Greg McKeown:
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Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you today with Laura Mae Martin. This has the power of relevancy because, I mean, everybody who’s listened to even a heartbeat of this podcast knows that we care about trying to live a life that really matters by being disciplined in a pursuit of those things that are important, eliminating the things that are not essential, and making it as effortless as possible to do what matters most. And she’s at the forefront of providing really tangible, specific things that these leaders can do to be able to tap into the least fungible resource that they have. And perhaps everybody listening to this can appreciate how much pressure there is as people move up the chain of influence. But really, it is quite a spectacular thing to work with the highest performers in the world, people, some of the people that we’ve interviewed here on the podcast, and to try to work out how to help them make tiny improvements in the use of their time and whether they focus on the things that really matter most.
Laura’s been at Google for 14 years. Her life, her work there started with a 20% project. At Google, at least in theory, you’re allowed to spend 20% of your time on a project of your choosing, and she used it to be able to teach people how to manage their inbox effectively. So this passion grew into a full-time role where she works with these executives one-on-one and also running the productivity at Google program, which includes sending out a weekly, you know, newsletter and insight, to tens of thousands of employees there.
She’s a proud alumni of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She resides in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a husband and three children, balancing herself a challenging professional life and personal life. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into her upcoming book, Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, which just hit the shelves, congratulations, on April 2. So, let’s get to it.
Welcome to the show.
Laura Martin:
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Greg McKeown:
One of the things that you write in Uptime is the following. You say, “Psychology tells us that we all have a disconnect with our current selves and our future selves. The results of a study published in The Journal Social Psychology and Personality Science show that people who perceived greater similarity to their future self experienced greater life satisfaction ten years later.”
So, opening question here. What is the best way to apply that right now, you know within a couple of minutes, within a few minutes, to help people take advantage of that insight.
Laura Martin:
At any moment, I think you can ask yourself whether it’s a decision or how you want to schedule something, or what you’re spending your time on. What will future me wish I had done right now? And so one thing I like to do that you could do right now is take a look at my schedule for the next one or two weeks and look for places that current me maybe hadn’t considered future me. So, did I forget to give myself a break somewhere? Did I over schedule? Did I become unrealistic about how much I was planned to get done in a day? And so I look for that, the inconsistency between my current self and future self, and then I make adjustments now instead of finding out that inconsistency was there later.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, that’s a really good test. How do you find that the executives respond to that? Are they able to do it? Do they make the changes?
Laura Martin:
I actually think executives tend to have that lens a little more sharpened, which maybe is, could be causation or correlation, but I think that a lot of executives are really focused on what is future me going to wish that I was spending my time on right now. What is future me going to wish that I had driven my team? So, they tend to have that vision. And I think that you, that can be something bigger, like where am I spending my time as a whole? Or just, I know this about myself. I’m going to need a full day a week after travel to really decompress and think and digest everything that I took in on a trip. It could be that small. And so I think that executives tend to have that vision, which is good.
Greg McKeown:
So your experience is that they’re already doing that, but the other employees at Google are less conscientious about that, less self-aware about how they spend future me time.
Laura Martin:
I think that executives, the stakes are higher, maybe is a way of putting it, but I think that they are really seeing the forest through the trees. So, looking at that big picture of how to associate my current self and my future self and where I’m spending my time and what I like to do through my scalable program is maybe you’re just starting out, you’re a young professional in your career and you haven’t really experienced that.
We’ve all gotten to that point where we think, wow, I really didn’t plan for my future self, well, or I really didn’t associate those two, because right now I’m over-committed and I didn’t think of what future me would think. So maybe you’re new to the workforce, and you’re just starting to figure that out. And, some of the tools that I give are trying to get you to think that way before it explodes in your face and you’re thinking, oh, I didn’t plan for future me. And so it’s just really small. Like you said, small mindset shifts, small ways of thinking of things up front that maybe can make a bigger difference than if you had to experience and learn from it.
