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The Hidden Lie of the #Hustle Culture

Lace Gilger
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Modern work has become exhausting and dissatisfying, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We share strategies for defeating burnout and making progress on the most important and meaningful things in your work with our guest Bruce Daisley.

Bruce Daisley is the former European Vice-President for Twitter and host of the UK’s number one business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. He is also the author of the bestselling “The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again” and the soon to be released “Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job”. Bruce has also been recognized as one of the 500 Most Influential People in Britain.

  •  We are in a crisis situation with work.

  • The average working day has gone up from 7 hours to 9 hours in the last 15 years

  • We are in the midst of a burnout epidemic. Half of all US workers are in a state of burnout. 

  • The average state of working is heightened anxiety and stress, and it’s having a major toll on us. 

  • More than ever before work is becoming part of our identity, much more than any previous generation. 

  • We lionize people like Elon Musk as roll models and ask ourselves - do I need to work that long and hard?

  • What is the impact on your energy, output, cognitive ability, and results of working 100+ hours per week?

  • The total productivity of people working more than 50 hours per week is less than those who work more. 

  • Working more than 50 hours per week is LESS productive than working less than 50 hours per week IN TOTAL PRODUCTIVITY, not per hour. 

  • Working relentlessly creates fatigue and lessens total aggregate output 

  • Scarcity forces you to make decisions. If you knew that you only had 40 hours of productive work per week, then you’re forced to make scarcity decisions about what the most important way to spend your time is. 

  • Right now we aren’t making KEY trade offs and scarcity decisions about how to spend our time - we are trying to cram as much in as possible. 

  • There are serious problems with #hustle culture

  • The 3 major brain systems and how they relate to productivity, creativity, and insights 

  • The best ideas live in the spaces between - not during periods of intense focus - when your “default mode” network is working 

  • We have no blueprint for work

  • We’ve developed a new version of work that no one really agreed to. Constant email. Open plan offices. The average person spends 16 hrs per week in meetings and sends/receives 200 emails per day. 

  • Walking meetings are a powerful strategy to improve your focus and creativity. 

  • We are seeing technological breakthroughs in work, yet none of them are translating to productivity rises. 

  • We haven’t innovated the way we work, despite technological change. 

  • “Turning off notifications on your phone can be one of the most productive things you do.”

  • Conduct meetings where phones are not allowed. 

  • Teams that spend time together socially are more likely to be cohesive. 

  • Unlock the power of “Monk Mode Mornings” to make progress on the most meaning things in your work. 

  • Modern work has become exhausting and dissatisfying, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

  • Homework: You have more power to change things than you think. Start a dialogue in your workplace. Bring evidence, science, and data to the conversation to help change your workplace culture. Your boss is navigating the new world of work with the same confusion that you are. 

  • Quite often, work is the lie we tell ourselves.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 5 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

Modern work has become exhausting and dissatisfying, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In this episode, we share strategies for defeating burnout and making progress on the most important and meaningful things in your work with our guest, Bruce Daisley.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we’ve put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on their along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That successpodcast.com, or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we showed you the power of listening. Taught you how to transform the way that you listen and unlock an incredible set of communication skills that almost no one uses or even understands with our previous guest, Julian Treasure.

Now, for an interview with Bruce. 

[00:01:39] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Bruce Daisley. Bruce is the former European vice president for Twitter and host of the UK's number one business podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. He’s also the author of the best-selling The Joy of Work: 30 Ways to Fix Your Work Culture and Fall in Love with Your Job Again and the soon to be released Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job. Bruce has also been recognized as one of the 500 most influential people in Britain. Bruce, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:10] BD: Thank you. So good to talk to you. 

[00:02:12] MB: Well, it’s so good to have you on the show. I'm so excited to dig into your work. I think it's so important and something that's a really relevant and timely topic especially in today's age. To start out with, I’d love to begin with a look at modern work and the state of modern work. You've obviously been a very successful business executive and seen a lot of this firsthand and uncovered some really interesting phenomenon. What's going on with work today?

[00:02:39] BD: Yeah. I think we’re in something of a crisis situation where silently over the last few years we found ourselves sleepwalking into a situation where by one estimate, the average working day has gone up by two hours over the last 15 years. But every step of the way, we felt that the changes that were coming were benign. The reason why the average working day has gone up is because we're spending more and more time on our mobile devices. 

Now, look, if you said to anyone, “I'm going to take email off your phone,” we’d all be really offended by it. We love email being on our phone. It makes work feel more manageable. It makes our working lives feel more easily adapted around our private lives. We love that aspect of our work, but the consequence of it has been that the average working day has gone up. There’s one of the challenges. 

