like to say, this is why I like my smoke alarm
at the house is it's never gone off.
- Yes. - Right?
If my smoke alarm just started going off four times a day,
that's a terrible alarm.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Like I need the red to mean something.
I need it to be something that I have to act on now.
I trim all my notifications down to like what I'm gonna
really need at a given time.
Otherwise, when I see people whose phone just beeps
and they pick it up, I'm like, oh my God, what was that?
I don't know, it beeped.
So that could be Facebook Messenger
your kids in a ditch. I'm with you. Don't worry. I'm so with you.
- Oh man. All right. Okay. Someone else gets me. That's good. I'm glad to hear that. Okay.
So, circling back to the interruption part and the group messaging 300 and plus unreads. And
I felt really bad. I felt really bad. I had to punch out of that thread. And it was a thread
that just blew up overnight and it was nothing bad, it was nothing, it wasn't negative,
it wasn't, there was nothing really wrong with it exactly, but from an interruption perspective,
my brain couldn't process it and I'm like, I just cannot wake up every morning with 300 unread
messages on my iMessage for a group thread where most of the stuff in there, well whilst it was
innocuous, did not directly require my attention and it's like, okay, so that's a perfect example
of, you know, it's an acute problem and I addressed it.
And I know I hurt some feelings. I know I did.
And I didn't want to do that.
But I guess there was a threshold of self-preservation there
where I was like, from my psyche, I'm looking at this and thinking, well,
I need to handle this because it is it's causing me an anxiety,
which is going to feed other issues.
So I had to do that.
And it felt it was hard and I didn't like it.
You did the difficult thing.
but I mean, I was talking to somebody,
actually, I guess it's an interview
that'll eventually be in Wired UK.
I was talking to a really cool reporter there.
But this is, to me, a big part of what I came to call
Inbox Zero, is that we all must be very picky
about understanding the inboxes we allow in our life.
There's so many inboxes that I don't get a choice about.
Like, I don't love being automatically added
to tons of threads and apps and groups and digests
for my kids' school,
but it's difficult for me to completely opt out of that.
Now, on the other hand,
it sounds like you've heard the show I do with Dan
called Back to Work.
An ongoing bit on there for years has been that,
you know, we get really nice email from people,
but we legitimately get, I'm gonna say,
at least half an order of magnitude of the mail that we get
is people pitching people to be on our show.
Now, should that bother me?
It shouldn't, but it's been going on for years, right?
It's been going on for years and years and years and years.
I finally, and I mean, I hope Dan eventually adds a form
'cause I miss seeing that email.
But I did what I always do, I went into Gmail
and I created basically a filter that sends it to the dev.
No, like it's gone.
It doesn't go to spam, but it's deleted.
Any email that I get at my address for that podcast,
the email is deleted.
Do I feel great about that?
I absolutely do not feel great about that.
But that has become a low nutrition source
of information in my life.
I don't need empty calories.
I don't need that in my inbox.
You're not allowed to pour a gallon of corn syrup
into my inbox.
I never ask for that.
This is for important things, right?
So do I feel great about that?
No, I do not.
But I am so with you on that because you already,
If you need to exercise a certain amount of muscularity,
maybe it's privilege.
I don't know, on a certain level,
it's probably a little bit of privilege too,
but you need to be muscular about what you're going to do
and have and make in your life.
And I think you need to be,
you need to believe enough in the importance of your life
to say when stuff is not allowed in.
If you start from that, it doesn't make it easier,
but it does make it less difficult.
It makes it less super hard,
because you're saying, hey, I'm doing this for me.
Like, you're not allowed to bug me
when I'm playing with my kid.
When I'm on the floor playing with my kid,
you're not allowed to do that.
I'm making dinner, I can't do that.
A lot of that is very just like low-key,
like I just turn off notifications, right?
I just showed my kid how to do this,
'cause she's on all these threads with her friends,
but showed her how to do the, what is it?
Turn off alerts, right?
- Yep, yep.
- But no, I feel you.
It's just that I think we begin with this principle
that everyone's gonna hate me
if I do what I need to do in life.
And I don't know.
I think we should all just be more cool with each other about what's allowed in.
