289. Your Worst Productivity Habit (It Isn’t Your Phone)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Joel: If you walk into your local coffee shop and ask the people there gathered, plowing away on their laptops or having a conversation with a friend to put down their lattes and answer a simple question, and that question is this, what do you think is the one habit you have that sabotages your productivity the most?

[00:00:21] Then wait for the answers. I bet you would see something like this. People reaching down to the table and picking up their phone and holding it in the air. People pulling their phone out of their back pocket. And I get this because we have apps on our phone that constantly distract us. You know, it’s social media for me sometimes.

[00:00:40] I hate to admit this, but it’s free sell. Like that’s like an old person’s game and I, I find myself sometimes addicted to it, but it is not actually. Your phone. I am here to correct this easy to go to, this low hanging fruit of delusional answer to this question. This is not your phone. Your phone is not your worst productivity habit.

[00:01:02] Today we’re gonna talk about our tendency to build our plans around best case scenarios instead of within reality. We’re talking about planning like you’re not actually a human, and then what that costs us and what we can do about it.

[00:01:23] Welcome to Focus on this, the most productive podcast on the internet. I’m Joel Miller.

[00:01:29] Marissa: And I’m Marissa Hyatt.

[00:01:30] Joel: This is where we remind you of something you already know. It’s not about getting more things done, it’s about getting the right things done,

[00:01:38] Marissa: both at work and in life. And today we’re talking about our tendency to overestimate and what it cost us.

[00:01:47] And Joel, this is not where I thought this episode was going. I thought surely we were gonna be sitting here talking about our phones, social media, all of the gaming apps and everything. Even things like health apps that are gamified to keep our attention and our distraction from the things that matter high, but that’s not actually at all what we’re talking about today.

[00:02:09] Joel: You know, those things can. B productivity traps. But the reality is there for most people, minor distractions actually over the course of their day. Even people that are like on X, correcting the worldview of the entire human species twiddling their thumbs as fast as they possibly can are really not unproductive because of that.

[00:02:34] They’re getting less done than they could, that’s for sure. But overestimation. Is actually the biggest cause of people not getting done the, the full extent of what they could do and in fact suffering the results from that.

[00:02:49] Marissa: Yeah. Well, I think that part of the reason that this happens is that, you know, we overestimate by building our plans on ideal.

[00:02:58] Conditions, you know, we kind of mm-hmm. Live in this fantasy land and we think, oh yeah, if I have all my energy and there’s no interruptions and I’m in a perfect mood and I had a perfect night’s sleep and there’s no emergencies, my team is not bothering me, everything, then what do I want to do today?

[00:03:19] Joel: Yeah. Assuming all those variables, yeah, let

[00:03:21] Marissa: me plan on,

[00:03:22] Joel: right.

[00:03:22] Marissa: Everything related to all of those factors being true at any given point in time. And the truth is like, what are the odds of that actually happening?

[00:03:30] Joel: Like zero zero. And the amazing thing is we know this, and yet we do it all the time. I. Do this all the time.

[00:03:38] I vastly underestimate how long things will take. I vastly overestimate my capacity to get things done, and I consider myself a fairly productive human being. Yeah, in the sum total of 8 billion of us or so, like if you put us all in a basket and shook us all up, and there was some kind of filter mechanism attached to it, and only the most productive people fell out the bottom.

[00:04:01] I would end up probably being in that bottom, falling out of the filter as like, Hey, look at me. I’m, I’m super productive and yet I do this all the time.

[00:04:10] Marissa: Yeah. And I think a lot of us do, and frankly one of our tools that we teach can. Exacerbate this situation, this issue. Mm-hmm. Which is our ideal week. A lot of you guys listening have gone through this exercise in your full focus planner.

[00:04:26] Maybe some of you listening are inside of our double win coaching program. You’ve worked with us on your ideal week, and Joel, can I have like a, an honest moment about this?

[00:04:37] Joel: By all means,

[00:04:38] Marissa: I have created, I don’t even know how many ideal weeks. Mm-hmm.

[00:04:43] Joel: Myself.

[00:04:44] Marissa: And the truth is, I rarely ever use them. I rarely ever look at them.

[00:04:51] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:04:51] Marissa: Because they’re too idealistic. They’re not rooted in reality, they’re not rooted in my constraints and. The truth is I’ve probably been doing it wrong, and I think most of you guys have too. And hopefully what we share today is gonna give you a little bit of a dose of reality, not in a, a negative, you know, kind of way, but in a way that can actually enable you to do your best work, to do better work, and get more accomplished than you think.

[00:05:21] Even within the context of reality.

[00:05:23] Joel: Let’s reframe that ideal week for just a second. I think when we think about the ideal week, we end up thinking, what’s the maximum I could get done in a week? Right? And we try to schedule the time accordingly. Not recognizing that the maximum you might be able to get done in a week is not actually necessarily categorically ideal.

