Hacks: Productivity, AI, and Minimalism with Sam Corcos

Sam Corcos (0:00)

Your calendar, or your time, is the empirical record of your actual priorities. You ask people like, what are your priorities? And they say, oh, it's family, or whatever it is. They have some optimistic thing that they say is their priority. And then if you follow up with, and how much time did you spend on that in the last week? It's like, well, this week I was really busy. Clearly, your actions and what you say are your priorities are not aligned. Getting married had the biggest impact on my productivity. It was about a 20 or 30 hour a week decrease in output. It definitely forces you to prioritize more. I'm actually in the process of writing an article. It's how I spent 17,784 hours working at levels for the last five years. That is an exact 15 minute increment allocation of my last five years.

Andrew Wilkinson (0:55)

Okay, we're here with Sam Corcos, who is the founder of Levels. And Sam, aside from being a really interesting founder, is also just like kind of a human robot. I feel like he, the way he runs his life is incredibly unique. And I feel like, Sam, if, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you're like a systems driven and hacks driven person who very much seems to abide by the Pareto principle.

Sam Corcos (1:22)

Yeah, I run Levels. My background is as a software developer. I try to be really intentional about how I spend my time. I think if I had to summarize it in one word, that would probably be it. We have a very limited amount of time on this earth. And I found that for a large chunk of my life, I was not using it particularly effectively. So I think knowing how you're spending your time and knowing what your priorities are, super important.

Andrew Wilkinson (1:47)

And your time just got a lot more truncated. When you first logged in, I heard your new, I think you have a newborn baby or how old is your baby?

Sam Corcos (1:55)

Yeah, he's 10 months now. Yeah, we had to quickly relocate because he started screaming. But that's how it goes.

Andrew Wilkinson (2:01)

Right on. It's interesting. It's an odd phenomenon having children because I feel like I actually got a lot more productive when I had kids because it meant that my workday had to be packed into a smaller frame. And yeah, how has it been for you?

Sam Corcos (2:15)

Getting married had the biggest impact on my productivity. It was about a 20 or 30 hour a week decrease in output.

And then having a baby on top of that, decrease that by another 10 or 15 hours a week. So I'm down to about 50 hours a week, which is the lowest it's been since I was probably, I don't know, in my early 20s. It definitely forces you to prioritize more. It's empirically made me less productive, but that's okay. I measure my time. I'm actually in the process of writing an article. It's like a perfect clickbaity title. It's how I spent 17,784 hours working at levels for the last five years.

Andrew Wilkinson (2:55)

That's awesome.

Sam Corcos (2:55)

That is an exact 15-minute increment allocation of my last five years.

Andrew Wilkinson (3:00)

After doing all that work to track your time, are you going to continue to do it? Like, you've been doing it for a while. I assume that's a little bit annoying. What insights have you been able to glean from that that have actually been actionable? And yeah, are you going to continue to do that? Go forward.

Sam Corcos (3:15)

One of the most valuable things is your calendar or your time is the empirical record of your actual priorities.

I'm sure this has happened to you many times in your life. You ask people like, what are your priorities? And they say, oh, it's family or whatever it is. They have some optimistic thing that they say is their priority. And then if you follow up with, and how much time did you spend on that in the last week? It's like, well, this week I was really busy. It's like, okay, well, clearly your actions and what you say are your priorities are not aligned. The thing that I have found is the most helpful is if you keep track of how you're spending your time in your calendar, you can both proactively capacity plan and you can also retrospectively analyze what your time was actually spent on. And that's just when you think that you have certain priorities like recruiting and you see that you're actually not spending as much time on it as you thought you were. It allows you to correct that behavior. Whereas if you just ambiguously think of these as your priority, it can linger forever.