The Productivity Project

So the idea is, for an entire year, I would dive deep, deep, deep into this idea of productivity. I had student bills to pay off at the time – about 19,000 bucks of loans. But I could defer those for a year. And I'd about 12 grand that I'd saved up in the bank. So I used that to live off for a year to run productivity experiments on myself, where I used myself as a guinea pig to experiment with productivity, like working 90 hour weeks, living in total isolation for a week, gaining 10 pounds of muscle mass – dozens of these experiments.

But it was first and foremost a research project to get to the idea of what it means to perform well in a workplace-type environment. So I looked at all the research and I interviewed experts to try to get to the bottom of what it means to "be productive."

Rachel Salaman: We'll talk about what you found out a bit more in a little bit. But first of all, how did you decide which productivity techniques to try?

Chris Bailey: If they were popular, I'd try them out. So one of the big ones out there is waking up early. There are so many productivity myths out there, but my book is about 300 pages long. But there is a 600-page book that doesn't exist, and probably never will, of stuff that didn't work during the project as well. Because so many of these changes, we like the idea of the change, and not what it means to actually "do" the change in practice.

And waking up early is a good example of that. For three months I woke up at 5:30, after struggling to shoehorn this habit into my life. And I struggled with it every single day of the experiment, but I'd finally done it. And I finally had the routine that productivity dreams are made of. I woke up at 5:30. I meditated. I read. I prepared a cup of coffee. I did yoga. I caught up on the news.

But then I realized that I absolutely hated the experiment shortly after that. And that led me to a lot of research on how there's no difference in socioeconomic standing between somebody who wakes up early, and somebody who wakes up later. It's what you do with the hours of your day, after you wake up, that make the difference in your productivity. And this is, I think, a really good example of a tactic that sounds good, and feels good, in theory. But in practice it's just a pain to implement. And once you actually do implement it, it might not work in the way you expected.

The idea of experimenting with personal productivity is just that. Productivity is personal and everybody is wired differently. But I think there are some tactics that work better for most people than others. But that is a key finding that I discovered in the project that, sometimes, the idea of a change is usually a lot sexier than what you actually have to do to make the change happen.

Rachel Salaman: And early on in the book, you say that productivity is not so much about what we do, but it's about how much, or what, we accomplish. So could you talk a bit about the implications of that?

Chris Bailey: Yes. It's basically aligning the idea of productivity to what's important. And the more we accomplish throughout the day, I would argue, the more productive we are. Or else, what are you being productive about? You can spend all day checking email and not accomplish a single thing. And so "busyness" doesn't lead you to accomplish anything. It's no different from laziness. And this is true with our actions. And so often, the busier we become, the more productive we feel. And I found this in the project, working 90-hour weeks for an entire month.

So for an entire month, I worked 90 hours one week, then 20 hours the next. And then 90 and then 20, to see how working these insane hours, and then these luxurious 20-hour weeks, affected how much I accomplished. And I felt at least four times as productive working 90 hours a week. And more than that, I felt a lot less guilty, because I didn't work these compressed hours.

Because when you have more work to do, then you have time to do it in. Usually when you stop working, that guilt kind of seeps into your work. And this is what I found during the experiment and I still find it today.

Guilt is a weird thing when it comes to productivity. But productivity isn't about how much you produce. It's about how much you accomplish. And so, when you have that mindset, one of the biggest findings, and most surprising things that I found, in the experiment was when I looked at how much I actually accomplished in the 90-hour weeks and the 20-hour weeks. I only accomplished a tiny bit more working 90 hours a week than I did working 20 hours a week. It blew me away when I saw that result. And it was because my work expanded to fit and accommodate how much time I had available for it in the 90-hour weeks.

It's the phenomenon of Parkinson's Law, where you feel like you're living at capacity in your home life, but then the new season of House of Cards, or Orange is the New Black, or whatever your show of choice is drops, and then, suddenly, this magical 10- or 15-hour window opens up and you have all the time in the world for it.

And our work is the same way. It tends to expand to fit how much time we have available for it. But, also, managing our time is also a way of managing our energy. So when you work 20 hours a week, that forces you to expand more energy over that shorter distance of time so you can get everything you have to do done.

