#580: In Case You Missed It: February 2022 Recap of The Tim Ferriss Show

Margaret Atwood (0:08)

Now is the appropriate time.

Tim Ferriss (0:24)

Hello, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the routines, habits, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This is a special in-between episode, which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. Based on your feedback, this format has been tweaked and improved since the last recap episode. For instance, at hyper Sundays on Twitter suggested that the bios for each guest can kind of slow down the momentum in this format. So we moved all the bios to the end. So we are listening, keep giving us feedback. View this episode as a buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun, we had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below where we press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog slash podcast and find all the details there. Please enjoy.

Could you speak to slow productivity?

And perhaps you could speak to John Gribbin's book, The Scientists, you mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation.

Because you strike me also as kind of a proof case or a test case of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you?

Cal Newport (2:01)

Well, I mean, I'll tell you, and this is literally true, what I was doing in the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, it was in the other room in my offices here, with a notebook, working on slow productivity, notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the earlier stages. And I had gone for a walk earlier, and had been developing some new thoughts, and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook as I was looking at the clock, like I got to get into the talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean, it's literally fresh on my mind. And so that's a big caveat. That means this is not a fully baked idea. I love half baked ideas. Yeah, so the ingredients are swirling. So here, I'll pitch you what I wrote down an hour ago.

So as of an hour ago, this is the way, because what I do when I'm thinking about ideas is I try to basically repitch them out from scratch. And I do that again and again. And each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year to get, for example, a book idea ready to even propose. It's just, this is the, like we talked about the math mind. Like I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is the problem itself. So here's the problem we're facing.

The human brain is wired. It's good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important. And it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. This is critical to humans, why we're different than a lot of animals. We can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good when we actually, you know, we need to fix the fence. We fixed the fence, the cattle can't get out. We feel really good.

The issue is, if you don't do anything, let's say I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable. We know that. But if you put too much on people's plates, so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete, then you can easily conceive actually all getting done, you short circuit that drive.

Just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat like a huge amount of junk food, it short circuits the drive and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's gonna get done, it makes us really unhappy because we're short circuiting a cognitive drive here and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed that it doesn't feel good.