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Josh Davis is the Chief Scientist and Senior Faculty as Mentora Institute. He is the author of an international bestseller on time management, Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done, now published in 10 languages. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, strategy+business, Training + Development, Psychology Today, and others. He also trains individuals in techniques derived from psychotherapy at the NLP Center of NY and coaches people to love public speaking.
Prior to joining Mentora, Josh guided the translation of research on behavior change into leadership content as the Director of Research and Lead Professor for the NeuroLeadership Institute, during a period where the organization more than quadrupled in size. He also served as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Barnard College, as well as Columbia University and New York University. He holds a bachelors in engineering from Brown University and a PhD from Columbia University, where he studied psychology and neuroscience.
It's always great to log on Intersections. Thank you very much!Jacqueline Dawson
Thank you both Prof. Hitendra & Josh. Powerful reinvigorating hour to take forward!Gabe Daniels
Thank you so much. Inspired as always by you and your guests!Hilary James
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Josh Davis on the topic “Managing Your Time During a Global Pandemic”.
Many of us are finding it challenging to manage our responsibilities in today's conditions. The stakes are high, the pressure is intense, the demands are many, and the conditions ever-changing; plus work and family are being intertwined. We are stretched and strained beyond measure.
The episode “Managing Your Time During a Global Pandemic” offers key insights on:
Hi, everyone. This is Hitendra Wadhwa. I want to warmly welcome all of you back to Intersections. It's been a while since we were together because we took a week off during the July 4th holiday here in the United States. Then we had a moment last week where we had to reschedule. My regrets for that. We look forward very much to having Geoffrey Canada back with us for a very thoughtful discussion sometime in the near future. But then for today, it is a joy for me to welcome into our midst, Josh Davis.
I'm going to present Josh in a couple of minutes. I'm going to introduce him to all of you as well. But before I do that, let me just again warmly connect and welcome all of you to Intersections.
Let me just start by introducing you to Josh, who is going to be joining me very soon right here. He is a neuroscientist and author and also a very beloved colleague of mine at Mentora. Josh is a PhD from Columbia in psychology and neuroscience with a bachelor's in engineering. He has also taught at Barnard and Columbia, as well as at New York University. Josh wrote a book on the very theme that we want to talk about today. Essentially, how to get the most out of your life, because it's about how to get the most out of your time. It's called Two Awesome Hours and was an international bestseller on this theme of time management.
He has done other writing on themes of leadership and personal growth in publications like Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, Fast Company and a few others. At Mentora, Josh is our chief scientist. He is a very close collaborator with me and some of our other senior faculty in codifying the principles and the science of human nature and bringing it out in very practical forms for our audiences, both for organizations and individuals who come and sign up for classes. In addition to this chief scientist role, he is also one of our senior faculty and senior coaches here at Mentora.
It is a real joy for me at this point to invite into our midst Josh Davis. Josh, what a pleasure to have you with us. Thank you for joining us. I am delighted to have you here with us.
Thank you so much. I've been looking forward to this. This is a conversation that I've been wanting to have with you for a long time. We have so many other areas of focus and there's just so many ways in which what I've done is really an inner mastery approach to time management. So excited to be here for this.
Josh, you might have noticed that little slip of the tongue. I was calling you Josh Waitzkin for a minute as I was searching for my mouse. There itself lies a powerful insight about time management at some point, which is the way I was splitting my mind into two. One, trying to talk to you and others and the other to figure out where the mouse is. But let's come back to that multitasking aspect of time management. But do you know who Josh Waitzkin is?
No, but as long as it's a positive association, then I'll take it.
Dr. Davis, you've written this book on time management and you called it something curious. You called it Two Awesome Hours. Why did you pick this theme? What got you intrigued about a topic like time management and something to do with Two Awesome Hours.
The way it unfolded was that I was recognizing something. I'm guessing every single person on here has had the same experience, that you can have these mornings or afternoons where you are hitting it out of the park, which is an American phrase which means you're doing amazing work. That anything you put your mind into, you're doing it quickly and it's like really exactly what you need. Then if you're anything like me, you can have three days in a row where you feel like you're worthless. You finish the day. At the end of the day, you're just beating yourself up. What did I do? How did I end? And it didn't seem right to me. Not just me, my friends, family, just everybody coming to the end of the day so often and saying, "What's wrong with me? Why didn't I do enough?" I started to put these two pieces together. I'm thinking, huh, I have something that is missing. What is that? What's the difference? So, because of my background in neuroscience and psychology, I went to the literature and tried to figure out are there conditions that set up those times when we're really out of bounds.
There are a great deal actually that's known about what helps somebody be at their peak mentally. What I then dug into is, what is that and it turns out that if you're just trying to be on all the time, it actually takes you away from being your most productive. But, if you're trying to set yourself up for a brief period where you're really showing up for the work that matters, then you can actually, on demand, start to create these mornings or these afternoons where you are really doing amazing work.