Some people take this viewpoint of seeing productivity as a way of doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster. But I see it as a way of carving out more time for the things that are actually meaningful to you. So you can get 10 or 12 hours of work done in seven or eight hours. So you have more time, more energy, and more attention for what's actually meaningful.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book, you say that you see productivity as consisting of those three elements: time, energy and attention. How does breaking it down like that help us get more productive?

Chris Bailey: Towards the end of the project I realized that every single thing that I either experimented with, the lessons from the experiment that I interviewed people about, the valuable nuggets from those, or the valuable nuggets from the research that I did, whether books or academic articles, fell into those three categories, either managing my time, my attention, or my energy better. And that led me to the idea that these three things are the three ingredients of productivity. And where your time, attention and energy meet in the middle – that confluence of those three things – that's where your productivity is made on a daily basis.

And the thing is, in the knowledge economy that we're in today, where we use our brains to do our heavy lifting instead of our bodies, we benefit from all the attention and all the energy we can possibly bring to our work. When we used to work in factories doing assembly line type work, cranking out widgets all day long, we didn't have to dedicate too much focus or energy to our work. We could show up hung­over if we really wanted to. We came in at nine, we left at five, we didn't need much energy. While we were there, we didn't really need to focus because the work was simple and it was repetitive.

But with the knowledge-type work that we do today, our work benefits from all the focus that we can possibly bring to it. If we're distracted or we can't rein in our attention when it wanders off to something else, we're going to work less efficiently.

By managing your focus and attention and energy better, you can get more out of your time. Because of those three ingredients, time is the most limited. We get 24 drops of it every single day and then we're done. And then that's all we get. But by focusing better, and managing our attention better, and by managing our energy better as well, we can accomplish more in the same amount of time.

Rachel Salaman: So tell us a bit about how meditation helps productivity.

Chris Bailey: The research around meditation is totally conclusive and it shows that it allows you to bring more attention to the present moment.

In any given moment, the average person brings 53 percent of their attention to what's in front of them. So 47 percent of your mind is thinking about what you ate for dinner last night, what you're going to do after you get home, what you're going to do after you listen to this interview with us. It's somewhere else, other than what's in front of you. And this is crucial when it comes to the work. Because when you bring 53 percent of your attention to what's in front of you, you leave half of your attention on the table. When you bring more attention to your work, you work more efficiently and you accomplish more in the same amount of time.

At the start of my project, I had a meditation ritual where I meditated for half an hour a day. And so, for about a decade before the project, I was interested in productivity. For five or six years, I was interested in meditation and mindfulness. And on the surface, when I started the project, I saw those ideas as, to be honest, quite conflicting. Because I saw productivity as doing more, more, more, faster, faster, faster, and meditation as a way of basically sitting somewhere and doing nothing. And, sure, it helps you de­stress, but who cares? You're burning half an hour of your day just focusing on your breath. So when they started conflicting, towards the start of the productivity project, I eventually got to the point where I stopped meditating entirely.

But then several things, at that point, began to happen. I began to bring a lot less focus to my work. I became overwhelmed by the stressors of the project. And they were a ton. Because I got to thinking, "What am I going to do? Because I don't have health insurance. How am I going to make it through the year with only 12 grand? I'm way ahead of that curve right now." And all these things fazed me more in my work. I began to work more frantically instead of stepping back to think about what was important. I began to waste more time. I began to procrastinate more and I worked less intentionally.

And so that was when I started the experiment to meditate and really see the impact that it had on my productivity. What I found was stunning. And it kind of clued me into how crucial attention is in our work today. Sure I spent 30 minutes sitting on a cushion, focusing on my breath, each day. But that allows me to bring so much more of my focus to my work throughout the day. So that I make that time back, and then some.

Rachel Salaman: One thing that comes through clearly in the book is that understanding what you call our "biological prime time" is really important to productivity. So could you tell us about that?

