Speaker 1: How do you manage time and why is time management such a problem for everyone?

Speaker 2: I think, again, this is going to be counter meta to what a lot of the commentary is, but I strongly believe in this because I've worked with so many professionals and I've found this to be the case almost 100% of the time. I think time management is an issue because people overvalue time management. There's a difference between time management and task management. Time management often involves time blocking, creating very good schedules, managing the way that you're blocking out your time and shuffling things around, there's a lot of micromanagement there. Time management is diminishing returns beyond a certain threshold. If you've got a schedule and that schedule is relatively representative of what you want to do, and if you've got blocks of time set aside so that you can focus on something, and those blocks do not by any means have to be accurate, that's probably enough. You're not really going to get much more returns for the amount of effort that you need to put into it. The much more effective thing is task management, so really, really good prioritization. I've never, ever, in my thousands of people that I've worked with, I've never met a single person that came to me that said that they had issues with time management, but did really effective prioritization, strictly. And when the stakes are high, it's a bit more brutal. There's no situation where you feel good about what you've prioritized. It's just a matter of picking what feels the least bad. So there are all these things that are important to do. Let's break it down into a binary question. Is it possible for you to get all of these things done to a high quality? The answer is no. Therefore, you have to cut things out. It's just a matter of fact. An issue is that people will try to get all of it done anyway, and now you're in this cycle where you're like, oh, I had to schedule and then I just didn't do it, and now you feel terrible. And your to-do list is constantly grows and it just becomes this whale of a to-do list that will never die. Once you hit the triple digits, it's like, well, your life is over. Instead, we need to be really, really strict with the prioritization and understanding that there are certain tasks that, yes, they're urgent and they need to get done, but there are certain tasks that are not necessarily urgent. This is coming to Eisenhower type things, which is popular prioritization matrix. There are certain tasks that are not urgent, but if you were to do them, it would make the other urgent tasks unnecessary or you wouldn't have those issues in the first place. So if you're on a boat and it's leaking or there's water coming in, the urgent task is to bucket that water out. But letting the water fill for a while so that you can plug the hole, that puts you in a position where the urgent task doesn't exist anymore. And I call this concept urgency trapping. If we're always working on only what's urgent without considering the future version of us, whether that future version of us will still have these urgent matters, that's a negative spiral because if you're never completing everything, then the list is growing. If you're stuck in urgency, then the list will continue to grow faster than you can clear it. And then that can lead to a lot of burnout, that can lead to a lot of bad habits in terms of procrastinating and managing time and motivational issues and things like that. But sometimes you've got to bite the bullet and say, I'm willing to take this loss in order to put myself in a position where I can then recover that loss later when I don't have to have so much urgent stuff on my plate. It's a very different mindset to have and it's difficult for a lot of people.

Speaker 1: How do we prioritize and put attention to our focus and focus management? And you do talk about focus a lot. Can you sort of take us through the journey around focus and linking it to prioritization?

Speaker 2: Okay, so deep work and the concept of deep work, this is a huge field and it's so complicated to the point where no one really knows how to do it consistently. We know that the environment makes a huge difference. So my number one tip here is add a task that is important to you, not urgent, but it's important and it's worth doing to create an environment where you know that you're not going to be distracted by things. Keep a distraction sheet. So when you're trying to do deep work, know what are the things that you're getting distracted by. Can you change the environment so that those distractions do not bother you in the first place? So often the tasks that we can prioritize to put ourselves in the position where deep work is more easily accessible. It's very difficult to force ourself into a state of deep work, but it is possible to put ourselves in a position where we can enter into that state with a little bit less friction. So it could be, are you getting enough sleep? Is your environment good enough? Are you being distracted by your coworkers or notifications or other types of distractions? The task is number one, identify what those things are. The next task is change the environment, modify the workplace or the settings or communicate with other people to set boundaries in a way that allows you to have that space. And then deep work should be the thing that comes a little bit more naturally. It should be the outcome of it. The issue is that people will prioritize deep work in and of itself, and they'll block it out in their schedule and say, this is important for me to get done. But if the quality of the work is not there, then that time that's being blocked out for this deep work, it doesn't produce the outcome that you need to. And then that also feels bad. So first we need to be in a position where that deep work is possible, and then we can prioritize that work and we can set it out in our schedule, from one to 4pm I'm going to focus on this task. And then when we enter into that state, we can actually do it and execute it effectively. Usually if we're in a good environment, if we've structured it effectively, the deep work can come. Even in really busy settings, there's a lot you can do. Do not disturb, headphones, white noise, a sign outside your door. Some offices that I've worked with before have implemented a post-it note system where they'll have a certain color post-it note that they put up, and they know that if that's on their monitor or their desk or somewhere, that's the physical do not disturb sign. And so they'll use simple things like that. Because everyone in the workplace knows that deep work is important. Everyone is supportive of things that would increase deep work. The managers want more deep work, the leaders want more deep work, the employees want, everyone wants it. But sometimes you just don't know what you can do to do it, and then everyone is just frustrated together.