John Zeratsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love it. I love that it emerged out of the sprint concept. I know you talked about the book, but I forgot that and these are all very related. I also love that a lot of the best stuff comes from people actually doing the thing. This came from, "I just have discovered all these little things and I'm just going to share it." Not just like, "I need to write a productivity book." Yeah, I think, like Jake said, we both had always sort of been dissatisfied with the state of the productivity art, and we had big things we wanted to do. I mean, when you work in any kind of job, I mean we've both spent our early careers as designers and the job is really all about doing big projects. It's all about being able to focus, being able to spend time on the things that matter. And that's to say nothing of what we want outside of work, things that we want to learn how to do personally, people we want to spend time with. And it's interesting, we've found that when we talk to people about Make Time, they always know. They always know what they want to make time for. The problem is not like what should my goal be or how should I figure out what to do with my life? They usually know, but it's very hard to actually make time for those things. And I think the problem is that most productivity advice focuses on getting better and faster about doing the things that are already in front of you. So, the messages that are in your inbox, the meetings that are on your calendar, a lot of focus on efficiency, like crank through that stuff. Our perspective is basically that those are the defaults. Just like our software that we use, apps that we use have defaults, those are the defaults of life, of the companies that we work in, the culture that we live in. And so, the solution is actually to change those defaults and to really flip this way of thinking on its head. So, it's not about how do I go faster? How do I get more efficient? It's about how do I put the thing that is the most important first in my day or in my life, and then build everything else around that and accept that you're going to need to do a bunch of those little things. You're going to need to answer those messages and go to those meetings, but really, start with the idea of what's most important to you? What do you actually want to make time for? Along these same lines, we're going to talk about this kind of four-part strategy that you recommend, but a couple of things before we get into there. One is along the lines you just talked about is this insight that you had of just like willpower is never going to be enough to get you to make time for the things you want to do. And you had these two concepts of busy bandwagon and infinity pools, so maybe just talk about those two briefly.…

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