Absolutely. And I think it also comes down to respecting the fact that other people,
you know, they do have a life. And when you sort of like drag them into threads and messages
and so on and so forth, it's like, well, do you stop and think, well, are they going to
appreciate this interruption? Are they going to appreciate, is this something that they're
going to get value out of? Is this something that I actually need to put in front of their
face? You know, and because the technology...
- And they may not know, they don't know
what you're carrying today.
Can I be honest, the first time that I got yelled at
about what we're describing here, 1993.
Okay, so this is back when I was on a telnet connection
to something called Freenet and using probably Pine
or whatever, and I used to do this thing.
It might have been '95 because that's when my band
was around, but the point is, it might have been on Eudora,
but the point is that I used to do this thing
where I would send an email to every single person
that I had an email address for,
even if they lived in another country,
and I'd say, "Hey, my band's playing.
"My band's playing at the Bacon Race,
"playing at the Cow House,
"10 o'clock on Friday," or whatever.
- Sure.
- And what was I thinking?
It took a guy that I knew,
actually a, not a developer,
but a guy who worked in the NOC at the university.
He's like, "Hey, don't send me these anymore."
And I was incredulous.
I said, "What do you mean,
I'm not gonna send you this anymore.
I was basically everybody's right wing uncle for a minute.
And he goes, hey, don't send me these anymore.
I'm like, what do you mean?
I mean, what?
You can just throw it away if you don't want it.
But I hope you come to the show.
He's like, no, no, just like,
don't include me on these big threads with people.
And I get enough email already, you know.
I, there's just so much email.
And I was like, but can you imagine that?
Merlin Mann in 1995 or whatever doing that?
And the fact that I would then be so mad at that guy
that I got into a whole thing.
And now I'm generating more email to argue with him about that.
I mean, that was a long time ago.
But there is a person every day who
hasn't been yelled at about that yet or isn't sensitive to that.
And their life is Facebook and forwarding memes.
And they wouldn't for a second think
that it's a problem to serially bug somebody,
because their whole life is serial bugging.
And they don't seem to mind it.
- And I guess everyone's--
I like to think that everyone's on a learning curve.
and on many aspects of like life,
including social interaction
and what's acceptable and what's not
and putting yourself in other people's shoes
and like, are they gonna appreciate these,
you know, 300 messages in the morning when they wake up?
You know, it's like everyone
is in a different place on that.
And I sort of, I used to get upset and annoyed,
but it's something that as I've gotten older,
I've realized that, well,
other people are further ahead on certain things.
And some of that is accelerated by the fact that
you mentioned like privilege before,
It's like one of the downsides of being well-known,
at least in our sorts of circles,
is that you will get a higher volume of people
bugging you for different things,
or just saying hi even perfectly innocently,
fans, what have you,
and that could cause additional load on you
that you're like, "Well, why are these people doing this?"
And it's like, well, they're not doing it to be difficult,
but it's like--
- Sometimes an email is just a way to say, "I like you."
Yeah.
Right?
It's not-- I've sent plenty of those emails.
I am not immune to that at all.
But I also like your point, though,
of trying to be-- something we could all
try to remember to do more often is just
to remember that we don't know what everybody's trip is.
We don't know what anybody is going through on a given day.
I'm not saying it should make us timid,
because sometimes you need to deal with somebody on a day
that's not going to be great for either of you.
That shouldn't necessarily stop you.
But I feel like, just to go a little pop the stack,
as John Syracuse says, I feel like one of the biggest
problems that we run into, especially in the age
that we're in, is-- it's true for all times,
but it's so true now-- is trying to guess
other people's motivation.
And sometimes not being extremely
generous about the motivation that we
imagine that other people have.
And I think that's something that could help all of us a lot.
But it really works on just a personal level.
In that interview with the person from Wired,
talking about where inbox zero is today,
the really only practical stuff that I had for her
was how to write better emails.
The practical, I said to her,
"Look, put this in that little box
"that's called tips and tricks, do this.
"Write a great subject line that makes it clear
"what the person needs to do with your email.
"Send them an extremely short email
"where there's white space under the note
"that you've written, and in the first sentence,
make it clear what you want them to do and why.
And if you're really cool and smart,
make it end with a question
that they can easily answer yes.
- Sure.