The reason that I said 2 hours and not just 1 hour or 5 hours, is not because we couldn't have 5 awesome hours with some practice, but because 2 is something achievable and reasonable for anybody starting today. I think it's useful to have that as a target in mind, because with just the right kind of planning and with some small shifts, you can get there and have 8 awesome hours. Some days you only need 1 awesome hour. But when we start thinking about what's the work that matters, how am I going to make myself in the perfect condition for that work? It becomes a whole different ballgame, a whole different idea about how we're trying to approach work.
Wow! Thank you for that, Josh. I think what I'm hearing from you is that time, in some ways, is sacred. The way we approach it and our relationship with it is something that we have to see from a very almost deeply sanctified lens, that this is a gift that we've been given and that there is a science on how to make the most of those moments. And at the minimum I aspire to make two hours every day to be really awesome. Although, again, for some of us and in some conditions, it might be 8, it might be 20 etc. Obviously, that's the next step we want to take is to understand what science is, that science or making those 2 or more hours awesome.
Before we get that, a quick little digression about Josh Waitzkin. Josh Waitzkin is actually a chess champion. He wrote this amazing book called The Art of Learning. Josh is also a dear friend. He lives and operates out of New York and grew up there. At a very young age, he became the US junior chess champion. By the time he was 18, he was jaded with all the success he was getting in just playing chess. He almost became the junior world champion, lost in the very final match against a Russian competitor. Hollywood made a movie on him called Searching for Bobby Fischer. It was all about the celebration of this amazing genius Josh Waitzkin. Then he turned his mind towards some personal development work, and ended up learning an Asian martial art, Tai Chi. Then went on to start playing that martial art in a more competitive way, first in New York and then ultimately took a plunge into a worldwide, Taichi Push Hands competition which he got slammed in, came back, licked his wounds, upped his game, went back a few years later and he became a world champion in Push Hands Taichi after being a U.S. junior chess champion.
From there on, he has gone to do Brazilian Jujitsu. He coaches hedge fund owners and managers, all over Wall Street. He has written this really great book called The Art of Learning, which I recommend to any or all of us. I often make my students at Columbia also read it. So that is Josh Waitzkin for you. A really tremendously insightful person. I hope that we can have him here with us sometime as well.
So, back to Josh Davis, who is the expert on time management for us. One of the things that I've really found insightful in that moment where you came to Columbia and you talked about this time management discipline to my class was when you shared how in a well-intentioned way, we sometimes get very swept up by whatever task we are doing. It is almost a sense of pride that we have, that we are very immersive in that task, that we get very concentrated in that task. But that very act of being very concentrated and immersed in a task can be our downfall when it comes to smart time management. Talk about that.
Yeah. This is really one of the biggest traps that there is. One of the things that I think is most powerful from neuroscience here is understanding that we really don't have as many opportunities to be deliberate, to be intentional about what we're doing as we think. So once we get on to a task, we get into this automatic mode. It's not that you're unthinking, but you are less conscious about so many choices. You're not deciding what to do. You're less aware of the things that are bothering you. For example, you're less aware of other distractions. Sometimes it can be very exciting. Sometimes it's even a flow state. Many times, it's simply that you're in a reactive mode that you might even just be checking email. Well, what if something occurs to you? Oh, I should check on this next thing. I'm working on PowerPoint. There are still these pieces to do. That's where your mind goes. We get into this reactive mode. Once we're in that mode, it's very hard to pull back because there's only a few times when we really tap into our full set of conscious resources during the day. It's when we come to a crossroad, it's when we have to actually make a deliberate decision, then consciousness really gets recruited. You actually activate many more of these resources and point it towards the prefrontal parts of the brain when you have to be deliberate, conscious and focused.
In those moments, you have the capacity to actually step back and make a deliberate decision. But the thing is, when you're in the middle of a task, you really don't. You're not quite the same person. You're operating, you're using different principles, different systems in the brain in many ways. Not entirely, but in many ways. What we have learned to do actually is to do two things to learn and capture these moments, like little decision points to learn to capture them when they do occur. So right before you started the task. That's the time to actually really step back and say, "Is this the right thing to be doing? What is important today? What do I want to get out of this day." Then choose. Because once you get started on the wrong tasks, time gets wasted. There's this thing that happens, though. Some of you may recognize this, where you're feeling unproductive and you just want to push through it. You're just like, I feel so unproductive. I need to get to something.
When you're aware of that feeling, when you're aware of wasting time, that lasts for a matter of minutes. When you start on the wrong task, you can waste hours. The difference is orders of magnitude. What you have to learn to do is recognize the preciousness of that moment, when you are more aware, when you can be intentional. The other thing that we can do is to build some of these in to make them more deliberate, to actually schedule ways to do it. One thing I can offer is, literally just stand up, walk down the hall. I call it a no device walk, because if the device is there, you're going to be reactive to something. A no device walk can be for a couple of minutes and ask yourself this question. "What's important today?" That can make all the difference, and when we're in a space like what we're in right now, where everybody is working from home and it's unclear where the boundaries are, workday can start at the moment you wake up and finish when you're going to sleep. What's work? What's life? There are constant distractions.
