为重要的事腾出时间 | Jake Knapp 和 John Zeratsky(《Make Time》作者,Character VC)
Making time for what matters | Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky (Authors of Make Time, Character VC)
Your Daily Highlight
Jake Knapp: It’s not really about productivity, it’s not about time management. It’s really just about, look, at any given day, we’re lucky if we can have one great moment where we have our peak attention and we use it well. And it’s not going to happen every day, but if we have some intention around it, it can happen more often than not. The notion with the highlight is imagine it’s the end of the day if someone asks you, “What was the highlight of your day,” what would you say? That’s the anchor of everything. That’s the core, that’s the foundation. Things can sometimes be a mess outside of that, and you still feel really good about your days. You still feel really good about the way you’re spending your energy.
Recording the Audiobook
Lenny: Today, I’ve got two guests, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. Jake and John are authors of two incredible books, Sprint and Make Time. With Sprint, they’ve helped more than 300 teams design new products and bring them to market, including teams at YouTube, Slack, Gusto and One Medical. Previously, John and Jake worked at Google Ventures, and before that, at Google, where John was a leader on Google Ads and YouTube. And Jake helped build Gmail and co-founded Google Meet. Today, they run a venture capital firm called Character, and they actually just opened up applications for their accelerator program called Character Labs, which you can learn more about at character.vc/labs.
In our conversation, we focus on their more recent book, Make Time, which a guest of this podcast, Ben Williams, recommended in the lightning round, and I absolutely loved and wanted to make sure more people learned about it and the advice within it, especially product leaders and founders who are constantly looking for ways to be more productive. I want to get you right to the meat of the conversation. So, let me just say that we get into a ton of very practical pieces of advice for how you can be more productive in your day, and if you listen to this episode, I guarantee you’ll find at least three things that you’ll want to start doing differently starting tomorrow. With that, I bring you Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky after a short word from our sponsors.
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Jake and John, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Jake Knapp: Thanks for having us. We’re so stoked to be here.
The Make Time Book
Lenny: I was just re-listening to the audiobook of Make Time to prep for this conversation. And I feel like I kind of know you guys from listening to your voice for so long in the car, and it’s a little surreal to be talking to you guys.
John Zeratsky: That was really fun to record. And while we were doing it, we kept saying to each other, it was like we were recording the world’s longest podcast.
Jake Knapp: That’s what it felt like.
The Productivity Trap
Lenny: Actually, on that, how long does it take to record audiobook? I’ve always been curious. How much time does that-
Jake Knapp: Well, it takes twice as long as it should have because my stomach kept growling and the microphone would pick it up. And so, John would do a perfect take and we’re both sitting in the little room together and the engineer was in the other room and he’d be like, “You got to do it again. You got to do it again. The guy’s stomach keeps growling.”
John Zeratsky: I think it took two days, right?
Jake Knapp: Yeah, I think it was two days. Yeah, and I think actually they thought it would take two days, so I don’t think my stomach slowed us down too much.
The Busy Treadmill and Infinity Pools
Lenny: That is not as long as I thought. I thought it was a month of recording and such a painful experience. Sounds like not so bad.
John Zeratsky: No, honestly, it was really fun. I mean it’s weird, but it’s just like, I don’t know, you can get into this very intense zone where you’re singularly focused, right? There’s nothing else that you need to do or should do, so it’s just like read, drink tea, read, break for lunch, read, drink tea. It’s just like this really satisfying flow.
Authors’ Personal Practices
Lenny: That sounds like a great few days.
Four-Step Framework Overview
Jake Knapp: Yeah, I think it was really fun doing it together too. I think it would’ve been harder to do… I mean obviously people do it and I think they like doing it on their own, but we’ve been working together for so long, it’s always more enjoyable when we get to do something together. So, that made it cool.
Laser Focus and Recharging
Lenny: Amazing. I want to do an audiobook now. That sounds like a lot of fun. So, to start diving into our conversation, so you guys wrote this very seminal book called Sprint, which we’re going to talk about. But you also wrote this other book that I have right here called Make Time, that to me was even more powerful and I think it might be even more powerful in people’s lives than Sprint. And I think it’s one of the most interesting and most fun productivity books out there. My wife actually grabbed the book from my desk the past week as I’ve been prepping for this, and just started highlighting it. You could see all these highlights in here. She just goes-
John Zeratsky: Awesome.
Jake Knapp: Oh, that’s so cool.
Why Highlights Work
Lenny: [inaudible 00:06:38] I want to be more productive. Also, a guest on the podcast introduced me to the book. At the end of the podcast, I’ll ask you this too, but I ask people, what book do they recommend most to other people? And he mentioned this book, and so that’s how I uncovered it. So, it all comes full circle.
Jake Knapp: That’s so cool.
Lenny: So, I thought we’d start with Make Time and then get to Sprint in the second half of the conversation. First question is just what do most people get wrong when they’re trying to become more productive?
Jake Knapp: To set the answer up, I’ll give you a super brief history of Make Time. And for over a decade, John and I have been, in quotes, designing time as part of our work with startups, helping them find or expand product market fit. So, we developed a design sprint at Google Ventures, which the Sprint book is about. And now, we run this venture fund of our own called Character. And we run these highly-structured sprints with companies. And when we’re doing that, we get to control how everything happens. We get to change the defaults of the way the workday happens, of what happens sort of hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute, how people are using technology, how people are interacting with each other. All those things are sort of under our control because we’re trying to achieve these big goals in a really short period of time. Everybody focused.
So, as this stuff was going on, John and I started applying some of the lessons, the things that we found were working really well in those structured sprints. We started experimenting with applying those in our own day-to-day lives, and we found that some of those things were super effective and they were a bit counter to the way we’d sort of heard or learned about productivity. And there’s all kinds of habit books and productivity hacks out there. And I think John and I have probably tried most of them, if not all of them. But it seems like 99% of the people who follow those things are still feeling overwhelmed, they’re still stressed out all the time anyway.
So, even though we are not productivity gurus, this hasn’t been like this thing we were doing forever, it’s not our full-time job, but we thought we want to share this framework. So, Make Time, the book and the blog that proceeded it was just kind this side project to share what we learned. And yeah, it seems like it is resonated with a bunch of people. There’s this kind of steady stream of interest in looking at these things a different way.
Lenny: I love it. I love that it emerged out of the sprint concept. I know you talked about the book, but I forgot that and these are all very related. I also love that a lot of the best stuff comes from people actually doing the thing. This came from, “I just have discovered all these little things and I’m just going to share it.” Not just like, “I need to write a productivity book.”
How to Choose Your Highlight
John Zeratsky: Yeah, I think, like Jake said, we both had always sort of been dissatisfied with the state of the productivity art, and we had big things we wanted to do. I mean, when you work in any kind of job, I mean we’ve both spent our early careers as designers and the job is really all about doing big projects. It’s all about being able to focus, being able to spend time on the things that matter. And that’s to say nothing of what we want outside of work, things that we want to learn how to do personally, people we want to spend time with. And it’s interesting, we’ve found that when we talk to people about Make Time, they always know. They always know what they want to make time for. The problem is not like what should my goal be or how should I figure out what to do with my life? They usually know, but it’s very hard to actually make time for those things.
And I think the problem is that most productivity advice focuses on getting better and faster about doing the things that are already in front of you. So, the messages that are in your inbox, the meetings that are on your calendar, a lot of focus on efficiency, like crank through that stuff. Our perspective is basically that those are the defaults. Just like our software that we use, apps that we use have defaults, those are the defaults of life, of the companies that we work in, the culture that we live in. And so, the solution is actually to change those defaults and to really flip this way of thinking on its head. So, it’s not about how do I go faster? How do I get more efficient? It’s about how do I put the thing that is the most important first in my day or in my life, and then build everything else around that and accept that you’re going to need to do a bunch of those little things. You’re going to need to answer those messages and go to those meetings, but really, start with the idea of what’s most important to you? What do you actually want to make time for?
Lenny: Along these same lines, we’re going to talk about this kind of four-part strategy that you recommend, but a couple of things before we get into there. One is along the lines you just talked about is this insight that you had of just like willpower is never going to be enough to get you to make time for the things you want to do. And you had these two concepts of busy bandwagon and infinity pools, so maybe just talk about those two briefly.
Jake Knapp: The idea of the busy bandwagon is just this expectation that everybody’s busy. And in the United States, there’s kind of this thing that I think if you travel abroad and talk to people for a while, then you come back, you’ll notice, which is like if you ask someone, “Hey, how’s it going? What are you up to?” And they’ll be like, “Oh man, I’m busy.” It’s kind of the default answer. “I’m busy. Things are busy.” And it means, usually, it could mean a variety of things, but usually it’s good. Like, “Oh, it’s busy, so business is booming,” or, “It’s busy, I’m overwhelmed,” or whatever. But busy, it’s kind of the expectations that everybody’s busy. And we are, I mean we are busy, but we call it the busy bandwagon because it feels like you should be busy. And it’s this inner feeling caused by what we see or perceive other people are doing that drives a lot of the stress. And I don’t mean to sound like I’m above it all and have figured it all out. It still drives my stress, this inner feeling that other people haven’t figured out, other people are expecting fast reactions from me, all this. That’s the busy bandwagon, this sort of feeling that I should be busy, that everyone else is busy. And what that does inside of us is really the core of what we have to change and figure out, this getting out of a reaction mode. The other thing that happens to us are the infinity pools. And John, do you want to describe what infinity pools are in our context?
Design Your Day With Calendars
John Zeratsky: Yeah, we came up with this name because we were trying to think of endlessly replenishing fount of content. So, basically if you can pull to refresh or if it streams, it’s an infinity pool. So, this is pure entertainment stuff. This is stuff that people say like, “Oh, I spend so much time on Instagram,” but it’s also stuff that’s important and necessary and productive. Email is a huge infinity pool and it’s probably the single hardest thing for the two of us to control and avoid getting sucked into. And anybody listening to this is going to, I think, understand how powerful those pools are and how effectively designed and engineered those products are to be really compelling and to be friction-free and to just make it easy for us to dive back into that pool.
And so, when you put these two things together, the busy bandwagon and the infinity pool, you kind of have this, it’s like a flywheel, but bad. You feel like you really need to be busy, you really need to be on top of everything. And then, you’ve got this whole collection of apps and services and products there that are ready to pounce on that, they’re ready to take advantage of that set of defaults, that cultural and internal set of defaults that you have about what you should be doing. And for a lot of people, it just sort of spins out of control. So, our view is if you can name those two things, if you can understand those two things, then you can start to deliberately change some of the defaults around them, so that you can put your most important projects, people, work first, like we talked about.
Choosing Today’s Highlight
Lenny: I’m guilty of both these things. I feel like the reason I do some of these chats, this one in particular is it’s like one-on-one coaching almost. This is going to help me stick to some of the things you teach. And I’ve already actually implemented a number of the things you recommend, but this is reinforcing it. And then, obviously, also helping all the listeners get better at these things. Before we get into it, one last question is just like real talk, how how’s your guys’ productivity? You wrote this book, it sounds amazing. There’s 87 I think pieces of advice. How is it going for you guys? As we go through, I want to hear what you’re actually using, but just broadly, how’s your productivity?
Jake Knapp: At the top of the interview, Lenny, you asked, “What do most people get wrong when they think about this productivity, time management, whatever?” And I’ll frame my answer in those terms. So, most people, I think they try to get better and faster at doing what’s right in front of them. We don’t change the defaults in our environment, so we can focus and spend time on these different more important things. And if you think of that sort of what do I want to do? What’s my goal? What do I want to spend time on that John referred to as project A, generally the things we want to do, these project A things, they’re big, they’re not easy to start, they’re slow to create, dopamine hits, they’re non-urgent. Like boss is not asking for them if you have a boss. And generally, the tasks and activities that stand in our way that keep us from doing project A, they’re small, they’re medium size, it’s obvious how to start them, they create dopamine right away, they’re supposedly urgent, email meetings, TikTok, Instagram, news, what’s on your OKRs, all these things.
And I know what’s on your OKRs may not sound like it’s a peer of those others, but in a way it really can be. So, these big things, they’re at odds with these little things that get in the way that the busy bandwagon expects us to do, these things that have infinity pools built in. And so for me, right now, it’s a constant battle between the Jake and the busy bandwagon and my inner feeling of how can I live up to people’s expectations of me and respond in the way that I should and react in the way that I should? And then, how can I do the project A stuff, the big important stuff? A lot has changed in my life since we wrote the book.
The summary is every few months I need a few new experiments. I have found in what has been some trying times that the tactics and the framework that we use… Because it’s kind of simple and it sort of fits with these experiences that I’ve had for many years doing sprints, that it works. And that if I can go back to that, that if I can create space for it, if I can think about this as it’s a series of experiments, if I can look at myself with curiosity and say, “Why are things not working out?” And then try to experiment my way out of it that I’m able to. But yeah, so at any given point in time, I probably give myself a B to B-, and sometimes it’s a C and sometimes it’s a D, and sometimes it’s an A, and I’m really plugging away, but it’s totally an ongoing challenge.
So, I’m not going to sit here and say, yeah, just follow me with a drone for 48 hours and you’ll think that’s exactly how you should do things. But part of our philosophy, I think that part of the way I look at it is it can be a mess. And yet, if you can create the space for those project A moments, for your highlights, that can shape everything else, if you just have those moments. Things can sometimes be a mess outside of that and you still feel really good about your days, you still feel really good about the way you’re spending your energy.
Three Ways to Find Highlights
John Zeratsky: And having a framework for it gives you a path back. If you’re just stuck and you’re looking… You’re sort of grasping for hacks. You’re sort of like, “Oh, I read this blog post about this thing, I’ll try it.” That might have some short-term effect, but ultimately, you’re probably not going to stick to it. You’re probably going to fall back into that place of overwhelm and disappointment and burnout. But we find that if you have a system, that you can use the system and you can return to it and continue to build on and experiment, that you can make more sustainable progress on these things.
Writing Down Your Highlight
Lenny: I think a really important takeaway from these two stories you guys just shared is you don’t have to do all of these things. You don’t even have to do most of them. If you just do one or two, if you find one or two things that can make you a little bit more productive every day, that makes a huge dent. And so, I think it’s okay to feel like, “Oh, I tried this stuff. It didn’t work.” I think as long as you take a couple of things away today that might be useful to you, and then just try them again in the future. If they end up not working out. Like you delete an app and then you reinstall it, I think that’s okay. So, I think that’s an important takeaway from this is don’t feel like you’re failing if you’re not doing all of the things that we’re talking about today.
But let’s get into it. There’s this kind of four-part framework for how to help yourself be more productive. Basically, if you could just give an overview and then we’ll just talk about each of these steps one by one. So, the four parts are create a highlight, laser, energize, and reflect. So, I’ll turn it over to you guys just broadly, and then let’s go through each of these one by one.
A Real Highlight Switch Story
Jake Knapp: It all starts with this notion of a highlight. And highlight is, I hate to say this, it’s the most powerful best part, I think of the whole process. And I hate to say that because John came up with it. It wasn’t even me. But I have to admit, it’s really good. And I think as folks have read the book and shared it, that’s the thing we hear back from people. If you could just do one thing from this book and try this out, it’s a big deal.
The notion what the highlight is, start your day out and you imagine it’s the end of the day, you’re looking back on the day. If someone asked you, “What was the highlight of your day,” what would you say? What do you want to say at the end of today was the highlight of today? And you start there, just like, “Okay, what would I like to say the highlight of the day was?” And you might think about what’s urgent. Sometimes the highlight is this thing that really has to happen today. Today is the day there’s a big meeting, or there’s this thing I absolutely have to get done for work for tomorrow. That could be your highlight and getting that done well, having good attention to that will be very satisfying.
But a lot of times the highlight comes from joy or satisfaction, projects that wouldn’t otherwise get attention. And it also doesn’t have to just be something at work. It could be people in your life that you want to spend time with, a hobby that you want to spend time on. If you want to get better at Mario Kart, having a good session at Mario Kart, whatever might be the highlight of your day. The notion is just in the morning to think, “What is it and what is that highlight going to be?” And then, try to find a block that’s 60 to 90 minutes. That’s just usually the rough time we think it takes to really get in the zone on something, do a really excellent job, be totally focused on it. So, that highlight, that’s the anchor of everything. That’s the core, that’s the foundation. And you start that way, you’re now trying to shape your time around that highlight, and making sure that you have your peak energy, your peak attention when the time for that highlight comes around.
So, laser is about the tactics you might need to actually focus on that thing. In highlight, we have a set of tactics for how to create and think about and frame that highlight. Laser, we have a set of tactics for how do you pay attention when that time comes? Then for energize, it’s about having the right amount of energy to do the thing, to pay attention. My highlight for today is trying to be coherent in this podcast, so this morning I need to think about what’s the best way for me to have peak energy when a podcast starts.
Lenny: That’s my highlight too, actually. I have [inaudible 00:23:10].
Learning to Accept Imperfection
Jake Knapp: Oh, good. Right on. Okay.
Thoughts on Parenting
Lenny: Record a great podcast episode.
Jake Knapp: Excellent, excellent. Okay. Yeah. And if you’re not watching on video, Lenny had a sticky note and he wrote it down. So, that’s actually literally the best way to do this is write it down on a sticky note, put it somewhere where you can see it. And so, you’ve got highlight, laser during the time of the highlight, energize, make sure you have the energy you need when the time comes. And these are just tactics around sleep and food and exercise, and just things that help with your mental energy, not crazy stuff. And then the final thing is reflect, and this is where we think about this as the scientific method. Did it work? Did what I tried today work out? And if not, just being curious about it, what didn’t? And adjusting and trying to think, “Okay, maybe there’s another tactic I can try.”