[00:05:47] Like that. That might actually be a complete contradiction as we work through this conversation. I actually think it would be helpful to come back to the ideal week a few times just to talk about how to rightsize that exercise.

[00:05:58] Marissa: I agree. Well, and hopefully, like I said, this will give you a. Some tools and some ways of thinking about things that actually propel you further versus feeling like you’re somehow now inside of a really uncomfortable tight box.

[00:06:12] Like we don’t want that to be true, but we do have to be rooted in reality. And I think that for a lot of us, we feel like we just can live in this fantasy land. And. Create all of our plans from that place, and then we get frustrated and discouraged when things don’t go according to that plan. But the truth is, the odds of it ever happening in that way.

[00:06:33] We’re slim to none to start with. And so I think if we start from this place of understanding that our capacity is limited, that we can actually set ourselves up for better success.

[00:06:44] Joel: Well, that’s really the first point here. So when we talk about overestimation, the first area where we go wrong is we overestimate our capacity.

[00:06:52] We think that we can handle more commitments than we can. Our calendars, our schedules, they have no margin built into them, and then we’re like, wondered why we’re exhausted.

[00:07:03] Marissa: I had a, um, meeting yesterday with one of our team members having a conversation about this very thing because it’s easy to overestimate our capacity and think, oh.

[00:07:12] We can totally do everything and every commitment that comes up, we’re gonna say yes to, and then we’re exhausted and burnout at the end, and then we’re frustrated with ourselves, right? We get frustrated with our calendars, we get resentful and all of the things. And the truth is, in 2018, pew Research study reported that 60% of US adults felt too busy to enjoy life.

[00:07:35] Some of the time.

[00:07:36] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:07:36] Marissa: So with 12% saying they felt that way all or most of the time.

[00:07:40] Speaker 3: Mm. That’s like good, which is really

[00:07:42] Marissa: sad. Like how, how many of you is this true for where you just feel like you’re going from one thing to the next, you’re not slowing down enough to actually enjoy life? This is true for a lot of us.

[00:07:53] Joel: Enjoying life is actually a really apropos way of phrasing this because when we’re planning, we sort of imagine that future US is a machine that doesn’t even have the need to enjoy life, that it can handle back-to-back commitments. It can handle back-to-back meetings, appointments, kids ball games, work projects, house projects.

[00:08:14] But. Future US is still just a person. And by the way, it’s the same us as the person that’s struggling right now. We need white space, we need fun. We need things to go slow. Sometimes we need margin like we’re not machines.

[00:08:28] Marissa: Yeah. I really love this concept of thinking about ourselves in the future, and if we think about this as a friend or somebody that we care about.

[00:08:38] We would think about these things for that person and for whatever reason when it, when it’s ourselves, we tend to not do this. We just think, oh yeah, I can handle all these things and I’m gonna commit to going so far above and beyond in the future. And then we get there and we wonder why we feel the way that we feel.

[00:08:57] I get this so much because I do this all the time. I am overly ambitious about what I can do in my capacity, and I think, mm-hmm. Part of the reason for me, part of the challenge for me in particular is I don’t have children. And so for me, there’s a lot of white space for me and I think, oh, I can just fill all of that with more work or more accomplishments or doing more or.

[00:09:25] No matter what it is, even if it’s things that are fun. Mm-hmm. I still think my capacity is a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the time.

[00:09:33] Joel: Right.

[00:09:34] Marissa: But it’s not energy wanes, it’s just

[00:09:36] Speaker 3: not.

[00:09:37] Marissa: We need, like you said. Slowness. We need margin built in for ourselves. And, um, I think that this is, at least for me, one of the biggest areas that I fall prey to.

[00:09:47] Joel: Well, so let’s go back to the ideal week for a second. Like, this is something that a lot of people are not actively planning, right? In their ideal week. Margin, for instance, or a buffer between activities. It’s really easy to think, for instance, as you’re building an ideal week, you know, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever, that you’re gonna work this solid four hours, you’re gonna, you’re gonna take a 30 minute lunch, you’re gonna like work another solid four hours or something like that.

[00:10:12] That’s ludicrous. Like that’s just not gonna happen. Yeah. And you’re not gonna do that day in and day out, and you’re not gonna be able to do that without rest. Baked into it,

[00:10:20] Marissa: and it’s easy to actually build this in for yourselves, and by the time that you actually get to that future reality, you’re gonna be so much more grateful because you’re not having to sprint in the same way.

[00:10:32] So one of my favorite, just practical ways to do this in Google Calendar, and I know any other electronic calendar has similar features, you can turn on what are called speedy meetings. Where basically every time you try to schedule an hour long meeting, it actually schedules it for 50 minutes. And same thing with a 30 minute meeting.

