Tools for Better Productivity & Time Management | Dr. Adam Grant & Dr. Andrew Huberman

0:02 I think it was E.B.

0:03 White who said, "I arise in the morning,

0:06 "torn between the desire to enjoy the world

0:08 "and the desire to improve the world,

0:10 "and this makes it difficult to plan the day." And I feel that every day.

0:14 I think, I mean, I even, I felt it this morning.

0:18 I was like, okay, it's time to leave to come to the Huberman podcast.

0:23 I'm like, wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing.

0:27 So what do I do?

0:28 Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria?

0:32 The explanation "I was getting my morning sunlight,

0:35 "and therefore I'm x number of minutes or even

0:37 hours late" would've been completely fine with me.

0:41 I figured as much.

0:41 Yes, absolutely.

0:42 Like that's a built-in acceptable excuse with you.

0:44 I think, I mean, I think everybody experiences a version

0:47 of this, and it's definitely gotten

0:49 worse with social media and with smartphones.

0:53 I think, so one of the most startling data points

0:55 for me was Gloria Mark first put this on my radar,

0:59 before COVID, the average person was checking email 72 times a day.

1:04 How do you ever concentrate for more than

1:07 a couple minutes if you're self interrupting that often?

1:10 You can't.

1:11 Brigid Schulte has a great term for this.

1:13 She calls it time confetti, and she says,

1:16 we're taking these meaningful blocks of time,

1:18 and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of confetti.

1:22 And not only can we not accomplish anything,

1:26 we're also eroding our own sense of joy

1:29 because it's really hard to enjoy the, you know,

1:32 the 30-second blip of time that you get on a task.

1:35 And I think we know a lot more about

1:37 the existence of these problems than how to solve them,

1:40 but one thing we do know is blocking out uninterrupted time is meaningful.

1:45 There's a great Leslie Perlow experiment where she takes engineers,

1:49 and she has them, she sets a quiet time policy.

1:52 No interruptions Tuesday, Thursday,

1:54 Friday before noon, 65% above average productivity.

1:58 Could you repeat the protocol again?

2:01 Yeah, so quiet time, there are a couple iterations of it,

2:03 but I think the most effective one was Tuesday,

2:05 Thursday, Friday, no meetings, no interruptions,

2:08 no Slack, no emails before noon.

2:11 And during those periods of no interruptions,

2:14 one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work.

2:18 Yeah, you have a.

2:19 So for me, it might be podcasting.

2:20 Obviously I don't have my phone in here and never do,

2:22 but it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else.

2:26 It just means focusing on the major task.

2:28 The task, exactly.

2:29 And you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose,

2:32 and I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday,

2:34 Thursday, Friday before noon.

2:36 It's just the idea of setting a boundary

2:37 and collectively committing to it that seems to be important.

2:41 And I think, you know, when I think about this, I'd be really

2:45 curious about your take on chronotypes here because I

2:48 think one thing I've learned in the last

2:50 couple years is that if you're a morning person,

2:53 you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning.

2:56 And so the quiet time block would work very well for me as a morning person.

3:00 If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon.

3:04 And I was encouraged, there was some evidence during COVID that people

3:07 have their best meetings right after lunch,

3:10 that they're something like 30% less likely

3:13 to multitask in an after lunch meeting.

3:16 And I guess, you know, you could probably unpack like the food coma,

3:21 you know, getting re-energized by other people.

3:23 But it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first

3:27 few hours and the last few hours of the day for deep work,

3:30 and then doing our core meetings and interactions

3:33 and kind of off task activities in the middle.

3:35 What do you think about that as a sequence?

3:37 Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about this for you,

3:39 but I love that sequence.

3:41 It certainly fits with my natural rhythms.

3:43 I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is

3:48 sleeping well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule.

3:51 When I say standard,

3:52 I mean going to bed somewhere between let's say 9:30 and 11:30 PM.

3:56 Waking up sometime between, let's say 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM,

4:01 maybe 5:30 to 7:30, something like that.

4:04 So not highly unusual night owl or super early bird.

4:09 For people that are following that sort of schedule, the first,

4:14 let's just say from zero to eight hours after waking,

4:17 there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines.

4:23 So dopamine, norepinephrine,

4:24 epinephrine in which generally, okay, generally speaking,

4:27 lead to increases in alertness,

4:29 attention and focus that are great for analytic work,

4:33 great for implementation of strategies that you already understand

4:37 and you need to churn through a lot of stuff.

4:41 And of course, there's a big increase in the morning,

4:43 especially if you view morning sunlight,

4:45 a healthy increase, I should say in cortisol.