- Okay, that's if everybody did that more.
Not all every email, you don't need to,
I mean, sometimes you just wanna say,
"Happy birthday, Grandma."
That's fine.
She's probably real happy to get that email.
But if you're dealing with other people
and you want them to do stuff,
you must be clear and you must be,
you must make that the easiest email
that they will receive today.
Not just to look at in the process,
but to do something about.
Also, you could make it the easiest email to delete,
grow up.
But you've got to, the way to improve email in particular,
it's not to get more filters.
I mean, you have to as a defensive mechanism.
It's not to go get this new douchebag email app
that puts hidden, invisible gifs, clear gifs in it
so they can track people.
The key is for us all to write better.
If we all write better email and change our expectations,
everything has to get better.
Will that happen?
I don't know.
I just can't think of another way than applying more empathy and care to what we do and just
assuming that other people will hopefully expect the best out of people and have communications
that support that.
And when it doesn't work for you, cut it off.
- For sure.
And taking a little bit of extra time when you're writing an email, for example, to have
that sort of forethought and consideration goes a long way.
And it's not something that you always or often or may never get any positive feedback
from.
Like someone said, "Hey man, you sent me a fantastic email."
It's not something that I don't think I've ever gotten that.
I've had people come back to me and say, "Thanks for your two-page email."
Which I sort of like, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter email.
Yeah.
Or it used to be like for the longest time, if you were the kind of person who had decided
to send shorter emails, people would get kind of upset.
And be like, wow, that was really,
are you mad at me?
Like, no, I'm not mad at you, I'm just trying to be clear.
I think one, there's so much that is great
about the way we communicate today.
It can be used in terrible ways.
But it's cool that we can keep up with our friends.
I mean, it's become easier than ever.
But I do feel like one possible kind of downside,
I enjoy the texting and the emoji,
and I enjoy all of that, I'm not a sourpuss about that.
I do think the thing to be careful of is ambiguity.
I think to be unambiguous in how we communicate
with each other is still valuable.
And the reason I'm saying that here is,
if you do take that extra second
to think about what you're writing,
well, you know, let's start with,
does this person need to get this email?
Really?
How will they feel about getting this?
And how will that be reflected in my subject line
in the note that I write?
And I don't mean to obsess about email,
but it's something people ask about, right?
So do they need to get this email from me?
Is this the right person?
Okay, and how do I express that in what I'm doing here?
But also, have I made it unambiguous?
And unambiguous in such a way that if they,
you didn't know they were in the emergency room,
and they got that email two days later,
will they be able to know that this is definitely
something they don't need to do anything about?
Ask yourself how many emails you get every day
that are that thoughtfully done.
'Cause it is valuable.
you know, clarity, lack of ambiguity,
make it as they say, we're misusing this word from law,
but make it actionable.
And if you're a project manager like I used to be,
try to always phrase it as a easy yes or an easy no, right?
Can I, do you want me to book the conference room
for Thursday at 10 a.m.?
I can take care of that and get donuts.
Cool?
Yes, done.
Three letter response, you've just made that person's day.
- Totally.
And I always like to finish my emails
on setting an expectation for the response.
And if it can be a simple yes or no,
then just stating that definitely won't--
- How long did it take me to book this with you, John?
How long did it take?
- Should we?
- It took a very, very long time
'cause I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it.
And you know what I did?
I kept snoozing your email to the next day
for probably a month.
- That's okay.
- No, no, no, it's not you, it's me.
I'm the one who's broken inside.
'Cause what did I do?
What are we talking about?
We're here to talk about procrastination.
Well, guess what?
I'm very happy that we're doing this,
but I procrastinated doing this
'cause I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it.
I wasn't sure if I wanted to book it.
You know, we had Halloween and we had my kid's birthday
and then we had my birthday
and we're gonna see the Warriors tonight
and there's never a good day to take care of your stuff.
It's always manana.
And you wrote a great email and you were very kind about it
and I still blew it.
So, you know, physician heal thyself.
- Well, I still think it's beautiful
that we're here talking about procrastination
and then organizing a time to talk about procrastination
was susceptible to procrastination.
- Oh, it's just, that's, yes.
I can do multitudes and they're all terrible.
- It's poetic.