So, the book is like… What are there like 87 tactics in the book? There’s a lot of different approaches, but the expectation is not you’re going to use all of them. And the expectation is not that-
… expectation is not you’re going to use all of them. And the expectation is not that all of them will work for each person. I use different tactics than John does, and some of his don’t work for me, and vice versa. But that idea of centering on a thing, focusing on it, having tactics for that, having tactics for energy, and then having some tactics to reflect and reframe and be curious. That taken together, we find, just can reframe the way it feels. It’s not really about productivity. It’s not about time management. It’s really just about, look, in any given day, we’re lucky if we can have one great moment where we have our peak attention, and we use it well. And it’s not going to happen every day, but if we have some intention around it, it can happen more often than not.
Laser Mode: Staying Focused
Lenny: I think that last point is so important and why the highlight works so well for me is usually there’s… You don’t get anything amazingly done in a day, often. And usually, you’re just distracted by all these things, and you’re doing all the easy stuff. You talked about this idea of Project A, like here’s the thing I really want to get done, but the dopamine hit us so far in the future, and it’s so hard. And so, the reason I think the highlight is so powerful is, you get one thing done you’re proud of, that is a great day. And it may sound crazy that that’s true, but it’s so true.
Delete Phone Infinity Pools
Jake Knapp: Yeah, totally.
Lenny: So, I want to talk more in depth about each of these four things, and maybe spend the most time on the highlight and the laser because I think that’s where most of the impact comes from.
So, with the highlight, do you have any advice? You shared a couple examples of how to come up with like, “Here’s the thing to pick for the day.” There’s a few questions that you recommend, and I think you shared a couple of them. And then, are there any examples of highlights from your guys’, I don’t know, past couple of weeks that would be good for people to hear an example? And then, also, there’s this calendar component, which maybe fits into the laser, but I guess that feels like a really important element of this. So, if you just talk about that?
John Zeratsky: For me, and again, this is where the framework is intentionally flexible, different people have different highlights. But for me, I am very project oriented. I’m very work oriented. And for me, most days, a really good day comes from having made progress on something that is really important to me. So, my highlights are usually focused work, creative work related. And this has become even more important since we started our own VC firm three years ago. And before that, I was sort of, I guess, more or less a writer, full-time writing, and speaking at events, and doing some consulting. And before that, I was a partner at Google Ventures, at GV, and before that I was a product designer. So, I’ve been through different modes and contexts in my career. But if you know any VCs, if you’re listening to this and you know any VCs, they’re probably the busiest, most frazzled people that you know who are constantly on email, constantly in Zoom calls and meetings, and on airplanes all the time.
And so, the natural environment of that work is the busy bandwagon, and it’s to have a lot of infinity pools that you need to care about. And so, in that context, in order for us to make progress on projects, in order for us to move the ball on a launch related to this program, Character Labs, that we run with pre-seed founders that’s coming up, or we’re writing a new book, and that’s a big project, or working with one of our portfolio companies and running a sprint with them, or writing a newsletter that goes out to our LPs, those things are all really important, and I feel like they give us a unique edge as a VC firm.
If we accept the premise I said before, that most VCs are just sort of frantically running around, if we can take these bigger swings at things, then theoretically, they should really help us be successful. So, most of the time, it’s all a very long way of saying that most of the time my highlights are like, “What do I want to accomplish at work? What is the thing that I want to get done today?”
And so, what I do then is, I structure my calendar around making time for that. There’s a tactic in the book called Design Your Day that is really about kind of drawing out your day, and using your calendar as a canvas where you can design how you want to spend your time rather than using your calendar as a thing that is done to you, a thing that tells you what you have to do. Reclaim control over that.
And so, most days, the first half of the day before lunch is my focus time, and I protect that very, very intensely, and then use that time to work on whatever my highlight is.
Lenny: We had a previous guest on, Neer Eyal, also talking about productivity, and he had actually the same advice of just using your calendar as your to-do list, basically, because that’s where time’s going to go, what your calendar’s telling you to do. So, I think there’s a pattern here that I think people need to pay attention to.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I mean, we take it even further, and we have sort of a calendar template that we use as a team. So, we have certain times of the week. And it’s not exactly the same for all of us on the team, but there are certain times of the week where it’s like, yeah, this is when we do these kinds of things. This is when we have these kinds of meetings.
And not to say that those are all standing meetings, although we have some of those as well, but these are kind of the content buckets in the template that we can fill with a specific type of activity, but then other parts of the template are sort of reserved for focus work, reserved for individual, solo time to work on things that we need to get done.
So, yeah. I think the calendar is, at an individual level and especially at a team level, is this really powerful tool that most people just kind of… Not only do they not use it as a tool, they just sort of hate it. They’re sort of like, “Ugh, my calendar, it’s a mess. If I could live without a calendar, that would be the dream.” But I think if you can use some of these tactics or use other approaches to reclaim it, and use it proactively as a tool for yourself, it can really help you structure your time around the things that you care about.
Lenny: Yeah. The way I’ve been starting to use my calendar is this way, exactly, is I try to prepare for work on next week’s newsletter post for like an hour and a half, then prep for the podcast coming up in a few weeks. So, it’s very specific and broken up.
Along those lines, I often don’t do these things as I planned. And one of your principles, something around Groundhog Day, it’s okay to repeat it if you didn’t do it. If you highlight you didn’t do, just repeat it again and again until you do it. Right?
Infinity Pools Only Multiply
Jake Knapp: I think that what’s so cool about this notion of Groundhog Day. And if you’ve seen the movie… Well, if you haven’t seen the movie, see the movie. What a great movie.
Lenny: It was a good movie.
Understanding Attention Residue
Jake Knapp: If you’ve seen the movie, you know it’s like, not to give it away, but he gets better and better at doing the day, and that’s kind of this core philosophy that we take on.
I think a lot of the time, when in the past I have thought about, “How can I be effective with my time? How can I be productive?” It’s beating myself up. It’s not a good feeling to be in that head space of like, “I’m screwing up. What can I fix?”
And this notion that it’s like, you’re going to have another chance, you’re going to have another chance. “It’s okay, just try again, just be curious about what happened,” is a big deal. And starting with the calendar, using the calendar as a framework for saying, “Hey, here’s what actually happened. Here’s what I think is going to happen.” That’s what you’re saying when you do this Design your Day tactic.
And I did this exercise earlier this week. I was switching to a new calendar thing, and trying some new features with… We invest in this company called Reclaim, and they do this stuff-
Lenny: I’m an investor in Reclaim also.
Deleting Apps Is No Big Deal
Jake Knapp: Oh, well.
Lenny: How about that? Not planned, this promotion.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, little [inaudible 00:32:36] there.
Separating TV and Phone
John Zeratsky: It sounds like we knew that, but we actually didn’t know that. I didn’t know that you-
Jake Knapp: We did not know that.
TikTok’s Proxy Filtering Strategy
Lenny: How about that?
Jake Knapp: That was just discovered. So anyway, I was just looking at my calendar, and I was like, you know what? I’m going to do what John does. When I wake up, I’m going to schedule when I exercise, when I eat breakfast. I’m going to schedule when I take a shower, everything, and block it all out. When I walk and feed the dogs, everything’s going to be on there, so that then I can have this idea, and when the day starts, I know there’s slots for all those things. And then I’ve found this week that what I thought happened, how long I thought those things take, was not how long they take. And so, set that thing to repeat every day and look at it, and then I’m like, “Oh, okay, interesting. That’s not what happened.”
Okay, so I can adjust it. I can adjust the template and be a bit more kind to myself about this part, be a bit more kind to myself about that part. Gosh, the morning time wasn’t a good focus time for me. I’ll see if I can… Is there a way I can make that block happen in the afternoon? It’s just a helpful way to track stuff and see it.
Especially, I think a lot of people are visual learners. We can benefit from seeing things. It’s not everybody, but a lot of us are in that camp. And when you put it on the calendar, you can see it, and that helps a lot.
Email and Messaging Strategies
Lenny: And also keeps someone else from booking that time. Double win.
Disconnecting From the Internet
Jake Knapp: Not to be undervalued, keeps someone else from booking that time. Right. And they look, they see, oh, okay, Lenny’s already got stuff going on. I figured out, okay, I better be cautious before I ask for something. And that default, to be helpful to other people, and say yes when they put something on a free spot on your calendar, defeats a lot of our inner purposes.
And one core idea I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet is that we strongly believe in people’s intuition about how they should spend their time if they have the chance. What really is important. And that is true. We’re talking about running this VC fund, or writing books, which are obviously very like, well, we’re in charge of those things.
But this is also true, we’ve been employees in big organizations, I also believe it’s true that if you have a boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss, that you have great insight about what, if you had a window of time, would be the highest leverage thing for you to do. And it might not show up on your OKRs, it might not be on your boss’s radar, your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s radar. You have great intuition, and we want to create space for you to do that thing because you’re going to feel better about it, you’re going to be more satisfied, and also good things are going to happen.
Energy and Reflection
Lenny: We’re spending a lot of time on this highlight, but I think it’s because it’s so powerful. It’s such a simple idea, but so effective. So, just to kind of give people tactical advice for how to actually implement this, just a couple things that I’ll summarize.
One is, to pick the highlight, you had a couple of questions I have here, for how to help you pick one for the day. So, you either ask which highlight will bring you the most satisfaction? Or, when I reflect on today, what will bring me the most joy? Maybe that’s the same question. But I-
Jake Knapp: Slightly different, slightly different.
Lenny: Slightly different. That’s true. Okay, good.
Jake Knapp: Satisfaction could be like, “I know this thing has to get done, and I got it done.”
Lenny: Good point.
Jake Knapp: Joy could be like, “Man, that was great.” And they’re in the same family, but they’re cousins.
Lenny: Great point, great point.
Energy: The Mind-Body Connection
John Zeratsky: Yeah. And I mentioned, a lot of my highlights, personally, are very much in the urgency or satisfaction camp. They’re these big chunky projects. I got it done. I finished that deck. I finished writing that thing.
But I also try to stay attuned to when I need something else in my day, when I need… I need some joy. I need some fun, some play. I need to prioritize going for a run, or going for a walk, or cooking a big dinner. And so, I trust my gut on those things, and I say, “Okay, what’s most important to me today is not to be productive, but to do something else.”
And sometimes that’s the best highlight for me. For other people, maybe that’s their highlight every single day. Maybe they work as a… I don’t know, I’ve talked to a lot of people who work in healthcare settings about this. They’re a nurse or a doctor, and when they’re at work, they’re at work. They’re not bouncing around between meetings and emails and Zooms. They’re on their feet. There’s no time to do anything else. So, their highlight is probably something they need to do at the end of the day to unwind, or take care of themselves.
So, you have these three different strategies that we talk about, urgency, satisfaction, and joy, as being three different places you can look for the right highlight for you each day. But ultimately, I think it comes down to just trusting your gut and sort of asking yourself, like you said, “What do I want to look back on and have said, yeah, I’m glad I made time for that”?
Lenny: Awesome. So, you touched on the third. So, it’s basically, what would give you the most satisfaction? So, in the morning, you essentially ask, or the night before. I think one of you, I forget, because when I was listening to the audiobook, I don’t know who’s talking. But one of you is like, “I like to do it the day before.” Is that right?
John Zeratsky: Yeah, that’s me.
Lenny: Okay. Okay.
Reflection: Maintaining Daily Curiosity
Jake Knapp: That’s John talking.
Introduction to the Sprint
Lenny: Okay. So, the questions you asked either the night before or in the morning are, “What would give me the most satisfaction today, or the next day? What would give me the most joy? Or what’s the most pressing thing that I need to get done?”
So, you do that, and then the advice is either write it on a Post-It… I actually bought these tiny little Post-Its by accident. I was trying to buy regular Post-Its, and they’re actually really great for this specific use case, so it’s perfect. Write your highlight, stick it on the monitor.
So, that’s one way of doing it. The other is stick it in your calendar, where you have focus time. In theory, it’s like every day, here’s my focus time, where you have the most energy. Is that the general advice?
John Zeratsky: Generally, although I think that that’s probably more important for a certain kind of highlight. I have focused time most mornings. To be really specific and nerdy about it, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings I have focus time. Tuesday and Friday mornings I have meetings. But on a Thursday night, my highlight might actually be to have friends over and cook dinner. And that’s not the same as focus time, but it’s this pressure release valve where I’m like, “That’s the thing that I want to make sure…” I want to make sure I wrap up email at 5 so that have time to get everything ready, but it’s not necessarily that peak energy moment in the way that we might think about being productive or getting things done or getting into that flow state.
Sprint Origins and Philosophy
Jake Knapp: Awesome.
How to Start Sprinting
Lenny: So, there’s a lot of ways to do it. So, maybe you just take away, if you’re listening to this, is just think about what could be your highlight for today or tomorrow?
John Zeratsky: Yeah. And I would say, go one step further and make sure to write it down. Don’t just think about it, because there’s something really special that happens when you write things down, even if it’s on a sticky. Even if it’s in your notebook, your journal, even if it’s a note on your phone. Take that step as well.
Jake Knapp: Even if you don’t see it again, just writing it down is a big deal.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, that’s a really important point.
Jake Knapp: I can give you a concrete example of a highlight, and a failed highlight, from yesterday, actually. And so, most days these days, my highlight is around making progress on the book. John alluded to working on a book, and so obviously it’s a huge project. I heard it said that if you are writing books, it’s like having homework forever. You always feel like there’s always more to do. And so, that’s mostly been my highlight.
But yesterday, I wanted to prepare for this podcast. I knew that was going to be satisfying, to feel like I was ready. We don’t think about talking about Make Time all the time, like we said, it’s sort of like a side project for us. So, I wanted to be ready and somewhat coherent. And I knew I’d be satisfied, but I also knew it was urgent. We’re going to be doing the recording today. So, that was my highlight. Write that down. “Get ready for podcast.”
And I had two focus blocks, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. It should be easy. Focus block number one, kind of just didn’t do a good job. I was distracted, I was in my email, I was doing everything that I would say you shouldn’t do, I was doing. Feeling down on myself. I’ve become a loser. I didn’t get anything done.
Okay, second focus block. Man, now the pressure’s on. I got to do it. And so, I finally get into the zone. And my wife thinks I have a pretty serious case of undiagnosed ADHD, so a lot of it is just, if I really do have a deadline, then I really will click in. So, now I have a deadline. I’m doing it, and I’m making notes, and getting there, but I feel like there’s still a ways to go.
And my 12-year-old son bursts into the room, and it was, “Oh gosh, you’re invading me right when I’m at peak focus.” And he is like, “Hey, I’m going to do one more trip outside to sled in the snow. Do you want to come?” And I’m like, first reaction, “No, absolutely not. I can get this thing done. It’s my highlight. This is the one thing I need to do today. I can do it max level of quality if I can just stay in this precious zone of focus.”
But then I was like, “Wait a second, what’s really going to be the highlight of my day? What’s really going to be the highlight, the thing that I might actually remember in the future?” We rarely get snow here. I live on this island in Washington state. We maybe get significant snowfall once every two years. We’ve only lived here for a few years. He’s 12. He loves snow more than anything in the world. He loves snow. But he grew up in California, so he hasn’t had many days, and he’s 12. He’s on the cusp of being a teenager. There’s not, maybe, any more days in his life that he’s going to want me to get on the sled with him and wrap my arms around him and go down the hill.
I was like, “I got to get out there.” So, okay. Pause this, ran outside. We did it. And man, it was magical. And I didn’t know we were going to get one more in, because the snow was supposed to be melting already. We went down the hill, we went down the hill, we went… It got dark, we had to stop. But it was so magic. And I remember the very last end of the sled run, and it’s like the last one, and he’s like, “Man,” he’s like, “That was a great last sled run. So glad we did it.”
And I was like, “Yeah, so glad we did it. It’s great.” Come back inside, 15 minutes. I try to hustle and get this done. So, I was like, maybe it was like 80% or 75% to where I wanted to be on this. I couldn’t check off that highlight as being the most important thing. But because of the framing of, it might be wrong, what am I going to remember, all this stuff, it just felt natural to me to switch modes and say, “Oh my god, that actually is a highlight. That’s this thing that’s going to be really, really precious. That’s where the joy and the satisfaction are most for today.”
And still, because I had written down the other thing, I still did it instead of churning on email the entire day. But I screwed up twice, but it still turned out pretty good. So, anyway, that’s kind of what it can look like at its best. And a lot of times, it doesn’t make that much sense, and a lot of times I miss the special moments, or I miss the key work moments, or the key time when I could have gotten the most done. But I just feel better about it, which is a lot of what this is about. I just feel better about it because I feel more intentional.
Teams Suited for Character Labs
Lenny: Well, thank you for sharing the real talk. I think you made the right choice. I feel bad for having you have to decide between your kid and this podcast.
Jake Knapp: You didn’t have anything to do with it. No, no, no. I just wanted to… It’s selfish for me to want to be prepared. I just want to look good. I just want to sound like I know what I’m talking about.
Lenny: Well, it’s working out. It all worked out. That’s a great story. It reminds me, in your book at some point, I forget who it was of you that had to… You’re like, “Here’s my priorities in my life right now.” And it was like family, writing, Make Time, something else, and then you’re like, “Okay, actually Make Time is more important right now than my family,” because you just have to get this done, and I wonder if this is a counter.