Now, the output of that, the outcome of that is that we’re in something of a burnout epidemic. Burnout is recognized by the World Health Organization as a genuine thing, and by some estimates, half of all U.S workers are in something of a stage of burnout where burnout where things we used to find enjoyable aren’t as enjoyable as they used to be or we find ourselves hyper stressed when we’re trying to go to sleep, but exhausted when we wake up in the morning. 

We’re in this phenomenon where a lot of us are feeling that the average state of working is heightened anxiety, stress and it's really just having a toll on our whole lives. Work is more than ever before becoming our identity. We’re starting to define ourselves who we are via talking about our jobs more than in any previous generation. 

My feeling was that in the spirit that you wholeheartedly come at this podcast with, my whole feeling was that I wanted to explore whether there was any evidence. What data science would give us about how to address this balance? How could we get back to really finding that there was enjoyment in our jobs and what pointers would the evidence give us towards that? 

[00:04:49] MB: So many interesting points, and one of my favorite lines from the book was this idea of – And I think we've all had this experience of going to bed wide awake and waking up exhausted. Such a great way to encapsulate this major problem with the burnout that everybody is suffering from and the almost constant treadmill of anxiety that are working culture has become.

[00:05:11] BD: Yeah, absolutely. Look, it's not held by the fact that many of us find that maybe when we first go into the world of work and maybe if we’re in our late 20s, early 30s and we’re contemplating how to get on in work, how to – We've decided we want to be a success, we want to graduate to achieving more and the thing that we find very quickly is that the people that we see as models around us, people who say they've got the secrets of success. 

Quite often, model, practices that when we look at them we think, “Okay. Well, I need to do that.” Elon Musk, it would be no surprise if a few of your listeners thought, “Okay. I want to be a bit more Elon. How can I be more Elon?” Elon Musk, when he's asked about it, his own working practices, he says he works 130 hours a week. He says he sleep under his desk two or three days a week. You too can have the Elon Musk experience, get yourself down to Target and buy a sleeping bag and you too can have that Elon experience. That's the challenge that a lot of us see people like Elon as role models, and yet we believe therefore, “All, right. Do I need to work that long and hard?’ That's what I was interested in. 

Okay. Objectively, if we look at people work 100 hours a week and we measure them over the short to medium-term, what is the impact on their cognitive abilities? What's the impact on their energy? What’s the impact on their ability to get their job done? Here’s what we learn, people who sustain those long periods of work. There's long working hours over a long time. We all remember probably, your listeners probably remember a time at college where they were working longer into the night. But what we delete from that college story was the fact the next day we slept-in and then we had a four week vacation. 

Any time we actually look at when people work a hundred hours a week, what we discover pretty quickly is that productivity rather than going up, it goes down. In fact, one of the biggest pieces of research into these hundreds of thousands of data points was done by a guy called John Pencavel at Stanford University and he looked into average working hours sustained over the long-term and he concluded that anyone who works over 50 hours a week, their total productivity is lower than people who work less. That's fascinating, because that's not the lie we tell ourselves. 

We tell ourselves that certainly when it comes to us, we can work late into the night. We can work weekends. Maybe we can work early mornings, and yet when people have set about trying to measure that and demonstrate whether the data proves it, whether there’s data behind it, actually it seems that it's not the case. Working long hours is an illusion rather than a way to maximize our productivity.

[00:08:05] MB: Such an insightful point, and I want to clarify a piece of this because it's something that I wrestle with and struggle with and think about. The people who were more productive, is it that the marginal hour is less productive or their total aggregate output is less productive?

[00:08:22] BD: Total. Total. There’s the interesting thing. Here’s the strange thing. That dataset that John Pencavel worked with, he said that if people were working a seven day week, and I guess some people might be channeling a startup mentality. Maybe they tell themselves, “I’m going to work a seven day week.” If those people, if they're in the routine of working seven days a week, then if they get into a routine of working six days a week, their productivity is higher on those six days than it is on those 7 days. Why? Because we just carry that fatigue through every hour of working. 

In fact, the marginal increases from working hours. Stop going up after 55 hours work. John Pencavel says the increase between 50 hours and 55 hours is incredibly small. I think he said if anyone knew how small it was, they wouldn't optimize for work. But over 55 hours, over the course of the week, over 55 hours, their total output starts going down.

[00:09:18] MB: Staggering and so interesting. I definitely want to dig into that research a little bit more.

[00:09:22] BD: Isn’t it fascinating though that even though we hear all of these examples, Marissa Mayer when she was the chief executive of Yahoo, she described her time working at Google. She was employee number 20 at Google. She was asked the secret of her success, and like Elon Musk, she said the secret of her success was working 120 hours a week. She said that she also slept under her desk. She often didn't take bathroom breaks and she never went on vacation. There’s the same story painted out. Yet when we get someone to look at the evidence, we can't replicate that practice being productive. 

