Full Transcript for Prioritisation and saying no: the best advice from the How I Work archive

one. A while back, I hit a time where I felt completely burnt out. What made it kind of sting was that only a couple of months earlier, I'd been complaining to a friend that my team kept telling me I was working too many hours and setting a bad example. I brushed it off because I felt so energized by everything I was doing. So I I asked organizational psychologist Adam Grant whether I'd been delusional. Adam is a professor at Wharton and the author of bestselling books, including Give and Take, Think Again, and Hidden Potential. And his latest book is called Vibe. My full chat with Adam is linked to in the show notes. And now here's Adam Grant. If I were, say, writing a piece to help other people, I just felt stuck in terms of What on earth do I do other than take time off? What would you advise me, Adam, hearing where. 00:04:21 Speaker 5: I was at? 00:04:22 Speaker 6: One of the things that I've both found in my research and learned through experience over time is I've got to start by asking, what's the most important project to me in a given week? And prioritize that. And then if they're not in a hierarchy, I end up just trying to juggle too much at once. Whereas if I know what the number one priority is for the week, I'm willing to accept that some of the others might fall on the back burner a little bit. I guess that would be my first piece of advice. 00:04:49 Speaker 1: And I found it so hard to prioritize because I just wanted to do everything. And I had so much passion and so much enthusiasm. And ironically, I remember probably about two months before I had this week where I just felt like I hit burnout. I went for a walk with a girlfriend who's a clinical psychologist. And I was saying to her, I'm getting really frustrated because people on my team are telling me that I'm working too long hours. and that I'm setting a bad example. And I've said to my team, I don't expect you to do what I do. And I'm really energized by the hours that I'm working. And I felt so good. And like, I was achieving so much. And then I thought about that conversation when I hit that week. And I thought, was I just delusional? Was I, Adam? Was I just living in some fantasy world where I thought this was sustainable just because I felt really energetic in that moment? 00:05:41 Speaker 6: It sounds like you're a frequent victim like me of the planning fallacy, where you just underestimate how long different things are going to take. And when you're looking at a blue sky calendar a few months down the road, yeah, of course I can do all that. And then you forget to do the 3x or 4x multiple for the unexpected extra tasks that get added on or that need to be redone or done differently. And then you realize you've just overcommitted yourself. 00:06:13 Speaker 1: Adam's point about over-optimism leads nicely into our next guest, who has a clever way of keeping everything in check. Sahil Bloom is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Five Types of Wealth. I asked Sahil how he works out what his priorities really are, and he suggests a really useful question to ask. Then he shares the test he runs before committing to anything new and why it filters out so many shiny opportunities along with several other strategies. You'll find a link to Sahil's full episode in the show notes. And now here is Sahil. What is your process for setting the right metrics in your life and with your family? 00:06:59 Speaker 5: I think it all starts with figuring out what your priorities actually are. I would say that that is the first biggest picture exercise that people need to think about. Very few people really take the time to think about what is the life you actually want to build. So the question that I like to ask myself, which I think everyone should ask, is to sit down and say, if a third party were to come in and observe my actions for a week, they would come in and just watch me for a week. what would they say my priorities are? And the recognition there is that there is a big gap between what you would say your priorities are and what your actions show your priorities are. 00:07:42 Speaker 1: How do you make decisions then with this new perspective around Firstly, what to drop that you're currently committed to? And then what will you say no to that you'd previously said yes to? 00:07:54 Speaker 5: I have a test and it is basically to say, if I assume that this thing, whatever it is, is going to take twice as long and be half as rewarding or profitable as I currently think, would I still want to go do it? The reason that's such a useful heuristic is because we tend to be overly optimistic at the outset of something new. But very few people are willing to do the losing version for as long as is necessary to get to the winning version. So if you are willing to do the losing version long enough to earn the winning version, it tends to be a great thing to then go take on. 00:08:31 Speaker 1: How often do you personally reflect on that? Like in the last year? Because it's always interesting, like, I don't know, when you write about concepts and Some of them just kind of seep in and they become you, but some of them you still have to deliberately realign. So I'm curious, how does it work for you right now? 00:08:48 Speaker 5: I do something I call a think day about once a month. A think day is the idea of carving out one to two hours once a month to go to a new open space, a coffee shop outside, etc. Bring a journal, bring a pen. And just think on some of these bigger picture questions of your life. Reflect on them. Allow yourself the space to see the bigger picture and then to make course corrections along the way. I find that every single time I do it, there's somewhere that I've gotten a little bit off kilter, fallen a little off course. And the truth is that those tiny course corrections are very impactful in. 00:09:24 Speaker 4: The long run. 00:09:25 Speaker 5: There's this concept in aviation, the one in 60