[00:10:51] It schedules it for 25. So it builds in a little bit of a buffer for you into your schedule. And so when you’re creating your ideal week, keep that in mind. If you have your one-on-one meetings with your team all in one day, ’cause you’re trying to batch that activity. Give yourself some margin. Have those meetings be 25 minutes or 50 minutes instead of 30 minutes or 60 minutes back to back with no ability to go get a cup of water or get up right and stretch your body and move around.

[00:11:22] Give yourself ample time to eat lunch so you’re not rushing from one thing to the next, not digesting that food, not allowing your body to. Enjoy the nutrients that you’re putting into it. You know, give yourself the ability to actually sit down and enjoy a meal. In your personal life, you know, one of my favorite things to do in my ideal week is build in that downtime in the evenings so that I’m able to have that ability to really rest and recharge, take a bath, you know, listen to an audio book, do a puzzle, you know, watch a show, whatever it may be, so that I’m really able to recover and rest.

[00:11:57] And I think that when we stop trying to make every single minute matter in terms of productivity. We’re able to actually accomplish more.

[00:12:07] Joel: Totally true. You’ll be rested, which means you absolutely will be able to, uh, achieve more personally. Megan and I have a tension here in our relationship because she’s very project oriented.

[00:12:18] She likes to get stuff done, and she wants to get it done sooner rather than later. You may know this about her. Yes, I don’t know, but what that has meant for. Had meant for years was Saturdays looked like it’s go time, you know? Mm-hmm. Like, we’re not at work. Now it’s time to go get done this list. Yep. I’m not that person.

[00:12:37] Speaker 3: Right. So

[00:12:38] Joel: we actually, in our ideal week on Saturdays, that’s like now a down day. Mm-hmm. And we really plan almost very little that day. And it’s meant for me to just be free to have a day to just unwind and deescalate from the intensity of the week. Then Sunday comes around and we go to church in the morning, and then we have this list of projects in the afternoon and we just knock them out.

[00:13:01] And I’m way more ready to do that list of projects on Sunday afternoon when I am rested. And I also am, I’m just like more myself when I have that day to kind of decompress.

[00:13:15] Marissa: Yeah. Put her around. And then For

[00:13:16] Joel: Megan? Yeah, and then for Megan, she knows she can count on me Sunday to be able to do all those things.

[00:13:21] So it’s like both parties win and. That is an example of how an ideal week can end up serving. Not this, can I get everything into it, but rather can I pace myself in such a way that I am my best self at the end of the week?

[00:13:36] Marissa: I think that’s really kind of the concept of the Sabbath. You know, taking a day to really rest, recharge, kind of putter around.

[00:13:44] Um, do those things that are really going to fill your battery back up for the week ahead. Yeah, and I think that often. As high achievers, we don’t do this. We think every minute has to be packed with some kind of productive activity, and we forget that that rest, that recharge, that creative thinking, that engaging in nature, recreation, all of that is productive.

[00:14:06] It’s just productive in a different way.

[00:14:09] Joel: Alright, that takes us to our next area. We fall so easily prey to overestimation. Self-control, and this may be one of those areas where your phone actually might be a problem, but it’s still not your problem. It just happens to be the thing that’s tempting you.

[00:14:25] But the reality is, yeah, we overestimate our self-control and as a result, we end up wasting a lot of good intention on things that just don’t serve us. Part of this comes down to the fact that we assume that discipline is a virtue. That’s true. Mm-hmm. But it’s not the whole story on discipline.

[00:14:46] Self-discipline is also a finite resource and you can deplete it. And that’s why it’s like, it’s easier to say no to a donut in the morning than that. Glass of wine in the evening, or that second glass of wine in the evening. Mm-hmm. It’s just harder when you feel drained or depleted to like maintain self-control.

[00:15:05] Marissa: Yeah. And if you don’t believe this, I mean, look at any child, any toddler, right. You know? And notice that as the day goes on, that self-control starts to wane, the more tired they get, the more exhausted. I mean, this is really easy for us to see in children. It’s harder for us to see within ourselves, and we wonder why we get into.

[00:15:23] These habits, you know, or these behaviors, like you said at the end of the night where we feel like we just don’t have that self-control any longer. You know, we wanna hit the next episode button again on Netflix, and there we are, and it’s 11:00 PM and it’s like, why do I not have that self-control? Yeah, it’s because you’ve used it up, so to speak, already in that day.

[00:15:43] Joel: Yeah. I remember listening to, I think it’s Reed Hastings, who’s the CEO of Netflix, say that their main competition. Their strategic, like where they could strategically go wrong as a business is sleep, like that’s their main competitor. That’s like kind of a scary thing for a CEO to admit, but at the same time, they’re winning the battle because if you are sitting up there at 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock or 12 o’clock and that new episode, I mean it’s only 50 more minutes.

[00:16:15] Like, it’s so easy to just let that sucker auto play you through until you’ve, you’ve missed your bedtime by three hours.