Chris Bailey: So the idea of a "biological prime time" is that not all hours of the day are created equal. So there are some hours of the day when we have a disproportionate amount of energy, relative to others. And this is dependent on our chronotype, which is related to our circadian rhythm. And the thing is that everybody is wired differently. And so some people have more energy in the morning. Some people have energy late at night. We even have words for things like these, of course. Some people are "morning birds," some people are "night owls."

And so to get a handle on how much energy I had throughout the day during the project, I took a step back. And I charted how much energy I had every single hour, on the hour, for three weeks. So I cut out caffeine. I cut out alcohol. I ate smaller, frequent meals throughout the day. I woke up and I fell asleep naturally. And throughout these conditions, where I tried to normalize how much energy I had so that it didn't fluctuate too much, I charted how much energy I had every hour, on the hour. And I found that, consistently, between the hours of 10 and noon, and 5 and 8p.m., and as well as onwards, I had more energy than in any other hour of the day.

And it goes to the idea that productivity isn't just managing our time. It's managing our energy and our attention. And I think this is why, by the way, the 5:30 experiment didn't work out quite so well for me, because I have the most energy late at night. So it wouldn't make sense to go to bed when I have the most energy, because that's when I'm also the most productive.

Because I'm fortunate – productivity is often a process of understanding the constraints that we have – I have fewer constraints than most people in the work that I do. And so why not do the work when I have the most energy? The idea behind this is that not all hours of the day are created equal. And so by stepping back and figuring out which ones you bring the most energy to, you can work smarter and not just harder when you align the most crucial and fruitful tasks in your work to those hours.

Rachel Salaman: And in the book you actually suggest that we block out our "biological prime time" in our calendars.

Chris Bailey: Precisely. And this is, I think, something that's crucial. Because you have the most energy during those hours, they're worth defending religiously as best as you possibly can. And people won't book you for meetings if they see that that period of time is blued out in your calendar.

Rachel Salaman: You include a section in the book that explores the idea of relating to your future self. What are the key points here?

Chris Bailey: The idea behind that one is that if somebody wheeled up an FRMI machine to you, and they asked you to think about your future self. So yourself in the future, what life will be like 10 or 20 years from now with you. And they also ask you to think about a total stranger like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt, Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber. They ask you to think about any one of these famous people and they looked at your brain scans. What they would find would be fascinating. And what they would see is that the brain scans would be basically identical to one another. And so you see your future self as you do a stranger.

But if you thought about your present self, the brain scan would be wired totally different. Different parts of your brain would be activated. So this is crucial when it comes to our productivity because, when we see our future self as a stranger, we're also more likely to put off work for our future self to do because it's as if we're giving work to a total stranger.

If I asked you, "Would you want to run a marathon in a month?" Chances are, you'd say no. But if I asked you, "Do you want to run a marathon 16 months from now? I have this marathon that's 16 months from now and I'd love a partner to run with." Maybe you would still say no, but you would hesitate a lot less than you would with the one that's a few months away. Because it's far enough off in the future that you hoisted on your future self to do.

And this is why people have so many documentaries in their Netflix queue and people have tons of classic books that they're bound to read some day and never do. It's because we see our future self as somebody who is different from the version of ourself that exists today, even though we're basically the same person. And investing in your productivity will make you a little bit of a different person in the future in a good way. But really we're more similar than we feel, and so if we don't feel like doing something today, the chances are we won't feel like doing it tomorrow either.

And so this is the idea of beating procrastination by reconnecting with your future self. And there are some easy ways to do this. Simply imagining – I'm not a huge fan of visualizations or anything like that because they rub me as being a bit corny but imagining what your life will be like if you make a positive change and stick with the positive habit. This has been shown in studies to lead you to actually do that thing.

So if you imagine what your life will be like – what you'll look like in front of a mirror if you ate a smoothie every morning instead of bacon and eggs – simple changes like that are more likely to stick, if you connect your present day self with your future self. Even writing a letter to your future self that's one or two years off in the future. And so what your life will be like, and imagining that. I have a picture of myself as an old man hanging up in my office and it creeps everybody out. But it lets me see that I'm going to be the same person later on than I am today. Different in some ways, but I'm going to have the same bank account, so why not save money for myself in the future?