Look, here’s the interesting thing, that we look at other professions where people use their energy. Maybe let's look at track and field, and if someone told you that their plan to be the next Usain Bolt was them training 120 hours a week, the first thing we’d probably ask is, “Oh! Interesting. Does it work? Can you measure that that's more effective?” Why? Because we sort of know that that notion that you could while and train relentlessly, it must lead to fatigue. Yet here’s the strange thing. When it comes to our own jobs, it's like challenging religion. We feel uncomfortable with challenging the idea, the notion that we can work relentlessly. We can work infinitely. 

Here’s why I think this matters, because I think scarcity forces us to make decisions. If we knew that we only had 40 units of productive work a week, 40 hours of productive work, then what would we do? We’d start making decisions of scarcity. We’d start saying, “Okay, I don't want to be in that four-hour status meeting, because if I'm in that meeting for four hours, then that's a 10th of my week, and I could do something more productive,” and we start making decisions of scarcity. 

Here’s I think the really interesting conundrum that were presented with work right now. We’re not making those decisions of scarcity. W we tell ourselves, “I’ll work late into the night,” and yet maybe I was a classic example of these. I would routinely come home and I would be a kitchen table emailer. I would come home. I would eat some food. Maybe there would be TV on in the background, some music on. Maybe I would treat myself occasionally to a glass of wine, but I would sit at the kitchen table typing emails.

It was only latterly I sort of reflected on what I had actually accomplished. What did I do on that Monday not emailing? Well, I read one particular email, a difficult email. I read it four or five times. I closed it. I’d come back to it again. It’d change the music. I’d answer a couple of these emails. I’d then open a document. It was really complicated. I’d close it. I’d come back to it later. I wasn’t actually doing anything, but we sometimes create the illusion that we’re working. I think that’s the critical thing that I would say. I would say there’s so much evidence about how we could improve. 

I was swept away with how many papers, how much academia has gifted us in this field and yet so little of it reaches people in work. That was my feeling, “Wow! Such revelation is hitting me,” and I wanted to be able to share some of it with people in full-time profession. 

[00:12:41] MB: I want to come back to this topic of why we refuse to make these key scarcity decisions, but before we do, something else you said a minute ago really resonated with me and in many ways underpins a lot of this, which is this idea that more and more and more, work is becoming part of our identities, and this badge of honor that I work harder than anybody. I sleep under my desk. All of these stuff, it's a very slippery slope.

[00:13:08] BD: Yeah, very much so. Look, I'm really charmed when I see organizations that recognize another way. I saw the organization, Slack, and it really struck me that a lot of people who work at Slack said that it hadn’t been their first tech job. They'd been around the track once. That forged an impression in them. So Slack has a value that they, it’s one of their values, which is do a good day's work and go home. 

What does that mean? That means they have no football tables. They have no ping-pong tables. They don't have beer tap that serves beer if people stay late. They don’t have any of those things. They encourage people to do good days work and go home. Why? Because they believe that the richer people’s personal identities, the more that people have got passions and interests, those things bring themselves into people's work and they bring color to people's work. They bring diversity, a plurality of perspectives. 

I was really charmed with that, because I think so often now, especially as property prices and student debts are ever bigger as a presence in people's lives, it's completely natural that any of us might sit there thinking, “I just want to work hard and pay off my college debts.” Of course, it's a human response. 

I was really impressed that some organizations are saying, “We actually want you to bring your fullest self to work by having other interests. We’re not going to value you staying late and working into the night. That won't be the reason you get promoted here.” 

[00:14:44] MB: That’s a great example, and I know you're in many ways leading this charge as well, but I hope to see more companies and organizations start to embrace some of what the science and the evidence tells us about how people could be more productive and more effective instead of these cultural myths about what work is and the false badge of slaving away and working hundred plus hours per week.

[00:15:08] BD: Yeah. I think this is the critical thing that there are so many icons of #hustleculture and there’s so many people who are celebrating working hard and that relentless eking out every last drop of productivity. Unfortunately, there’s very few role models, there’s very few examples we can look at who say, “Actually, there’s another way.” Because here’s one thing that I really fascinated by, and I think for me this is really instructive, that any of us who’s setting about trying to be the best version of ourselves. Of course, productivity is an important notable goal. But let me give you something that I was really captivated by, which is a sort of rudimentary take on neuroscience. 

If you and I, Matt, we’re doing sort of an introductory level of neuroscience. Neuroscience 101 would be this effectively three systems of cognition in the brain. The first one is called the executive attention network. Okay. That’s you, you're typing an email on your phone. The executive attention in that work is you typing that email. Then a second network that runs directly in parallel, all the times that the executive attention network is running, there’s another network called the salience network. This network protects us from – It makes sure the we’re back typing that email on our phone, and meanwhile we’re walking across the road and the salience network is what protects us from oncoming traffic. It makes sure it's a safe time to walk across the road. Those two run in conjunction with each other. 