Greg McKeown:
I don’t remember what the moment was precisely, but within the last couple of days, I had a moment when I was talking to my wife, Anna. I literally was like, oh, I’m really grateful to past me for this moment. And I can’t remember what this specific tactic was a change, but I felt a connection between my past and future self in a really present way. And I thought it was a delightful way to try to live in kindness, in a sense, to your future self.
So then the future self goes, “Thank you for doing that. Thank you for getting that sleep last night. That helps me today. Thank you for creating buffer in my schedule today. That was kind of you to do it.”
This idea of being kind to your future self, and of course, to say nothing of wise to your future self or making trade-offs now to be able to help the future self be in a better position, this all seems like actually quite a profound way to live. Do you have other thoughts about this or tactical things to do?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, I really like your way of not only planning for future you but then future you, turning around to past you and saying, “Thank you for doing that.”
I’ve never really thought of it that way, but I love that because it gets you into that appreciation mode and it cements that moment in your mind so that you are remembering. I did that for myself, and so I like to think of it. If it feels foreign or unattainable, it could be as small as setting your coffee machine on a timer the night before you. That’s something small where the morning you wakes up, the coffee’s already brewing. And, “Thank you, last night me who might have wanted to go to bed but set up morning and tired me.”
So it could be really small, packing your lunch the night before anything that is helping that future self. And then I love that turning around. And I think the more you make that connection, which is what that study showed, the more that loop is going plan for future me, thankful for past me doing that, that’s where you start to have more of that connection. And you know yourself, you know your future self, and you’re thankful to your past self for doing that.
Greg McKeown:
It almost reminds me of the magic of a time capsule at Stanford University. Every year, they create a time capsule. And so now, for a hundred years, they have, it’s in their main quadrangle in front of in the square at Stanford Memorial Church. And just the idea that they are thinking about somebody that they won’t even meet in that instance makes me think, well, there’s the coffee the night before idea, which I really like, having a quick relationship gratitude cycle with your past and future self. But also, I was thinking about this principle in terms of the ten minutes and ten years rule that you say, okay, what can I do in the next ten minutes that ten years from me now will be grateful I did. And suddenly, you’re giving yourself an excuse to make a trade-off you wouldn’t otherwise make. Yeah. Any reaction to that spec practice?
Laura Martin:
I think it could go all the way to, you know, I think end of my life me, which is like the ultimate future me, you know, what will I be happy that I spent my time caring about, spent my time giving back on, spent my time thinking about. And so that does shape how I spend the next ten minutes. And so I think that’s kind of like the ultimate scope of where am I putting my energy? What am I making important in my life? And so I think, like you said, it could be as small as how to apply that right now, but I think big, big picture, it can help you make that decision of what am I going to do with the next week of my life? And how is that reflective of how I’m going to want to feel in those last few days about how I spent my time? So that’s super macro, but I think it can work for either.
Greg McKeown:
Well, I think that it’s attaching, it’s like think macro, act micro.
Laura Martin:
Right.
Greg McKeown:
It’s the duality of it that I think is the test. And, like I wonder, when you’re working with the executives or just the other employees at Google, do you get into that macro picture? Or is it more like efficiency hacks? Okay, here’s how you can send the email faster. Here’s how you can take your email and put it into tasks. You know, to what degree is it these digital hacks, and to what extent is it long-term vision?
And the reason it matters to me at least, is because it’s not so much, at least in my life’s experience, whether I’m walking slowly or fast. The question is, am I walking in circles?
Laura Martin:
Right? Are you walking in the right direction? So I asked what I was going to say. I don’t think you can really effectively teach digital hacks without the bigger picture. And so sometimes I think the digital hacks can be what I call a gateway to thinking that way. So, let’s talk about how to say no to a few meetings. Okay? That feels like a quick win, and I’m energized about that. But now let’s talk about bigger picture. Why are we saying no to those meetings? Or what are the top three things that you’ve decided to spend your time on this quarter? Let’s really define that for ourselves. Or what are the three boundaries that you’ve created that make you the most productive person? And if we haven’t defined that, then the meetings will come and we want to talk about the ins and outs of that.