Oh God, no, they're not.
It's fine.
It's okay.
It's fine.
It's all good.
We lead busy lives.
It's fine.
I think we've more or less talked about interruptions,
although I'm sure we could keep going.
So you sort of characterized earlier
the differences between distractions and interruptions.
I guess I want to sort of tease
a little bit more of that out.
If that's, so what are your thoughts on the differences?
Well, first of all, I guess I should stipulate--
I mean, folks don't have to agree with me on this.
This is my own opinion.
But this is my own taking a cut at disambiguation.
Because I think words mean things.
And then words end up being how we govern our lives.
And if you don't see a difference between a distraction
and an interruption, you're changing a lot,
or you're reshaping a lot of why you're how you are in a way
that may be slightly dishonest to say the least, right?
So when people say to me, oh my gosh,
I have so many distractions.
Well, what the hell does that mean?
What is so distracting for you?
And is that the same thing as your interruptions, right?
Like, I'm glad we've made that distinction
'cause I think it matters.
So what is a distraction?
A distraction to me, it's certainly,
an interruption I guess can be a kind of distraction.
But to me, a distraction is the kind of thing where it's caused by a lack of clarity, enthusiasm,
commitment to the thing that you're working on right now. And there's about a million ways that
we can address that. Maybe one of the first ways to address that is why are you doing the thing
that you're doing now? See, also, is this the best thing I could do right now? Well, as you say,
maybe if we look at that kind of like a Stephen Covey chart, like maybe this is a high, it could
It could be low priority, but like high,
how does this chart work?
High urgency, right?
- Yes.
- If your boss is yelling at you
about the kind of donuts in the conference room,
well, you're gonna deal with that
because it's low priority to you,
but it's urgent to him or her, right?
So just deal, I guess, right?
Why are you doing that thing right now?
And is there a reason that your mind
or your intentionality is finding an interest
in something that's not the thing you're doing now?
Now, most people won't do that.
Most people will say,
Well, if I'm doing it, it must be important, right?
Don't we find a reason to say, well,
because I'm the center of the entire universe,
obviously what I'm doing needs to be done.
It's these distractions that are bothering me.
Well, as somebody who's very interested
in the work of David Allen, I'm here to tell you,
there's probably a pretty good chance
there's another reason why you're finding
yourself distracted.
Should you be doing this at all?
Are you committed to doing this?
Are there other tasks that should precede
the thing that you're working on right now,
where you're finding all these distractions.
Is there a different way that you might want to frame
what you're working on?
Is there a different, if you're stuck,
if you're writing and you're feeling stuck and distracted,
is there another piece that you could work on
for a little while?
Do you need to drink some water, take a walk,
or get a short nap?
You know, with a baby, there's like seven things
you just keep doing over and over until they stop crying.
You don't know which one worked,
doesn't matter which one worked.
You just keep doing the fixes until the baby is,
You bundle it, you change the diaper, you give it food,
you get water, take it to the bathroom,
do all the things, right?
So we're just all really big babies in a lot of ways.
What's our swaddling gonna be?
So there are at least a couple levels.
Like I said, there's a million levels,
but two quickies are like,
should I be doing this thing at all?
And if it is something that is priority,
high priority as we like to say,
if it's something that needs to be done,
if it's something that's due today,
what is it about these distractions
that are such an attractive nuisance for me?
What is it about these interruptions that I allow?
So do you wanna maybe start there?
- Yeah, I think so.
I think that the interesting thing is that
there's distractions from the intended,
so if you've got a bunch of verbs you're trying to execute
in order to get to that completion state
that you're trying to do driving forward
to satisfy that noun, you've got up on the wall.
And it's a distraction versus an interruption,
sort of the differences between them,
I was sort of thinking like, well,
if it's not an external interruption or distraction,
it's something that we could distract ourselves with,
that concept of, well,
it's not one of the verbs I need to be actioning,
but it is still something that may need to be done.
I don't want to reprioritize it.
The insidious part is when you find yourself
creating those distractions
and recognizing that you're creating those distractions.
That's the part--
- Maybe you started shaving a yak in one way or another.
- Yeah, it's like what motivates us to do that to ourselves,
to sabotage ourselves and derail ourselves.