But there’s a third one, and the science of understanding what's going on in people's brains is relatively recent. Brain scanning, the last 20 years we’ve really got some value from it. Scientists were baffled by the fact that they would give people something to do and their brains would light up. But then the moment they stopped doing it, their brains would light up, but in a different way, and they [inaudible 00:17:03] this the default mode of the default network. 

Here's the interesting things. The default mode, we might – If we were in the brain scanner and we were in the default mode, the researcher might say to us, “What's happening right now? What are you thinking about?” Generally we’d say something like, “I was dreaming. I was daydreaming. I wasn't thinking about anything. I was a million miles away.” Boredom, if I could give you a term from your youth. Do remember boredom from when you’re a kid? Those hours of boredom we used to have. That's what the default mode is. Boredom is where we’re in the default mode. Long way of saying it. These three systems in the brain, one of which is sort of this unfocused, this boredom. 

But here's the really fascinating thing. When we come up with our best ideas, and I’d challenge your listeners to think about this. The next time you have a good idea, which of these states were you in? Were you in like the executive attention network? Were you frowning into your laptop trying to come up with an idea or was it the moment when you gave up frowning into your laptop, you walked into the other room to pour yourself a glass of water and an idea struck you? Because, broadly, that's what a lot of people observe. They observe that their best ideas happen not in these intense focus, but in this rather sort of more dreamy unfocused. 

My favorite example of this was this very acclaimed screenwriter. A guy called Aaron Sorkin. He wrote Moneyball. He’s just writing now. He’s got the theatre production of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. He’s incredibly prolific writer, poet, all amount of screen and stage. He wrote the West Wing TV show. He realized his best ideas were coming to him when he was on deadline. His best ideas were coming to him not when he was in the state of focus staring into his computer screen, but when he was in a state of these default mode, in a state of sort of dreamy distraction. 

He realized for him, his best ideas were coming to him not staring into his laptop but in the shower. He told Hollywood report magazine, he had a shower installed in the corner of his office and he takes 6 to 8 showers a day. Fascinating, right? He was asked about it, “Are you doing this because you're sort of obsessive-compulsive?” He said, “Not at all.” He said, “When I'm on deadline, when I need to come up with something, I find that the fact that I get into the shower, I almost reboot my whole system and something occurs to me.” For me, this is such an epiphany, because we spend so much of our time trying to optimize for our productivity. So much amount of time thinking, producing more with every waking minute. 

Here's the strange thing, any of us who are charged with coming up with original thought, we’re thinking of a clever way to do it. That’s all of us. We don’t like to call it creativity, but all of us are charged with improving things. What we find is that those flashes of inspiration, those sparks of ingenuity, those moments of guile, they strike us in our default mode. They strike us when we’re on downtime. 

Someone told me, I have all my best ideas walking my dog, and I thought, exactly, default mode. That's one of the critical things that I feel that I've learned, is that we need to be thinking more not just about how can we produce more, but how can we allow our brains to breathe and actually sort of create moments of creative inspiration? 

[00:20:18] MB: I couldn't agree more, and there's so much research supporting this idea of creating the space, creating the contemplative time to really step back and not be so caught up in everything constantly happening. Even the neuroscience, I don't know if you came across this term, but the phrase and a lot of the scientific research around this is the idea of creative incubation and how the subconscious works on problems much more effectively if you take your conscious focus away from really burning constant focus on whatever you're trying to solve or wherever you're trying to generate a creative breakthrough.

[00:20:54] BD: Very much so. I think the more that we get an understanding of this, I think the more that we, all of us, try to get a layperson's understanding of some of the science that governs these things. Then we can try to intervene and push back against some of the things that appear common sense in our workplaces but are actually potentially quite destructive.

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[00:22:48] MB: Let's explore a couple of those other ideas we've talked a lot about, the general culture of work. But tell me about a few more of the things within our workplaces that seem like they're common sense but are really counterproductive and harmful to productivity and well-being.

[00:23:03] BD: I think one of the things that become the norms, what we’ve found I think is that we have no blueprint for work. We've developed a new version of work that no one has ever really signed off on. If we were to look at some of the cold hard facts of modern work, the average U.S. worker spends about 16 hours a week in meetings. 

In fact, if your boss expects you to stay connected to your device, then generally we’re observing that the average working week of attention on our email can be around 60 to 70 hours a week. We find ourselves in open offices, so in sort of open plan environments where we set with constant interruptions. Then when we do get to our desks, generally we are sending and receiving about 200 emails a day. All of those things act to drain some of our cognitive energy. 

