Productivity doesn’t mean clearing your to-do list

- [Interviewer] Your latest book, it's called Make Time. What's sort of the big idea behind this one? - [Interviewee] I suppose that a lot of the idea about Make Time is about making good use of time. It's about the idea that we have limited time in our days and in our years and in our lives and every day matters. - [Interviewer] Well, that's cool and it sounds super worthwhile. Could you give us maybe a little before and after or transformation story, case study of what it's doing for folks? - [Interviewee] Something I described in the book that happened in I suppose about 2012 where I'm with my two sons, playing with them in the living room and then evening, you know, it's this great moment, you know? It's this great family moment and I'm like, I'm on my iPhone. I'm on my iPhone and I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm just unconsciously pulling it out and looking at my email or looking at Facebook or whatever and my older son was like, Dad, what are you looking at on your phone? You know, just like, not trying to call me out-- - [Interviewer] Excuse you. - [Interviewee] Just like, he was curious. It must be something interesting if you're not going to be playing trains with us here. And I was like, oh man, I don't even have an answer for that. I don't know why I'm looking at my phone. I have no good answer. Here I am rushing to process as many emails as possible and go through as many meetings and get as much done as I can so that I can be home early and spend time with my kids and yet I'm not even mentally present. I started to realize that the default settings were not necessarily beneficial for me and taking on everything was not necessarily good and this was kind of an obvious realization, but for me, what happened from there 'til now was that I started to kind of question the way my days were spent, the way my time was spent. - [Interviewer] That's cool, that's cool. Could you give us maybe a little bit more of a picture that you could paint in terms of the before and the after. How does it feel? - [Interviewee] The simple before and after, I guess, would be that before, I used to judge my success, and let's just talk about work, my success at work based on how productive I was. So, how well was I getting done all the things that I needed to get done. I'd come to work in the morning and have hundreds of emails to deal with and I felt like if I dealt through it, if I processed all of that email by the end of the day and got back to zero, that was like, I'm on top my email. And if everybody who puts a calendar request in my calendar, if I go to those meetings and help everybody with what they have going on, then I'm helping everyone on the team and that's really good. The after is, you know, you still have to deal with emails, you still have to meet with people. Those things don't go away. You can't zero those out. But the after is to start with what is most important to me each day before I do anything else, to figure out what is the one thing that at the end of the day, when I look back on today, I want to say is like the highlight of my day and sometimes, it might be spending time with my kids. Sometimes it might be, there's this big sizeable chunk of this project that I want to do today, and I'm going to start with that thing and I'm basically going to put me first on the schedule and I'm going to do whatever I have to do to clear that out. If it means I'm not checking my email until after that work is done, then I do that. If it means I'm going to have to push some meetings around or say no or cancel something, that's what's going to have to get done, but that thing always come first and it means that the chances of it getting done, they're like 95%. They're not 100%. Things happen, things come up, but that's really the shift for me has been from trying to be productive and trying to get as much checked off as possible to trying to be really purposeful and to look for a way to do larger things. Not just tasks.