For many people, these expectations have just emerged suddenly that you're always available. If you're working from home and you're always home, you're always available. We're in a position now where we have to be extra careful about taking these decision points because we're going to have to make so many more decisions about precisely how to use our time than ever before. That's the essence of what this is about.
Yeah, it's just tremendous insight for all of us. I remember reading recently that in this Coronavirus time there has been a 17% increase in the amount of what they call fragmented time that people are experiencing every week. In other words, we have this Zoom meeting and that Zoom meeting scheduled at specific hours, because that's the nature of connecting with people online. Whereas if you were in the office, we might organically flow from one meeting to walking to the cubicle of a colleague and starting to talk to them. Then checking on with somebody to say can you meet me now for a few minutes? But, with online, things are a little bit more scheduled. But then you have these fragmentary, downtime slots. If there are, in fact, going to be some of those downtime slots, it seems, Josh, that one of the things you're saying is that if you can use those downtime slots to gain more perspective, to step back from the hustle and bustle and the striving to do X and do Y, to just recheck with your core, what is your real purpose here for today? What are the highest priorities for the day? Are you getting emotionally or otherwise caught up in the fray of something rather than see the big picture? Then these fragments, these 10-15 minutes here and there that you get free in between other things are not a waste of time or not just a doodling of time, but can be strategic reset moments. Does that make sense?
I love it. It's perfect for the moment. You make me think about some things. You speak about frequently setting a positive intention for every event. This idea of a positive intention is a micro purpose. What is my purpose here? And how can I get myself into a space where I believe I can actually work? That is what we're talking about in these moments. What is that intention? What is that purpose? Another way of looking at it that I might offer is, in addition to what you're sharing, research is very strong that when people have to switch or when people are telling themselves that they are multitasking, they lose a great deal of productivity. In addition to what you're mentioning about the new nature of work, many people working from home are also frequently task switching between family and work.
There's much more of this task switching happening. I'm talking about task switching, some of you might use the phrase multitasking, but research is quite clear that nobody is able to focus on two things at once. If your focus has to shift, you are switching tasks. There's time lost. Some research even shows that 80% of productivity is gone. There is a real impact on it. But if we can capture these moments, it can actually make us more productive. If you have to switch, you've just broken out of the mode. You're no longer in reactive mode, if you capture that moment. If you step back and say, "What is my positive intention for this day?" And if you give yourself just long enough to remember what that is.
This takes me back to what everybody has heard from Stephen Covey, the brilliant advice that you have to focus on what's important and not what's urgent. One of the reasons that continues to just be advice for so many people is that it's not easy to do. How do you actually do that? This is how you do that. You capture those moments when you're capable of actually connecting with what's important.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Do you want me to show you, Josh, one of my favorite ways to gain perspective and step back, as you've been evangelizing to us? I just get up from my seat in between stuff and I just start walking around, pacing. As I'm pacing, I'm clearing my mind. I'm thinking of the big picture. I'm thinking what is it like at the depth of my being right now, of my soul right now? What is it telling me? That's one thing I find really effective, taking small walks. Small little bits of bursts of physical exercise.
The other for me is just to sit. Sit still, close my eyes and just disconnect from the outer noise and seek to connect with that purity and the inner core. Those are two of the habits that I found very helpful for me. What about you, Josh? What are one or two rituals that help you get that perspective, get that re-grounding?
For me, one of them is the walk also. I make sure it is a no device walk, that's a critical distinction for me at least, it has to be a no device walk. Another is that I like to do this thing where I periodically notice what's going on in my mind. It's not quite a meditation because it's very much thinking. I just like to ask the question and just be curious what are the signals that are bubbling up? What are the feelings I'm having right now? The urges. I just take a moment and I notice them. Usually, it helps to redirect me pretty quickly to what's important when I just explore that. That's one of the things that I'll do as one of these breaks.
There's actually a little story that I'd like to share on this topic, because I think for this one, there's a number of people who may say this makes sense, but I'm busy. I have a lot of stuff to do, and you're asking me to take more breaks. I just need to power through it. I know what I need to do. I just need to power through it. I want to make the strongest case I can. That is actually a mistake in most cases.
There are times when we really do know. But if, you know, a brief 30 second decision point can help you say, "Yes, I am on the right track." So, I was in a position one time where I was on my way to give a talk at a big conference. It was going to have hundreds of people in the audience. This was a Saturday. The conference was on Monday. A more senior person, a colleague of mine and I, realized we were going to end up giving the same talk basically at this conference. I, being the more junior person, had to change my talk, my presentation. It was a Saturday. The talk is on Monday. Meanwhile, I'm traveling for work and I'm in a fun city and I've asked my wife to join me. She has gone to some great pains to be able to be there to take the time off. It's expensive and so on. So she's there for the weekend and here I am in this position where suddenly I have to create this whole new presentation. All I've really got to work with to try to create something new is that, the title and the abstract of it. There is just this tremendous pressure, "Oh, my God, I'm going to need every second. How am I going to make this work" and make this worthwhile for people? Meanwhile, feeling like "I really do not want to let my wife down." We were so looking forward to this.