Jake Knapp: Well, yeah. I mean, I think that part of what people have found useful about Make Time is that John and I come at this from different perspectives. And I have kids. I have a twelve-year-old and a twenty-year-old, sons, and dealing with being a dad is a big part of how I try to figure out how to make sense of what to do.
And John doesn’t have kids, and so he has it easy. No, he doesn’t, but that’s just a different frame of mind. And I think sometimes I read something that people without kids wrote, and I think, “Well yeah, sure. I am sure that’s wonderful for you, but what about X-Y-Z?”
And although, I’m sure a lot of people who have more kids, or when they have young kids, it would… But that’s a real part of it. And whether it’s your family, your significant other, anything that’s going on in your life that’s not part of your work, there are times when you, on a day, or in a moment, you have to shift those priorities. And it can help to just be this idea of stack-ranking things, and being clear about it, can help you just come to terms with it. “I’m making that decision right now. It makes sense to make right now.” Or at least, I can see that I did it, and if it seems like I screwed it up, I’d flip it back. I know where it happened.
A lot of this is just like if you were designing a product or writing code or whatever, you can see that’s where the bug happened. I’ll just try to fix that line.
Lenny: Yeah. I love how real you’re getting, and it also reminds me of… We just had a kid. He’s seven months old, so I’m going through a lot.
Jake Knapp: Oh, congratulations.
Lenny: Thank you.
Jake Knapp: That’s busy times. Seven months old is busy times.
Lenny: Yeah, that’s great.
Jake Knapp: People always told me, told us, when we had kids when they were babies. They’re always like, “Oh, just you wait.” I just feel like this is a thing that people want to tell other parents. “Just you wait until this happens.” And then one person said, “You know what? Generally speaking, it gets easier and easier and easier. Every month, every week, generally speaking, it gets easier.” And I think that is true, so just keep that in mind if you’re ever feeling like it’s overwhelming.
Lenny: No, I think that is true. I’ve experienced that. It also gets more amazing. That’s what I’m finding, too.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, yeah.
Lenny:
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I want to talk about the next bucket that, you call it laser, you could also think of it as just how to focus better, and this is where most of the very tactical tips for how to avoid getting distracted are. So what I think might be helpful here is let’s just do a rapid fire through as your favorite tactical tips to help people stay focused, and the ones that you actually do and find most helpful, I think it’s like six years later now since you published the book, the better. So let’s go through some stuff here.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, the basic principle with laser is that willpower is never going to win, and there’s great research on this, but for now just trust me, you’re not going to white-knuckle your way through not looking at Twitter when you’re trying to work. So it’s all about making it hard, creating barriers to getting distracted. So a few things for me, I’m not on Instagram and I’m not on Facebook. I was on both of those things and I left both of them, I disabled my accounts. I am on Twitter and LinkedIn, but I don’t have either of those apps installed on my phone. I stay logged out of those sites on my computer, except for when I want to use them for some specific purpose.
LinkedIn I need to use all the time, because I’m a VC and I have to look people up and stuff, so I found this Chrome plugin, or Chrome extension, I guess is the right word, that disables the feed in LinkedIn. So when I go to LinkedIn.com, it’s the search bar at the top but there’s no feed, which is amazing because I can use LinkedIn as the phone book and then not get distracted. So those are some of the very, very concrete specific things that I do, all, again, with the goal of putting a speed bump between me and that thing so that if I go, and I don’t do this much anymore but I used to, literally my hands on the keyboard would just be like, T-W-I, like Twitter.com, and then you see that log in screen instead of my juicy feed and I’m like, oh yeah, right, okay, I did that on purpose, great, I broke that feedback loop a little bit.
Lenny: I did a similar thing with Twitter/X, where I deleted the app and I just used the mobile website. I think this point of logging out is really powerful, I think people haven’t heard that idea as much, because it’s not like you can’t log in really easily, you just click a couple things and you’re back. But to your point, it reminds you, okay, I see, I really shouldn’t have done this.
John Zeratsky: Well, I also signed up for two-factor authentication for everything, not because I care about somebody hacking my account, but because it’s another speed bump. Because that way, even if your browser remembers your password, or I use one password, so even if the browser extension is going to fill it in for me, there’s still another step, so it’s sort of reverse engineering my own distractibility.
Lenny: That feature that everyone’s always talking about that Apple built of the code being automatically there in the keyboard, that’s counter to this friction that you’ve created.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
Lenny: Okay, so it’s interesting is I had this, and then I just like, goddammit I really just want to be on Twitter. And so I just re-installed it again recently, and I need to fight that again.
John Zeratsky: Well, I go through cycles like that too, and I go through that a lot with email. Jake, you still don’t have email on your phone, is that right?
Jake Knapp: No, I would be on the floor checking email right now on this call if I did, on the floor.
John Zeratsky: I used to do that, Jake inspired me a long time ago to remove email from my phone, and so for years and years that’s been my default. But more recently I’ve had more reasons to install it, mostly related to travel, if I’m on the go and I just want to stay on top of things. And something that Jake and I have talked about a lot is you go through these different cycles of, hey, I need this thing, or I want this thing, and then part of the reflect step, part of paying attention and reflecting on how it’s going is to recognize, oh wow, I’ve actually been spending a lot of time on email on my phone, or a lot of time on Twitter, maybe I’ll just uninstall it for a while. Maybe I’ll just reset and do that for a while. And then there’ll be some other thing that happens that causes you to reinstall it, and that’s totally fine, because you’re being deliberate about it and you’re paying attention, rather than saying it has to always be this way forever and it’s set in stone.
Lenny: That’s a great tip of just coming back to it, not feeling like you’re defeated, it’s like, all right, let’s try this again.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, I think a big part of it is if you can experience the feeling of not having it on your phone. Like I’m old enough to have lived in a world building products where there were no smartphones, and we got a lot done back then, things happened. I mean, for God’s sake, they designed the first iPhone without being able to use iPhones while they did it, you can do a lot. So this idea that we have to have it or everything’s going to fall apart, that’s just not true for 99.99999% of everyone.
It’s interesting to see what it feels like if you delete all of the infinity pools off of your phone, and this is something I did out of rage at myself in 2012. It was another situation where I was with my kids, who were much younger at the time, and I was spending time with them, we’re playing wooden trains, and all of a sudden my son’s like, “Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad,” and I’m like, “God, what?” And I didn’t even realize it but I was on my phone, and I don’t even remember what I was doing, email or something, but I think I told him, he’s like, “What’s on your phone?” Because to him, he was like, we’re doing something really fun, so if you’re on your phone it must be something really cool, maybe it would be a cool thing to share, because this is great, so it must be another great thing. He wasn’t trying to shame me or anything.
And I was all defensive, I’m like, “Well, I need to do this for work,” which was, I think, my internal monologue of why I was doing this thing that actually was just a really low-friction dopamine hit. And then I thought, God, this is not what I wanted, this is not why I worked so hard today so I would get done with my work so I could be home in time to do this before my kids go to bed. And I was like, screw this, so I just started deleting things on my phone, and I deleted email and I deleted Facebook and I deleted this, everything that had an infinity pool, everything that had an infinite amount of content. News is like this, anything streaming.
When we wrote this book, it came out in 2018, I think we said we thought it was going to get worse, and it has. But at that point in time there was really Netflix, and now there’s all these streaming services. At that point in time there was Instagram and Facebook, but now there’s TikTok, the best part of every video available instantly right here. This stuff, it only gets harder to resist. When you clear all that stuff off of your phone, it’s painful, the idea of deleting all this stuff, and each time the phone’s going to ask you, “This is going to delete all the data and settings, are you sure you want to do that?” It doesn’t want you to. And when you do that though, what does that feel like? And it’s usually a feeling of discomfort, but also relief that I don’t have to check this, this thing, I don’t have to check it, I don’t have to.
And if you’ve ever felt like your phone was in the Lord of the Rings, how Bilbo, I guess, yeah, Lord of the Rings, they want to put their hand in their pocket and touch the ring, or put the ring on without even knowing it, Frodo’s like, “I didn’t even realize I did it.” That’s what this thing is like. And when you take those off, just that feeling of relief is, to me, so powerful, that having done this for a decade now, and yeah, there’s exceptions, like I’m traveling, God, I have to check my email for X reason, and I install it and I check it. And then it automatically, because I’m aware of it, I’ll just feel this static.
There’s this notion of attention residue, and I think the researcher who coined this term is Sophie Leroy from the University of Washington. Anyway, you can look that up, I think I learned about that from Cal Newport. But this idea says, it makes a lot of sense, that you pay attention to some things and they just stick in your head and they create this static, those apps just create this static. The idea of email being on my phone and accessible at any time creates a discomfort, a disquiet that now that I’ve seen it and felt what it’s like to not have it, I could not imagine experiencing it.
You do give some things up. You’re not going to be as responsive. John and I don’t have as many Twitter followers as we’d have if we used Twitter. There are these things that you look at other people, and I just saw a post on LinkedIn because I haven’t used plug-in yet, but I looked on this post and it was a colleague that I used to have and she was saying, “Yeah, I posted a few tweets last year and a couple of them went viral and I gained 30,000 followers.” And I was like, man, all I have is 30,000 followers, and that was from years and years ago, I thought I was a pretty big deal, oh jeez, maybe I should… And I was like, oh God, don’t do it, because I know when I’m doing it, then I’ll be thinking about it all the time and the attention residue will spoil my life.
So yeah, anyway, sorry, that’s just a rant, but you should try it. The distraction-free phone thing is just worth trying, if you can take off everything, if not just try taking off the thing that’s your kryptonite. What’s the thing that is the hardest for you to resist, sucks your attention the most, makes you feel not good? Take it off for, try it for a day, or try it for two hours, just to feel that feeling. And then once you’ve felt the feeling you’ll always know, I could release that, and I think that’s powerful.
Lenny: And I think when you delete it, it’s important to know nothing’s being deleted when you’re deleting the app, you can reinstall it, you log in, it’s all the same.
Jake Knapp: It’s all the same, that’s an important point. They make it sound like, oh my God, this is a big deal. It’s not.
Lenny: Yeah, just have to remember your password or Google auth, or whatever you’re using. This metaphor of The Lord of the Rings and the ring is so good for how it feels to just say, I’m just going to check Twitter, what’s the problem, I’m just going to check it again, I’ll just check it, check it. That’s so good. And then in Lord of the Rings, the way they resist the ring is they hide it, they put it somewhere else, they give it to Frodo to take it, right? That’s the same solution, it’s just like, I can’t get access to it, it’s over there.
Jake Knapp: Right, right. Yeah, you got to be like Gandalf. Even if that ring would do great things for you, you got to give it to Frodo for a while, maybe show up at the end with an eagle.
Lenny: Just too eerie, yeah, yeah, the eagle.
Jake Knapp: Scoop them up.
Lenny: Yeah, oh man. So the key tips here are find the apps that are sucking your attention, could be Twitter, could be LinkedIn, could be your email, and delete them and/or log out of them. What else?
John Zeratsky: There’s a few tactics that Jake and I both use that are related to TV, watching TV, and a really simple one, which is also kind of a luxury one, but I think there are ways to do it that are pretty universal, is just not having a TV in your main living space. Again, not having the default be like, I’m home, the TV is on, what are we watching? And so for me and my wife, that’s always been the TV is just in a different room. And Jake, do you use a projector where if you want to watch something you have to get it out, set it up, and make a decision to watch something?
Jake Knapp: Yeah, so it’s a bit of a project. And it doesn’t take that long, but you definitely are not just click, and you don’t see it when it’s not set up. So we have a projection screen that’s all folded up in the corner, and the projector’s in a cabinet, so you got to get it out and get a chair and put it on there. If you’re motivated enough you can do it, but it takes a few minutes.
Lenny: You need an old-timey camera that you have to wind.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, right.
Lenny: Someone has to sit there.
John Zeratsky: Here’s another one that-
Jake Knapp: [inaudible 01:00:13] in the back.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, right. Another one that’s really helpful for me that actually is sort of a bridge is the laser section and the energized section, because it relates to sleep, is I don’t keep my phone in the bedroom. The phone doesn’t come in the bedroom. And not only that, the place where it charges, the MagSafe little charging place for it, is downstairs. It’s on a different floor, it’s in the kitchen. So when I put that there at the end of the night and I go upstairs, I might still be awake for an hour, I might read, I might get ready for bed, all those things, but the phone is a way to make sure that the last thing I do each day is not on my phone. That’s super helpful to me, and I think there’s a bunch of ways, whether it’s in a drawer or in a cabinet, there’s a bunch of ways you can implement that tactic that I think could make a big difference.
Lenny: My wife and I have been talking about that actually, but the issue is to watch our kid with the Nanit app we need our phone. I know that you can get other devices that aren’t on the phone, but we just like the Nanit, and so we’ve stuck with that.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, one tactic that’s related to that that a lot of people have told us they’ve had success with, and not specifically with the Nanit app, but some people have said, “Oh, I can’t uninstall those apps because,” Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever, “because I do social media for my work. Literally my job is I do marketing at the company, I have to be on social media.” So what some people will do is they’ll have a separate device. So it’s almost like the old days of your personal phone and your work phone, they’ll just have a work device, like a work iPad, that those apps are only there, and when they’re working they’re on it, when they’re not working they put it away. So you could have another device that’s the Nanit device and that’s all it does and it’s in a nice little stand by the bed, that can create some separation as well.
Lenny: That’s a great idea. I think there’s a company, I think it was Arianna Huffington made a thing where it’s a little bed for your phone, where you put it somewhere in the living room and you put it to bed and you charge it there and it’s outside your room.
John Zeratsky: Yeah. There’s a company, I can’t think of the name right now, but I can look it up and send it to you, there’s a company that makes a cool box that not only you put your phone in, it charges, but it has some sort of way of, it interacts with the phone, it puts it into Do Not Disturb, or there’s some cool integration that it does. So yeah, those things are a little bit gimmicky, but if it helps you create that default, I think it’s worth it.
Lenny: Here’s the trick my wife wanted to share with you guys as she was reading the book, she’s like, “Tell them about this thing that we’ve been doing,” which is with TikTok. She doesn’t install the app, and she basically relies on me to send her TikTok videos I like to her account, which she then checks on my phone.
Jake Knapp: You’re Frodo.
Lenny: Yeah, yeah, I’m holding the TikTok, my precious. And so the trick there, there’s two wins, one is she only sees the best stuff. She respects my taste of videos to watch. And then two is I’m always like, “Give me my phone back,” and so there’s limited time where she can watch them, and that keeps her from getting addicted to TikTok.
John Zeratsky: Yeah. My wife and I have a similar dynamic, but in reverse and with news. I spend very little time reading the news, and I don’t have any news apps on my phone, but my wife’s pretty into the news. She has a healthcare background and she studied journalism in school, so she loves particularly those two topics in the intersection of those two. And so she gives me a news digest. When we’re chatting at the end of the day, or when we’re doing something together, she’ll just, it’s not structured, it’s not some official thing, but she just shares what she was reading about that day. It’s nice, it gives us something to talk about, I think it suits both of our styles and our preferences. It’s good for her, it’s good for me, so it’s fun to think about how you can implement some of these ideas in a relationship as well.
Lenny: How do I subscribe to this feed of your wife sharing the news every day? It sounds like a great podcast we all need.
Jake Knapp: Really, really good stuff, or really important stuff, will find us. I think there is, part of the busy bandwagon, or part of the infinity pools thing, is this feeling inside that I’m responsible for staying up to date with the most important news in the world, or the most important news in my inbox, or my company or my team, work, and I’m responsible also for getting the very best of entertainment that’s out at this moment that’s the most topical and the funniest, or the most interesting, whatever, at this moment.
And it’s okay to let go of that and, the good stuff, it’ll come to you. People will share it with you or you’ll hear about it. If it’s a really big news story, you’ll hear about it eventually. If it’s going to affect you, actually, you’ll hear about it. And with most news, and most entertainment, we don’t play a role, it’s hard to admit, but we don’t actually play a role in what happens, and so the idea that we’re responsible for being on it all the time, that’s a job that we can quit, or at least take a sabbatical from.
Lenny: So Tim Ferriss talked about this in The 4-Hour Workweek, is way back in the day is just like, I wait for people to tell me what I need to know, exactly what John just shared before this, and I find this with, so first of all you find that when you delete Twitter, LinkedIn, you go week without it, and nothing is any different. You still know everything you need to know, your job, everything’s going great. You missed a bunch of stuff that had no impact on your life. And so I think doing that exercise helps you realize that and I don’t need to be on Twitter all the time.
And not to get political, but with news about Trump, there’s always these headlines, “Trump, look what he did in this lawsuit today, it’s over.” I just feel like there’s so many posts about all these things Trump is doing every day, and none of them, nothing happens. It’s just the same thing, just keeps going. If something actually happened there I would hear it from a lot of people, the New York Times would send me a big push. So it’s like, I don’t need to know all these things he’s doing every day.
Jake Knapp: Well, it doesn’t matter what your political affiliation is, that is true. Trump is always going to be in the news, and it’s always going to, that’s the constant, that’s the third constant, death, taxes, and Trump will be in the news.