rule that for every one degree error in heading, a plane will miss its eventual target by a mile for every 60 miles flown. 00:09:36 Speaker 1: How do you structure a think week as distinct from a think day? 00:09:40 Speaker 5: The idea was for it to be as unstructured as possible. The way that we did it, I did it with my business partner was that we each proposed sort of a set of reflection questions, big picture questions that we wanted to think on. 00:09:54 Speaker 1: Could you share examples of some of the questions that you posed? 00:09:58 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:09:58 Speaker 5: One of the biggest ones for me is what did I know for sure that just wasn't so? 00:10:09 Speaker 1: If a think day sounds hard to squeeze in, this next idea takes just 20 minutes. Adam Alter is a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and the author of bestselling books, including Irresistible and Anatomy of a Breakthrough. I asked Adam about the daily or weekly ritual that's had the biggest positive impact on his life. And his answer is a short audit he does most Fridays. There's a link to Adam's full episode in the show notes. And now here's Adam Alter. What's a daily or weekly ritual that has had the biggest positive impact on your life over the last few years? 00:10:51 Speaker 2: And so what I've started doing is taking a small window of maybe 20 minutes. It's usually on a Friday, but it sort of varies depending on what I've got going on. And that's my audit of the week. And not just of the week, but of where things are headed. So what I'll do from week to week is I'll say, okay, in the last week, has my energy such as I'm using it and pouring it out gone in a direction that's fruitful? Is it in the service of some longer-term goal or even short-term goal that's valuable? If not, what should I do differently in the coming week? 00:11:23 Speaker 1: Are there specific prompting questions that you have on. 00:11:27 Speaker 2: These weekly audits? Yeah, but to get a rough breakdown of how much of your energy is being spent productively, how much of it is being spent checking off these kind of necessary but not particularly enriching activities or goals, And then how much is being wasted? And so I was working for four hours, which was productive for two. Now I just work for two and say, all right, it's time for a break. 00:11:53 Speaker 1: So I've got a quick question for you. How many things on your to-do list right now do you realistically expect to finish this month? If the honest answer makes you kind of squirm, then stay with me. Because coming up after the break, Laura Vanderkam reveals the best day of the week to plan and why getting it right can make your weekend better. Oliver Berkman shares a two-list system that stops you bouncing between 50 tasks and finishing none. And Laura Mae Martin gives you the exact words she uses to say no without damaging the relationship. Laura Vanderkam has written more about time than just about anyone I know. She's the author

of books including 168 Hours, Off the Clock and Tranquility by Tuesday. She also hosts the Before Breakfast podcast and co-hosts Best of Both Worlds. In this clip, she explains the one ritual she thinks every busy person needs. She also tells you which day she does it and why planning before the weekend arrives is can give you a better Saturday and Sunday. If you only take one habit from this episode, this might be the easiest one to start with. A link to Laura's full episode is in the show notes. And here is Laura Vanderkam. What are some of the practical ways that we can move from like life feeling like chaos to something that is more like a well-organized circus? 00:13:29 Speaker 7: I think every busy person needs a dedicated weekly planning time. And this is time when you look over the next week and ask yourself, what is most important to me in all three rings of the circus with my career, with my relationships, like with friends and family, and then for myself, whatever I need to do for my own mental, spiritual, physical, emotional health. 00:13:54 Speaker 1: Do you have a regular spot in your week where you go through that weekly planning ritual? 00:14:00 Speaker 7: I tend to do mine these days on Thursday mornings. But for many people, either Thursday or Friday, looking forward to the next Monday to Sunday week is a really good time to do this. Partly because if you do it before the weekend, you get to think about your weekend during your planning time, and that might make your weekend better. 