So I'm in this position and the first thing I did was to go out for a walk around the city with my wife for a couple of hours and to have a nice leisurely lunch with her. What happened was the stress levels started to reduce. Yeah, it was still on my mind. I knew I had to do it. But what happened was that there were breakthroughs occurring in my mind as I started to realize what is actually important for me to do here in connection with this audience. What are the messages that I have that really are unique? And I was able to stay so focused on the purpose of what I was doing because of that. Then I would go back and work, but I didn't want to leave her alone. So I would only have at most a two hour window, often a one hour window over the next day and a half to go back and do some focused work. And because of that break, it forced me in this position where my mind immediately automatically started going to this place of what is important here. The work that I did was so targeted, and was so on point. There was almost no wasted time.
Afterwards I came up with something extraordinarily creative. What I managed to do was reuse a lot of pre-existing content from other things. People loved the presentation. It was a big hit. It was something I was able to use again and again. I took more decision points in that time than I had in any time prior in my life in a whole week. I did it all in a day and a half. I really did enjoy the weekend with my wife. She was quite happy to have come and I came away with something great. The more we feel the need to just cram things in, the more important it is to take these decision points. I just like to offer that.
Very good, thank you. It really brings it to life. There's a lot of power to how you were able to demonstrate that capacity to achieve both goals. To both be there recreationally for the family and your wife, and at the same time do your best work. One thing I really admire about you, which I want to share with our audience, is that capacity to distill to the essence, anything that you are working on in our own work together, as we collaborated at times on putting together presentations and classes and training for our clients, or thinking through a complex learning journey for a community of executives, for an organization, etc. I have a lot of appreciation for that discipline you bring by seeking to simplify it and being able to make those hard calls. Those hard calls of saying no to a lot of peripheral stuff in order to be able to say a really great yes to the things that really matter. That itself could be one form of mastering your time, isn't it? Which means to take a good, hard look at the peripheral aspects of your life. I've always admired people like Steve Jobs and Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa for the discipline they had of taking away the decision fatigue or waking up every morning and looking at a full wardrobe and say, "OK, what am I going to wear today? What's the attire with which I want my dress for success today?" No, I'm just going to wear my simple white garb as Gandhi or my blue jeans and black top as Steve Jobs or my monastic clothes as a nun as Mother Teresa.
These aspects of a life that we can just simplify or aspects of our work that we can simplify, or our presentation, etc. To get to the essence can sometimes be the big breakthrough, isn't it?
Absolutely. There's so much that we can say no to when we know what really matters. I think it is Warren Buffett who said, "Success is saying no to 90% of the opportunities that come your way?" Something like that.
Yeah, that is beautiful! In fact, I've been very intrigued about applying this idea even in the way I engage with movies, because I've seen how some of the most powerful films to me are the ones where a lot of stuff has been stripped out, especially in a time like this, when big budget and big technology is dominating in Hollywood and Bollywood. You find that some of these movies just take all of that out to create something which is just at the core, the essence of what the movie is really meant to be about.
I remember this one film. It is about this guy, and he is in the car and he's having the struggle in a conversation with a friend of his. Then he has another conversation with his wife and it is kind of going back and forth between these two conversations. The whole movie is just shot in that car. There is no other character in the film except those voices on the telephone and he sitting in the car, his is the only face you see besides just the traffic on the road. It is one of the most compelling films that I have watched in recent times. It really grips you. It is so beautiful as just a window into human nature. Even while it was so radically simplified.
I just want to point out what you just said made me think of being an editor of your own life. That metaphor is really nice.
Yeah. Beautiful! Is it possible to reduce attention residue from task switching? is there any signs that you're aware of on how people can become more masterful in being able to do better at this kind of rapid switching of attention from one thing to another, back to the one to a third, back to the one, etc. Because I'm guessing this is becoming extremely pertinent in today's time where some of us are full time working folks with kids at home. We have the kids no longer being able to be in school for a while. We also are working from home. Every now and then our work life is getting interrupted by the need to also be a good parent to our child and help support them in what they're doing online or just help them go to the bathroom or whatever it might be. So this quick switching back and forth becomes actually a crucial muscle for us to build. What does neuroscience tell us about this, Josh?
Yeah, well, so I think we have to get into talking about how quickly because you pointed out rightly, that some switching can't be avoided, especially in this work from home scenario for many people. For some people, working from home actually means that there's less switching they need to do if they live by themselves, for example. Sometimes when we're talking about task switching, especially in research, to my knowledge, it has always been about relatively quickly moving back and forth. And we're talking about on the order of seconds, I'm doing this one thing and I'm trying to do this other thing. How much time is lost? How long does it take me to reset?