But I can think of it like a recipe book. You do need the context about why you want to eat healthy and what you want to do for your body, but also you want like a grocery list. And so I think you kind of need both pieces of it. You can’t talk too big picture because then it’s like, yes, these are my goals for life, but my calendar is slammed. How do I get out of this? How do I actually decline this? My brain is full of emails and how do I get it clear so that I can focus on these things?
But then you can’t have one without the other. So I feel like sometimes any coaching, you have to meet people where they are. So sometimes I can start with what are the big things you’re focused on right now? And let’s trickle down from there, or it’s okay, you’re feeling overwhelmed with email, let’s tackle that, and then we’ll back into is email where you want to be communicated with and what is the point of this communication and what are you most focused on and where do you want that to go? So I feel like sometimes it starts; it goes both directions because you can only meet people where they are with coaching.
Greg McKeown:
What I think I heard you just say is that you don’t start with, you personally, don’t start in the work that you’re doing with the really big macro questions. You start with, you’re overwhelmed, you’re exhausted right now. You’ve got too much to do. Let me try and help you with a micro change that you can apply immediately so that you have a small win so that you can breathe deeper for a second, and then maybe you create enough space to be able to even consider the bigger question.
Laura Martin:
Yes, I feel like that’s typically where I’m meeting people is a little bit lower on that scale. And then eventually, if I’m at multiple coaching sessions, we get to some of those bigger questions, which is great.
Greg McKeown:
One of the things that you wrote in Uptime is regarding the rule of three. You talk about the 2018 study at Ohio University that “confirmed the long and widely held rule of three, the idea that people will remember things if they’re grouped in threes, by showing that in learning, our brains seek patterns and group things together, you’ll likely have more than three responsibilities or priorities in your life in any given time. But figuring out your top three helps you drive your focus.”
Now, you talked about Robert Kinsall, who’s the CEO of Warner Music Group, and you describe him as one of the most productive people you’ve ever worked with. Can you just describe what that means? How does Robert work?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, he’s one of those people who came to me, but I learned from him, you know, which is one of the benefits of coaching people who are already.
Greg McKeown:
So he was coming to you for coaching on productivity?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, just to see what I had to say. And, of course, there were small tactics, again, more of the digital tactics that I taught him and more of, like, in the weeds. But he really had such a good structure of how he defined what he was working on and how he communicated that, which I think was one of the even bigger things because if you know in your brain what you’re working on, but at that level, you have so many other people who are focused on what you’re focused on, whether it’s a chief of staff or your direct reports or in his case, an entire company.
So I think that one of the biggest things is that he not only had these priorities, but then he was so good about communicating what those were communicating when they changed, when inbound communication came in, or there were meetings about these topics, and there were action items, really being conscious about how do they fit into these priorities? And if I want to delegate them because they don’t. Who does that go to? And so it was more just watching the way that his team works and hearing them almost behind his back say, well, we know that Robert cares about that as one of the big three priorities. We’ve already heard him break that down. So we need to prioritize that as his chief of staff team. So it was just amazing, the power of focus and what you’re focused on and then giving that legs by empowering everyone who’s there to support you and support your company and things like that, to know that about you. And so it was just, I loved the system that he had around it and lists that matched these priorities, and it was just seamless. It was a great flow.
Greg McKeown:
Well, there’s something so simple that you’re describing, right? You’re saying he had three things. He said these are my big three. And then he didn’t just say them and forget about them or say them and think, “Well, because I’ve said them, because I’ve announced them, because I’ve told people now it’s going to happen magically.”
He had to break it down himself into smaller tasks and then talk about it. He himself is bored of the subject, but keepaps on going and going and going. And you took from that, as far as I can see, that simple process and have now taught it to other executives. You go on to describe somebody that you, an executive you worked with, and you implemented that simple system. Can you just describe what you did?