And that's, and recognizing that we're doing that
to ourselves, that's the thing that I struggle with,
is getting a grip on, you know, and maybe it's,
maybe it comes down to a question of discipline
and saying, well, you know, the verbs are up,
the nouns on the wall, the verbs have been described,
I'm not going to distract myself
and I'm gonna be true to myself.
and I'm just going to do what is up there and that is it.
And maybe that is the best,
and maybe that is the only way to really to manage it
is to be that, I don't know, it's difficult.
- It's very, the way you're describing though,
it's a very noble way to look at it.
If you'll permit, I would like to propose
a somewhat radical thought technology for approaching this.
So I'm not saying this is true,
not saying this is you or me or anybody else, but for the sake of argument, if you find
yourself distracted, especially on a regular basis, and whether it's the same thing or
different things or whatever it is, but you have some kind of niggling feeling that you're
not achieving the focus that you need to accomplish the things you would like to do.
Let me propose a thought technology that's either going to seem impossible or obvious.
Is it possible that there's something you are very, very scared about right now?
In my experience, a lot of procrastination, when you really get down to it, a lot of it's
bad planning or bad thinking, right?
Like, I haven't thought through my tasks, I don't know the phone number, so I can't
call.
A huge amount of procrastination is based in some kind of fear, and it's a fear that
we don't want to look at, let alone confront.
So what do we talk about when we talk about writer's block?
Well, writer's block.
What is writer's block?
Well, people who write, write.
So just go, "Write.
Well, I can't write because I have writer's block."
Why do you have writer's block?
You may have writer's block because you're terrified.
You're worried that what you're doing sucks.
You don't want to confront the idea that you'll never make something good again.
You don't want to confront the idea that you'll never finish this.
All those things.
That's a pretty straightforward one.
Couldn't we agree that that's fear?
There's other kinds of fear, which is like fear of being bored, fear of a task being
difficult, fear of the way that I'll be judged if this thing doesn't turn out great.
I just want to toss that out to you, John, is that for so many of us, if we really keep
digging on procrastination, you know, let's go back to that continuum.
There's a thing we do in our bedroom with our partner over here at this far end that
we have very little fear of doing, perhaps, whatever your favorite thing is, and then
you have the stuff over here you just can't even stand to think about.
And again, I'm not a neuroscientist, but I do believe that our brains will work extremely
hard to find a way to keep us away from the things that we fear.
And I think if we just, I'm just tossing this out, but if we were to accept this model,
then a solution becomes what is the thing that I'm afraid of?
If I'm being honest, if I'm going to roll with this, Merlin's crazy thought technology
about procrastination.
Even if it's something really stupid, that really stupid, tiny, dumb task that's super
high priority, easiest thing in the world to do, as people like to say, is there a chance
that there's a little bit of fear about something somewhere?
Oh my God.
All I have to do is text this person, but I just realized why I haven't done it.
And it's that I still haven't responded to their invitation to the Christmas party that
I super don't want to go to. So is it really about this task? No, it's about the fear that
they're going to bring up the invitation. And I don't know what to say. And it's about
the fear that I have for telling them that I just hate their parties. So I'll throw to
you here, what do you, is there a thought technology that works for saying a model?
Maybe it's kind of rubber ducking again, but is it possible that we can look at fear as
the cause of whatever is keeping us from doing the thing we know we need to do.
It's definitely an angle that I hadn't sort of pulled the thread down to that far, I think.
And it's something that... The thing with fear, you mentioned, is like, fear isn't rational.
And it's like, it may be the silliest thing, and the notion of something being silly or not is
highly subjective and obviously down to the individual and you know what
one person finds silly or something is deadly serious to the next
person and you can't sort of like, you can't judge that, you can't
predict that. It's very very specific to you as an individual and fear is
much the same. What scares one person will not scare another. It's like
to your example. - The other person will think it's silly. Why are you
scared of spiders? There's no spiders here. - Yeah, exactly. Why are you scared of a
party invitation. It's like, well, what's wrong with being in a crowded room with
30 other people? And I'm like, well, what's right with that?