Then there's a different kind of switching, which is I'm working for 10 minutes and then I get interrupted with something else. Then I need to pay attention to that for 5 minutes. Then I can come back. Now, there is still a switching cost that occurs. I'm not aware of any research about how to reduce that switching cost, but what we can do is in terms of the residue, there's also sort of an emotional residue or a set of urges or feelings of I should be doing this other work, I need to be getting back to this or framing the interruption as an interruption, as something that's causing you to not do what you need to do and just having the pressure buildup.
What I can offer you there is one thing is to reframe and you don't have to wait for the moment to do it. You can sort of pre frame in your mind, have a reappraisal or reframe of what it means. Let's say, if my kids come in, yeah, I really wanted to finish this one thing. If I do take 10 seconds and remember what's important to me, that it's about them and it's about doing my work. Then it's possible for me to say, "OK, here's an opportunity," If I've planned ahead for how I can feel that I can remember that reframe and do it.
Another reframe I want to offer you is; and this one is true. This is a decision point. My child, if it's a child who has come in or whatever the interruption is, has just created a decision point for me. My gut instinct was to be angry, to feel stressed that I'm not getting back to the other thing. But actually, a gift has just occurred, because I might have been working on something that was not the best use of my time. This is something that is very near and dear to me. I've made it a very rich part of how I operate. I can guarantee you at least 50% of the time, I still find myself working on something that's not the best use of my time. Learning to see that as actually a gift can be a nice reframe as well. That's some way to let go of some of the emotional residue and be more present.
I really like Josh, thank you. You raised a very important point, which is about the undercurrent of emotions that actually have a strong impact on the productivity, the attention, the mindfulness, the presence, the intention that we can bring to anything and everything we are doing. Let's talk about that for a couple of minutes, because you know, just as much as I do in our work at Mentora, in the teaching that we have out there for organizations and individuals, this aspect of emotional intelligence and emotional life is so crucial, isn't it?
One observation that I want to share, as a build on what you've just said, is that in addition to those decision point moments or those distraction moments where another task suddenly just presents itself to you. In doing a certain task itself, we sometimes go through a whole different sequence of emotions from moment to moment, when we read a certain email, when we think about how that member of the audience was just not appreciative of what I said, when we worry about whether the stakeholder is actually going to have the funding in this Coronavirus stage or whatever it might be. So there is this background energy in our mind, which is the emotional undercurrent that is running through as we are superficially paying attention and doing a task. If these emotions are not properly attended to and regulated so that we create the conditions for the best in us to arise in that moment, then we are suffering from an unconscious, invisible cost on the inside, isn't it? Which is that we are really not being able to bring our best to the moment.
If you were to calibrate on a zero to 100% scale how you are doing in any given moment, it could be that in some cases we are actually working on a presentation or an email or something, but there is a surge of anger, irritation, disappointment, worry, concern, hopelessness, whatever that is consuming us in the background, then 70-80% of our energy is actually caught in that emotional state. Does that make sense, neuroscientifically?
Absolutely. There is so much energy that goes into two aspects of it. One is anxiety itself can often be draining. It can be energizing in the right context in small amounts, but it can also be draining. Then fighting the emotion, the cognitive control is quite fatiguing. I can't feel that I have to tamp it down. I have to just find a way to control myself and focus anyway. When that internal struggle is occurring, there's a great deal of fatigue. This is one of the other things in the book. One of the other strategies there is to manage your mental energy. Your mental energy is going to have to do with both your fatigue and your emotional energy that's occurring. The two are intimately intertwined, as you mentioned. The fatigue aspect of emotions, but emotions themselves also. They drive us to do things. They are there for a reason. They don't happen by accident. Yet, there's a well-known phenomenon when anxiety gets too high, we don't think straight. We're not actually at our best. But when anxiety is too low, we're also not at our best.
A little bit of anxiety, many of us have learned, actually helps us focus. It's a strategy that we use to help get us on point. Sometimes anger is a strategy people use to get themselves fired up. But too much of it then makes it hard to think clearly. There is actually a great deal of research about how to address that. We've really tapped into the research on cognitive therapy about what really does work for most people. But there are also some things that I can offer that are very easy to do. These have to do with the mind-body connection, which is something else that I wrote about in the book, which is that two simple things you can do.
One of them is that most people may not know this, when you become dehydrated, on average, most people will become more irritable, angry and short tempered. Now, you may notice that this happens to you sometime or happens to other people who you work with sometimes, that you're just not giving as much patience to something. If it has been two hours since you had a drink of water, you're probably getting dehydrated. It's as simple as that. We are bodies. We're not computers. Where the body is the battery. We are a whole biological system. We don't operate like computers in many ways. We can be amazing for short bursts of time and then not amazing for a long period of time. Computers are the same all the time.
We have our brains and bodies and so are starting to take that seriously. What would that mean? Well, have a drink of water every couple of hours. Also, there are these effects. This is one of my all-time favorites. This just dramatically changed the way that I operate day to day learning that there is a reset switch. Let's say you are too anxious or whatever the emotion is that is really getting in the way for you, there is a reset switch. There is a way to actually be able to be present, to feel less of that, to be able to focus more on the positive and the opportunities. That is a small amount of exercise. Twenty minutes of jogging. Not pushing it too far to the limit that actually has decreasing returns in the end cognitively. But a little bit. You can use it strategically. It's a completely different relationship with exercise than trying to do it for long term health, where you might workout hard once or twice on the weekend. This is using it as a strategic tool each day to get you either to start your day so that you are mentally and emotionally where you want to be for the day or to reset in the middle of the day.