John Zeratsky: A related tactic that I’ve been doing for a long time is my main source of news is the Economist magazine, which is far too highbrow for what I need, but the main feature of it is that it’s weekly, because at the end of the week, the zillion stories about Trump, or whatever, if there was something of consequence, it gets distilled into this really good summary. Really, really good. The Economist has some of the best journalists in the world, they’re just absolutely fantastic, and so not only does it have this really nice cadence of once a week, if something matters it’s going to get rolled up there, it’s going to get summarized. And so that’s one of my most durable habits related to these tactics, is reading the news once a week, reading the Economist. It fits my brain, it fits my life rhythm really well.
Lenny: Yeah, it’s the opposite of Twitter, basically.
John Zeratsky: Yeah.
Lenny: So yeah, let’s hear a couple more tactics and then let’s touch on the other two parts of this framework.
Jake Knapp: Well, first a pairing, and then one more. The pairing is reset expectations and slow your inbox. So these are two tactics related mostly to the email and messaging. So resetting expectations is just about having maybe a conversation with people you work with, but it can be as simple as a signature in your email. And so one great example of this is a signature that says, I’m checking email two times a day as an experiment to improve my focus, or I’m checking email once or twice a day, you decide how spicy you want to get with this option, because I’m working on an important project. And just a simple line that people will see passively as you send emails that will reset their expectations of how quickly you’ll respond. And if you like you can say, I’m checking email once a day because I’m working on a big project, you can text me if it’s urgent. Feel free to text me, you can invite people to do so.
But that very act of just putting it in there, you can also do it as an out of office autoresponder, so just like, hey, instead of I’m actually out of the office like, hey, I’m going to be slow to respond to email because I’m working on an important project. That because is really important, and we talk in the book about this, a funny study about the power of because and this case where people would make up bogus excuses, but they’d say, “Because to cut a line,” it’s an old study, they’re making photocopies, but they would cut the line and say, “I need to cut the line because I need to make copies.” And just saying because dramatically boosted the percentage of the time that a person would let them cut the line. We’re suckers for explanations, all of us. So if you say because people will feel better, and you can feel better about saying it.
But this idea that you’re just going to put up a placard, basically, that says, hey, I’m slow to respond because I’m working on a project, and maybe give people an escalation path, or don’t, that’s a huge deal. And it seems like it would be a huge deal because it changes others expectations, and that is true. But the real power of it is in changing our own expectations about what we are going to do and what we are expected to do. Most of the stress comes internally, from our feeling that if we don’t get back to people right away, we’re not enough, we’re not measuring up, we feel some kind of shame or guilt about not doing it and not being fast and not being responsive. And so doing this statement is just about renegotiating with ourselves.
The other one is to slow down your inbox. This is a simple one, if you start to do that, if you start to just check your email once or twice a day, or even less frequently, or even if you check it a little bit more frequently but you aren’t responding to emails, you don’t hold yourself accountable to this idea of an empty inbox, then the whole loop slows down. If you respond to emails really fast, you respond to messages really fast, people respond back to you and then there’s more to respond to. And if you slow down that little hamster wheel, it slows down. And so that’s powerful too. So those two around email I think can be really helpful, they help me with this, my default feeling about email and messaging and everything is I should be as responsive as possible, and I have to constantly renegotiate that with myself, and those are ways I do it.
This other one that’s pretty extreme, that I only just tried for the first time, it’s in the book but I hadn’t actually tried it, but this was a reader of our blog told us about this. Her name is Krissa, I think she allowed us to use her first name but not her last name. So Krissa, if you’re listening, shout out to you, this turned out to be a great tactic, but it’s to cancel the internet. And she had canceled the internet at home, which is wild. But what I did was I have an office, a very small office in this small town here where I live, and-
Small office in this small town here where I live and I canceled the internet there so that I could, when I went there, all I can do are tasks that you can’t do with the internet, which is a lot. I mean, you can use a lot of apps in offline mode and it’s a great place for me to write. It’s a great place for me to do focus work, design something, presentation, but any kind of focused thinking, reading, writing can happen there and now the whole feeling of stepping into that room where I cannot access the internet is insane.
To create this kind of a thing at home, you can do things like put a timer on your internet. You can actually buy one of those vacation timers, plug it into the wall, plug your router into that, and it will actually switch your internet off at a certain hour or hours. There’s also software that’ll let you do this selectively, but the big notion of just having there be a time when you are off and it’s a fairly significant pain to get back on again, it’s more than just clicking wifi on, wifi off. I find for me that’s not enough of a speed bump. It’s pretty powerful.
Lenny: Just the way you’re describing the feeling of walking into an office that has no internet, I totally feel that. Just imagine, just like, “I have no internet here. I could do so many things. I could read.”
Jake Knapp: It might be a coffee shop where you don’t find out what the wifi password is and there’s just this amazing, amazing feeling. Maybe it’s just you go to a park where there’s no wifi, just whatever it might be, finding a place where you can’t, you just can’t get that stuff. Leave your phone at home if you can’t bear to delete all the apps. It’s so great. It’s so great. And then you’re not fighting the battle.
A lot of this stuff, there’s a visualization I think of where I’ve got the highlight in front of me. It’s right there. This thing I can see that I want to do, but it’s like five feet away or 10 feet away, and right next to me just kind of vibrating are all of the… You can imagine all the app logos, they’re just kind of vibrating right around my head.
They’re right there and touching any one of them, it’s like they’re little pieces of candy. It’s all going to feel good. There’s this really good meal, five to 10 feet away is this great sandwich, but these little pieces of candy are right in my face and it’s going to be hard to resist just popping a little Sour Patch Kid or Laffy Taffy in my mouth, but if I could push them away, if I can just push them far enough away so that there is far away or farther away than the sandwich, I’m going to eat the sandwich. And Mike, if that’s what you do basically with these barriers to these distractions, then you can get into laser mode and it’s easy. You want to. Once there’s space, you’ll want to do the thing that’s most important. It’s just it’s hard because the candy is right in our face.
Lenny: Such a good metaphor. You also have this metaphor of Odysseus sailing past the sirens. If folks know that story where there was a siren, I don’t know, cliff thing where he’s just sailing.
Jake Knapp: I know well, in eighth grade I played Odysseus in school play, so I can tell you all about it.
Lenny: Man, what a character to play. Yeah. And in that story, he wanted to experience these sirens who nobody could resist, but he forced his sailors to tie him to the ship and not allow him to do anything, even though he’s like, “Let me go. I need to go there.” Because everyone crashed into the sirens. Anyway, I’m doing a bad job explaining this story, but I think it just comes back to the same point again and again that you can’t rely on your willpower to not go towards these vibrating candies all around you that you need to set up these systems.
Jake Knapp: I think there’s this notion that we will use willpower maybe comes from the fact that some people can, maybe some people are just using willpower or they’re on Twitter, they’re on Instagram, they’re on TikTok, they’re on Facebook, they’re doing all these things, and they’re also functioning just fine, or at least what we see from the outside is just fine. But maybe internally too, it’s fine.
It just seems that everybody I actually talk to and certainly my personal experiences, all that stuff makes me feel bad and actually undercuts my ability to do the things that are meaningful. The meaningful contributions I can make through my work or through my life, whatever. They’re all undermined and undercut by the bad feelings and the distraction that come from all of social media, all of the news and almost all of my email. And so if that’s true for anybody, if it’s even remotely true for us, we have to just radically rethink what we’re doing.
This thing, I think we basically are steered toward becoming reaction machines and this notion of, “I’m going to have an empty inbox. I’m going to do every task. I’m going to be a fast responder, I’m going to be in every meeting. I’m going to do that because I want to help other people, and that’s the way it works.” I think this desire to be helpful is a big driver of it. I think we want to alleviate our stress and other people’s stress, and that seems like the right way to do it. It’s candy. Some of the stuff is candy and easy.
We also see this modeled by people in power, so like CEOs and bosses, it works for them because they’re applying their influence through being constantly reactive and being in meetings all the time. That’s just how they do what they do. That’s how they apply their influence. But even for them, I think it has limits as a way to apply influence. At the bare minimum for the rest of us. And for those of us who again, I think is the vast, vast majority for whom all of these things create problems and we’re not able to easily willpower and self-esteem manage all this stuff, if we’re a reaction machine, we’re not doing meaningful work, no Project A’s and we’re not really alive as humans. We’re just chat bots. So it’s worth experimenting if you don’t want to live your life out as a chatbot.
Lenny: I think the point you made there around the feeling is just a really important point that even if you feel really productive enough and you’re getting things done, is if you’re feeling bad, it’s still an important thing to focus on. This idea of, are you spending time on things you want to spend time on? You also reminded me of this app I’ll mention briefly that I think you guys will love, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. It’s called mailmanhq.com. It shuts off your Gmail for periods of time. So you could say, “Only allow my email through at these times of day.” And so instead of email whatever, it’s just like you can batch your release of email.
Jake Knapp: That’s beautiful. Mailman HQ?
Lenny: Mailman hq.com.
Jake Knapp: Okay, I’m writing that down right now.
Lenny: Yeah, I go on and off it because sometimes I just want on an email, but it makes a big difference. It’s wild how just not even knowing your email makes a big difference.
Jake Knapp: Yeah.
Lenny: Okay. Let’s touch on the last two parts of this framework, energize and reflect, and then let’s spend a little time on Sprint for people to get a sense of what this method is all about. For folks that haven’t read the book.
John Zeratsky: So to replay the system overall highlight is about the thing you want to make time for today. The most important thing today, laser is about creating barriers to distraction so that you have much your energy or as much of your attention as possible to focus on your highlight on that one thing. Energize is sort of like a booster to laser.
It’s sort of like the big idea is that our brains and bodies are connected and our ability to pay attention and to focus and to do those things that we care about only works when we are well and we have slept, we have eaten well, we have exercised, we have talked to other people the right amount, not too much, not too little and so we put this as part of the make time framework because we don’t think you should go crazy, try a million biohacker type of things, but we do think it’s worth applying this same philosophy of pay attention to what’s working, what’s not, have a system, try some new things, pay attention to those things, run these experiments. We think it’s worth doing that for your health, for your energy as well, because it really does make a difference.
Lenny: Maybe share one or two tips there real quick for people to energize to create a little more energy during their day?
John Zeratsky: In the year since we wrote the book and as my life has just continued to change and I’ve gotten a little bit older, I’ve realized that sleep is probably the single most important thing. I mentioned earlier, not having my phone in the bedroom, no TV in the bedroom, hopefully that goes without saying, but just being able to really construct an environment that allows me to sleep. I started wearing an eye mask recently.
Lenny: I do that.
John Zeratsky: Yeah, really helps me fall asleep and stay asleep and then the other thing is exercise is a big source of energy for me, but I realized that I was making excuses about why I didn’t need to or shouldn’t exercise in any given day. So even though this is not what we recommended in the book specifically, I ended up signing on with a personal trainer so that I have accountability, I have a schedule, I have somebody who’s thinking about what I need that’s not just me and those two things have kind of been the pillars of how I build energy over the last few years.
Lenny: I use this app called Future, I’m a investor, quick disclaimer, but it’s basically a personal trainer through an app that’s like a real person that helps you design a workout for you, and then they give you the workout on the app and you just follow the instructions and that’s the thing that got you working out three times a week.
John Zeratsky: Nice. Yeah.
Jake Knapp: That’s awesome.
Lenny: Killing it. Okay. And then within reflect, maybe just briefly talk about the importance there and then one thing people could do to reflect on how things are going.
Jake Knapp: Reflect is just simply the act of looking back on the day and treating the day. It wasn’t marble gravestone of your successes or failures, it’s just a experiment that you ran. What happened in the experiment? Taking note of it in that lens, what did it look like? There’s a template in our book that has some questions you can answer, but really it’s pretty simple.
If you write down your highlight in the morning or the night before, if you’re draw it and you stick it somewhere visible, then at the end of the day you just look at it and just like, “Okay, did that happen or did that not happen?” If you stick it somewhere visible, you won’t even have to do anything. You’ll just come across it and you’ll know if did that happen or not? So that’s the simplest part of it is writing it down, sticking it will create a reflection loop for you.
Another thing that I think is quite powerful at the end of the day is to write down, keep a notebook by the side of the bed and write down one or two or three things that you are grateful for during the day, just like a simple gratitude journal. And you’ll start, this keeps you in this frame of mind of what was cool today, what happened that was satisfying or joyful, what brought me joy and then if you start the day thinking about what you’d like to happen and then you look back and say, “What was great?” Your brain is just starting to look for those good things. Look for those big highlights, and that’s a great way to live your life day to day saying, “This is what I hope will happen. This is what did happen. Now I’m more tuned into what it might happen tomorrow. Oh, now I’m more tuned into what happened today.” And again, and it’s just a really nice loop. So was there a connection between what you hoped would happen? Did you manage to do your highlight? If so, what helped you do it? What worked or didn’t work? What made it hard? It might be an energy thing that suggests a tweak to when you drink coffee or if you take a walk or whatever. It might’ve been a focus thing. So maybe I’ll try another barrier for this thing because that undercut me. Whatever it is, it’s just basically, in summary, curiosity about your day instead of self-judgment about your day.
Lenny: I think we’ve covered Make Time and tons of depth if people want to practice these things, highly recommend getting the book. It’s called Make Time and it’s really quick to read and it’s basically just a long list of things you can do and we talked about a lot of them. There’s a lot more. And I think part of the premise of the book is try stuff, see what works, see what doesn’t. Keep reflecting, iterating, some of these things, even if you find two things that change how productive you’re, that’s a huge win.
Jake Knapp: I highly recommend people get the book. That’s great. And it’s our best attempt to put together a how-to guide for doing this stuff. For what it’s worth, we’re not really motivated to try to create a self-improvement empire. This is not our full-time job. We just hope it works for you and is useful. So if you don’t want to buy the book, we get it. Go to maketime.blog and just check out some of the experiments and things that are available there or just try one or two of the things that we talked about today. Try the highlight. If you’re going to do one thing, just try right now writing down what you want your highlight to be, either for today or if it’s late in the day for tomorrow on a sticky note and put it somewhere that you’ll see it tomorrow.
Just that is a great step in the right direction. Try having a conversation with your colleagues or putting a signature or an autoresponder in your mail that says you’re going to slow down or talking to them about slowing down at character. At our VC fund, we had a conversation and decided we’re going to try to have our main communication happen in Notion so that if we’re talking about something, it’s in a form, it becomes a document, and the expectation of how you react and respond there is going to be different than in a tool that’s designed to get you responding as fast as possible, like an email inbox or Slack.
So just have a conversation about that. Take a couple apps off your phone. You don’t have to buy the book or become totally bought into the system to do those things, but that’s what we really want. We just want you to have more time for what matters for you.
Lenny: Amazing. So I’ve used up basically all our time talking about Make Time. I think we should have a follow-up episode just to talk about Sprint. What I think we do is let’s cut off the lightning round and whatever stuff you guys would’ve shared there, we’ll include in the show notes. I’ll send you those questions asynchronously, but let’s just talk about Sprint for a few minutes just to give people a sense of what is this framework, it’s extremely popular, lets a lot of really successful products, and then we’ll wrap up and point people in the direction that you recommend.
Jake Knapp: Cool.
Lenny: What is this framework of Sprint? When do people use this idea, this framework, this approach? And what are some examples of what has come out of somebody applying Sprints?
Jake Knapp: The big idea with a design Sprint is to go from a zero to a prototype and a test of that prototype in just five days. And it’s a recipe, it’s a scripted set of activities that we developed over a number of many years. First, started with some projects I was doing at Google and I run some experiments with the way I was working. I was a product designer on Gmail in the 2000’s, and I also co-founded Google Meet. And in the sort of week where we really catalyzed what had been a project that was going nowhere, this 20% project of people who were familiar with Google, like a side project was going nowhere for a year and a half. It was really on the rocks. And in one focused week working together, we decided me and these two other folks we’re going to clear everything off.
I visited them in the Stockholm office where they were. We created a working prototype. Instead of trying to come up with the perfect plan, the perfect PRD, the perfect pitch to executives we’re like, “Let’s just build a prototype and put it in front of our colleagues and get them using it.” And we did that and that was the thing that stuck. And so from there on, I was like, “I need to recreate these kinds of moments for teams because that’s powerful.” So we ran hundreds of these at Google Ventures with startups, tweaked and refined the process, wrote this book called Sprint.
We run a venture fund today, John and I and our colleague Eli, called Character. We help teams find and expand product market fit with Sprint. It’s a tool for doing that and it uses a lot of these principles we talked about with Make Time to change the defaults, but not just the defaults of the way an individual works, but the ways teams work, the way people make decisions, the way we evaluate what’s a good idea, a good strategy and worth pursuing based not on just a hunch or a guest, but based on something we can actually see with customer reactions. So all of that kind of in a nutshell is what Sprint does.
John Zeratsky: This idea of getting unstuck and turning maybe some abstract ideas or some concepts that you’ve been discussing, turning that into a concrete prototype, something that you can look at and you can click around and you can actually try. It works in a lot of different contexts, and we’ve heard amazing stories from people who read the book and have run Sprints at companies that have a hundred thousand people and governments and all sorts of different organizations, but the stories that are in Sprint are about working with startups.
We think this is especially valuable for startups because typically you’ve raised a certain amount of money which buys you a certain amount of runway. You have a certain amount of time to prove that you have product market fit to prove that the thing that you’re making is the right thing for some customers. And so the faster you can do that, the more quickly you can find out if you’re on the right track, the more quickly you can learn and you can course correct and ultimately you can get to a better place faster than if you spent months working on that prototype or that first version of the product before releasing it.