4:47 Cortisol is not bad, folks.

4:48 You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day.

4:50 We know that.

4:51 Okay, so for most people it seems,

4:55 at least my understanding is that that period of time,

4:59 zero to eight or eight hours after waking or so,

5:02 is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical tasks.

5:06 But one of the common problems is that people

5:09 take that ability to implement a known strategy,

5:12 and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all,

5:17 by the way, talking to coworkers is great, and it's often required, but it's,

5:21 the question is whether or not it's productive

5:23 conversation or whether or not it's just conversation.

5:26 And we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day,

5:27 and I'm obsessed with the idea of neural

5:29 energy as opposed to just caloric energy.

5:31 So there we're talking about neural energy, and then post-lunch,

5:35 so really as we get to this sort of, you know, nine to 17 hours after waking,

5:40 there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during

5:42 the middle of the day that post perennial dip,

5:44 there's a post-lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying

5:48 your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash.

5:50 But it's interesting that you note that more productive meetings

5:54 and less task switching and distraction occurred in meetings set after

5:59 lunch because that makes me think that perhaps being a little

6:03 bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus.

6:07 And indeed, that's the sort of optimal state,

6:11 relaxed, but focused, you know, you're not sleepy,

6:14 but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're,

6:17 you know, Bouncing off the walls.

6:18 Tending to a bunch of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way.

6:20 You know, and I'm drinking, you know,

6:21 double espresso right now, late mid morning, late morning,

6:25 and you know, I can sit still,

6:29 but I think certain Zoom meetings, how do I say this?

6:32 I don't want to offend any of my colleagues.

6:33 I mean, they are boring enough,

6:35 like they are not content rich enough to grab all my attention.

6:39 And nowadays, of course there are multiple screens.

6:41 Typically I've got two phones and a computer,

6:43 and you have to really spend some work to flip over

6:45 those phones while I'm on a Zoom and things like that, so maybe.

6:49 Sorry, what were you saying?

6:49 I wasn't listening.

6:50 So it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal

6:53 that supports what you just described, but I don't know.

6:56 My thinking or my understanding rather was that creative work

7:01 and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon.

7:06 I've noticed when lecturing,

7:08 I'd be curious what your experience is with in university lectures,

7:12 when I held courses in the evening,

7:15 I used to like to hold my courses five to 7:00 PM or even seven

7:18 to 9:30 PM when I was teaching undergraduates

7:21 that people were much looser and more relaxed.

7:24 And I always thought that that might have something to do

7:27 with an increase in GABA transmission that's

7:29 known to happen late in late evening.

7:31 The people are just kind of more relaxed, and less social anxiety.

7:35 They've been around people for much of the day.

7:37 They're warmed up.

7:38 I send back more reflections than answers.

7:40 I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described,

7:43 but there are some emerging theories about how that might work.

7:45 And it has this zero to nine hours phase one, nine to 17 hours, phase two.

7:50 And then of course, from 17 to 24 hours,

7:53 I'll call it phase three, you should be asleep.

7:56 Yeah.

7:57 Ideally.

7:58 Well, that I think there's a confound in your teaching experience,

8:00 which is undergrads often sleep in until what?

8:04 Noon.

8:06 True.

8:07 Or they might be up until 4:00 AM.

8:08 Or at least 10:00 AM seems to be a typical rise time.

8:09 Yes.

8:10 For the undergraduate.

8:12 So a morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake,

8:13 but there is, there's some brand new evidence

8:15 that on, at least on creativity at work,

8:17 I read a series of, I think it was three studies recently

8:21 showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning.

8:25 And in part, I think, again the, I don't think any neuroscientist

8:29 has touched the mechanisms on this yet,

8:32 but in terms of the psychological processes, early on there's just,

8:35 there seems to be a benefit of the energy level

8:39 and some of that energy leads to more divergent thinking.

8:43 And later, if you're a morning person,

8:44 you might lose the ability to diverge quite as much.

8:47 And so you end up in a more conventional space of thought.

8:50 Does that track at all with your understanding

8:52 of how it might play out in the brain?

8:54 My understanding is it would be a little bit, it would be individual,

8:57 but you know, there is something

8:59 to these liminal states between sleep and waking.

9:01 So maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said and what you just said,

9:06 which is that we know that in the transition states into and out of sleep,

9:13 and it doesn't necessarily have to be within

9:15 the first half hour in and out of sleep,

9:17 that there seems to be more divergent thinking

9:20 or at least activation of neural networks that are

9:23 not as constrained as one observes when they're

9:26 in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode.

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