Hitendra, I'm imagining you're also thinking of meditation as being a tool for precisely the same thing and to my knowledge, it can offer the same kind of reset. But there are these things, these bodily things that we can do that dramatically shift the emotional energy that we have to allow us to be present.
You know, it reminds me of a story from Josh Waitzkin, from his book Art of Learning. He was participating in all these competitions and he realized that actually the secret to success in chess was not necessarily just brilliance because lots of people had them, but it was to be able to sustain that brilliance over the course of a long game. What he noticed is that his game used to drop after a while because his mental state, his energy state just couldn't sustain itself. Then what he started to do as an intervention was that after he had made his move and now his competitor's clock was ticking and they were thinking what move they were going to make, rather than just always seek to use that downtime to get more work done by anticipating what they might do and therefore what I'm going to do, etc. But it seemed like, "OK, I got this free time now because of the competitor's clock, and they are the ones who have to make the move." But let me use this time to get even more advanced thinking in place for the next move, he said, rather than do that, occasionally he would just get off from the chessboard and he would go to the stairwell next to that competition room and just run up and down the stairs, and then he would come back with a new burst of energy. So that's so much the point that you just made, Josh.
I want to read a quote to you from one of Lincoln's very close friends. I share this because I just want to inspire all of us to the possibilities there are in advancing our capabilities in new directions. you can see that Joshua Speed, Lincoln's friend, is remarking on this very challenge of quickly switching back and forth between different tasks that you and I and all of us are facing today. Joshua Speed says, "I marveled at Lincoln's powers of concentration. He had a wonderful faculty in that way. He might be writing an important document, be interrupted in the middle of a sentence, turn his attention to other matters, entirely foreign to the subject on which he was engaged and take up his pen and begin where he left off without reading the previous part of the sentence. He could grasp, exhaust and quit any subject with more facility than any man I've ever seen or heard of."
I share that because regardless of where the average of humanity is, we have got to look at the best practitioners out there in any craft as a way to understand and see perhaps little more to the plastic nature of the brain and what I can develop. It reminds me a little bit of the work of a scientist that we've had very much on this show itself. A very exalted researcher on the field of meditation, Richard Davidson from University of Wisconsin-Madison. In some of his work, the book is written with Daniel Goleman. They talk, if I recall, about some of the evidence that is coming out that this capacity to switch attention back and forth and quickly ramp down and ramp up, ramp down and ramp up is strengthened among people who are doing long term meditation.
It kind of makes sense to me intuitively, because what is meditation? In some ways, it is about taking your mind into your mental gym and making it really build its muscle. When you build this muscle in a way that you've never done before, who knows what capacity of a Lincolnesque kind that we might get.
Here's a quote from Op Ed in The Washington Post, taking on this quest for helping us with time management in today's time by Laura Vanderkam. She says, "In more than a dozen years of collecting time logs from thousands of people, I've seen that no matter how busy people are, there is always some discretionary time. I have seen time logs from parents who during normal times were working full time in remote jobs and home schooling their children while also making time for hobbies, working for 40 hours a week and home schooling for 20 adds up to 60 hours. A week has 168 hours. As for people without caregiving responsibilities, even if they're working 70 hours a week, which is about the limit people clock in their time logs, and if they sleep 8 hours a night, which is 56 hours per week, that still leaves 42 hours for other things." Now, granted, some of that is just going to be like chores. I think there's something really powerful in this idea of maintaining a diary and just analyzing how you're spending time and then looking for those pockets where perhaps you could do something different. What do you think about that, Josh? Is there anything that you have researched or discovered around the power of creating some log or a system of tracking time?
Well, this is one of the classic things in coaching. Somebody presents a challenge like this, where am I going to get the time and you have them do a log for one week? And you often don't need to do any coaching. They just look at it and say, "Oh my God, look at the choices I've made." And also, if you can frame them as choices, then it is quite powerful in helping you in helping you make some different choices with the time. Now, that's the key thing, though, is that it is, as Hitendra said, a choice about how you're going to do it.
What I want to suggest is a phrase that some people like and some people don't. It's what I kind of tossed in there in the book at one point, which is strategic incompetence. If you embrace the idea, I'm going to have some things that I'm not going to be the master of. I'm going to have some things that I am going to let go. I feels so risky. So I want to acknowledge that there is a very big sense of risk if I'm going to let something go. One thing that has become more popular to let go, but it's still terrifying for many people is a lot of their email. You can play with this in little ways, but each time you have a little experience of letting something go and see what happens, discovering whether you survive it. I'm not going to respond to this kind of email, not going to join that kind of a meeting and just doing it for a day or two or a week and discover what happens. At some point, you may even just use the metaphor, the example of email a little bit more. You may find yourself willing to declare email bankruptcy and say anything that's older than two weeks. I'm just going to mark as having been read. It's there if I need to search for it. But that's it. I've just freed myself.