00:14:22 Speaker 1: This is the longest clip in this episode, and it's one I really needed to hear at the time. We recorded it two weeks before the energy game came out in Australia, and I was feeling very overwhelmed about the many tasks I had on my plate. So I asked Oliver Berkman for some wisdom. Oliver is the author of 4,000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and for years he wrote a much-loved column on psychology and productivity for The Guardian. A link to my full chat with Oliver is in the show notes. And now here is me telling Oliver my problems and his very excellent pieces of advice. And I also am a massive recovering productivity advice junkie. I think you are far further on the journey than I am. And something I find myself struggling with at the moment and reflecting about a lot is that I've got my new book, The Energy Game, coming out in two weeks here in Australia. And I look at my to-do list and I know your advice with the to-do list and we really need to limit the active things on the to-do list. I have not taken this at the moment, your wonderful advice about that. And instead, when I look at the section of my list in Notion that is all around book publicity, pre-order marketing, et cetera, et cetera, I feel really overwhelmed and I doubt myself and I kind of oscillate between I've got to do more, I've got to do more, I've got to get a new personal best with the amount of pre-orders that I can drum up for the energy game compared to the last two books. 00:16:06 Speaker 4: And then. 00:16:08 Speaker 1: I kind of go to the other extreme. I'm like, stop putting so much pressure on yourself, Amantha. Like you are driving yourself insane. And I wonder, Oliver, what wisdom would you give to me going between these two extremes and feeling a little bit stressed about it? 00:16:24 Speaker 4: I feel like I resonate so much, right? And as I said before, like, I don't think any of my journey has been about leaving any of this behind. It's about sort of noticing it, seeing it and laughing at oneself in a friendly manner and doing things a little bit differently, which is actually the whole game, I think. And I think it's much more powerful than, you know, I could try to sell you now on some complete new system and you could hypothetically get really excited about it and go off and have a complete fresh start and wipe your Notion files and do a whole new... And that would just be more of the same. So when I talk about limiting your work in progress, when I talk about not trying to do a thousand things at once and then becoming very depressed because you don't have the capacity to do a thousand things at once, I think this is true, but I think it's very flexible approach in terms of the temporal horizon that you're working on, right? So when you're looking at your whole life and you're thinking about like, well, I'd like to write several books within the next few years of my life, but I'd also like to do this, this, this, this, and this. That's the time to be like, okay, that whole other goal of becoming a professional graphic designer or something, that maybe has to go on the back burner for an extended period. But when it just feels like there's like 50 things that you could do to promote a book, I think the really important thing there is is to know which sort of three or four or five of them you're working on right now and what the outcome would be that would enable you to say that that stage of that thing is done. But not necessarily that the other ones have to be abandoned completely. So this is where in 4,000 weeks, I talk about this very simple open list, closed list approach where you make one list that has like every single thing you can think of that you'd like to get done. And then you create a second list that has say five to 10 slots on it. And you put outcomes on those slots like send 10 outreach emails to this kind of person or add this page to your website, whatever it is. And you don't allow any more items onto that list until you freed up a slot by completing one of them. So you're effectively sort of artificially adding a bottleneck to your workflow. Although you're not really because as a finite human being, you are the bottleneck. Because the big risk when there's 50 things you do is you sort of jump around between them all. Each time one feels a bit difficult, you decide you're going to move forward with another one instead. And so you go round and round in a

circle and never make the critical progress on any of them. And then not to go on and on, but just one other thing, like this all comes in a context, all this stuff about how to manage your finitude, you know, comes in a context of saying like, you're never going to feel like you did enough in a project like promoting a book. And there's something incredibly powerful about understanding that you're never going to feel like you did enough because you can conceive of so many valuable and useful things to do, so many more than you'll have the time to do. I've always found anyway, something incredibly liberating about that recognition, right? It's not because you're a bit of a loser that you won't get to the point of having done enough. It's because that is baked in to who we are and what our situation is. And