The Future Of Less Work
00:04:22 · Anthony Trucks
[00:04:22] S1: could be... I could answer this in four different layers. We won't go that deep, though. But I will say this. There's the thing... The same as me. There's things I know I should do. There's things I just don't do. There's something I know I want, but I'm okay for now. It's not too painful. So I'll just, I'll slowly progress towards it, but I'll be okay not getting it done. And so what I ended up finding out is that a lot of people have one, they have a disconnect between a sense of identity around that thing. Because if you have the identity of a person who does that, it would be more uncomfortable to not do it. It's just simply how I'll say it. Like I do a video every single day. It's a podcast that we launch out. It's like seven minutes, it's personal. I've done it now. Today was episode fifteen thirty six. It is more uncomfortable not to do it now than to do it. Like it's a weird dance because it's so much me to do it that I just do it. If I don't, I feel it, right? So that's one part of it. The other side of it is we put too much emotion behind doing the thing, or needing emotion to do the thing. Like I'm supposed to do this and I don't do it. I don't want to do it. It's like, well, this emotion like that gets all heavy and anguish. And I go, we're putting too much into what it is. I think you just have to show up and go, I don't care how I feel, it has to get done. Let me just get it done. Let me knock this thing out. And what happens is we don't realize that that's a very possible thing to do. Meaning most folks operate on willpower, and it doesn't have to be willpower based. It's just to be like, that's supposed to be done. Let me push through it, knock it out, move on. And now what ends up happening, it's not this big mountain to climb. Because you're right, let's say you want to be healthy. You should go for a walk every day. You should work out. You should eat healthy food, right? And we know these things, but then we go, Oh, that candy bar looks delicious. I'll get that workout later on. Maybe I'll just push the workout to tomorrow. I've walked enough yesterday to cover today. We make these conversations in our head, we get a little emotional about it. And the reality is it's like, no, it says on my calendar that that's supposed to be a fifteen minute walk. I take the fifteen minute walk.
00:06:13 · Anthony Trucks
Part of it boils down to the idea of you have to stop having the conversation internally about whether you should and should not do it, because you get to this point of having what's called decision fatigue. I actually just talked about this in my podcast this morning. It's the idea that a lot of us run to that moment and we choose. Should I do it? Should I not do it? There's a decision in it. And there's actually a part of our brain that drains when we make decisions. It's why Jeff Bezos, not Jeff Bezos, but the Apple guy, I can't think of his name off the top of my head. Steve Jobs. That's why Steve Jobs always wore turtleneck. It's why Obama always wore the same kind of suits. What happens is people get used to doing the same thing, because what happens is I diminish the amount of choices I have to make. It's a non choice, therefore I save the actual fluid, we'll call it the tank of my decision tank is still there. And so what happens is I don't decide, should I get the workout? I don't decide, should I get the walk? I don't decide, should I work out and eat food? It's just what I do. And so that when I do it enough, I knock it out. And here's the interesting piece when you extrapolate this. If that's tied to your professionalism, you're the future of work, right? If I'm looking at an eight hour day to get work done, and halfway through the day you have burned your decision take up, because it's not you to do these things, but the second half of the day is a wash. But for me, if it's just who I am to do it, I'll get halfway through the day and still have three quarters of my tank left. So I get those extra four hours done. So if you extrapolate this out a year from now, I have two years of work being completed to your one because you kept battling the decision and not just becoming the person who did that thing.
00:07:41 · Nirit Cohen
[00:07:41] S0: Yeah. So I think the where I was going with, I think a lot of where your content connected to the things that I was interested in in terms of the way you work is changing is that it is... It's not really about doing the work of today. It's actually doing the unscheduled stuff that will get you prepared to do what you need to be doing or want to be doing tomorrow. Right? So it's very easy for most of us to come into work and kinda do what is on our plate because it's being put there. It's very easy. I think the harder part is how do you learn not what you need to know for today, but who you need to become for tomorrow? How does a salaried employee become more entrepreneurial? Right? Does a manager potentially shift from telling people what their job is because that's kind of changing to coaching them through something else. So I think those are the interesting aspects of how this evolves.