There is so many different tasks that we could approach in that way. But it is a big risk. It's so different from how we may have been operating. I encourage you to create small experiments, to discover what happens and to discover whether you survive. I think I know what the answer would be. But it's so raw and intense that we do need to actually honor that.
Thank you, Josh. Another question to you is; could you touch on the mindset and thoughts and beliefs that affect one's relationship with time and with our priorities?
One thing I want to offer, this may be philosophical for a moment, some of you are probably familiar with Albert Einstein's conception of time as being largely a fiction of our imagination, there essentially has to do with the fact that we age, but he considered it is really four dimensions of space. He called it space time, and they're being analogous. That's why if you're moving through space faster, you're moving through time slower and so on. But the idea is that, this idea of time is so often we just take it and we imagine that it is equal to a certain amount of productivity. That is simply not true. One of the wonderful things about a human being, about a human brain, is that there is just such a vast range of things that we can do, think and feel.
If you think about a dream, you can have an entire lifetime that passes in five seconds and it feels like you went on this amazing journey. The dream lasted for such a short time. The mind can fly through all kinds of things. Time is not actually a great proxy for productivity. So that's one different way of thinking about it. So rather than trying to think about what my time that I have and how do I break it up, what do I utilize it for? thinking about what is it that matters to me? How do I connect more with my purpose? What are my emotions? What am I ready for at this moment? How could I change that? How can I connect with what's important to me, who I am? etc.
When we're connected with these things and then we think about tasks, we think about development, we think about experiences in life and we start to organize our life around doing those things and matching it with the energy that we have. It's a different game that we're playing. I don't want to pretend that we're not all following the clock and that we're not going to eat and sleep roughly on a 24-hour cycle and that the Earth doesn't rotate once every 24 hours. That is happening, but it is really a fiction to think that time and productivity are the same.
This idea that time equals money, that was a clever way of saying things when you were referring to a very manufacturing-based approach, or if you're a lawyer and you're billing by the 15 minutes. Yes, then there's a direct connection in that way. But it really shouldn't be taken farther than that. I hope that helps a little bit.
I love that. I want to share an example of how that can apply to relationships. I have found, for example, that when I am sometimes feeling very responsible for managing my time and if I'm interacting with someone and I want to really move through that efficiently. This could be someone in my personal life. If I bring in that kind of a rushed and a very time-oriented view to the first few moments of that interaction, sometimes the interaction can go into a downward spiral because the person from the other side was seeking a listening ear, was seeking a patient presence but I was meanwhile, seeking to advance the problem solving that needed to happen between them and me.
Instead, if you take the other approach, which is that when you're starting an interaction with someone, you use the first few seconds to just put your agenda aside and just be in the presence of that person and seek to establish a silent common bond. Sometimes that can be done almost instantly because, you know, the person you're seeing the facial expressions of, you're hearing the tone of the person, and you have these seven different modes in which that person exists. And you know, which of those seven is this and you know this is the moment where you can advance your agenda.
But then there are other times when you sense in that moment that this person is in a different place and space from that aspect of the person that you need for your agenda to be pursued. And perhaps there's an opportunity for you to put that aside and just be there for them to celebrate, perhaps something that they have just gone through, to tune in and check in with them, to just listen about something that they're struggling with or something. Once that connection is made, that silent bond is made, often I find that the other party, almost paradoxically, when you thought that, "Oh, my God, now I'm going to have to waste all this time, I have to get so deeply invested, etc." No, just by giving a little bit of that calm, patient, engaged presence, the other person just gives you the license to now completely own the agenda and to do anything and everything on your mind, because they just feel validated, they feel connected, the immediate emotional need is met and now they can be there for you.
Well, one thing I hear is that we come in with this preconception about the time things will take. But that's based on expecting it to go a certain way. If instead, we're able to come in with a certain amount of ability to release attachment to a specific agenda we may have or an ability to focus on what really matters in this in this event, in this interaction, if we're able to connect with those things, then if there are only 3 minutes or if there are 30 minutes, you can adjust more effectively to that.
Perfect. The thing I wanted to add to that is that, Josh, you to me are one of the exemplars of this practice. You bring a tremendous, very patient, an empathetic presence to any room, to any audience, to any individual. That centeredness, that calmness, that sense of joyful anticipation about what is it that this moment might unfold, the capacity to be quiet and listen and just absorb and draw all the energy of the other person is what makes you a great faculty, a great coach, great chief scientist, great colleague, and I'm sure also a great friend and partner at home. I'm just glad that we're having this conversation about a best practice which you are in such a great position to exemplify for us.
We're coming to the end of our hour. I know there is so much more richness to your book than we can do justice to here. I know we also have a class on managing time and managing yourself here in our work at Mentora. I know there are more resources for our audience to consider in going and double clicking and taking a deeper dive.