[00:16:22] Marissa: Yeah. Well, and it doesn’t help that they’re ending every single episode on a cliff finger. And this happened to me last night. I was watching The Diplomat, which is what I’m currently watching, I think it’s season three, loving it, and, um, late to the party on watching it.

[00:16:37] And last night I fell preyed to that and I finally, I luckily didn’t go till 11:00 PM. Nine 30 or so, which is late for me. I, I tend to not watch TV that late. And I had to watch that one more episode and finally it was like, oh my gosh, I’ve got to go to bed. We’re recording podcasts in the morning. What am I doing?

[00:16:56] You know, who am I? And it’s like you just all of a sudden wake up going, what? Right. Happen. So Joel, why does this happen? What does the research show

[00:17:05] Joel: researchers say? That we have essentially just an overinflated sense of our impulse control. Mm-hmm. And this sort of makes sense when you’re. In a place where you do feel resourceful, you do have a lot of self-control, and you can imagine past experiences where you have a lot of self-control, you know that you can handle yourself.

[00:17:25] And we selectively forget all the times that we didn’t. And so, yes, we just sort of imagine the ideal version of ourself operating at all times. And it just so happens that you are not your ideal self a lot of the time. And so as a result, we have this inflated impulse control. And that just sets us up for problems.

[00:17:48] Marissa: Well, we tend to essentially over expose ourselves to temptation because we think that we have better in comp, impulse control than we actually do. Right? And so this may be true where you think, oh yeah, you know, no big deal. I’m gonna watch one episode. Not thinking about the fact that that episode will quickly within, I think it’s about five seconds on Netflix, will roll into the next episode, right?

[00:18:12] And that the longer that pattern continues to happen, the lower your impulse control is. So you know, we can expand and develop our discipline and our self-control. That’s probably a conversation for another time, Joel. We could do a whole episode about that, but we can also design our environment. Our temptations in mind, and I think very few of us do this so.

[00:18:37] For instance, I keep getting ads for this device that is called The Block. Mm-hmm. And it’s a device where you put that on your refrigerator or somewhere in your house and in order to unlock your phone, you have to go over to the block. I think that’s what it’s called, I think it’s called the Brick, actually.

[00:18:57] And you go over to it and you, and you have to go get up from wherever you are to be able to unlock your phone. And so there are strategies like that that we can do. To actually help, um, our environment to work for us rather than against us.

[00:19:12] Joel: That would make playing free sale a lot harder.

[00:19:14] Marissa: Yes. Free sale.

[00:19:16] I’m telling you that is like 1998. You know, windows that makes people just

[00:19:22] Joel: don’t often reflect on how old I actually am. That’s the reality. Yeah.

[00:19:26] Marissa: Today is that angel. Um, but things like putting our phone in a box or in a drawer that can be really effective for helping us. Mm-hmm. And we’re trying to not have as much screen time, you know, putting it away, out of sight, out of mind setting our do not disturb.

[00:19:42] Uh, especially during the day. If you guys aren’t using the work mode on your iPhone for your work hours, do it. You know, that family group text. Not speaking from experience here that keeps blowing up during the day with all of your sisters and family. Talking about, you know, the latest restaurant opening or the latest fun Instagram post, you don’t probably need to be aware of that in the middle of your workday.

[00:20:08] And so by setting yourself up using that work mode where those people cannot get through during your work hours, that can be a really effective strategy. My most

[00:20:18] Joel: productive weeks in the month or days in the month are actually podcast recording days because I put do not disturb on my phone. Always forget to turn it off and nobody contacts me the rest of the day.

[00:20:30] It’s amazing.

[00:20:43] Marissa: The other thing that, uh, we can do that Joel, you specifically might need a little help with, um,

[00:20:50] Joel: I see where this is going, is

[00:20:52] Marissa: closing your tabs.

[00:20:57] I don’t think you know anything about that.

[00:20:59] Joel: I feel called out because that’s actually what you just did. I have, I work on an iPad Pro and an iPad Pro has the capacity to have open several hundred tabs. I don’t remember the exact upper limit, but I know that it’s more than 800 because I’ve gotten over more than 800.

[00:21:20] My God,

[00:21:21] Marissa: that shouldn’t be allowed. Right

[00:21:22] Joel: now. I have a very manageable, very manageable 124 open.

[00:21:28] Marissa: Wow. Yeah. So.

[00:21:31] Joel: I tend to think of this as actually a productivity enhancer for me, but sure, it’s possible that it’s deserving me. I might be willing to admit that.

[00:21:40] Marissa: Well, I do think that our tabs or the windows that we have open on our computers can be a distraction, and we can, again, we can think we have more self-control than we actually have, and so just by shutting down those tabs or somehow putting them to where they’re not in view can be really helpful.

[00:21:59] So Joel. Maybe you should try that one.

[00:22:02] Joel: I’ll take an under advisement.