Lenny: I think what’s awesome about it is as a product manager, the idea of containing a new idea experiment to five days versus this ongoing teams distracted on this idea just like, “Cool, we’re going to spend a week, see where this goes. They’re not going to spend months exploring. We’re not going to talk about it. And just in theory, let’s just try it.” I think it’s really powerful. And so for folks that may want to explore this until we do a follow-up episode, is it just by the book, is there anything else you could point them to think about this idea and implementing it?
Jake Knapp: Yeah. Well, if you are thinking about, or in the very early stages of starting a company, a great thing to do is to get in touch with us at character.vc. And actually we’re just opening up applications to our labs program. So character.VC/labs. Our labs program is an intensive program for startups, and we will run a sequence of Sprints including some new formats that are not in the book, but are excellent.
This will be our third time running through this. We found that it’s especially valuable for AI startups. So it just turns out that a lot of the complex issues you have to figure out with turning something that may not initially be trustworthy may require a big behavior shift to customers who aren’t used to working in this way and sometimes artificial intelligence can produce things that feel kind of alien to people.
And so making this stuff actually useful, more than just a chatbot with little stars that’s in the corner that says, “Hey, would you like to ask the AI a question about this?” But something that’s really meaningful, doing this kind of repeated and we’d run a sequence of Sprints doing it again and again, you work with directly with John and I, we find a really powerful way to get started.
Anyway, that’s a big advertisement for Character Labs. But yeah, in general, check out the book. Also, would say if you’re not quite ready to dip your toe in the whole book, you can go to the sprintbook.com. And we have a ton of resources on there, including a new thing, which is a Miro board, a Miro template that I created that has step-by-step instructions for every single step as well as 30+ videos of me explaining each step and actually I think I’m wearing the same sweatshirt in those, so if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can see more of me in this sweatshirt in that template. And that’s free, that’s free and there’s a bunch of resources on the website that are free as well. So anybody, everybody should be able to access this stuff.
Lenny: Stuff. Amazing. And again, for folks that may want to check out the Labs cohort, is there anything other than AI-oriented that would be ideal? Just how early stage, any other markets that are ideal for the Sprint process and the way you’re approaching it?
John Zeratsky: Yeah, it’s a four-week Sprint program for pre-seed software startups. So we only invest in software startups at Character, and this program is really ideal for companies who they know what they’re doing. They’re not just like, “Oh, I want to start a company.” They have an idea of an opportunity that exists, a market that they’re focused on, but they definitely haven’t reached product market fit.
They may not even have a product to test that hypothesis with. So it’s very early stage, and we are pretty flexible on the sector, the industry that you’re in. But what we find is that the more there’s kind of a big behavioral risk, the better this stuff works. So if you’re just trying to make a slightly better version of something that already exists, and maybe it’s going to be a little cheaper or a little faster, a little easier to use, you probably don’t need this stuff. You can probably just do it and probably going to work.
But if you are like one of our portfolio companies, they make AI that controls the industrial facilities. They came from Google DeepMind and they did this for Google data centers before, something like that where you have to convince plant operators who are wearing hard hats and dealing with huge equipment, you have to convince them to trust AI. That’s a big behavior shift. That’s a big behavioral risk. Or in healthcare, in education, places where it feels like the technology can really make a big difference for people, but it can be hard to get over that hurdle of trust and understanding. Those are the types of opportunities that we think we can really help with.
Lenny: Playing on hard mode, these sounds extremely difficult. I love it.
John Zeratsky: Yeah.
Lenny: So if you’re thinking about starting a company or if you’re in the process of starting a company, check out character.vc/ labs. John, Jake, thank you so much for being here and for making time for this podcast conversation.
John Zeratsky: Thank you for having us. This was great.
Jake Knapp: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Lenny: Absolutely. My pleasure.
Jake Knapp: It was really a pleasure, Lenny.
Lenny: The pleasure is mine. Bye everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| 1Password | 密码管理工具,保留原文 |
| Apple Podcasts | 苹果播客平台,保留原文 |
| Arianna Huffington | 阿丽亚娜·赫芬顿 |
| attention residue | 注意力残留 |
| Ben Williams | 人名,保留原文(播客往期嘉宾) |
| busy bandwagon | 忙碌跑步机 |
| Cal Newport | 人名,保留原文 |
| Character VC | 风险投资机构,保留原文 |
| design sprint | 设计冲刺 |
| Do Not Disturb | 勿扰模式 |
| Eli | 人名,保留原文(Character 基金团队成员) |
| Energize | 精力(书中策略类别) |
| escalation path | 升级渠道(指紧急联系替代方式) |
| feedback loop | 反馈循环 |
| Frodo | 弗罗多(《指环王》角色) |
| Future | 健身 app 名称,保留原文 |
| Gandalf | 甘道夫(《指环王》角色) |
| Google DeepMind | AI 研究机构,保留原文 |
| Google Ventures | 风险投资机构,保留原文 |
| Groundhog Day | 《土拨鼠之日》(1993年电影,此处为书中比喻概念) |
| hamster wheel | 仓鼠轮(比喻不断重复的循环) |
| Highlight | 亮点(书中核心概念,指一天中最重要的事) |
| infinity pools | 无尽池 |
| Jake Knapp | 人名,保留原文(播客嘉宾,Make Time 合著者之一) |
| John Zeratsky | 人名,保留原文(播客嘉宾,Make Time 合著者之一) |
| Krissa | 人名,保留原文(读者) |
| kryptonite | 致命弱点(此处为比喻用法) |
| Laffy Taffy | 糖果品牌,保留原文 |
| laser | 激光(书中策略类别,指专注模式) |
| Lenny | 播客主持人 Lenny Rachitsky,保留原名 |
| lennyspodcast.com | 网站,保留原文 |
| lightning round | 快问快答 |
| MagSafe | 苹果磁吸充电技术,保留原文 |
| mailmanhq.com | 邮件管理工具,保留原文 |
| Make Time | 书名,暂译《为重要的事腾出时间》(保留原文书名) |
| maketime.blog | 网站,保留原文 |
| Miro | 协作白板工具,保留原文 |
| Nanit | 婴儿监控 app/设备品牌,保留原文 |
| Neer Eyal | 人名,保留原文(播客往期嘉宾) |
| Notion | 协作工具,保留原文 |
| Odysseus | 奥德修斯 |
| OKR | 目标与关键成果(管理工具术语,保留原文) |
| out of office autoresponder | 外出自动回复 |
| PRD | 产品需求文档(Product Requirements Document,保留原文) |
| product market fit | 产品市场匹配 |
| Project A | 项目 A(指最重要的项目) |
| Reclaim | 公司名称,保留原文(日历工具公司) |
| Reflect | 反思(书中策略类别) |
| show notes | 节目笔记 |
| Siren | 塞壬 |
| Slack | 即时通讯工具,保留原文 |
| Sophie Leroy | 人名,保留原文 |
| Sour Patch Kid | 酸味软糖品牌,保留原文 |
| speed bump | 减速带 |
| Spotify | 音乐/播客平台,保留原文 |
| Sprint | 书名,保留原文《Sprint》 |
| The 4-Hour Workweek | 《每周工作4小时》(Tim Ferriss 著作) |
| The Economist | 《经济学人》 |
| thesprintbook.com | 网站,保留原文 |
| Tim Ferriss | 人名,保留原文(作家、播客主持人,《每周工作4小时》作者) |
| white-knuckle | 咬牙硬撑 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
为重要的事腾出时间 | Jake Knapp 和 John Zeratsky(《Make Time》作者,Character VC)
一天中的亮点
Jake Knapp: 这本书其实不是关于效率的,也不是关于时间管理的。它真正讲的是——在任何一天里,如果我们能拥有一个绝佳时刻,在全神贯注的状态下把它用好,那就已经很幸运了。这不会每天都发生,但如果我们对此有所意识,它发生的频率就会大大提高。所谓的亮点(Highlight),就是想象到了一天结束时,如果有人问你”你今天最精彩的部分是什么”,你会怎么回答?这是一切的锚点。它是核心,是基石。即使其他事情一团糟,你依然会对这一天感到满意,依然会对自己的精力投入方式感到满意。
Lenny: 今天我请到了两位嘉宾,Jake Knapp 和 John Zeratsky。Jake 和 John 是两本杰作的作者——《Sprint》和《为重要的事腾出时间》(Make Time)。通过《Sprint》,他们帮助了超过 300 个团队设计新产品并将其推向市场,包括 YouTube、Slack、Gusto 和 One Medical 的团队。此前,John 和 Jake 都在 Google Ventures 工作,再之前是在 Google——John 曾是 Google Ads 和 YouTube 的核心负责人,Jake 参与了 Gmail 的开发,也是 Google Meet 的联合创始人。如今,他们经营着一家名为 Character 的风险投资公司,刚刚开放了加速器项目 Character Labs 的申请,可以在 character.vc/labs 了解更多信息。
本次对话我们聚焦于他们较新的那本书——《为重要的事腾出时间》。本播客的一位嘉宾 Ben Williams 曾在快问快答环节推荐过这本书,我个人非常喜欢,也希望更多人了解它以及其中的建议,尤其是那些一直在寻找提升效率方法的产品负责人和创业者。我想直接进入正题——我们会聊到大量非常实用的建议,告诉你如何在日常中更高效。如果你听了这期节目,我保证你至少会找到三件从明天起就想改变的事。接下来,有请 Jake Knapp 和 John Zeratsky。
录制有声书
Lenny: Jake 和 John,非常感谢你们来做客,欢迎来到播客。
Jake Knapp: 谢谢邀请,我们非常兴奋能来。
Lenny: 为了准备这次对话,我刚刚又在车里重听了《为重要的事腾出时间》的有声书。听了你们的声音那么久,感觉好像已经认识你们了,现在和你们对话有点不太真实。
John Zeratsky: 录制那本书真的很有趣。录制过程中我们一直在跟彼此说,感觉就像在录世界上最长的播客。
Jake Knapp: 确实就是那种感觉。
Lenny: 说到这个,录制有声书到底需要多长时间?我一直很好奇,需要花多少——
Jake Knapp: 嗯,花了应该花的时间的两倍,因为我的肚子一直在叫,麦克风会把它收进去。所以 John 刚完成一段完美的录音——我们俩一起待在那个小房间里,录音师在另一个房间——他就说:“你得重来一遍,你得重来一遍,这家伙的肚子又在叫了。”
John Zeratsky: 我记得是花了两天,对吧?
Jake Knapp: 对,应该是两天。其实他们本来就预估两天,所以我觉得我的肚子并没有拖慢太多进度。
Lenny: 没有我想象的那么长。我还以为要录一个月,过程非常痛苦。听上去还不错。
John Zeratsky: 说实话,真的很有趣。虽然有点奇怪,但就是……怎么说呢,你会进入一种非常专注的状态,注意力高度集中,没有其他需要做或应该做的事情,就是读、喝茶、读、吃午饭、读、喝茶。就是这种非常令人满足的心流。
Lenny: 听起来是很棒的几天。
Jake Knapp: 是的,而且两个人一起录真的很有意思。单独录会更难……当然很多人自己录也觉得挺好,但我们合作了这么多年,能一起做点什么总是更开心,所以这很酷。
《为重要的事腾出时间》
Lenny: 太好了,我现在也想录一本有声书了,听起来很有趣。那么正式开始我们的对话——你们写了一本非常有影响力的书叫《Sprint》,这个我们后面会聊到。但你们还写了另一本书,就是我手里这本《为重要的事腾出时间》。对我来说,它的影响甚至更大,我觉得它对人们生活的改变可能比《Sprint》还要深远。我认为它是最有趣、最好读的效率类书籍之一。上周我在为这次对话做准备的时候,我妻子从我桌上拿走了这本书,然后就开始在上面画重点。你看,里面有好多高亮标注,她直接——
John Zeratsky: 太棒了。
Jake Knapp: 哦,太酷了。
Lenny: 她说”我也想更高效”。另外,播客的一位嘉宾也是通过节目向我推荐了这本书。节目最后我也会问你们同样的问题,但我通常会问嘉宾:你最常向别人推荐的书是什么?他提到了这本书,我就是这么发现它的。所以一切都串联起来了。
Jake Knapp: 太酷了。
效率的误区
Lenny: 所以我想我们先聊《为重要的事腾出时间》,下半场再谈《Sprint》。第一个问题就是:大多数人在试图变得更高效时,最常犯的错误是什么?
Jake Knapp: 为了回答这个问题,我先简单讲讲《为重要的事腾出时间》这本书的由来。十多年来,John 和我一直——加个引号——“设计时间”,这是我们帮助初创企业寻找或拓展产品市场匹配(product market fit)的工作的一部分。我们曾在 Google Ventures 开发了设计冲刺(design sprint),《Sprint》那本书讲的就是这件事。现在,我们运营着自己的风险投资基金 Character VC。我们与公司一起运行这些高度结构化的冲刺。在这些冲刺中,我们可以控制一切。我们可以改变工作日的默认设置——每小时、每分钟发生什么,人们如何使用技术,如何相互交流。所有这些都由我们掌控,因为我们要在极短的时间内达成重大目标,所有人全神贯注。
在这过程中,John 和我开始把那些在结构化冲刺中特别有效的经验,拿到自己的日常生活中来试验。我们发现其中一些做法效果极好,而且跟我们过去听到或学到的效率方法多少有些背道而驰。市面上有各种各样的习惯养成书和效率技巧,John 和我大概试过其中绝大多数,甚至可能全部。但似乎 99% 照做的人仍然觉得应接不暇,始终处于焦虑之中。
所以,尽管我们并非效率大师——这不是我们一直以来的专职工作——但我们觉得应该把这个框架分享出来。《为重要的事腾出时间》,这本书以及此前发布的博客,就是一个分享我们所学所悟的副项目。它似乎引起了很多人的共鸣,一直有源源不断的人想用不同的角度来看待这些事情。
Lenny: 我太喜欢了。尤其是它脱胎于冲刺这个概念,这一点我很喜欢。我记得你在书里提到过,但我忘了这一点——它们之间确实紧密相连。我也很喜欢,很多最好的东西都来自真正做那件事的人。这本书源于”我发现了这些小窍门,我想分享出来”,而不是”我需要写一本效率书”。
John Zeratsky: 对,我觉得就像 Jake 说的那样,我们一直对效率领域的发展现状不太满意。我们都有一些想做的大事。不管从事什么工作——我们早期都是设计师——工作的核心就是做大项目,就是能够专注,能够把时间花在重要的事情上。更不用说工作之外我们想要的那些东西——想学的新技能、想陪伴的人。有意思的是,我们发现跟人聊《为重要的事腾出时间》的时候,人们心里都清楚。他们总是知道想为什么事腾出时间。问题不在于”我的目标应该是什么”或者”我该怎么想清楚人生要做什么”。他们通常都知道,但真正为那些事情腾出时间却非常困难。
我认为问题在于,大多数效率建议关注的是更快更好地处理已经摆在面前的事情——收件箱里的消息、日历上的会议,大量精力花在效率上,比如赶紧把这些事处理掉。我们的观点是,这些东西都是默认设置。就像我们使用的软件和应用有默认设置一样,这些是生活的默认设置,是我们所在公司的默认设置,是我们所处文化的默认设置。所以解决方案其实是改变这些默认设置,从根本上颠覆这种思维方式。不是”我怎么更快""我怎么更高效”,而是”我怎么把最重要的事情放在我一天或我生活的首位,然后围绕它来安排其他一切”。你当然还是需要处理那些琐碎的事——回复那些消息、参加那些会议——但首先从这个问题出发:对你来说什么最重要?你到底想为什么事腾出时间?
忙碌跑步机与无尽池
Lenny: 顺着这个思路,我们接下来会谈到你们推荐的四部分策略,但在此之前还有几点。其中一个就是你刚才提到的那个洞察——光靠意志力永远不足以让你为想做的事腾出时间。你们提出了两个概念:忙碌跑步机(busy bandwagon)和无尽池(infinity pools),能不能简单谈谈这两个概念?
Jake Knapp: 忙碌跑步机的意思是,每个人都被期待是忙碌的。在美国有一种现象——如果你出国待一段时间,跟那边的人聊聊天再回来,你就会注意到——你问别人”最近怎么样?在忙什么?“对方会说”哎呀,太忙了”。这几乎成了标准答案。“我很忙。事情很多。“它可能意味着各种各样的事情,但通常带有正面色彩——“忙说明生意兴隆”,或者”忙说明我压力山大”之类的。但”忙”确实成了一种对每个人的期待。我们确实也很忙,但我们称之为”忙碌跑步机”,因为你觉得自己应该忙。这种内在的感觉,源于我们看到或感知到的别人正在做的事,正是它驱使了大量焦虑。我不想表现得好像我超脱其外、已经想通了一切——它仍然在驱动我的焦虑:那种觉得别人都在往前跑、别人期待我快速回应的感觉,诸如此类。这就是忙碌跑步机——一种”我应该很忙,其他人也都很忙”的感觉。它在内心深处产生的影响,才是我们真正需要改变和解决的核心——脱离被动反应的模式。另一个影响我们的东西是无尽池。John,你来描述一下在我们这个语境下无尽池是什么?