One the things that I think is an important decision that we need to reflect on is that scientists argue about whether there’s a finite capacity to our brains, but it does appear to be elements of cognition, which are closer to the battery on our cellphone, then we probably would like to normally think. We often can force our self to believe that our brains are infinite. For anyone who's tried to read a complicated book or a complicated paper, at 11 PM, we’ll know that their brain doesn't seem to have the same battery power as it does at 9 AM. 

I think understanding that is really critical. Psychologists, neuroscientists sometimes call this ego depletion, the idea that cognition is finite. Now, while they do argue a little bit around the edges of the extent of ego depletion, how finite our brains are. There seems to be some evidence that we can restore some of our energy with the actions we take. Walking meetings seem to be a really good way to revive, re-energize our attention to bring some energy back into us. For my feeling, we've created a version of modern work, which has got all these meetings, these emails, and it's exhausting. 

I think if any of us were told when we were children the amount of time we were going to spend in meetings not paying attention to what was going on, we’d be astonished, because if a child – I always think of freaky Friday. If a child's transport planted into your brain today and saw that you're sitting pretending to listen to someone's PowerPoint slides, the child with the sort of naivety of a child would say, “Why are you doing this? Just get up and leave,” and yet most of us find ourselves in hostage to those situations. 

I think this is a critical thing for me. One of the things I was – Here’s my entry point. I was working, running Twitter across Europe, and one of the things that we observed was that while people might superficially think tech job, that's what I want. I want to go and work in a big tech platform, and that's definitely true. We had lots of people who were really inspired by the work they were doing, but we were starting to witness burnout in the people that we employed. It was largely a reflection of the way we were working. 

People were burnt out because we were emailing all weekend. Because of different time zones, we were emailing all evening, and there was a constant expectation that people would be available to jump on a call, and all of those things acted. They were in service of just the team starting to feel depleted. The team feeling like they could do a tour of duty, but they couldn't last forever. 

We were seeing – One of the things that was a real wake-up call for me, I was seeing some of my most talented people quit, but worst, some of them were quitting with no job to go to. I was presented with this realization, “Wow! If we've got some of the best people I've ever work with and they’re quitting with nowhere to go to, it's such a vote of no confidence in the culture that I had created, in the organization that I was running.” I told myself, “Look, I need to delve into the science books. I need to delve into the evidence here. I need to be trying to find answers.” There aren’t just my thoughts, my hunches, my instincts. I’ve got to try and find answers that are proven by data and evidence. That's why I set about doing challenging some of these norms that we've created and trying to find a way to create a more energizing positive and more productive version of work.

[00:27:30] MB: That's a truly inspiring vision and I applaud you for embarking on the journey. There're a couple of things you mentioned that I want to dig into. The thing that you talked about earlier that I really want to unpack a little bit more is this notion of how we think that we can just pile more and more and more work into our week. We can always take on another project, another priority, and yet when you really truly come to grips with the reality that there's, let's say, 40 to 50 hours of truly productive time that you actually have, it forces you to really prioritize and to make tradeoffs and to make scarcity decisions around where you spend your time. 

Why do you think so many people are afraid to do that and how can we be better about making those kinds of decisions and bringing that thoughtfulness to the way that we approach our work?

[00:28:22] BD: I think more than anything, the first stage of the process is an awareness of it, because it's very easy. When a colleague says to you, “Can you attend this meeting?” and you end up in a two-hour meeting. What happens is the emails that you are meant to do, the document that you are meant to create, the things that you are meant to give your attention to, they don’t disappear. They just get displaced. Most of us probably who work full-time now recognize the feeling of sitting on the sofa, answering an email or getting told off by a friend when we’re just answering an email on a night out. 

Most of us recognize that we've seen an erosion of the boarders between work life and home life. Look, look quite often we are willing accomplices, we often feel like it reduces our stress to answer that email rather than having it sitting there waiting for us. I think that’s the reality of modern work for a lot of us. We’re sort of presented with those conundrums. 

I think the challenge for me is this, is that we’re not being honest with ourselves. The moment we start being honest about, “Okay. I've got 40 units. This is zero cost. This is zero-sum to my working week. If I gave two hours to that meeting, I'm going to stop doing something else.” As soon as we say that, it starts forcing us to prioritize. Look, you’ll know well the old truism that sort of in business, strategy is what you choose not to do. 

I think one of the things that we find is that anyone who takes a look at productivity stats, workplace productivity stats for the 20 years, it's a total enigma. Why? Because we've seen the fastest innovation of technology and the tools available to every worker is unprecedented in history. We've never seen innovation like this, and yet average productivity per work hasn't grown. In manufacturing industry, productivities continue to rise. 