00:08:38 · Anthony Trucks
[00:08:38] S1: I got you there too. So what I've noticed when it comes to like interacting with people and teaching them is when you have to be a person that does it yourself first to lead. That's always been your first piece. When it comes down, I think, to the idea of how do you find out what to do, right? There's ample examples out in the world of individuals who are living lives in a capacity that we might enjoy. So someone could probably look at their life and go, I'm doing this job, I'm in this life, but I like how that life looks, or that experience of life looks, or that role or job title looks. And I go, okay, great. You don't actually achieve or attain or sustain above your current identity, I don't believe. Meaning you have to operate a certain tick to have certain things. And so what I think we first have to do is be okay with the ego being attacked a little bit. Meaning being okay admitting I'm not perfect there. That's usually the first step for most folks, because they'll go, Oh, I'm not perfect. But the moment something shows up and there's a chink in the armor, this big ego wall pops up and goes, But I'm okay. No, it's because of... And they place blame outside, it's external. As opposed to going, ah, you're right, I might need to work on this. The first piece is there's a way to actually have people give you feedback received. But second thing is you can oftentimes take a look and if you're honest with yourself, ask if my hero or my person I admire, like if they followed me around for a day, what would they say? If they actually watched my day to day actions, my process, so I say I want what they want. If that person stepped into my day to day, would they go, Hey, good job. You're on the path. Just keep working. Or would they go, Oh, okay, I noticed some things here. Like I'm used to doing this and you're doing this, and you say you want this, but these are incongruent pieces. Like a simple example is I have kids, three of them. I have a son who is, he's right now has this little dance of difficulty. But I noticed that what he says he wants, he doesn't function the way to get this thing. And so I go, Hey, you say you want to play division one football, but we're not doing division one football things right now. Those two are misaligned, right?
00:10:31 · Anthony Trucks
So if you can actually let yourself open and go, Okay, I see the separation, it'll inform you of things you can improve upon. Now, just because you see it doesn't mean it becomes real. Just because you know what's out there doesn't get done. The next piece is to go, what if I can deconstruct this down to a simple small thing I do every day? And it may not be calendared, maybe it does. But there's oftentimes a thing that we have to do that is not a single one time push. It's not like all of a sudden it happens a day, it's done, right? It's the compounding of days. It's the fifteen minutes a day, the five minutes a day. So what people have to do is first go, who do I want to be? Right? Okay, noticed that thing. What is it that I can see that somebody has that I may want? Okay, pay attention to it. Maybe I open the ego wall and go, oh, I can improve here. Now I've get informed of some things. Once I have these things on my plate of they can be worked on, I don't have to do all of them, by the way. I might say there's five new things. You might choose one or two, and that's completely okay also, we're making progress. But then I go, What must I do fifteen minutes a day consistently? And I say, don't go big, go small in the biggest way possible. Make it the most disgustingly consistent thing you can do. And what happens is, I'll look like this, we all been to a coffee shop before. You ever gone to the coffee shop and you have work to get done, your laptop's there, but your phone's in your hand. You had an hour to be there. And about five minutes in, you notice you're still scrolling on your phone. And you go, Ugh, I gotta put the phone down. So put the phone down. And you start trying to focus on the computer doing the work you're supposed to do. The first five minutes is anguish. It's like you're thinking about the phone, the alerts, and everything. And then within like ten, fifteen minutes, all of a sudden you're you're melted into the work. And you pop up an hour later, it's like, Oh my gosh, everything's done. Like that moment there's a blend in, that's how... When that happens in an hour, same thing happens over a period of weeks in a position of your career or your business.
00:12:21 · Nirit Cohen, Anthony Trucks
[00:12:21] S0: Yeah. And I think the part that is interesting to focus on and and what you're discussing is actually transformations. Because, again, you know, the the the health one is an example that a lot of people resonate with. Right? We we know we need to do something. It's not about the knowledge. It's about getting us to do it. These days, at work, it's about changing aspects of how we do work or even the kind of work we do. And sometimes that goes against our routine. [00:12:53] S1: Oh, very much It's [00:12:54] S0: hard to look at someone who's doing this because everything is changing around us. So I'm not sure we all know what it's going to be like or feel like to work in about two years. But most of us do have people around us who seem to be doing better, right, in terms of adopting tools or maybe being more entrepreneurial. And I think you're suggesting take those small enough steps to say, okay, what is that one thing that I can adopt from them actually Yeah, do this