John Zeratsky: 好。我们起这个名字的时候,是想形容一种永远不会枯竭的内容源泉。基本上,只要你能下拉刷新,或者内容是信息流形式的,它就是一个无尽池。这里面有纯娱乐性的东西——人们会说”我在 Instagram 上花了太多时间”——但也有一些是重要的、必要的、甚至看似高效的内容。电子邮件就是一个巨大的无尽池,对我们两个人来说,它可能是最难控制、最难不被吸进去的东西。正在听节目的每个人大概都能理解,这些池子有多么强大,那些产品被设计和工程化得多么精妙——极具吸引力,几乎零摩擦,让我们可以轻而易举地重新跳回那个池子里。
所以,当你把这两样东西放在一起——忙碌跑步机和无尽池——它就像一个飞轮,但是是坏的飞轮。你觉得自己真的必须很忙,真的必须把一切都掌控在手。然后,你身边又有一大堆应用、服务和产品虎视眈眈,随时准备扑上来利用这一点——利用你那一整套关于”我该做什么”的默认设置,既有文化层面的,也有内心深处的。对很多人来说,事情就这么失控了。所以我们的看法是:如果你能说出这两样东西的名字,理解这两样东西,那你就可以开始有意识地去改变围绕它们的一些默认设置,这样你就能把自己最重要的项目、最重要的人和最重要的工作放在首位,就像我们之前聊的那样。
两位作者的亲身实践
Lenny: 这两条我全中。我觉得我做这些对话——尤其是这一期——的原因之一,就是它几乎就像一对一辅导。这能帮助我坚持你们教的一些方法。实际上,我已经实施了你们推荐的不少做法,但这次对话是在强化它。当然,同时也是在帮助所有听众在这些方面变得更好。在我们深入之前,最后一个问题——说点实在的——你们自己的效率怎么样?你们写了这本书,听起来很厉害。书里大概有 87 条建议对吧。你们自己执行得怎么样?等会儿聊到具体内容时,我想听听你们实际在用哪些,但先大致说说,你们的生产力如何?
Jake Knapp: Lenny,在访谈开头你问了一个问题:“大多数人在思考生产力、时间管理之类的话题时,最常犯的错误是什么?“我就从这个角度来回答。大多数人的做法是,试图在正在做的事情上做得更快、更好。我们不去改变环境中的默认设置,从而让自己能专注和投入那些更重要的、不同的事情。如果你想想”我想做什么?我的目标是什么?我想把时间花在什么上面?“——John 之前提到的项目 A——通常来说,我们想做的事情,这些项目 A 型的事情,它们规模大、不容易开始、多巴胺来得慢、不紧急。如果你有老板的话,老板也不会催你要这些东西。而那些挡在我们面前、阻止我们做项目 A 的任务和活动,它们往往不大不小、一目了然知道怎么开始、立刻就能带来多巴胺、据说还很紧急——电子邮件、会议、TikTok、Instagram、新闻、你 OKR 上列的东西,所有这些。
我知道 OKR 听起来跟其他几个不太像一类,但在某种意义上它们确实可以是一回事。所以,这些大的事情,跟那些挡路的小事情是对立的——那些忙碌跑步机期待我们去做的事,那些内置了无尽池的东西。所以对我自己来说,现在就是一场持续的战斗:一边是 Jake 和忙碌跑步机之间的较量,加上我内心那种”我怎样才能不辜负别人对我的期望、按要求的方式回应和反应”的感觉;另一边是我怎样才能做项目 A 那类事——那些大的、重要的事。自从我们写完这本书以来,我的生活发生了很多变化。
简单来说就是,每隔几个月我就需要做一些新的实验。在一些相当艰难的时期里,我发现我们用的那些策略和框架——因为它比较简单,而且跟我多年做设计冲刺的经验比较吻合——它确实有效。如果我能回到那个框架,如果我能为它腾出空间,如果我能把它看作一系列实验,如果我能带着好奇心审视自己、问”为什么事情不太对劲?“然后再通过实验找到出路——那我就能走出来。但话说回来,在任何特定的时间点,我大概给自己打个 B 到 B-,有时候是 C,有时候是 D,有时候是 A,我真的在拼命努力,但这完全是一个持续进行的挑战。
所以,我不会坐在这里说,对,跟着无人机拍我 48 小时,你就会觉得那就是你应该做的。但我们的哲学——至少我看待它的方式——其中一部分是:你的生活可以是乱糟糟的。然而,如果你能为那些项目 A 的时刻、为你的亮点腾出空间,它就能塑造其他一切——只要你有那些时刻就够了。外面的东西有时候可能一团糟,但你仍然会对自己的每一天感觉很好,仍然会对自己投入精力的方式感觉很好。
John Zeratsky: 而且有一个框架可以让你找到回来的路。如果你只是卡住了,到处张望……你在盲目地抓取各种小技巧。你可能会想,“哦,我读到一篇博客文章介绍了这个方法,我试试看。“这可能会有一些短期效果,但最终你大概不会坚持下去。你大概会重新跌回那种不堪重负、失望和倦怠的状态中。但我们发现,如果你有一个系统,你可以使用这个系统,可以不断回到它,并在它的基础上持续建设和实验,那你就能在这些事情上取得更可持续的进步。
Lenny: 我觉得从你们俩刚才分享的经历中,一个非常重要的收获是:你不需要做所有这些事。你甚至不需要做其中的大部分。如果你只做一两件,如果你找到一两件能让你每天稍微更高效一点的事,那就会产生巨大的改变。所以我觉得,如果你觉得”哦,我试了这些东西,没用”,这也是可以的。我觉得只要你今天从中带走几条可能对你有用的建议,然后在将来继续尝试就行了。如果最后没成功——比如你删了一个应用又重新安装了——我觉得也没关系。所以我觉得一个很重要的收获就是:不要因为你没有做到我们今天讨论的所有事情,就觉得自己失败了。
四步框架概览
那就让我们开始吧。书中有一个帮助你提高效率的四步框架。基本上,你们能不能先给一个总览,然后我们再逐一讨论每个步骤。这四个部分是:设立亮点(create a highlight)、激光聚焦(laser)、充电(energize)和回顾(reflect)。我把话筒交给你们两位做一个总览,然后我们一个一个地过。
Jake Knapp: 这一切都始于”亮点”这个概念。亮点——我不想这么说,但它确实是整个过程中最有力、最好的部分。我不想这么说是因为这是 John 想出来的,不是我。但我不得不承认,它确实很好。而且我觉得随着人们读了这本书并分享他们的感受,这也是我们从人们那里听到的最多的反馈。如果你只从这本书里挑一件事来尝试,这就是那个大事。
亮点的意思是什么呢?在一天开始的时候,你想象现在是这一天结束的时候,你在回顾这一天。如果有人问你”你今天的亮点是什么”,你会怎么回答?你希望在今天结束的时候说今天的亮点是什么?你就从那里开始——“好,我希望今天的亮点是什么?“你可能会想什么是紧急的。有时候亮点就是今天必须完成的某件事。今天是那个重要会议的日子,或者有一件明天工作绝对必须完成的事。那可以是你的亮点,把它做好、把注意力集中在它上面,会让你非常满足。
但很多时候,亮点来自于喜悦或满足感,来自那些平时得不到关注的项目。而且亮点也不一定只是工作上的事。它可以是你生命中想花时间相处的人,或者你想投入的爱好。如果你想提高 Mario Kart 的水平,来一场漂亮的 Mario Kart 练习,任何可能成为你一天中亮点的事都可以。核心就是早上想一想:“是什么?今天的亮点会是什么?“然后,试着找出一个 60 到 90 分钟的时间块。这通常是我们认为真正进入状态、把一件事做得非常出色、完全专注所需的粗略时间。所以,亮点就是一切的锚点,是核心,是基础。你从这里出发,接下来就是围绕这个亮点来安排你的时间,确保当亮点时刻到来时,你拥有最佳的能量和最佳的注意力。
激光聚焦与充电
“激光聚焦”是关于你真正聚焦于那件事时可能需要的策略。在”亮点”部分,我们有一套关于如何设立、思考和框定亮点的策略;在”激光聚焦”部分,我们有一套关于当那个时间到来时如何保持注意力的策略。然后是”充电”,关于拥有足够的精力去做那件事、去保持专注。我今天的亮点就是尽量在这期播客中言之有物,所以今天早上我需要考虑的是,在播客开始时我怎样才能拥有最佳精力。
Lenny: 实际上这也是我的亮点。我有一张便利贴。
Jake Knapp: 哦,太好了。很好。
Lenny: 录一期出色的播客。
Jake Knapp: 太棒了,太棒了。如果你没在看视频的话,Lenny 刚才拿出一张便利贴把它写了下来。这确实真的是最好的做法——写在便利贴上,放在你能看到的地方。所以,亮点、亮点时间的激光聚焦、充电——确保时机到来时你有充足的精力。这些就是关于睡眠、饮食和运动的策略,以及有助于提升心理能量的各种事情,没有什么疯狂的东西。最后一个环节是”回顾”,这就是我们所说的科学方法。它奏效了吗?我今天尝试的方法有效吗?如果没有,就带着好奇心去想,是哪里不行?然后调整,试着想:“好吧,也许我可以尝试另一个策略。”
所以这本书大概有 87 个策略?有很多不同的方法,但期望并不是你会全部用上。而且期望也不是——
期望并不是你会全部用上,也不是所有策略对每个人都有效。我用的策略和 John 不同,他的一些策略对我不起作用,反之亦然。但这个以一件事为中心、聚焦它、拥有聚焦的策略、拥有精力的策略,以及反思、重新审视、保持好奇的策略——把这些合在一起,我们发现真的可以重新定义你的感受。它其实不关乎生产力,不关乎时间管理。它真正关乎的是:在任何一天里,如果我们能拥有一个全神贯注的绝佳时刻,并且好好利用了它,那就很幸运了。这不会每天都发生,但如果我们有意为之,它可以比不这样做更频繁地发生。
亮点为何有效
Lenny: 我觉得最后这一点非常重要,也是亮点对我来说如此有效的原因——通常你一天下来不会有什么惊人的成果。你往往就是被各种事情分心,做的全是那些简单的事。你们提到过 Project A 的概念——就是你真正想完成的那件事,但多巴胺的奖励太遥远了,而且太难了。所以我认为亮点之所以如此强大,就是你能完成一件让你自豪的事,那一天就是美好的一天。这可能听起来很夸张,但确实如此。
Jake Knapp: 对,完全同意。
Lenny: 所以我想更深入地讨论这四个部分,可能把最多时间花在亮点和激光聚焦上,因为我觉得那是大部分效果所在。
那么,关于亮点,你们有什么建议吗?你们分享了几个如何确定当天亮点的例子。你们推荐了几个问题,我觉得你们已经分享了其中几个。另外,你们两位在过去几周有没有什么亮点的例子,让大家听听?然后,还有日历这个部分——它可能更适合归到激光聚焦里——但我觉得那是这个方法中非常重要的一环。能不能谈谈这个?
如何选择你的亮点
John Zeratsky: 对我来说,我想再次强调,这个框架是有意设计得很灵活的,不同的人有不同的亮点。但对我来说,我是一个非常以项目为导向、以工作为导向的人。大多数时候,一个美好的一天意味着我在某件对我来说非常重要的事情上取得了进展。所以我的亮点通常与专注的、创造性的工作相关。这一点在我们三年前创办了自己的风险投资公司之后变得更加重要。在那之前,我大致算是一个全职写作者,在活动上演讲,做一些咨询。更早之前,我是 Google Ventures(GV)的合伙人,再之前我是一名产品设计师。所以我的职业生涯经历过不同的模式和情境。但如果你认识任何风险投资人——如果你在听这个播客并且认识一些 VC——他们很可能就是你认识的人中最忙、最焦头烂额的那些,总是在回邮件,总是在开 Zoom 会议和面对面会议,永远在飞机上。
所以这种工作的天然环境就是忙碌跑步机,就是有大量的无尽池需要你去关注。在这样的环境下,为了让我们的项目取得进展,为了推进我们与种子前创始人共同运营的 Character Labs 项目即将到来的发布,或者我们在写一本新书——那是一个大项目——或者与我们的某个被投公司合作做一次冲刺,或者撰写发给 LP 的通讯——这些事情都非常重要,而且我觉得它们赋予了我们作为一家 VC 公司的独特优势。
如果我前面说的前提成立——大多数 VC 都只是在忙乱地四处奔波——那么如果我们能在这些事情上做出更大的投入,理论上它们应该真的能帮助我们取得成功。所以大多数时候,我这番话说了这么长,其实大多数时候我的亮点就是:“我想在工作中完成什么?什么是我想在今天做完的事?“
用日历设计你的一天
然后我要做的,就是围绕为那件事腾出时间来安排我的日历。书中有一个策略叫”设计你的一天”(Design Your Day),核心就是画出你的一天,把日历当作一块画布,在上面设计你想怎么度过你的时间,而不是把日历当作一个施加于你的东西、一个告诉你必须做什么的东西。重新夺回对时间的掌控权。
所以大多数日子,午饭前的前半天是我的专注时间,我会非常、非常严格地保护这段时间,然后用这段时间来做我的亮点是什么就做什么。
Lenny: 我们之前有一位嘉宾 Neer Eyal 也来聊过生产力的话题,他其实给了同样的建议——就是把日历当作你的待办事项列表,因为时间终究会流向日历告诉你该做的事情。所以我觉得这里有一个规律,值得大家注意。
John Zeratsky: 确实如此。而且我们更进一步——我们团队有一个日历模板。每周有特定的时间段,虽然不是团队里每个人完全一样,但基本上有固定的时段来做特定类型的事情、开特定类型的会议。
这些并不全都是固定会议,虽然我们也有一些。模板里更多的是”内容桶”——可以把特定类型的活动填进去。而模板的其他部分则留给专注工作,留给大家独自处理需要完成的事情。
所以我觉得,不管是在个人层面还是团队层面,日历都是一个极其强大的工具,但大多数人……不仅没有把它当工具来用,反而还挺讨厌它的。他们会说:“哎,我的日历一团糟,如果能不用日历就好了,那就是我的梦想。“但我觉得,如果你能运用这些策略或其他方法重新夺回对日历的掌控权,主动把它当作自己的工具来使用,它真的能帮你围绕你在意的事情来安排时间。
Lenny: 对,我现在也正开始这样使用日历,完全一样的思路。我会尽量安排一个半小时来准备下周的 newsletter 文章,然后再准备几周后的播客。非常具体,时间也分得很清楚。
不过话说回来,我经常没法按计划完成这些事情。你们有一个原则,好像是关于”土拨鼠之日”的——如果没做到也没关系,没完成的亮点就一遍一遍重复,直到完成为止。对吧?
Jake Knapp: 我觉得”土拨鼠之日”这个概念特别酷。如果你看过那部电影……没看过的话,去看一下吧,真的很好看。
Lenny: 确实是部好电影。
Jake Knapp: 如果你看过,你就知道——虽然不剧透——但主角在那一天里越做越好,而这正是我们秉持的核心哲学。
以前很多时候,当我思考”如何高效利用时间?如何提升生产力?“的时候,其实都是在自我惩罚。那种”我又搞砸了,我该怎么补救?“的心态,感觉很糟糕。
而”土拨鼠之日”这个理念告诉你——你还会再有一次机会,再有一次机会。“没关系,再试一次,好奇地看看发生了什么就好。“这很重要。从日历开始,把日历当作一个框架来说:“好,这是实际发生的事情,这是我以为会发生的事情。“——当你做”设计你的一天”这个练习的时候,你说的就是这些。
我这周早些时候做了这个练习。我当时在切换一个新的日历工具,尝试一些新功能……我们投资了一家公司叫 Reclaim,他们就是做这类东西的——
Lenny: 我也是 Reclaim 的投资人。
Jake Knapp: 哦,是吗?