Laura Martin:
So I think the first step is defining, and so some people don’t necessarily have those three things defined. Another thing I like to do is.
Greg McKeown:
Do most people have them defined in your experience? Almost nobody does.
Laura Martin:
No. Exactly. And I always say, if I stopped you on the street and said, what are your top three priorities right now? You should be able to answer that because you’ve thought about it beforehand. And, of course, they’ll change. And, of course, there’s personal you and work you. And so sometimes those will flux where if you’re moving across the country, that might now become one of your top three priorities. But no, I feel like people haven’t necessarily defined those, and maybe they’ve defined goals, but I don’t think of those as the same thing. Those are a little bit more focused, far-reaching things that I eventually want to achieve, whereas priorities are what shows its face on my calendar right now. What is my time being spent on?
Greg McKeown:
And you’re talking about three, the big three for the quarter.
Laura Martin:
Right. Exactly. I think the quarter is typically a good time to evaluate that. And so the first step when I implement this, so it somebody else is saying, what are those three priorities? Defining them and coming up with a communication plan of who and how needs to be told this, whether it’s your team, your support team, or your chief of staff assistant, because who can schedule for you without knowing your top three priorities? That’s important. And even your spouse, anybody who’s in your life who needs to know what you’re most focused on.
Then it comes down to the actual in-the-weeds, like you said, digital tools of how are we keeping track? So, if you’re working with a to-do list, are we indicating on that to-do list how these things tie back to your priorities? If you’re in meetings and action items come from meetings about these things, how are we funneling that back to make sure that they’re all still aligned?
If there’s somebody who’s directly supporting you on one of these priorities and they’re kind of the delegate for some of the actions that are coming out of that, are they aware of that? And I think you said it well, which is a lot of times, these things can be big, like reorganizing my team. But the bigger question is how does that actually look? Give me an example of how that shows its face on your calendar. So I really try to get in the weeds of that, too. So that might be meeting frequently with my HR partner, doing skip-level interviews with my team to understand who’s doing what, and researching other teams, internal or external, that have functioned in the way that I want my team to function. So that is a little bit easier for people to grasp. How do I do that? How do I prioritize that? So then that could include then a calendar audit of where are those three priorities showing up as a percentage of your time. And so those types of systems help to support not just these are, like you said, not just these are my priorities, and I’m going to tell them, but are these truly the things that I’m focused on with my time, with my energy, with my action?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, you’re really trying to say the intent is powerful and can do a lot for you, but what you’re trying to coach people to is, is look at the mirror of your calendar. That calendar needs to look like a reflection of those three intents. And if it doesn’t, then you’re just living in a sort of self-denial, a nonessentialist, not self-denial, nonessentialist self-deception, where you’re saying these things matter. Evidently, they don’t exact calendar doesn’t lie.
Laura Martin:
A calendar doesn’t lie. That’s what I always say. So you can say what you want, but, you know, don’t tell me your priorities; show me your calendar. Because if you’re spending a day a week on a side project that you’ve said isn’t one of your top priorities, that indicates that it is. That’s a lot of time to be spent there. So that’s why I recommend getting the data on it because it’s the truth.
Greg McKeown:
And by, when you say by getting the data on it, you mean look back over the last two weeks of your calendar?
Laura Martin:
Yes.
Greg McKeown:
How much time did you actually spend on one of those top three elements?
Laura Martin:
And many calendar programs can do that for you. So, within Google Calendar, you can say, “These are my top three priorities. I’m color-coding them this way.” And then at the end of each week, I can simply click a button on time insights to see how many hours I’m spending on that and then get the other category.
And so it doesn’t have to be this huge manual process. It can be something that you’re doing and then say, “Wow, for the last two weeks, I’ve been faltering a bit. I let some commitments sneak up that aren’t really what I’m focused on. Let me reset and again, prepare future me to do a better job with those things, whether it’s saying no or shifting.”