Rachel Salaman: In the book, I think you mention a website where you can write an email that is timed to come back to you at a certain point in the future. Is that right?

Chris Bailey: I think it's futureme.org.

Rachel Salaman: Still on the subject of technology – obviously technology can really help productivity, but it can also hinder productivity. So let's talk, first of all, about how email and social media can really drain our productivity on a day­-to-­day basis. What did you learn about keeping those two "attention magnets" under control?

Chris Bailey: That's exactly what they are. I like that term "attention magnets," because email doesn't often take up a lot of our time. But when we switch to it from all these different other aspects of our work, it can take up a disproportionate amount of our attention and prevent us from diving deep into any one thing that we do.

If we're engineering a new product and constantly checking our email at the same time, that email is going to force us to not become immersed in what we're doing. And this is, I think, one of the largest costs of email. It doesn't take up a lot of time, but it takes up a ton of attention when you add it up. You switch into and out of email 30 or 40 times throughout the day. I think Rescue Time, which is an app that tracks how we spend our time on the computer, found that the average person switches into email 41 times over the course of the day. And that's a lot of time where our attention is derailed from what we're working on in the present moment.

And again, it goes back to the whole 53 percent idea, where we're only bringing 53 percent of our attention to what's in front of us at any given time. That's because of things like email. But when we deal with these distractions ahead of time, and so that means carving out certain blocks of time to check our email, which is one of my favorite tactics to do. I check my email once a day. This is tough to do. It's easy advice to give and more difficult to practice, but it's worth the struggle a thousand times over because of how email and social media can compromise our productivity.

And again, it goes to the idea that certain elements of our work are "springy," in that they expand to fit how much time we have available for them. And so, if you have a 20-minute gap in your day, chances are email might seep into that gap and begin to expand to fill it. And this is true with all these low­-return elements of our work. Any digital distraction is the same way.

One of the things I like doing now is disconnecting my Internet modem. The modem is getting disconnected, or airplane mode is going on, or my phone is going in the other room. I wrote most of my book disconnected from the Internet and nothing gave me more clarity in the writing process than doing that. I didn't really expect it to work because I thought, "I've got so much research to do in this book. I've so many people to contact. I've so many emails to keep on top of and the people that I'm chatting with about quotes for the book," and all those sorts of things. But it allowed me to meet the deadline and beat it. I think I shipped it six weeks ahead of schedule, which is rare for a book. But I would hope for a book about productivity that something like that would happen and I credit that to the idea of disconnecting.

One of my new favorite apps for the iPhone is called Moment, and it tracks how much time and attention we spend on our iPhone, and I think there's a similar app for Android as well. And it shows you how many times throughout the day you (a) pick up your phone, and (b) how many minutes that you spend on it. So you can see how much time and attention that you spend on it when you go from one thing to another to check your phone.

And so I think just being aware of how much time you spend on these distractions is a good starting point. And that's what I find with the best productivity tactics. That they become motivating in and of themselves. So when you look at how much more you accomplish doing something like, even meditating for a few minutes, setting three intentions at the start of every day, that's one of my favorites. Doing tactics like these, when you see how much more they lead you to accomplish, they become motivating and they become self-­reinforcing. And if they don't, then maybe you shouldn't stick with them.

Rachel Salaman: A bit earlier you talked about putting your phone in another room. And in the book I thought one of the really useful tips was about moving any distraction 20 seconds away. So could you give us a few more examples of how that works?

Chris Bailey: Yes. The idea behind that is that 20 seconds is enough temporal distance. So that when a distraction is that far out of our way, or less than 20 seconds in our way, it becomes way less distracting or impossible to avoid. And so it works both ways.

For an example, when we keep chocolates at the bottom of our freezer so that it takes more than 20 seconds to thaw. That's a go-to method of mine because food is my weakness. And every part of my life. Keeping chocolate at the bottom of our freezer, making our social media passwords impossible to remember, so we have to maybe dig out the answer in our filing cabinet.