Maybe we can end with this one thing that I found really intriguing as a story in your book. This was about this executive who worked really, really hard for a very high stakes presentation that they had to do. They walked into the room and they flopped. That presentation didn't go well. You think about all the sacrifice, the toil and the focus they put into it and how they used every little moment, every little fragment of time that they had to get a lot of the extraneous other things done that would have needed and distracted their attention so they could create these big chunks of time to prepare for this main event. How could anybody do better than that in the dedication they showed for managing the time with just great zest and commitment to really prioritize a highly important task. But then they flopped. What's the lesson in that?
Lesson in that so you're referring to is this executive, working in this sports company, he's got this great idea to revive this line that they had in the past. He has this opportunity to pitch to the C-suite. He has come up with so many great ideas and then he is trying to use his time most efficiently. This is the error. He's trying to be efficient, instead of being effective. He's trying to simply think about time. He's staying up late the night before, fatiguing himself and then the next morning, he is quickly checking his email to make sure there's no fires. He is quickly trying to respond to things. He has got 15 minutes before the big meeting, let me just try to take care of this other thing that somebody needed. He ends up doing things that had he not done them, it would have been OK. He would have been forgiven or it wouldn't have mattered. He is getting stressed out about it. He is making decisions with every little thing that he is doing. One thing we know about that fatigue that Hitendra referred to before, it's something called decision fatigue, that your prefrontal cortex in front of the brain is so critical for focused attention.
Every time you make a decision or try to engage in self-control, you wear it out a little bit and it's like you have just gone for a long run. You could keep running, but it's hard. You need some more motivation, like somebody chasing you, that would get you going, but you need that motivation. So, he's wearing out this ability to make quick decisions and to control himself. Then he walks in and he is late. He walks right into the meeting and he is not able to be present. He is not able to make those quick decisions. He is not able to think on his feet. It's sad because it doesn't have to be that way. He is just thinking about time in terms of how can I pack it all in and be efficient instead of how can I be effective for the stuff that matters.
That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, Josh. On that note, we are going to start to bring our conversation to closure in just the next couple of minutes.
Josh, I've certainly enjoyed this exchange and I know we just scratched the very superficial surface of all the wisdom and insight that you can bring to this community. I much look forward to those possibilities in the weeks and months ahead. Josh.
Let's end with this quote from Elaine because I think it's just a beautiful little story. It says, "I always took the time to say goodbye before leaving for work even if my son was crying and even if I still had to leave him crying. I think the payback is partly in our close relationship today."
What a beautiful testament to the idea of just using our time very thoughtfully to get the best outcomes and small little gestures, small little rituals, modern disciplines that can give us so much bang for the buck, isn't it, Josh?
It's a beautiful story to end with.
Wonderful! So I'm going to just take a minute just to share with everyone our news about a guest for next week. But I'm happy to allow you to leave. So let's start by just thanking you for giving so generously of your thought and your time. I want to recommend to everyone it is a wonderful, short, very practical and inspiring read, Two Awesome Hours that we can all pick up from Amazon.
Josh, as our senior coach in faculty for all organizational work, is someone that some of you, if you're working organizationally, will also get a chance to meet. I would love to have you back here in the imminent future as well. Thank you for making the time and I'm grateful for your presence here, Josh.
My pleasure. Thank you very much.
That's great. Just to close things out. We have done a few things today on time management, isn't it? We have talked in particular about the power of decision points, not getting too swept up in a task, but being able to pull back and doing that on a regular basis. We talked about the value of managing your energy, being able to from time to time, take that short bursts of time to take a quick walk and do some other form of exercise so that your brain is just constantly fueled with the energy that you need to do good things. We have talked about the idea that your emotions actually have a lot of impact silently on how effective, mindful, present, engaged and creative you are and therefore wanting to maximize your time just to become more of a master in your emotional mastery, which we have spoken to Dr. David Burns about in some of his work in cognitive behavioral therapy and Josh today, gave us some more physical activities that we can do to also master our emotions.
Then he spoke at the end about some of these other nuances about multitasking and switching a brain from one thing to another and just being mindful of using time the right way rather than trying to maximize how much time we have. One phrase I really liked there is the idea that we don't have to try to maximize the moments in our life as much as seeking to maximize the life in our moments. I think that was Josh's overall central message.
Next week, I'm going to have a dear friend and someone I just feel so much appreciation for, for the path that he has taken in his career, his life and his vocation and the great work that he is doing in the community in New York City. He is the Reverend Father, Phil Jackson. He is the Vicar of Trinity Church in New York, a very iconic and historic part of the spiritual landscape of New York. He is going to come and talk to us about his journey in life and in leadership and the opportunity that you and I and all of us have to nurture our spiritual core and find ways to positively engage and express it in everything we do in life and leadership.
I look forward to that opportunity to have you back with us next week with Reverend Phil Jackson. It's great to have you back again with us. Great to get going again after this two-week gap. I look forward to seeing you again next Thursday, my friends. All the best!
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