But also then, let's go back to that neurology, which is that if we
kind of accept we're following this thought technology, but remember, there's
one thing above perhaps all else that your brain is trying to,
your mind, it's trying to keep you from dying, it's trying to keep the
species going, all those kinds of things. But if you look at what causes a lot of
our behavior, one way or another, in my opinion, it comes down to integrity. So
So we use integrity today to be this thing about values and character, right?
But as somebody who has an aging body, I look at integrity in a different way.
So integrity is wholeness.
It's something that has stayed committed to what it's here for, right?
Your arm works like an arm because you have bodily integrity.
But we also have a kind of emotional or psychic integrity.
And that's the thing where I really do feel like our brain will do anything to justify
what we've done in the past.
A lot of research about this, right?
So try to justify what we've done in the past and to make sense of what we're thinking about
doing right now.
So when it comes time for you to send that text to the person whose party you don't want
to go to, is it possible that you will suddenly, you find yourself angry?
That's weird.
Why am I angry?
Well, I'm angry because this person is so difficult to work with.
Is that really the reason?
Well, your brain has convinced you that that's the reason.
Is it important for you to send that text?
Well, it's important, but I'm not sending it because I have my reasons.
I have my reasons.
Like, I don't want to admit that I'm fearful.
I don't want to-- again, what if I owe them money?
Like, what if I never sent a thank you note?
Whatever it is, your integrity as a whole functioning,
good human does not want to have even the tiniest crack in it.
So when we talk about courage, what-- you know,
as they say, courage is not doing things that, you know,
you're scared.
Courage is not a matter of having no fear.
Courage is a matter of having fear and doing it despite that.
Right?
So I don't know.
I just find that extremely useful.
Now maybe it's not that.
Maybe it's something much more quotidian.
Maybe it's just that your phone's about to die.
Maybe it is that you really do need to sharpen these pencils.
Maybe it really is that you just want to finish this one level
on your PlayStation game.
But if you start applying that thought technology of saying,
is there a chance that I'm scared of something here?
And what is that thing?
Is that a thing I should be scared of?
Is it a thing I wish I weren't scared of?
How do I address that?
If you start addressing what you're scared of,
you may find that you procrastinate a lot less.
- I think that's a fantastic point.
And honestly, I'm gonna reframe a couple of things
that I'm struggling to get through
and just try and dig down to see
if there is something else beneath that.
- Good for you.
- Yeah, I think that's really great advice.
So I think it's actually a really probably a good point
to sort of to wrap up on actually.
If you wanna talk more about this,
can reach me on the Fediverse at chigi@engineered.space and you can find Pragmatic at engineered.network
or you can follow @engineered_net on Twitter to see show specific announcements. If you're
enjoying Pragmatic and you want to support the show you can via Patreon at patreon.com/johnchigi
or one word with a thank you to all of our patrons and a special thank you to our silver
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Now, if you'd like to get in touch with Merlin,
what's the best way for them to get in touch with you, mate?
- Well, you can check me out on Hot Dogs Ladies on Twitter,
and I very rarely talk about this stuff anymore.
I mostly do podcasts.
So I would say,
if for some reason you wanna hear more of me,
I can't even imagine, let's put it this way.
If you want to hear some John Siracusa, you can check out a podcast I do called Reconcilable
Differences with John.
John is the way that I was introduced to you through the famous RSI episode.
You can go to relay.fm/rd and find episodes of John Siracusa and me trying to figure each
other out.
- Fantastic.
Yep, highly recommend.
I listen to every episode and I love it.
So definitely check that out.
And yeah, and I know you just said before that you don't talk about this stuff as much
anymore.
I'm very grateful that you took the time out to talk to me about it today.
And I actually, I've come out of this with a lot to think about.
So thank you so much for your time.
You're welcome.
And I want to give you a thank you and an apology.
I thank you for having me on because it's nice to talk about this stuff two or three
times a year, but also an apology that I talk so much because I don't really want to talk
about it anymore.
And when I get the chance, I really appreciate it.
I hope it was useful to your listeners, John.
Thank you for having me on.
Anytime.
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It's all good. The whole talking thing. When we get on a roll, we get on a roll. And that's okay. It's all good.
It's just all the latency sucks. It's nice to be the remote guy, except when it's not that fun to be the remote guy.
But I do appreciate you having me on. It was really fun to do.