Greg McKeown:
And presumably, somebody needs to keep updating their calendar as they’re living it. I don’t mean the future calendar. I mean, for two weeks, let’s say, keeping an accurate account of where you did spend your time. Okay, I spent this time in email. I spent this time. You expected to spend X amount of time. You even blocked it out to spend X amount of time on this major project for the quarter, but you didn’t use it for that. You ended up getting pulled into these meetings or these things or whatever.
So, do you have people actually correct their calendar as they’re doing this for a couple of weeks, or how do you guide people in that?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, so, like I said, there’s a tool that does it for you. So every Friday, I recommend a look back, look forward, where you’re basically taking the time to say, “What did I do this week that was focused on the things that I wanted to focus on? Where did I maybe take on too much?”
Or sometimes, if you’re just starting out, there’s going to be commitments that are tapering off. So you can’t always say, “Next week’s going to be perfect.”
But I think as you’re, like you said, starting off, it’s a good idea to look back and then look forward before the week happens because as soon as the week starts, you’re almost too late to really make the absolute most of it. So I like to look forward and say something as small as, “Is there a meeting on my calendar where the agenda now doesn’t require my attendance? Or are there two meetings with the same group of people that I combine and extend by ten minutes? Or can I preemptively say no to this commitment, knowing that I’ll now use that for work time based on what I have on my list right now that I need to do?”
And so getting ahead of that and then again checking at the end of the week, how did that go? And I think you just get better and better at it. And so I don’t do that level of analysis for myself anymore because I’m in the weeds. I get an email and I see it’s asking for something that’s not a priority to me. And I’m instantly able to decline that, knowing that I don’t need to see the data. I just know that I’m not going to do it. And so think, like you said, it’s a muscle that you just start to learn instead of, oh, I wonder how it all played out. You think, no, I know how this is going to show up on a report like that, and I’m going to nip it in the bud before it happens.
Greg McKeown:
So I want to clarify something still, though: when you say I use the tool to look at how you spend your time, that tool can only be as accurate as the data you’re putting on your calendar. So are you suggesting that, like, for a week or two when you’re starting off to try to align yourself to these big three, that you would edit your calendar, like at the end of the day, to make sure that it’s a truthful showing, a sort of calendar journal of how you actually spent your time?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, in the book, I talk about doing that anyway, so that’s kind of where I was assuming, like, if you’re planning the night before for doing an hour-by-hour plan the day after, like, you should have those blocks that are considered email. And then, if you’re using a tool like Google Calendar, color coding that as your email color so that that’s feeding into your overall data. So, if you’re not doing that ahead of time, you would want to retroactively or adjust; maybe you had said you were going to work on email for 30 minutes, and you ended up doing something else you would want to adjust that.
Greg McKeown:
That’s what I’m talking about.
Laura Martin:
Yes. You would want to say, I actually didn’t spend that time doing what I said. I was. I got derailed and I focused on this. And you want to be intentional about updating it so you can get good data because a lot of where our time slips is when we don’t realize where we’re spending it. And that could be, “I set aside an hour to work on this project, and that’s what it says on my calendar. But I actually ended up getting distracted by chats or emails, and I need to make sure I don’t count that as an hour worked on the project at the end of the week.”
So, yes. Yes, you need to be diligent about that.
Greg McKeown:
Well, one of the things that I liked was in the chapter about saying no, you offered three questions that you’ll ask yourself. Really, I would say, to feel better about saying something that’s saying no to something that’s nonessential.
So the first question was, what is the worst thing that would happen if I never do this?
Laura Martin:
Yes, I think that that’s a question I use a lot when I find something lingering on my to-do list, or it keeps coming up, and I keep not doing it because I think that the back of my brain knows that, for whatever reason, it’s not essential. And so I really ask myself, “If I never did this, which is the extreme, what would happen?”