And it works the opposite way too. And so my filing cabinet, I can reach it right here, it's less than 20 seconds from my desk. And so it takes less than 20 seconds to file something. And so I never get put off by that task. So that it's not intimidating enough for me to put off. And likewise, I always keep a couple of books related to my work near my desk so that, if I find myself putting off a task, I'll read until I warm up to the task enough.

And so keeping good distractions less than 20 seconds away from you and the bad ones, the candy jars and the chocolates and all those sorts of distractions, more than 20 seconds away from you, it's enough distance to make you more productive.

Rachel Salaman: So now, nearly two years after finishing the project, tell us what's stuck with you.

Chris Bailey: I woke up this morning. I woke up naturally after getting a full night's sleep. So the sleep stuff stuck. I'm drinking some mocha right now, which is one of the best caffeine vehicles I know of, and so that stuck. Most of it stuck and that is the thing about the best productivity tactics, that they will become motivating, because they allow you to get that much more done. And when you see how much they allow you to get done, they become especially motivating, I think.

Rachel Salaman: So, of all the productivity tips that you tried out, which would you recommend as the most useful?

Chris Bailey: The first one is figuring out what's important in your work. Because if you don't know what you actually need to be productive on, you're not going to become more productive. And so taking that step back to figure out and write down and capture everything in your work, and picking the three things that are the most valuable is crucial, and is one of the most helpful things that you can do.

In addition to that, I would say the "rule of three." And the "rule of three" is one of the simplest time management techniques that I know of. But it's also kind of an attention and energy management technique at the same time. And it's so simple. At the start of each day, you fast forward to the end of the day. And you think, "By the time the day is done, what three main things will I want to have accomplished?" And those become the primary focus that you have throughout the day. It's so simple. And you do other stuff too, of course, because, if you only did three things all day long, you probably wouldn't have a job for much longer.

But it's important because, at the same time that you decide what you focus on throughout the day, when you decide what's important, you also decide what isn't important. Because at the same time you decide what you don't do. It's very lightweight. It's very simple. And it lets you work more deliberately each day because of the process of stepping back to think about and consider the limits that you have.

Some days you'll have less time because you'll have a ton of meetings. Some days you'll have less focus and less energy. It lets you consider your limits and work more intentionally each day. If figuring out what the most fruitful tasks in your work are is a way of working more deliberately generally, and the "rule of three" is a way of working more deliberately every day. And also every week, I do the "rule of three" each week. And so every Sunday I step back and think about what the three main things I want to accomplish are.

Single tasking. So working on one thing in the moment is the best way I know of of bringing that deliberateness down to how you work each and every moment. And so single tasking is basically working on one thing at one time. And it's so simple and it's almost stupidly simple to even talk about. But the studies around multitasking are conclusive and they show that the practice doesn't work. It leads you to waste more time. It prevents you from becoming immersed in your work. You basically do a mediocre job of everything.

Single tasking, working on one thing at one time, allows you to channel like a laser, all of your attention and all of your energy and time into one thing at a time, so you can do a hell of a job of it. So that means disabling the distractions around you and just bringing as much attention to what's in front of you at one time as you can.

This is a way of training that attention muscle. And so that 53 percent, the idea that we only bring 53 percent of our attention to what's in front of us, that number isn't static. And we can increase it when we constantly rein our attention back in to focus on what's in front of us. And that's all meditation is, by the way. It's working out this muscle so that we can up how much attention that we bring to what's in front of us in any given moment.

Single tasking is one of the best ways, in the moment, to bring more attention to what's in front of you and not more time. And so I think, in a way, in a really important way, productivity is the process of working more deliberately and more intentionally. And this deliberateness and this intention, I think, lies at the heart of what it means to become more productive.

And those are three ways. There's 25 in the book. I don't want to be too selling about the book, but from the hundreds I play around with, these are the 25 that I found helped me the most and other people the most too. And so those are three that will hopefully help you out.

Rachel Salaman: Chris Bailey, thanks very much for joining us today.

Chris Bailey: Thanks for having me.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Chris's book again is, "The Productivity Project: Proven Ways to Become More Awesome." You can find out more about Chris and his research at alifeofproductivity.com. I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.