so another way of putting it is that actually you will do enough because you will do everything that it's within your capacities and your energy levels and your talents to do. And that just by definition will be all that you could ever have. done. 00:19:50 Speaker 1: And I want to talk more about this idea of treating your to-do list as a menu. Can you tell me more about that? 00:19:58 Speaker 4: So I guess where this started off in my thinking is in another chapter of this book where I'm talking about not to-do lists, but like your sort of to-read pile or your digital folder of articles saved to read later, and how not very much reflection on how content works in the 21st century will reveal that this is essentially an endless list. And I wrote then about how it can be really helpful to see that kind of collection of things, not as a bucket, but as a river, right? Because if there are more things that you could meaningfully, usefully do with a day, then you will be able to actually do with the day, then you are in fact picking items for now and letting the rest go, whether you like it or not. The fact that a restaurant menu is long and you get to pick a few things from it is kind of the point of a restaurant menu and what makes it pleasurable. But it's that the items on a list, when you view it like that, stop being things that you have to do and become things that you get to do. You get to pick from a menu. And we do get to pick from our to-do lists. 00:21:11 Speaker 1: To finish up this episode, we're heading back to Laura Mae Martin from Google because she had too much good advice to fit into one clip. She shares with me in this clip the actual sentences she uses to decline requests, including a no-but approach that I love. If saying no makes you feel like you're letting people down, listen closely. Here is Laura Mae Martin. What else do you recommend to those execs that you find yourself just hearing, consistently great feedback like this, this has really changed the way that I work. 00:21:46 Speaker 3: It's funny that you say that because definitely one of the biggest things that I wouldn't say I do it, I wouldn't give myself the credit,

but giving that permission to have blank space in your schedule, whether it's a no meeting Friday, or it's a think day, or it's a really long break for a lunch where you're just kind of thinking or decompressing. I'm that person who's looking at each meeting with them saying, Do you really need 30 minutes here? Or could we do 15 minutes? Could we group these three meetings together? Anywhere low hanging fruit on the schedule. And it seems so small cutting meetings down 15 minutes. But if you do that to 10 meetings over the course of a couple of weeks, it's like now you're all of a sudden feeling like, wow, I have. more time here, more time here. I'm like with a magnifying glass on their schedule. Like, why is this here? Have you always been in that? Would you sign up for this tomorrow? Or have you just always done it? 00:22:35 Speaker 1: Now tell me about saying no, because I know you used to be really bad at this and how did you become good at it? 00:22:43 Speaker 3: I actually had a mentor, a manager, and he gave me that feedback. He was in nice words, constructive words. He was like, you're kind of a pushover. And it's getting to you because I can tell that you're overcommitted. And I can tell that you're doing things that even you know, you shouldn't do. And so I try to do like actual sentences that I've used that have gone well for me, you know, like, hey, as much as I would love to do that speaking event, I'm actually holding that week for some work that I think, you know, is coming in. And I would call this one. No, but Here's a resource that I use for a similar event and it would be great for you to use it. And then sometimes I'll even follow back up and say like, how did the event go? So sorry, I couldn't. 00:23:24 Speaker 6: Speak at it. 00:23:25 Speaker 3: Like hope everything went great. But I think it's just knowing that if you say no to someone and you explain to them in the right way, they're going to see your side of it and you're not ruining your relationship, I guess. 00:23:39 Speaker 1: Something I noticed when I was pulling these clips together is that nearly every guest is builds in a moment in their week or month to stop and look up. Sahil has his think day, Adam Alter has his Friday audit, and Laura Vanderkam plans on Thursday mornings. So here's something to try. Pick one recurring meeting in your calendar and ask Laura May's question, would I sign up for this tomorrow? And if the answer is no, shorten it, merge it, or drop it. All of these seven conversations are in the How I Work feed and there are links to them in the show notes. And if you would like more on this topic of prioritization, I have created an entire playlist on guests I have spoken to about prioritization. And also, if you know someone who has trouble saying no to things, please send this episode their way. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people, part of the Kulin Nation. A big thank you to Marta Nimba for doing the sound mix. Today's episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. Unlock smart business buying. Learn more at amazon.com.au forward slash how I work.