And that’s a good way of gauging how important is it really? Or is it just something I’ve been carrying around thinking I should do?
And so I haven’t let it go yet. So that’s just one of the lenses I use to kind of probe myself for that.
Greg McKeown:
It’s like a calendar or task equivalent of Aunt Mildred’s, you know, blouse that we have in our closet that we don’t get rid of simply because it’s there. And we feel, well, there’s a term for it. It’s a brain heuristic, but it’s the endowment effect that we value something more because we own it. And so in a similar way, something that’s in our inbox or request that’s been made or just a loose end with something or just an idea we’ve had one time, like, we just have all of these zombie tasks. They never go away. And you’re saying this is one question that you found helpful to be able to analyze it.
Laura Martin:
And I think the endowment effect I like to combat with the zero-based mindset. So whether that’s zero-based accounting means obviously create the budget without looking at last year. I even talk about zero-based closeting, which is if I walk into my closet like it’s a store, what would I actually pick up and shop for right now? What would I buy? And I think Aunt Mildred’s blouse probably would not be on that. And so you can shift that mindset just to help let go of some of those things. If I was invited to this recurring meeting starting today, would I actually accept the invite and go to it? So that’s just a mental hack in addition to a question like that to help fight that?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, absolutely. I love that mental hack for getting past the endowment effect. How much would I pay for it now? Would I buy it now today? It’s, you know, is in a sense, a conversation. We’ve talked about the conversation, you know, living in a way for your future self, but this is having a conversation with your past self saying, “Okay, well, I know you did that. I know you chose that. I know you kept that. I know that’s how you chose to live. But do I want that now for me? Or am I just living out of the, the reactive?” I am reacting to my past self choices.
Laura Martin:
I think that’s especially if you struggle with delegation or you haven’t thought through all of the options. So that could be something as simple as a household task that you’ve been meaning to do, and it needs to be done. So it’s not something you could just cross off. But have you gotten creative about, could I ask, I need my roof cleaned. Someone’s already coming to do the gutters. Could I ask them to do that as well? So, just another way of thinking, is there another person, another way, another tool? Especially with AI, now, that’s a good one to constantly be asking: Could AI do this for me?
And how could I get it done without the use of my time? That softens it a little bit if it’s still something that needs to be done.
Greg McKeown:
Well, yes. And in the spirit of zero-based accounting, right? So there’s, you know, one way is to say the periphery, “Is there someone else that could do this?”
A different way of looking at it is to start with zero. And you say, “What absolutely must be done by me? What cannot be done by anybody else?”
And suddenly, you think, “Well, exercise can’t be done by somebody else.” Like, you have to do that yourself. There are ways to make it more effortless to do it. You could do it with other people who. So that makes it easier to go funner to complete. You don’t have to figure out all the system. You can outsource that by having a trainer or going to a program. I mean, there’s things to make the execution easier, but you still have to be there. And that’s, I think, a good metaphor as well. It’s like, which things have to be you. And that number starts to shrink. Like having a close, personal, securely attached relationship with my wife, that has to be me. Having a close, securely attached relationship with each of my children, that has to be me.
There’s loads of stuff that doesn’t have to be me, you know, that I still sign up for and get on with on the basis that it’s. Well, I think that. I think that, basically, there’s two reasons people do it themselves, right? The one is it’s easier. You think it’s easier, you know, you just can do it yourself, make it happen right now. But then the math of that is bad because even if it only takes you 10-20 minutes and you multiply that if it’s a daily task, I mean, of course, very, very quickly, you could find somebody and train somebody to do that thing for you faster than you could do it, you know, over anything, like a long period of time.
And then I think the second reason is that people want it to be done just so you know, so there’s a sense of, again, control or attachment to something. But I remember interviewing one of the ex-executives at Apple on this podcast who, like, the first year of working at Apple, Steve comes to him and says, “When do your kids go to sleep?”
“Okay, this time? Okay.”
