Author, speaker, and executive Jay Papasan explains a few of the biggest lies you've been told about productivity, and how to overcome them.Hear Jay's full interview in Episode 82 of The Action Catalyst.
You talk about the lies of productivity. Before we talk about what we want you to do, we often say, what do we have to get out of your head? And in this book, we call those the lies. And the first lie, which we felt like was the number one, was this idea that everything matters equally. And I actually don't think people argue that or express it, but it's back that way.
And it's because our to-do lists are too full. Our calendars are kind of overflowing. I've had moments in my life where I was literally mapping out my days in 15 minute increments. And there are a lot of people who feel that way. We have a lot of opportunity to do stuff and we have a lot of obligation. And I kind of compared the way we operate
with so many things kind of stressing us out, the need to do them all, to like being a character in a B-horror movie that runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. We make really bad decisions on how to spend our time. And so the antidote to that, that first lie, was essentially, you know, we want you to launch your days by identifying the things that you could do
and then identify the handful that you really should do and then prioritize them from one to whatever. So that's lie number one. The second lie, people have a lot, they're looking at all the things they might have to do. The other thing they're really tempted in this day and age to do is multitask. And we make a strong argument that multitasking is a lie.
In reality, when we think we're multitasking, researchers call it switch tasking. If they call anything in their research multitasking, it's just in the headline so they can get it in print. But they call it switch tasking because what actually happens is we're doing our work and then we decide to switch. And that's instantaneous. It's like squirrel, boom, we're off to the next thing.
The thing that they realized challenged us is when you switch tasks, your brain has to reorient to the new rules of the game. And there's a lag. And researchers believe about a quarter of our day, 28% is lost to this. And we're not even aware of it. So the next two lies are discipline life is a lie, and then willpower is always on will call is a lie. And we tried to break out two things.
Discipline, one of the meanings for it, is training yourself to do something until it's habitual. But if you know what your one thing is, the very next thing you would want to do is make it a habit. Because if that became habitual, you work to build the habit, and then the habit would work for you. And kind of the big aha we had here was,
was that when we looked at the research, like how long does it actually take to form a habit, most people conventionally believe it takes either 21 or 30 days. But the most recent research we found, they had asked, I think, over 200 graduate students to take on a new health habit, anything from drinking eight glasses of water to quitting smoking, whatever they wanted.
And for a year, they followed them around and said, did you do it, yes or no? And how hard was it every single day? And what they discovered is that on average, around 66 days is when it got as easy as it was ever going to get. So it takes us about three times as long as most people think to form a habit, even on average. We want to at least keep our foot on that pedal, right, for that long.
And so that was the discipline thing. So clarify the willpower part. So then what's the distinction? What would you call willpower? So we dove into the science of how we say yes to what we need to do and how we say no to everything else. But the researchers, the scientists, right, the guys in the lab coats, we're calling it willpower.
And they define that as the power to say yes to what you need to do and no to everything else. And both of those literally take energy out of your system. Your brain is 1 50th of your body mass, and it takes up 1 5th of all of the energy you consume. It's the hungriest organ in your body after the liver. And so literally, if you make a decision,
You know, I am wearing black shoes today and a black tie. That little tiny decision, they can measure the glucose in your bloodstream will drop. But there's things that require a lot more power. Like I'm going to focus on this task. I'm not going to go play on Twitter. I'm going to focus on my work. I'm not going to go hang out by the coffee machine.
Saying no to those temptations or saying yes actually uses a lot of energy. So for us, our big I highs, you tend to have the most in the morning and you can replenish it by eating properly. So we tell you, give willpower the time of day. and feed it.