[00:22:03] Marissa: I think a couple other strategies here that can be helpful. You know, if you’re trying to cut back on junk food, don’t have it in your house,

[00:22:12] Speaker 3: well you can do that. You know, I

[00:22:12] Marissa: mean, this is such a silly, simple strategy and it can be really effective if you have it there.

[00:22:18] If you have a box of cookies or whatever your, you know, treat of choice is. Your self-control is probably gonna be really low. And like we talked about, it’s going wane as the day goes on. And so when you’re sitting there watching that third Netflix episode

[00:22:35] Joel: that you said

[00:22:36] Marissa: you wouldn’t do that you said you wouldn’t do, and that bag of chips or a box of cookies is sitting in your pantry just crying out for it to be eaten, the likelihood of you saying, no, I don’t wanna do that, is really, really low.

[00:22:47] So just don’t have it in the house to begin with. Same thing. We talked about wine, you know, alcohol. Can be really tempting if we have it in the house. And a really effective strategy, especially for those of you who may be trying to do dry or what I see on social media, dry ish January, where you’re, you know, going a little bit less.

[00:23:06] Maybe you just don’t have alcohol in the house and you only engage with that in a social setting, for instance.

[00:23:12] Joel: I know a lot of people who are really successful with basically just saying. I only drink when I’m out with friends. Yeah. And like I, I never drink at home.

[00:23:20] Marissa: And I think that that can be really help.

[00:23:21] And especially if you have a bottle of wine, the likelihood that you’re just gonna have one glass. Again, it’s going to wane. And not to mention your impulse control goes down with alcohol use, so it gets even worse. So you’re really setting yourself up for a disaster by keeping those things in the house.

[00:23:41] Um, same thing if you’re trying to make sure you don’t skip out on meals or eat takeouts, you know, having some meals prepared in your house that are ready to go, that you can just grab in, put in your microwave or wherever to. Eat that nutritious meal. Nutri is gonna be so much more effective than assuming that you’re gonna have the impulse control to order the healthier version on Uber Eats when the truth is.

[00:24:06] They’re going to show you that beautiful, delicious, juicy hamburger or piece of pizza or whatever it may be right there.

[00:24:12] Joel: I think what this comes down to is just simply recognizing that discipline is a crappy plan. Yeah. The reality is we need to design our life and our spaces to support our discipline.

[00:24:24] That’s a plan, but discipline itself is not a plan.

[00:24:27] Marissa: So I would just say here, almost treat yourself. Like a child. I know this sounds silly, but if you think about your child and if you didn’t want them to have, be using a lot of screen time, you probably wouldn’t give them a device in their room alone at night, right?

[00:24:47] You’d probably make them only choose that device or beyond that device in the company of others or during daylight hours or things like that. And you would likely remove that device from their environment in the time that you were hoping that they weren’t gonna be engaging with it. So do the same with yourself.

[00:25:05] Ask yourself, what can I do to set myself up to win when it comes to this habit or this thing that I’m trying to work on, this goal, or whatever it might be. What are the things that I can do to really design an environment to support my success?

[00:25:18] Joel: The next area we fall prey to overestimation is in our productivity.

[00:25:24] And this is really a specific way in which we do it. Researchers call it the planning fallacy. It is a super well documented, virtually universal thing. Like if you take that basket of 8 billion people and shake ’em really hard and out the filter comes, all the people that fall prey to the planning fallacy, it’ll be like all 8 billion of ’em.

[00:25:45] Like that’s all of us. The research on this goes back pretty far. Like I think the foundational paper on it was written in 1994, but there’s elements of this research that go back to the 1970s, like I was a toddler when people first started talking about this. We’ve known about this problem for a while.

[00:26:04] We’ve suffered from it from probably, you know, since Adam and Eve, but we’ve known what to call it. We’ve been able to identify it since the seventies and. What we know is basically humans underestimate the amount of time it takes to get things done. Um, there’s like very famous examples of this in the literature.

[00:26:26] The Sydney Opera House, you know, they said it would take x number of years, it took much longer. The men who put together. The Oxford English dictionary thought that they would knock it out in X number of years. It took significantly longer, but you don’t actually have to look for outside examples of this.

[00:26:41] I mean, just look at last week in your own life and ask how often did this happen?

[00:26:46] Marissa: Well, and frankly, anybody who’s ever in the history of time done any type of construction project knows this. That is the biggest culprit. We all know this, right? If you do a renovation or you’re building something and the contractor says, oh, it’ll take six weeks count on nine.

[00:27:04] Joel: Yep.

[00:27:04] Marissa: Or, you know, 12 weeks. I mean, it always takes longer to accomplish these projects. And we get frustrated with them. We get frustrated with ourselves when things take longer, and the truth is, we need to bake this in. So if we think a project is going to take a week. Go ahead and give yourself a week and a half.