And he didn’t say why he was asking, I guess. But when that time came along, he just phoned the executive and he did it frequently, like constantly at first. And he just said, “Hey, talk to me about your day. Let’s chat. Talk.”
But this was the intent. Over a period of time, you will know how I think you will know what trade-offs I want to make, and then you will be empowered to act because we’ll be in alignment. And so this idea of really trying to inculcate the intentions that we have into delegation into a series of people, into a whole system of delegation, I mean, this is a completely different level to ask, as another one of my guests talked about to ask, who not how, is, I think, the big mindset shift there? And the third question that you ask here for help in saying no, is there any way for me to half do this and move on from it?
Laura Martin:
Yeah, I think that’s where, you know, perfection is the enemy of progress. Comes in where if something you, like you said, if we’re just carrying something around because we want to do it just so, there’s always a way to ask. I’m all for cutting corners if it helps focus on the right things. And so I think if we ask ourselves that question, am I trying to do too much? Which is preventing me from doing anything; that can also help to decide where we really could focus and kind of free up our brain from that action or that thing we’ve thought we need to do and check the box without spending as much time on it as we originally thought.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. In Effortless, I described this as, well, at least, this is one application of it. The courage to be rubbish. You just go, “Okay, hey, listen, some things ought to be rubbish. They ought to be done. Just, just so you know, they don’t, not everything has to be additive, not everything has to be improved. Not everything has to have, you know, have the bow on top of it.”
Yeah, there’s plenty of things that are very mediocre version will be perfectly fine for the situation that you’re in.
And if you don’t, then I think you sign yourself up for a life of fake optimization because you’re optimizing every little thing you do, but as a result, missing the big picture, things that would actually move the needle. You don’t get to the things that really matter because you’re not only doing a thing that is questionable whether you should be doing it or not, you’re doing it. Plus everything. “I’ll wow them every time I’m asked to do anything. Oh, not only I’ll do it, you watch, I’ll impress them. I’ll make this huge.”
And so we overcomplicate, over-engineer, and are unaware that every bow on top of that task is saying no to something essential. And that is terrible.
Laura Martin:
I love the courage to be rubbish because I think some people are surprised to know that my personal email inbox is pretty messy. But it’s not because I don’t know how to organize it. It’s because I don’t think that’s a great use of my time. I know that my work email matters, and I want that to be perfectly organized, but tying a bow on my promotional emails and my personal inbox would be a waste of my resources.
And so, same with my towel closet. It’s just never going to be perfectly organized. And I’m proud of that because that means that I know that that’s not the best use of my time. I go there occasionally, so I think people assume, “Oh because you’re so organized or you know, how to make things perfect, that should be everything.”
And I say, “No, like, I’m so glad I never spent time really focused on my linen closet, making it perfect. Nobody sees it doesn’t bother me. I can find things that I want that’s like a C job. And I’m happy with that because it means that I spent my time better elsewhere.”
So, I love the articulation of that.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I like that example. Because in my research into essentialists and nonessentialists, one of the things that I found is that it’s not just that nonessentialists think that trade-offs don’t exist; which they basically do believe that they certainly want to pretend that that’s true. And then it’s also not that just essentialists see the trade-offs are absolutely baked into the reality of existence, you know, like built in.
It’s not just that. It’s not that they just accept that reality. It’s not just that they’re not lying to themselves. It is that they actually start to embrace it in a really advantageous way. They see it as a strategic advantage because all strategy is strategic trade-offs, making trade-offs many, many times over that other people don’t. So that you get to the end of that project, that process, that multi year strategy for your life or for your business. And, of course, you’re winning now compared to the competitors because you made trade-offs they didn’t make. And you have this confidence. Not, of course, now 100% certain I’ll get what I want. But you’re stacking the decks in your favor because you are combining various trade-off positions that other people are not either willing to make or they’re not making. And so it seems to me that this is the spirit of what you were just sharing with the rubbish linen closet.
Laura Martin:
Yes, exactly.
