John Zeratsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…The idea of the busy bandwagon is just this expectation that everybody's busy. And in the United States, there's kind of this thing that I think if you travel abroad and talk to people for a while, then you come back, you'll notice, which is like if you ask someone, "Hey, how's it going? What are you up to?" And they'll be like, "Oh man, I'm busy." It's kind of the default answer. "I'm busy. Things are busy." And it means, usually, it could mean a variety of things, but usually it's good. Like, "Oh, it's busy, so business is booming," or, "It's busy, I'm overwhelmed," or whatever. But busy, it's kind of the expectations that everybody's busy. And we are, I mean we are busy, but we call it the busy bandwagon because it feels like you should be busy. And it's this inner feeling caused by what we see or perceive other people are doing that drives a lot of the stress. And I don't mean to sound like I'm above it all and have figured it all out. It still drives my stress, this inner feeling that other people haven't figured out, other people are expecting fast reactions from me, all this. That's the busy bandwagon, this sort of feeling that I should be busy, that everyone else is busy. And what that does inside of us is really the core of what we have to change and figure out, this getting out of a reaction mode. The other thing that happens to us are the infinity pools. And John, do you want to describe what infinity pools are in our context? Yeah, we came up with this name because we were trying to think of endlessly replenishing fount of content. So, basically if you can pull to refresh or if it streams, it's an infinity pool. So, this is pure entertainment stuff. This is stuff that people say like, "Oh, I spend so much time on Instagram," but it's also stuff that's important and necessary and productive. Email is a huge infinity pool and it's probably the single hardest thing for the two of us to control and avoid getting sucked into. And anybody listening to this is going to, I think, understand how powerful those pools are and how effectively designed and engineered those products are to be really compelling and to be friction-free and to just make it easy for us to dive back into that pool. And so, when you put these two things together, the busy bandwagon and the infinity pool, you kind of have this, it's like a flywheel, but bad. You feel like you really need to be busy, you really need to be on top of everything. And then, you've got this whole collection of apps and services and products there that are ready to pounce on that, they're ready to take advantage of that set of defaults, that cultural and internal set of defaults that you have about what you should be doing. And for a lot of people, it just sort of spins out of control. So, our view is if you can name those two things, if you can understand those two things, then you can start to deliberately change some of the defaults around them, so that you can put your most important projects, people, work first, like we talked about. I'm guilty of both these things. I feel like the reason I do some of these chats, this one in particular is it's like one-on-one coaching almost. This is going to help me stick to some of the things you teach. And I've already actually implemented a number of the things you recommend, but this is reinforcing it. And then, obviously, also helping all the listeners get better at these things. Before we get into it, one last question is just like real talk, how how's your guys' productivity? You wrote this book, it sounds amazing. There's 87 I think pieces of advice. How is it going for you guys? As we go through, I want to hear what you're actually using, but just broadly, how's your productivity?…

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