[00:27:25] Speaker 3: Right? Give

[00:27:25] Marissa: yourself the buffer to actually accomplish it. Because the truth is, life happens in the midst of that project,

[00:27:34] Joel: even when things are going great. Yes, this happens. Right? And so it’s like. Scheduling 150% or 200% of the time you initially assume is probably the best bet.

[00:27:46] Marissa: Well, and this happens I think, for a couple of reasons, because we tend to, you know, create our plans and then completely discount any kind of interruptions that are gonna happen.

[00:27:58] And the truth is, like I said. That happens, life happens. You’re going to get interrupted. Things are gonna come in. Something more urgent pops up, or your kid ends up sick and it derails your plans. Or you, like me, end up being sick and it derails things. Mm-hmm. So that just happens. We also attribute delays as exceptions rather than the rule.

[00:28:20] So I think it’s really important here to understand that. These are the rule, and we should bake in kind of like a contingency, you know, plan. We need to bake in a certain amount of time in addition to what we think things will take us. Yeah. So in other words, most of the time your plan is truly wishful thinking,

[00:28:42] Joel: right?

[00:28:43] Marissa: And we need to factor in reality on top of that.

[00:28:47] Joel: One other example of where we go wrong here, one of the things that we have. As humans, which is an amazing gift, is this thing called a memory. And our memory allows us to do all kinds of goofy stuff with time and our own self understanding and all that kind of stuff.

[00:29:03] So what we do sometimes is we remember a time when we did that thing, whatever it was, and we did it in this sort of ideal state, or we did it in some kind of compressed timeline or whatever. And then we just assume that we can always do it again like that. Yeah. In the future. And. It’s like never actually true.

[00:29:22] The conditions are always different. You’re different, like everything is different and you’re not gonna be able to get it done as fast as you did it in some ideal, pristine state that you’re probably actually misremembering to one degree or another anyway.

[00:29:33] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:29:34] Joel: But we do that constantly. We ask ourselves, how long will this take?

[00:29:37] Well, last time I did it, it took x. This time when I do it, it will take X also. And the reality is no, that’s not how it works.

[00:29:44] Marissa: Well, I apply a similar type of role to my financial budget, so I use YAB. Uh, I know we have a lot of people who listen to focus on this who are also YA people. You need a budget is what that stands for.

[00:29:57] Joel: Like do YA people, do they have like a name for their tribe? Like are they wine nabers? Like what do they call them?

[00:30:03] Marissa: Probably. That’s a good question. I would think wine nabers. Okay, I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. But yes, there is a whole tribe of people who are very dedicated to their system, their way of budgeting.

[00:30:14] It’s a phenomenal way, especially if you have financial goals this year, check it out, not sponsored. But in this process of budgeting, they often encourage you to create a category called stuff I forgot to budget for. ’cause stuff happens. Like things pop up, expenses pop up, or you want that one thing that you didn’t think to budget for.

[00:30:35] And sometimes we just need a category for those things that we forgot about.

[00:30:41] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:30:42] Marissa: And so you can also apply this to your calendar, to your time, to your projects. And we can kind of lump this into a category called stuff I forgot to plan for.

[00:30:52] Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:54] Marissa: And we need that buffer built in because when we have that.

[00:30:57] We don’t get frustrated. We don’t get discouraged or angry or resentful because we’re expecting it to happen. We’re expecting for things to come up that we didn’t account for initially, that we didn’t plan for, but we have accounted for them in this kind of lump category. So my encouragement, no matter what project you’re working on, or.

[00:31:18] If you’re working on your ideal week factor in those areas where it’s just for stuff that you didn’t plan for, right? Maybe you have a a two hour block every week or a one hour block or a period of time on the weekend. It’s just for stuff you forgot to plan for.

[00:31:33] Joel: I mean, when you think of the ideal week, like a budget, it’s actually really helpful.

[00:31:37] It’s a time budget and it’s a way for you to say. To preserve margin like this, and that’s really helpful.

[00:31:44] Marissa: Another area that we tend to overestimate is our ability to catch up.

[00:31:49] Joel: Mm. I’ve never been guilty of this one.

[00:31:50] Marissa: Never. Me neither. I don’t know anything about this at all. This is really true for us no matter what.

[00:31:57] If it’s coming off a vacation, if it’s something like we’re trying to catch up on sleep or tasks or goals, saving money. We tend to overestimate that we can catch up much faster, much easier than possible.

[00:32:14] Joel: Uh, this is so true. We mentioned last week the situation with my daughter, Naomi, being in the hospital and, and everything, and she came home right before Christmas, but this had been a weeks long misadventure at this point.

[00:32:29] I had been up with her every night while she was having this drug reaction. It basically caused this head to toe rash that was itchy. Does not even begin to cover how awful this experience was for her. She could not sleep, and we were up every night until usually three to 4:00 AM when finally utter exhaustion.