Lenny: 挺巧的吧?这可不是提前安排的广告。
Jake Knapp: 对,小巧合。
John Zeratsky: 听起来好像我们提前知道了似的,但我们其实不知道——我不知道你——
Jake Knapp: 我们确实不知道。
Lenny: 多巧啊。
Jake Knapp: 刚刚才发现的。总之,我当时看着自己的日历,心想:你知道吗,我要像 John 那样做。每天醒来,我就安排什么时候锻炼、什么时候吃早餐,什么时候洗澡,全都安排好,全都占上时间块。什么时候遛狗、喂狗,全部都放进去。这样当一天开始的时候,我就知道所有这些事情都有对应的时间段。然后这周我发现,我以为什么事情需要多长时间,跟实际需要的时间并不一样。于是我把那些事项设成每天重复,然后每天看一下,就说:“哦,有意思,实际发生的事和我想的不一样。“好,那我就调整一下。调整一下模板,在这部分对自己宽容一点,在那部分也对自己宽容一点。天哪,早上原来不是我的最佳专注时间。我看看……能不能把这个时间块挪到下午?这只是一种很有帮助的追踪和观察方式。
尤其是,我觉得很多人是视觉型学习者,能看到东西对我们有帮助。不是所有人都这样,但我们很多人属于这一类。当你把它放在日历上,你就能看到,这帮助很大。
Lenny: 而且还能防止别人占用那些时间。一举两得。
Jake Knapp: 这一点可不能低估——防止别人占用你的时间。对。别人一看,哦,Lenny 已经有安排了。我就知道,我得谨慎一点再约他。那种默认的倾向——乐于助人,别人看到你日历上有个空位就塞进来一个会,你就说好——这其实破坏了很多我们自己内心真正想做的事情。
还有一个核心观点我觉得我们还没提到,就是我们坚信:如果有机会,人们对如何安排自己的时间是有直觉的,知道什么才是真正重要的。这是千真万确的。我们现在说的事——运营一支风险投资基金,或者写书——显然这些东西我们自己说了算。
但这在其他情境下同样成立。我们都在大机构里当过员工,我也相信,即使你有老板,老板上面还有老板、再上面还有老板,你对自己如果有一段空闲时间,应该做什么才是杠杆率最高的事情,是有极好的判断力的。它可能不会出现在你的 OKR 上,也可能不在你老板、你老板的老板、你老板的老板的老板的雷达范围内。你的直觉非常好,我们想为你创造空间去做那件事——因为你会感觉更好,更满足,而且好事也会随之发生。
如何选择当天的亮点
Lenny: 我们在亮点这个话题上花了很多时间,但我觉得这是因为这个概念太强大了。一个非常简单的想法,却极其有效。所以,为了给大家一些实操建议,说说到底怎么落地,我来总结几点。
第一,关于如何选择亮点,你们有几个引导性问题,帮助你在一天开始时选定一个。你要么问自己:哪个亮点会给我带来最大的满足感?或者,当我回顾今天的时候,什么事情会给我带来最大的喜悦?也许这是同一个问题。但我——
Jake Knapp: 稍有不同,稍有不同。
Lenny: 确实稍有不同。好吧,说得对。
Jake Knapp: 满足感可能是这样的:“我知道这件事必须完成,而我完成了。”
Lenny: 说得好。
Jake Knapp: 喜悦则可能是这样的:“天哪,那真是太棒了。“它们属于同一个家族,但只是表亲。
Lenny: 好观点,好观点。
John Zeratsky: 对,我刚才提到,我个人的很多亮点其实是落在紧迫感或满足感这个方向的——都是那种大块头的项目。“我搞定了。我把那份演示文稿做完了。我把那篇东西写完了。“
三个寻找亮点的方向
John Zeratsky: 但我也会试着保持敏锐,察觉什么时候我这一天需要点别的——什么时候我需要……我需要一些快乐,需要一些趣味、一些玩耍。我需要优先去跑个步、散个步,或者做一顿丰盛的晚餐。所以,在这些事情上我会相信直觉,对自己说:“好,今天对我来说最重要的事不是高效完成什么,而是做点别的。”
有时候,那才是我最好的亮点。对其他人来说,也许那每天都是他们的亮点。也许他们的工作是——我不知道,我聊过很多在医疗行业工作的人。他们是护士或医生,上班的时候就是在工作。他们不是在会议、邮件和 Zoom 之间来回弹跳。他们站着跑来跑去,根本没有时间做别的事。所以他们的亮点可能是一天结束时需要做的某件事——放松一下,照顾一下自己。
所以我们谈到了三种不同的策略——紧迫感、满足感和快乐——这是三个你可以去寻找每天适合自己的亮点的方向。但归根结底,我觉得还是在于相信你的直觉,像你说的那样问问自己:“我回望这一天时,希望看到什么?什么事我会庆幸自己为它腾出了时间?”
Lenny: 太好了。你刚才提到了第三个策略。所以基本上就是,什么会给你最大的满足感?你早上会问自己这个问题,或者前一天晚上。我记得你们其中一位——我忘了是谁,因为听有声书的时候分不清谁在说话——你们其中一个说过:“我喜欢前一天就定好。“是这样吗?
John Zeratsky: 对,那是我。
Lenny: 好的,好的。
Jake Knapp: 那是 John 说的。
写下你的亮点
Lenny: 好的。所以你要么前一天晚上、要么当天早上问自己的问题是:“今天(或明天)什么事会给我最大的满足感?什么会给我最大的快乐?或者什么是我最紧迫需要完成的事?”
定好之后,建议是把它写在便利贴上……我之前不小心买了一批特别小的便利贴。我本来想买正常尺寸的,结果发现它们特别适合这个用途,完美。写下你的亮点,贴在显示器上。
这是一种做法。另一种是把它放进日历里,标注专注时间。理论上就是每天都有一个专注时段,在你精力最充沛的时候。这大概是你们的通用建议?
John Zeratsky: 基本上是的,不过我觉得这对某一种类型的亮点可能更重要一些。我大多数早上都有专注时间。说得具体一点、书呆子一点——周一、周三和周四上午我有专注时间,周二和周五上午有会议。但到了周四晚上,我的亮点可能其实是邀请朋友来家里做晚餐。那和专注时间不是一回事,但它是一个压力释放阀——我会想:“这是我要确保做到的事……”我要确保五点前把邮件收尾,这样就有时间把一切准备就绪。但它不一定是那种我们想到”高效”或”完成任务”或”进入心流状态”时的巅峰能量时刻。
Jake Knapp: 很好。
Lenny: 所以有很多种做法。如果你正在听这期节目,也许只需要记住一点——想想今天或明天的亮点可能是什么?
John Zeratsky: 对。而且我会说,再多走一步——一定要把它写下来。不要只是想一想,因为当你把事情写下来的时候,会有一些很特别的事情发生,哪怕只是写在便利贴上。哪怕写在笔记本里、日记里,哪怕只是手机备忘录里的一条。把这一步也做了。
Jake Knapp: 即使你之后再也不会看到它,光是写下来这件事本身就很了不起。
John Zeratsky: 对,这一点非常重要。
一个亮点切换的真实故事
Jake Knapp: 我可以给你举个具体的例子——一个亮点的成功案例和一个失败案例——就发生在昨天。最近大多数日子里,我的亮点都围绕着在书上取得进展。John 提到过我们在写一本书,显然这是一个庞大的项目。我听人说过,如果你在写书,就像永远有作业一样,总觉得还有更多要做的事。所以那一直是我主要的亮点。
但昨天,我想为这期播客做准备。我知道那会让我感到满足——觉得自己准备好了。就像我们说的,我们并不是一直在谈论《为重要的事腾出时间》,它对我们来说有点像一个副项目。所以我想做好准备,至少说话要有条理。我知道这会让我满足,但我也知道它很紧迫——我们今天就录制。所以这就是我的亮点。我写下来:“为播客做准备。”
我有两个专注时段,一个上午,一个下午。这应该不难。第一个专注时段——基本没做好。我分心了,看邮件,做了所有我会说你不该做的事,我全做了。心情低落,觉得自己变成了一个废物,什么都没完成。
好,第二个专注时段。这下压力来了,必须得做。终于进入了状态。我妻子觉得我有相当严重的未确诊 ADHD 倾向,所以很多情况下就是——如果真的有一个截止期限,我就真的能进入状态。现在截止期限到了,我开始做了,做笔记,慢慢来,但感觉还差不少。
这时候我 12 岁的儿子冲进了房间。我当时心里是:“天哪,我正处在专注的巅峰,你这时候闯进来。“然后他说:“嘿,我打算再出去坐雪橇滑一次,你要不要来?“我的第一反应是:“不要,绝对不要。我可以把这件事做完的。这是我的亮点,这是我今天唯一需要做的事。只要能留在这个珍贵的专注状态里,我就能以最高质量完成它。”
但我转念一想:“等一下,今天真正让我难忘的亮点会是什么?什么事才是我以后可能真的会记住的?“我们这里很少下雪。我住在华盛顿州的一座岛上。大概每两年才会有一次像样的降雪。我们搬来才几年。他 12 岁,爱雪爱到不行。他在加州长大,没经历过多少雪天,而他已经 12 岁了,正处在变成青少年的边缘。也许他的人生中不会再有多少天想让我和他一起坐上雪橇、搂着他从山坡上冲下去了。
我想:“我得出去。“好,暂停手里的事,跑出去了。我们滑了。太神奇了。我本来不知道还能再滑一次,因为按说雪已经开始融化了。我们滑下山坡,滑下山坡,一直滑……天黑了,不得不停。但那太美好了。我记得最后一次滑到坡底——那是最后一次了——他说:“天哪,“他说,“这最后一趟太棒了。真高兴我们出来了。”
我说:“对,真高兴我们出来了,太好了。“回到屋里,15 分钟。我赶紧把准备工作收尾。大概到了我期望的 80% 或 75% 吧。我没法把那个亮点勾掉,把它当作最重要的事来打钩。但因为之前设定的那个框架——也许你想的亮点是错的,你到底会记住什么——所有这些东西,让我很自然地切换了模式,心想:“天哪,那其实才是亮点。那才是今天真正无比珍贵的事。那才是今天快乐和满足感最集中的地方。“
学会接受不完美
Jake Knapp: 而且正因为之前我还是把另一件事写了下来,我仍然去做了那件事,而不是一整天都在刷邮件。我搞砸了两次,但结果还是挺好的。所以,总之,这就是它最好的时候的样子。很多时候,事情没那么理想;很多时候,我错过了那些特别的时刻,或者错过了关键的工作时机,或者本可以最高效完成事情的那段时间。但我就是感觉好多了,这其实很大程度上就是这件事的意义所在。我就是感觉好多了,因为我觉得自己更有意识、更有目的地在度过时间。
Lenny: 谢谢你分享这么真实的故事。我觉得你做了正确的选择。不过让你在孩子和这期播客之间做选择,我有点过意不去。
Jake Knapp: 这跟你没有任何关系。不不不。我只是想……我想要准备充分,这其实是我自私。我就是想表现得好看一点,想让自己听起来像懂行的样子。
Lenny: 嗯,效果很好。一切都很好。这个故事太棒了。这让我想起你们书里的某个地方,我忘了是你还是谁……你说”这是我现在的优先事项”,列出来是家庭、写作、《为重要的事腾出时间》(Make Time),还有别的什么。然后你说”好吧,实际上 Make Time 现在比我家庭更重要”,因为你就是得把这件事完成。我在想,今天这个经历是不是正好相反。
Jake Knapp: 嗯,对。我的意思是,我觉得人们对《为重要的事腾出时间》(Make Time)觉得有用的一个原因,是 John 和我从不同的角度来谈这个问题。我有孩子。我有一个 12 岁和一个 20 岁的儿子。作为一个父亲去应对这些,是我努力搞清楚该怎么安排时间的一个重要部分。而 John 没有孩子,所以他轻松多了。不,不是的,但那确实是一种不同的心境。有时候我读到没有孩子的人写的东西,我会想”嗯,是啊,对你来说当然好,那其他的事情呢?“当然,我相信很多有更多孩子的人,或者孩子还小的人,也会有类似的感受。但这确实是真实的一部分。不管是你的家庭、你的另一半,还是你生活中任何不属于工作的部分,总有些时候,在某一天、某个时刻,你不得不调整这些优先级。而把事情排个序、想清楚,这个做法本身就能帮助你坦然面对它——“我现在正在做这个决定。这个决定现在做是合理的。“或者至少,我能看到自己做了什么,如果觉得搞砸了,我还能调回来。我知道问题出在哪里。这很大程度上就像你在设计一个产品、写代码或者做任何事一样——你能看到 bug 出在哪一行。我就去修那一行就好了。
关于孩子
Lenny: 对。我喜欢你这么坦诚。这也让我想到……我们刚有了一个孩子。他七个月大了,所以我正在经历很多。
Jake Knapp: 哦,恭喜你。
Lenny: 谢谢。
Jake Knapp: 那是最忙的时候。七个月大是最忙的时候。
Lenny: 对,确实。
Jake Knapp: 人们总是在我们孩子还是婴儿的时候跟我们说,“你等着吧。“我觉得这是人们特别想跟其他父母说的一句话——“你等着吧,后面还有呢。“后来有个人说:“你知道吗?总的来说,会越来越容易、越来越容易。每个月、每个星期,总体来说都会更容易。“我觉得这是真的,所以如果你什么时候觉得应接不暇,记住这一点。
Lenny: 对,我觉得这确实是真的。我也体会到了。而且也变得越来越美妙了。这也是我发现的一点。
Jake Knapp: 对,对。
激光模式:如何保持专注
Lenny: 我想谈谈下一个策略类别,你们叫它 laser(激光),你也可以把它理解为如何更好地专注。这里是大多数非常具体的战术建议所在的地方,关于如何避免分心。所以我觉得有用的方式是,我们快速过一遍你们最喜欢的实用技巧,帮助人们保持专注——那些你们自己真的在做、觉得最有帮助的。毕竟距书出版已经六年了,应该有更好的心得。我们来过一些内容吧。
John Zeratsky: 好。laser 的基本原则是:意志力永远不会赢。这方面有很好的研究,但现在请相信我——你在试图工作的时候,光靠咬牙硬撑是不可能在 Twitter 面前不看的。所以核心是制造困难,在你和分心之间设置障碍。对我来说有几件事:我不用 Instagram,也不用 Facebook。我以前都用,后来两个都退了,把账号停用了。我用 Twitter 和 LinkedIn,但这两个 app 我都没有装在手机上。在电脑上我也保持登出状态,除非我要出于某个具体目的去用它们。LinkedIn 我需要经常用,因为我是做 VC 的,需要查人什么的,所以我找到了一个 Chrome 插件——或者说 Chrome 扩展,应该是更准确的说法——它把 LinkedIn 的信息流屏蔽掉了。所以当我打开 LinkedIn.com,顶部是搜索栏,但没有信息流,这太棒了,因为我可以把 LinkedIn 当电话簿用,而不会被分心。以上就是我做的一些非常具体的事情,所有这些的目的都是在我和那些东西之间放一个减速带。这样如果我不自觉地要去——我现在不太这样了,但以前经常——我的手放在键盘上就会不自觉地打 T-W-I,然后进入 Twitter.com,但看到的是登录页面而不是我那诱人的信息流,我就想:“哦对,对,我是故意这么做的,好,我把那个反馈循环打断了一点。”
Lenny: 我对 Twitter/X 做了类似的事情,把 app 删了,只用移动网页版。我觉得登出这个方法非常有效,我觉得很多人没怎么听过这个建议。因为它并不是说你没法轻松登录——你点几下就回去了。但正如你说的,它提醒你:“好吧,我看到了,我真的不应该这么做。”
John Zeratsky: 还有,我给所有东西都开了两步验证,不是因为怕有人黑我的账号,而是因为那又是另一个减速带。因为这样一来,即使浏览器记住了你的密码——我用的是 1Password,即使浏览器扩展会自动帮我填密码——还是多了一步。所以这其实是在对自己的分心倾向做逆向工程。
Lenny: 大家都在说的那个 Apple 的功能,验证码自动出现在键盘上,那对你制造的这种摩擦力就是反着来的。
John Zeratsky: 对,对,没错。
Lenny: 有意思的是,我也经历过这个阶段,然后我就想,该死,我真的就想上 Twitter。于是我最近又把它装回来了,我得再跟这个斗争一次。
John Zeratsky: 嗯,我也会经历这种循环,而且我在邮件上特别容易这样。Jake,你手机上还是没有装邮件 app 吧?