In office workplace, we haven't seen productivity rise. It's this total conundrum. Why on earth would this technology be afforded to us and yet we've seen none of it transferred to the bottom line? It's largely because we've effectively started making more demands on workers. It’s no surprise that burnout has gone up. People are working longer, because that’s the only way we’ve seen total output increase not from the amount people are producing per hour, but because they’re working longer and harder. 

For me, as soon as we start adjusting to these things, as soon as we start asking questions about these things, we’re going to get so far more honest state of work. There’s a really interesting thing. If you go back and you look at previous revolutions of technology. If you go back to the 1900s when the steam engine was replaced with electric motors. Among the first thing that happened was that when you saw that big system change from one to the other, steam engines required vast sort of turbines the required enormous coal and consuming furnaces and they would work at vast scale. They were huge. 

Electric motor to the engines could be tiny. The first thing that happened was that we first replaced the steam engines with an electric equivalent, and it was only afterwards gradually over the course of the next couple of decades that people said, “Oh! But by switching to little electric motors, we can miniaturize some of these processes. We can transform the way that we bring detail, we bring sophisticate sort of tiny little microscopic luxurious detail to the things we’re creating rather than produce it at vast scale.” 

It led to a big change, but we went through this transition. That's probably where we are with work right now, that we have not really innovated how we were working in the previous generations. We've just brought technology to it, and it’s why so many people right now are feeling like they are at something of a personal burnout, a breaking point themselves. 

[00:32:19] MB: If we feel burnt out, if we feel like we’re at the breaking point, you’ve shared one or two great strategies already and things like walking meetings are fantastic. What are some other strategies to help us recharge? To help us really combat that burnout?

[00:32:36] BD: Yeah. I think I've talked about the importance of probably drawing a line. The big thing for me was that I sat there thinking – It’s an interesting exercise. I sat there thinking my team are burnt out. I can't order them to make changes. I need to try and influence them. One of the things that I set about doing was, as I mentioned before, trying to model the 40 hours was enough of a working week, but there were certainly other things I could do. 

One of the best things that any of us can do, if we’re trying to get into a state of thought and concentration, turning off notifications on our phone seems to be one of the most productive things that we can do. There’s a strange thing. When I say to people they should turn notifications off on the cellphone, they say, “Oh, really? But how will I know if I’ve got messages?” Look, people generally reach the right conclusion for them. Some people say, “I’m going to leave my iMessages on,” or other people say, “I'm going to leave my social media on.” But broadly my feeling is that we should try and turn notifications off for our emails, or our Slack, because largely the reason why is that I guarantee that if you or I were to go and look at our emails now, we’ve both got emails. 

Actually, that alert that we've got more emails in itself isn't helpful. But what it does is it steals some of our cognitive power. There’s a strange thing that when Frances Frei, the culture expert went into Uber and she was invited in a Harvard business professor. She was invited into Uber, and she observed that they were all taking their cellphones into every meeting and it was having the impact of reducing everyone's attention but also making meetings longer. There were also like a back channel of the subtext of meetings that was being communicated nonverbally. 

She pointed out a piece of research that says that if we bring our cellphones into meetings, everyone's attention measurably goes down. If your cellphone is up turned so you can see, your attention dips even further. I think this is a really interesting thing. If any of us are trying to get our job done more quickly and productively and maybe with more flashes of inspiration, then turning notifications off on our phone seems to be an incredible, helpful intervention. 

Look, I set about thinking those things more than anything. I was fascinated with team culture. I want it to be back to my team feeling enjoyable. There's a lot of ways that I think we can build team cohesion, some really trivial ones. When you’re looking at how teams work together in an office, we often spend a lot of time thinking of org charts and sort of who reports into who, but as effective, a wonderful company did some really fascinating research effectively tracking people in offices, like we might track thoughts players on the field, they sort of, they put tracking devices on them. They watched where they went and they observed that the location of the coffee machine and the water cooler has as much impact on who works with who in an office as the org chart and the management structure. 

For me, understanding these things, where do you put the coffee machine? Can you introduce a social meeting? That’s a meeting where you sort of get together every week and there's no agenda. You just get together to be together. It seems incredibly wasteful, especially, I particularly meetings, but what we observe is organizations that set time aside to be together socially seem to demonstrate more cohesion and higher productivity. 

My fascination was how could any of us – We’re not the boss. I worked on the basis, we’re not in charge. But how can any of us set about improving the working dynamic where we are. One of the ways that we would set about doing that is just really looking into the evidence and the science. 

[00:36:33] MB: Great suggestions. I love this quote that turning off notifications on your phone can be one of the most productive things that you could do, and yet so many people think it's the opposite, right?