[00:32:52] Finally just let her fall asleep. But what that meant was that for weeks I was not getting to bed until three or 4:00 AM. I know this about myself well enough at this point. There is a benefit for being the kind of person who’s old enough to have played a lot of free sale that I recognize that I’m not just gonna rebound real quick.

[00:33:12] And we got home from the hospital just before Christmas. It took me about two weeks. Yeah. Of sleeping in almost every morning. To even begin to feel like a human again.

[00:33:23] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:33:23] Joel: I remember the day that it did work, like it was literally the Sunday before I was supposed to go back to work. I woke up that day early and I was like, oh.

[00:33:34] I feel awesome.

[00:33:35] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:33:35] Joel: I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, but that was not a foregone conclusion. Even just a week before. I’ve still felt terrible.

[00:33:43] Marissa: Yeah. Well I think we underestimate the time it’ll actually take us to actually catch up. Right. And we overestimate that we’ll able to catch up in the future.

[00:33:53] We kind of think, oh, I will push this off and I’ll catch up on it later. And it easy to think these things when. Future. We have all the time in the world,

[00:34:06] Speaker 3: right?

[00:34:06] Marissa: We’ve already talked about this, right? We think that we have way more time than we do in the future, and we tend to overestimate that. We’re gonna just be able to catch up on all these things, whether it’s sleep or our time, or the tasks or the goals or whatever it is that we’re needing to catch up on.

[00:34:24] We think that we have the ability to do that exponentially in the future.

[00:34:28] Joel: Yeah, it turns out though the future is pretty much the same as today.

[00:34:31] Marissa: Yeah, newsflash.

[00:34:32] Joel: One area where this can get really de self deceptive is around task lists. You know, like when things are chaotic and you just, you don’t even know which way is up.

[00:34:42] One of the best things to do is to sit down and write a task list, just like get it all down on paper. Mm-hmm. But there’s like a deception that can happen in this, which is that when you look at that list, the list looks manageable, your life feels manageable again, but you, you’re not actually thinking about the amount of time that any one of those particular tasks needs.

[00:34:59] And so when you have this list of like 18 things that you’re thinking about doing, that’s fine. If you could make the clock stop for every other human on the earth while you went to work on that stuff, but it’s not gonna go like that and you’re not gonna be able to catch up as easily as we tend to think.

[00:35:16] Marissa: So we tend to overspend, if you will, our time in the future. And then we, we wonder why we end up at a place of burnout and exhaustion and. Real cost. You know, there’s real cost associated. You talked about sleep debt, that’s a real thing. Mm-hmm. You know, it’s a real thing that when we say, oh, I’ll just cut in to tonight, two hours and I’ll catch up later.

[00:35:42] You know, I’ll stay up late tonight and, and finish this project. I’ll catch up on it later. We overestimate our ability to catch up in the future, so. Be really mindful of this, um, that this isn’t something that we want to overestimate. Like we said, your future is really the same as today. Pretty much.

[00:36:00] Pretty much, yeah. So we need to be in reality. So Joel. Let’s round this out and talk about what the cost of all of this overestimation really is.

[00:36:10] Joel: This is the accounting part of it, right? So we’ve done all the math. Now let’s do the accounting at the bottom. Let’s look at what this is really taking out of us.

[00:36:19] Some of these are indirect costs. Some of these are very direct costs, but one of them, the first thing we lose often is confidence and trust among the people who depend on us. We keep failing. And because we keep failing, they come to believe that they can’t have any confidence in our predictions about how long something will take or in whether or not we can deliver something on time or that the quality will be what it needs to be.

[00:36:45] We also create a lot of unnecessary stress by just the franticness of the catch up process because the overestimation trap puts us in this place where we’re constantly having to catch up. We’re just like. Stamped all the time and then all that unnecessary stress is a massive drain. Which is another cost.

[00:37:07] The overtax on our resources, not only our mental, emotional, physical energy, but think about what happens when you’re in this kind of like hyper state trying to catch up. You start making stupid decisions with money, you know, you start making stupid decisions with other commitments. We just start agreeing to things or.

[00:37:27] We’re not recognizing that we are not operating in the best place and our judgment just goes out the window and we start committing to things we shouldn’t and spending money on things we shouldn’t and so on. And so like we overtax our resources, not only the mental, physical, emotional, but really everywhere.

[00:37:45] And there’s a solution, but we need to like get serious about that.

[00:37:49] Marissa: The solution really is to set up a game that we can actually win. I talk about this all the time with our double win coaching clients. We, we tend as high achievers to create these games for our lives that are so out of context with reality.

[00:38:07] And then we get so discouraged when we can’t meet those expectations.

[00:38:12] Speaker 3: Right?

[00:38:13] Marissa: And the truth is, we’re in the driver’s seat. We get to decide what kind of a game that we’re playing, and we can actually give ourselves an advantage, a major advantage by creating one that we can win and that we know how. Right?

