Don’t mistake busy for productive

[Speaker] - I guess we're pulled in two directions in the modern world. If you have an office job especially, but I think it's very hard to escape because technology and email and messaging is so much a part of all of our lives, so we talk about this in the book, about being pulled between on the one hand what we call the busy bandwagon which is like, this expectation of instant response, this expectation of speed, this sort of cultural norm that we have in the United States of, fill your calendar as close to full as possible-- [Guest] - Uh huh, like your graphic in the book. Made me chuckle. [Speaker] - Yeah, yeah, like every single moment is busy, and sometimes like three things at the same time overlapping, right, and I feel like that's actually quite widespread, this notion of like being packed and if somebody asks me at work or in my personal life, like how are you, this expectation that if I say busy, that like that's a good thing, that I'm like, oh man, it's crazy crazy busy, that people will say oh, yeah, yeah, good, you know? Like it's sort of insane. So on the one hand, you've got that pull of like, okay, just, fire hose of stuff coming at you, respond to it as fast as you can, give it everything you can, like, work as much as you can. On the other hand, like you get exhausted from that and then on the other hand, we're pulled by what we call the infinity pools, which is like, all of this entertainment or distraction which is available like at our fingertips at all times, and is incredibly compelling and there's always something new, so, on my phone or on my laptop or whatever, like, the nonstop breaking news, the social feeds, you know, all the updates from my friends, all these cool things, there could always be something new. My personal emails is like this, right? There always could be something new on there, and so these things are kind of pulling back and forth, like Netflix, like all these things are just kind of like pulling you in the other direction and once you're too exhausted from the busy bandwagon, the infinity pools pull you back. [Guest] - That's great, culminate, it's like, now I'm so exhausted but I want to sort of be entertained and rejuvenated but I don't want to like, go hiking 'cause that's too hard, but so maybe something fun will be on the news or Netflix. [Speaker] - Yeah totally, totally and it's not our faults that we don't have the time for the things that matter the most to us, we're stuck in the middle between two really powerful forces, so that, the fundamental idea that we have it turns out, you change a few of those defaults, the defaults that hangs up the fault work cultural settings and you start to open up time and attention because things are so crazy right now you actually don't have to make the largest changes to have a really significant impact.