[00:36:43] BD: Yeah, but I think sometimes we do bias towards immediacy. We’re all guilty of these. If you ask people whether they like working with their boss, one of the things that they determined how much they like their boss is how quickly their boss replies to their emails. We’re all guilty of it. We want our boss to notice us quickly and get back to us quickly. We want other people to do the same. 

My feeling is this it was a wonderful piece of work by an investor, a guy called Paul Graham. He did a really interesting thing where he differentiated between two mindsets. The manager’s mindset, and it doesn't necessarily mean a people manager just by someone who manages projects or someone who's executing, getting things done. The manager’s mindset and the maker's mindset. 

He said, “Here’s the interesting thing. A manager can break that time into 15-minute segments.” They can be immensely productive. They can be auctioning and powering through things. You might attempt to your inbox. You might finish that document. It's about execution. The moment you switch into maker’s mindset, the moment you're trying to reflect, produce, think, then actually the way that time works is very different. 

If you've got a four-hour block, a manager can split that very easily into 15-minute segments. It might be a 30 minute meeting and then lots of very small segments. But if you're asked to come up with a new idea and you have that four-hour block and in the midst of that four-hour block you put a 30 minute meeting, he said, “That doesn't break up the four-hour block. It destroys the four-hour block.” 

The maker's mindset is very different. The maker’s mindset, if we're going to be allowing ourselves to get into deep thinking, to get into deep work, then breaking it with instructions and being constantly beset with little pings on our phone doesn't just have a slight impact, it destroys those moments of productivity. I thought it was a really interesting way to frame it. 

[00:38:39] MB: Yeah, the maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule post is a classic, and we’ll make sure to include that along with a lot of the other research you’ve talked about in the show notes. I want to dig into another recommendation from the book that I personally really resonated with this. Tell me about monk mode mornings. 

[00:38:56] BD: Very much in the same spirit. The notion of monk mode is that we sometimes reach those intellectual breakthroughs. We sometimes reach those moments where aha moments happen to us, when we’re in a state of undistracted concentration. The challenge of course for all of us, especially we might be just making our first progressions on the career ladder and we don't call the shots. 

If we were to say any of us would say to our bosses, “I’m not contactable all day on Wednesday, or I'm not going to be contactable for the next three hours.” Then I guess most of us face the prospect that our managers might respond negatively to that. 

The monk mode morning is the attempt to recognize the we have these demands upon us that our attention works best when it's uninterrupted. But as the monk mode morning says, “Okay. What are the ways that any of us can bring this into our work?” 

One the best ways, the monk mode morning is the idea that maybe you take 60 or 90 minutes out of your calendar twice a week. Monk mode worked best if you do it before you open email. The moment you open email, you sort of have these caffeinated seeds, these effervescent phase of thoughts fizzing through your mind. If we take a monk mode morning before we open our email, it seems to be more productive, and you just set an hour aside. 

It might well be you say to your boss, “Hey, I'm not going to be in till 10:30 on Wednesdays because I'm just taking an hour at home in the mornings to work on big pitches for new clients or big concepts for our 2021 plan.” 

The idea is the that period of concentration generally seems to be immensely rewarding for us when very simple, but when we ask people if they have had a good day at work, they generally describe having a good day at work when they've made progress in something meaningful. If we can set aside an hour or two hours a week just to do that, it's astonishing what we can produce in that time.

[00:41:09] MB: I totally agree and I've used that strategy for years to carve out time every single week to focus on the most important high-priority things in my life before getting distracted and sucked into the whirlwind of email and all of the demands on my time. 

[00:41:25] BD: Yeah, very much so. I think, look, these are the things that affect all of us and having a big impact on the way that we feel about our jobs. It’s really sad stats. If you delve into this – This is just not the luxury of office workers. If you look at teachers, 3/5th of all US teachers say they’re contemplating quitting the job in the next five years. 

It's the same for health workers, that this is not just the reserve of those who work in nice offers jobs, but we've created a version of modern work, which people find exhausting, dissatisfying. They’re seeking an escape. They’re seeking meaning elsewhere, and I'm convinced that there are small actions that any of us can take to just bring some of the enjoyment back to our work. 

[00:42:13] MB: Such a simple and powerful message. For somebody who listened to this conversation and wants to start to take action in some way to bring some joy back into their work, to get over the exhausting and dissatisfying nature of modern work, what would be one starting place, one action item that you would give them as their first piece of homework to really begin to bring that joy back into their lives?

[00:42:38] BD: Yeah. For me, I felt that this needed to be a democratic process. I felt that bosses – This book Eat Sleep Work Repeat, bosses don't read books like this. They send themselves on expensive executive training course and yet most of us find ourselves in the workplace cultures that maybe are not perfect that need fixing. I’m an optimist and I sort of believe that often we can find that we have more power of influence to change things. My feeling was start a dialogue in your workplace. Start a dialogue about can we do things differently. 