[00:38:28] It’s just like if you’re doing a construction project and you’re going to, likely, if you’re smart. Have some type of contingency fund for when things go wrong, because it’s not, if things go wrong, it’s when things go wrong, right? Because they always do you, you know, figure out some kind of termite infestation or there’s mold or the pipe that you thought was fine is actually.

[00:38:50] Not fine. It’s corroded, right? And so you have to replace that. And so you have to account for these things. And just like in a construction project, we wanna do this within our own life. We wanna have to have some type of contingency fund for our life and plan around it.

[00:39:05] Joel: Do you remember, I don’t even remember the name of this show.

[00:39:08] Love it or list it. Yes. That was the name of the show. Yes. And it’s David and Hillary. David’s the real estate guy, and he’s trying to sell people on buying a new place, getting rid of their old place, buying a new place. And Hillary is like, she’s trying to convince them that she’s gonna remodel the house and they’re gonna stick with it.

[00:39:24] They’re gonna not list it. They’re gonna love it. And on her team was this contractor named Fergus. Fergus whole job on that show was to call Hillary with bad news somewhere through the renovation to say something like, yeah, well we thought X, but it’s really y. Mm-hmm. And what’s funny about that, and, and I rem the one case I remember it in really loud.

[00:39:50] Almost colorful language was the moment he had a house where there was no foundation under like a significant portion of the house. And he is like, ah, we’re gonna have to put a lot of budget towards this ’cause there isn’t even a foundation here. And what’s great about recognizing that that’s something that you can play for drama on TV is recognizing that that’s just true about life.

[00:40:12] Like every week Fergus was gonna call with a problem that Hillary was gonna have to figure out how to solve. Yeah. And it turns out that we all have a Fergus in our life and we all have the problems that Hillary is gonna have to solve. And so it’s like, it’s almost like we shouldn’t even think about it when things go wrong.

[00:40:28] It’s just like when things go Yeah. The way they go. Yes. Because they just go that way.

[00:40:32] Marissa: Yeah. Factor life in and you’ll be way better off on the end. And I think that when we think about this within the context of our ideal week. Yes, it is an ideal week, and it’s important to recognize that on the front end, right?

[00:40:47] It’s ideal, but we also wanna be as realistic as possible. Think through things like your energy, your self-discipline, and impulse control along the way. We wanna build in, you know, margin in there, thinking through real life. And if you think something takes a certain amount of time, add on a little bit more because it usually is going to take longer than what we think in the first place.

[00:41:14] Joel: You know, the other side of that, of course, is when you get used to adding on more time onto an estimate and you come in under. Bonus. Bonus, like, that’s great.

[00:41:23] Marissa: Total upside. All right, Joel, let’s wrap this up by sharing a little bit about how we can apply this on a daily basis. So we’ve talked a lot about the ideal week.

[00:41:33] I think that’s helpful, but what can we do on a daily basis?

[00:41:37] Joel: Your daily Big three is kind of the tool to implement this in a real way. Because an ideal week is like, that’s your ideal state, right? That’s where you want to go. That’s what how you want to schedule your time. But then there is the day-to-day reality when Fergus calls and says, you have no foundation.

[00:41:52] And so you need to have a method where you’re kind of checking in with your own capacity on a daily basis. Yeah. And that’s literally what the Daily Big Three is designed to do. When you. Set your daily big three each day, and you have now the feedback of the end of the day telling you, I didn’t get it done, or I did get it done.

[00:42:13] Now you are in a position to judge your actual capacity, right? And so. I mean, I think there’s almost no better tool than just observing your daily big three each day and then just seeing what happens with your own productivity. Yeah. And if you’re less productive than you thought, then you should rethink that for tomorrow.

[00:42:31] Marissa: Exactly. If you’re not hitting your daily big three on a consistent basis, you’re probably choosing the wrong things to be on your daily Big three. These should be things that. Typically without fail, unless there’s some true emergency, you can hit these things, right? We wanna make sure that your daily big three is doable each day, because that’s what’s gonna give you that momentum towards the things you’re trying to accomplish.

[00:42:55] Joel: As we point out around goal setting, the idea is to take this big ambitious thing that you want to do and break it down to the smallest actionable step. And where we often go astray is we put something that is not. The smallest actionable step as one of our daily big three, and we just simply cannot bite off that much in a day.

[00:43:15] Marissa: Well, I think this really isn’t about scaling your dreams back. It’s not about, like I said, living in a box where you feel like possibility has been thrown out the window. This is really about giving yourself permission to be human. You have a finite amount of energy and time and capacity, and so we have to factor those things in to give ourselves a game that we can actually win at.

[00:43:45] Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.

[00:43:47] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen or at focus on this podcast.com,

[00:43:59] Marissa: and we’ll be here next week where we’re gonna be talking about why your days may feel harder than they should.

[00:44:06] And ultimately what you can do about it.

[00:44:08] Joel: Until then, stay focused. Stay focused, stay focused.