Let me give you one example. It's very easy, and my organization find ourselves doing the practice that I’ve really decided is one of my biggest no-nos, and that is the weekend email. In fact, one boss I had at my job at another organization sends a document round, all the people who reported to him. He said, “You might not work at the weekend, but I do, and I will be working all weekend.” 

You would come back from may be a morning bit of exercise and you would come into your apartment and there would be 30 emails not just from him, but from the people who reported to him. It felt like you can never escape work. It felt like work followed you around. Now, my feeling now is that there was a discussion worth having and bringing a bit of evidence to that discussion and maybe at that manager's offsite suggesting, “I wonder if we could have a discussion about how we work and our working methodologies and bringing some evidence.” I think you need to bring evidence to these, but you bring some evidence to it, and I believe that most bosses when presented with evidence will say, “Okay. Let's give it a go.” 

My feeling is, it’s the spirit of your whole podcast here, that actually the best discussions we have are informed with not opinion. We’ve all got our opinions, but with data, with science, with evidence. I remain optimistic that any of us should – The first thing we should try and do is start a dialogue. Start a dialogue. Can we set about improving the way we’re working?

[00:44:50] MB: Great piece of advice and really important to recognize that you do have more power than you think to change your culture, to change a workplace and to influence those around you. So many people give that power up without ever even trying. There's some real magic that can happen if you're willing to take the initiative and try to create a positive change in your life.

[00:45:09] BD: I couldn't agree more. There was a fascinating piece of work by a woman called Leslie Perlow from Harvard, and she went to try and track down people who said, “You can't change things here. You can’t have an impact on our culture.” She found management consultants. These management consultants said, “Look, you know you can't stand our job. We need to be on email all the time.” So then she started staging slight interventions. She’s ask them, “Okay. Amongst yourselves, I want you to agree who will not look at their phone on Tuesday night. Who will not look at their phone on Wednesday,” and she put them into teams. If someone looks at their phone when they were not meant to on a Tuesday night, the whole team lost. What happened was they initially said, “You don’t understand our job.” 

Within weeks they said, “I feel my energy levels are better. My partner is more grateful for me because when I’m out on date night, I’m not looking at my phone all the time. My family are grateful that my attention doesn't seem to become divided,” and she staged a number of those interventions. 

I think what they proved to me is they prove that, quite often, work is the lie we tell ourselves. Quite often, we tell ourselves that, “Oh! I can’t do this. I can’t change this.” We can change far more about our jobs than we realize, but we just – We need to start that process, that process. For me, it's about starting to dialogue on it. You start a dialogue and you realize very quickly, number one, you're surrounded with people who think the same as you. Number two, your boss kind of thinks things aren't working either and is open-minded to someone coming up with suggestions. 

My experience is we sometimes can imagine that when we’re in our most uncharitable frame of mind, that our boss somehow created something that sets to destroy us. Far from it, bosses are navigating these new world with the same confusion we are and starting a dialogue on these things. In my experience, I’ve now chatted to dozens of organizations. In my experience, it’s far more ground to be optimistic when we bring the science along than some of us ever really ever dare imagine.

[00:47:16] MB: Bruce, where can listeners find you, find the book, find all your work online so that they can learn more?

[00:47:24] BD: Best place to look is my website, is eatsleepwork repeat.com and I’ve chatted to countless psychologists, neuro scientists, experts there about trying to improve culture. The book is available with the same title, so Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It’s 30 hacks to improve your work. Anyone who's thinking, I just want to improve the way things feel around here. Maybe I just want to laugh more at work. Maybe I just don't want to be lying awake on Sunday night dreading going to that place. My feeling was I was you. I was that person, and I set about trying to change it. As someone who's reached the other side, I’m strongly of the opinion that all of us can take actions to make our work better. 

[00:48:07] MB: For people who feel like they can approach their boss, they’re struggling, Bruce you put together something that I thought was quite funny and really, really interesting. Just tell our listeners a little bit about the Bad Boss Helpline.

[00:48:21] BD: Yes. I’ve created Bad Boss Helpline, badbosshelpline.com. There’s a telephone number there or there’s an email address and you can contact us with your especially egregious boss and we will send a copy of Eat Sleep Work Repeat anonymously to your boss. If you do have a monstrous manager, if you’ve got a demonic supervisor that you’re sort of dealing your wrestling with, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

[00:48:49] MB: Well, Bruce thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom. Some really insightful takeaways and really important dialogue about the future of work and how we can avoid burnout and bring some happiness back into our workplaces. 

[00:49:03] BD: So lovely to chat to you. Thank you so much. It’s been so great to chat, Matt.

[00:49:07] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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