Jake Knapp: 对,如果装了的话,我现在这个通话期间就会趴在地上刷邮件了,趴在地上。
John Zeratsky: 我以前也这样。很久以前 Jake 启发我把手机上的邮件删了,所以好多年以来那一直是我的默认状态。但最近我有更多理由把它装回来,主要是跟出差有关,在路上的话想及时处理一些事情。Jake 和我经常聊到的一点是,你会经历不同的循环:哎,我需要这个东西,或者我想要这个东西。然后反思步骤的一部分——留意并反思当前状况的一部分——就是意识到,哇,我其实在手机邮件上花了好多时间,或者在 Twitter 上花了好多时间,也许我该卸载一段时间。也许我就重置一下,先这样一段时间。然后又会发生什么事让你重新装回来,这完全没问题,因为你是经过深思熟虑的,你在留意,而不是说必须永远这样、一成不变。
Lenny: 这是一个很好的建议——可以再回来,不要觉得自己失败了,就像,好吧,再来一次。
删掉手机上的无尽池
Jake Knapp: 对,我觉得很大一部分在于,如果你能体验一下手机上没有那些东西的感觉。我年纪够大,经历过一个没有智能手机的时代,那时候我们也在做产品,而且做了很多东西。说真的,他们设计第一代 iPhone 的时候根本没法用 iPhone,你能做的事情其实很多。所以我们”必须有它,否则一切都会崩溃”这种想法,对 99.99999% 的人来说根本不成立。
去体验一下把手机上所有无尽池都删掉之后的感觉,这件事很有意思。我自己是在 2012 年出于对自己的愤怒这么做的。当时又是一个类似的情况——我在陪我的孩子们,他们那时候还很小,我们在玩木制火车,突然我儿子喊:“爸爸、爸爸、爸爸、爸爸、爸爸!“我说:“天哪,怎么了?“我甚至没意识到自己在看手机,我也不记得在干什么,大概是邮件之类的。我想他问了我一句”你手机上有什么?“因为对他来说,我们在做一件特别好玩的事,所以你在看手机的话那上面一定也是很酷的东西,也许是值得分享的好东西,因为当下这个已经很棒了,所以那一定也是另一个很棒的东西。他并不是想让我羞愧。
我当时很防御性地想,“嗯,我这是为了工作,“但这其实只是我内心给自己的借口,为的不过是获取一个低摩擦的多巴胺刺激。然后我想,天哪,这不是我想要的,我今天这么努力工作、赶紧做完、赶回家赶在孩子们睡觉前陪他们,不是为了这个。我就想,去它的,于是我开始删手机上的东西,删了邮件,删了 Facebook,删了这个那个——所有有无尽池的东西,所有有无限内容的东西。新闻也是这样,所有流媒体也是。
无尽池只会越来越多
我们写这本书的时候,2018 年出版的,我记得我们说过情况会变得更糟,确实如此。但那时候基本上只有 Netflix,现在有各种流媒体服务。那时候有 Instagram 和 Facebook,但现在有 TikTok,每段视频最精彩的部分即时呈现,就在这里。这些东西,越来越难以抗拒。当你把这些全从手机上清掉的时候,光是想想就难受,删除的过程也很痛苦——每次手机都会问你,“这将删除所有数据和设置,确定要继续吗?“它不想让你删。但当你真的删了之后,那是什么感觉?通常是一种不适感,但同时也是一种释然——我不用再查这个了、那个也不用查了,我不用查了。
如果你曾经觉得你的手机就像《魔戒》里的那枚戒指——Bilbo,对,《魔戒》——他们会不自觉地把 手伸进口袋去摸那枚戒指,或者直接戴上它,Frodo 也是,“我都没意识到我这么做了。“手机就是这种感觉。当你把那些东西删掉之后,那种释然的感觉对我来说非常强大。我做这件事已经十年了,当然有例外——出差的时候,因为某个原因必须查邮件,我就装上查一下。然后因为我对这件事有意识,我就会感受到那种杂音。
注意力残留
有一个概念叫注意力残留(attention residue),提出这个说法的研究者应该是华盛顿大学的 Sophie Leroy。大家可以自己去查,我是从 Cal Newport 那里了解到的。这个概念说的是——其实很合理——你关注了某些东西,它们就留在你脑子里,制造出一种杂音,那些 app 就是制造这种杂音。邮件在我的手机上、随时可以查看,光是这个念头就会制造一种不适、一种不安。既然我已经见识过、感受过没有它的状态,我完全无法想象再去经历那种感觉。
你确实要放弃一些东西。你的响应速度不会那么快。John 和我的 Twitter 粉丝数不如我们实际使用时该有的那么多。你会看到别人的情况——我刚才就在 LinkedIn 上看到一条帖子,因为我还没用那个插件——我看到一位前同事说,“去年我发了几条推文,其中几条火了,涨了三万粉丝。“我就想,哎,我也才三万粉丝,那还是好多年攒下来的,我还以为自己挺厉害的,天哪,也许我应该……然后我就想,天哪,别这样,因为我知道一旦开始用,我就会一直想着它,注意力残留会毁了我的生活。
所以,抱歉,这就是一段吐槽,但你真的应该试试。无干扰手机这件事值得试一试——如果你能把所有东西都卸掉就全卸,不行的话就先卸掉那个对你来说最致命的东西。哪个是你最难抗拒的、最吞噬你注意力的、让你感觉不好的?卸掉它——先试一天,或者先试两小时,就为了感受那种感觉。一旦你体验过那种感觉,你就永远知道了:我可以释放它,我觉得这很有力量。
Lenny: 我觉得删的时候很重要的一点是,你要知道删 app 并不会真的删掉什么东西——你可以重新安装,登录进去,一切都还在。
删掉 App 没什么大不了
Jake Knapp: 都是一样的,这一点很重要。它们让你觉得,天哪,这可是件大事。其实不是。
Lenny: 对,你只需要记住密码,或者用 Google 授权登录,或者你用的任何方式。《指环王》和魔戒的比喻太贴切了——完美描述了那种感觉:我就看看 Twitter,有什么问题,我就再看一眼,就看一眼,再看一眼。太准确了。而在《指环王》里,他们对抗魔戒的方式就是把它藏起来,放到别的地方,把它交给 Frodo 带走,对吧?解决方案是一样的——我就是拿不到它,它在别的地方。
Jake Knapp: 对,对。你得像甘道夫一样。即使那枚戒指能给你带来巨大的好处,你也得先把它交给 Frodo 一段时间,也许最后再骑着鹰出现。
Lenny: 就是太诡异了,对对,那只鹰。
Jake Knapp: 一把捞走。
Lenny: 哈哈。所以这里的关键建议就是,找到那些吞噬你注意力的 app,可能是 Twitter,可能是 LinkedIn,可能是你的邮箱,然后删掉它们,或者至少登出。还有什么?
电视和手机的物理隔离
John Zeratsky: Jake 和我都有一些和看电视相关的策略,有一个非常简单的,也可以说是一种奢侈的做法,但我认为有一些普遍可行的方式来实现——就是不要在你主要的生活空间里放电视。也就是说,不要让默认状态变成:我到家了,电视开着,我们看什么?对我和我妻子来说,电视一直放在另一个房间。Jake,你是不是用投影仪?想看东西的时候得把它拿出来、架起来,做一个”我要看什么”的决定?
Jake Knapp: 对,所以看个电视有点像搞一个项目。倒也不会花太久,但你肯定不是点一下就行,而且不看的时候你也看不到它。我们有一个投影幕布,卷起来放在角落里,投影仪收在柜子里,所以你得把它拿出来,找个椅子架上去。如果你有足够的动力当然可以做,但确实需要几分钟。
Lenny: 你需要一个那种老式摄影机,还得手动上发条的那种。
Jake Knapp: 对,没错。
Lenny: 还得有个人坐在后面操作。
John Zeratsky: 还有一个策略——
Jake Knapp: 在后面摇曲柄。
John Zeratsky: 对。还有一个对我特别有用的策略,其实它是连接”激光”章节和”充电”章节的一座桥梁,因为它和睡眠有关——我不把手机带进卧室。手机不进卧室。不仅如此,手机充电的地方,那个 MagSafe 充电座,在楼下。它在另一层,在厨房里。所以晚上我把手机放在那儿,然后上楼,可能还会醒一个小时,可能读读书,可能做些睡前准备,这些都可以,但这个做法确保了我每天做的最后一件事不是刷手机。这对我帮助特别大。而且有很多方式可以实现这个策略,不管是放在抽屉里还是柜子里,有很多变通方式,我觉得都能产生很大改变。
Lenny: 我和我妻子其实一直在讨论这件事,但问题是我们要用 Nanit app 看孩子。我知道可以买其他不依赖手机的设备,但我们就是喜欢 Nanit,所以一直在用它。
John Zeratsky: 对,有一个相关的策略,很多人告诉我们他们用得很成功——不一定是针对 Nanit app——但有些人会说:“我没法卸载那些 app,因为” Twitter、LinkedIn 之类的,“因为我的工作就是做社交媒体。我的工作就是在公司做市场营销,我必须上社交媒体。“所以有些人的做法是准备一个单独的设备。就像以前那种私人手机和工作手机分开的日子,他们会有一个工作设备,比如一个工作用的 iPad,那些 app 只装在那上面,工作的时候用它,不工作的时候就收起来。所以你也可以有另一个设备专门用 Nanit,只做这一件事,放在床头一个漂亮的小架子上,这样也能创造一些隔离。
Lenny: 好主意。我记得有一家公司,好像是 Arianna Huffington 做了一个产品,就是一个手机的小床,你把它放在客厅某个地方,把手机放上去”睡觉”,在那里充电,放在你的房间外面。
John Zeratsky: 对。有一家公司,我现在想不起名字了,但我可以查一下发给你——有一家公司做了一个很酷的盒子,你把手机放进去,它会充电,而且它还有某种方式跟手机互动,会自动开启勿扰模式,或者有一些很酷的联动功能。所以这些东西是有点花哨,但如果它能帮你建立那种默认习惯,我觉得就值得。
TikTok 的”代理过滤”策略
Lenny: 我妻子有个技巧想跟你们分享,她读那本书的时候说:“告诉他们我们一直在做的这件事。“就是关于 TikTok 的。她不安装 app,基本上靠我把喜欢的 TikTok 视频发给她,然后她用我的手机看。
Jake Knapp: 你就是 Frodo。
Lenny: 对对,我拿着 TikTok,我的宝贝。这个技巧有两个好处:一是她只看到最好的内容。她信任我的视频品味。二是我总说”把手机还给我”,所以她能看的时间是有限的,这就防止了她对 TikTok 上瘾。
John Zeratsky: 我和我妻子也有类似的互动,但是反过来的,而且是关于新闻的。我花很少的时间看新闻,手机上也没有任何新闻 app,但我妻子对新闻挺着迷的。她有医疗行业背景,在学校学过新闻学,所以她特别喜欢这两个话题,以及两者的交叉领域。所以她会给我一个新闻摘要。我们一天结束的时候聊天,或者一起做什么事的时候,她就会——这不是什么正式的安排,不是那种固定的东西——她就是分享她那天在读什么。挺好的,我们有话题聊,我觉得这也适合我们俩的风格和偏好。对她好,对我也好,所以在关系中如何实践这些想法,挺有意思的。
Lenny: 我怎么订阅你妻子每天分享新闻的 feed?听起来像是一个我们都需要的好播客。
Jake Knapp: 真正好的东西,或者真正重要的东西,总会传到我们这里的。我觉得忙碌跑步机的一部分,或者说无尽池的一部分,就是内心那种感觉——觉得自己有责任随时跟进世界上最重要的新闻,或者收件箱里最重要的消息,或者公司、团队、工作中最重要的动态;同时觉得自己也有责任去获取当下最好的娱乐内容——最应景的、最搞笑的、最有趣的,反正就是此刻最好的。
Jake Knapp: 放掉这些也没关系的,好的东西,自然会到你这里。别人会分享给你,或者你会听说到。如果真的是重大新闻,你迟早会知道。如果它会影响到你,你真的会听说的。而大部分新闻、大部分娱乐,我们并没有参与其中——这很难承认——但我们真的并不参与其中发生的事情,所以那种觉得自己有责任时刻跟进的想法,这是一份我们可以辞职的工作,或者至少可以休个长假。
Lenny: Tim Ferriss 在《每周工作4小时》里很早就讲过这个,就是——我等着别人告诉我我需要知道什么,跟 John 刚才分享的一模一样。我自己也发现——首先,当你删掉 Twitter、LinkedIn,一个星期不看,什么也不会改变。你该知道的还是都知道,工作也没问题,一切照常。你错过的那些东西对你的生活没有任何影响。所以我觉得做这个练习能帮你认识到这一点——我不需要一直在 Twitter 上。
不说政治,但关于特朗普的新闻,总有那种标题——“特朗普,看看他今天在这场诉讼里做了什么,完了。“我就是觉得每天有那么多帖子讲特朗普在做什么,但什么也没发生。就是同一回事,一直在重复。如果真的发生了什么事,很多人会告诉我,《纽约时报》会给我发一条重大推送。所以,我不需要知道他每天做的所有这些事。
Jake Knapp: 不管你的政治立场如何,这是事实。特朗普总是会上新闻,而且总是会——这是恒定不变的,第三大恒定——死亡、税收,以及特朗普会出现在新闻里。
John Zeratsky: 一个相关的策略,我已经用了很久了——我主要的新闻来源是《经济学人》杂志,对我来说其实有点太高深了,但它的主要特点是周刊。因为到了一周结束的时候,那无数条关于特朗普或者其他的报道,如果真有什么重要的事,就会被浓缩成一篇非常好的摘要。真的非常好。《经济学人》有世界上最好的记者,他们真的很出色。所以它不仅有每周一次这种很好的节奏——如果有重要的事,它会被收录进去、会被总结出来。这是我与这些策略相关的最持久的习惯了——每周读一次新闻,读《经济学人》。它很适合我的思维方式,也很适合我的生活节奏。
Lenny: 对,基本上就是 Twitter 的反面。
John Zeratsky: 对。
邮件与消息策略
Lenny: 好,我们再来听几个策略,然后聊聊这个框架的另外两个部分。
Jake Knapp: 先来一组配对的,然后再来一个。这组配对是”重置期望”和”放慢收件箱”。这两个策略主要跟邮件和消息有关。重置期望就是跟你一起工作的人谈一谈,但也可以简单到在邮件签名里加一句话。一个很好的例子是签名写上:“我每天查看两次邮件,这是一个提高专注力的实验。“或者”我每天查看一次邮件,因为我在做一个重要的项目。“你想多激进自己决定。就这么简单的一行话,人们在你发邮件时会被动地看到,就会重新调整对你回复速度的期望。如果你愿意,可以说:“我每天只查看一次邮件,因为我在做一个大项目,紧急的话可以给我发短信。“欢迎你发短信——你可以主动邀请人们这样做。
但仅仅是把它放在那里这个行为本身——你也可以用自动回复来做,就像”外出”自动回复一样,不是”我真的不在办公室”,而是”嘿,我回复邮件会比较慢,因为我在做一个重要的项目。“这里的”因为”非常重要。我们在书里讲过一个很有趣的研究,关于”因为”的力量——实验里人们会编造虚假的借口,但他们会说”因为”。这是一个老实验,在复印机前——人们要插队复印,说”我需要插个队,因为我需要复印。“仅仅说了”因为”就大幅提高了别人让他们插队的比例。我们都吃这一套,我们所有人。所以如果你说”因为”,别人会感觉好一些,你自己说的时候也会感觉好一些。
但这个做法——基本上就是挂个牌子,上面写着”嘿,我回复慢是因为我在做一个项目”,也许再给别人一个升级渠道——或者不给——这就是件大事。它看起来会是件大事,因为它改变了别人的期望,这确实是真的。但它真正的力量在于改变我们自己的期望——改变我们对自己要做什么、被期望做什么的看法。大部分压力来自内心,来自那种感觉——如果不马上回复别人,我们就不够好,我们没达到标准,我们没有做到、没有够快、没有足够积极响应,从而感到某种羞耻或内疚。所以做这个声明,本质上就是跟自己重新谈判。
另一个是放慢你的收件箱。这个很简单——如果你开始那样做,如果你开始每天只查一两次邮件,甚至更少,或者即使你查看频率稍微高一点但不回复,你不要求自己做到收件箱清零,那么整个循环就会慢下来。如果你回复邮件非常快,回复消息非常快,人们就会回复你,然后你又有更多需要回复的。如果你放慢那个小仓鼠轮,它就会慢下来。所以这也是很有力量的。所以围绕邮件的这两个策略我觉得可以非常有帮助。它们帮到了我——我对邮件、消息以及一切的默认感觉是我应该尽可能快速响应,而我必须不断跟自己重新谈判,这些就是我做到的方式。
取消网络
还有一个挺极端的策略,我最近才第一次尝试。书里有这个,但我之前其实没试过。是我们博客的一位读者告诉我们的。她叫 Krissa,我想她允许我们用她的名但没让用姓。所以 Krissa,如果你在听,向你致敬——结果证明这是一个很棒的策略。这个策略就是取消网络。她在家里取消了网络,这太疯狂了。但我的做法是,我在我住的这个小城里有一间很小的办公室,我在那里取消了网络。这样我去那里的时候,能做的就只有不需要网络的任务——这其实有很多。很多 app 可以在离线模式下使用,那对我来说是一个写东西的好地方,是一个做专注工作的好地方——做设计、做演示文稿,任何一种需要专注思考的事——阅读、写作,都可以在那里完成。现在走进那个无法上网的房间,整个感觉简直不可思议。
Jake Knapp: 要在家里打造类似的效果,你可以做一些事情,比如给网络加个定时器。你其实可以买那种假期定时器,插在墙上,把路由器插在定时器上,它就会在特定的时间自动断网。也有一些软件可以选择性地做到这一点。但核心概念是,要有一个明确的断网时间,而且重新连上网要比较麻烦——不仅仅是点一下 wifi 开关、wifi 关关那么简单。对我来说,点一下开关这点程度的减速带是不够的。而物理断网的效果非常强大。
Lenny: 你描述走进一间没有网络的办公室的那种感觉,我完全能感受到。想象一下,就是那种”这里没有网络,我可以做那么多事情,我可以阅读”的感觉。
Jake Knapp: 也许是一家你不知道 wifi 密码的咖啡馆,就是那种妙不可言的感觉。也许你就是去一个没有 wifi 的公园,不管是什么方式,找到一个你无法、就是无法获取那些东西的地方。如果你受不了删除所有 app,那就把手机留在家里。太好了,真的太好了。然后你就不用打那场仗了。
很多东西——我有一个画面感,我的亮点就在我面前,就在那里,我能看到这件我想做的事,但它好像在五英尺或十英尺之外,而紧挨着我、不断震动的是所有那些——你可以想象所有 app 的图标,它们就在我脑袋周围嗡嗡震动。它们就在那里,碰触其中任何一个,就像它们是一颗颗小糖果,都会让你感觉很好。那里有一顿真正的好饭,五到十英尺之外有一个美味的三明治,但这些小糖果就在我眼前,很难忍住不往嘴里塞一颗 Sour Patch Kid 或者 Laffy Taffy。但如果我能把它们推开,只要推得足够远,让它们比那个三明治更远,我就会去吃三明治。基本上这就是你对这些干扰设置障碍时做的事情。然后你就能进入激光模式,而且很轻松。你会想要这么做。一旦有了空间,你就会想去做最重要的那件事。问题只在于糖果就在我们眼前,所以很难。
Lenny: 这个比喻太好了。你还有一个奥德修斯驶过塞壬的比喻。如果大家知道那个故事,就是有个塞壬,一个什么悬崖之类的东西,他就是驾船经过。
Jake Knapp: 我很了解,八年级的时候我在学校话剧里演过奥德修斯,所以我可以给你详细讲讲。
Lenny: 哇,那可是个了不起的角色。在那个故事里,他想体验那些无人能抗拒的塞壬,但他让水手们把他绑在船上,不允许他做任何事,即使他喊着”放开我,我要过去”。因为所有人都会撞上塞壬。总之,这个故事我讲得不太好,但我认为它反复回到同一个观点:你不能依赖意志力来抵御那些在你周围震动的糖果,你需要建立这些系统。
Jake Knapp: 我觉得我们会认为自己能用意志力,这个观念可能源于一个事实:有些人确实能做到。也许有些人就是在靠意志力,他们在用 Twitter,在用 Instagram,在用 TikTok,在用 Facebook,在做所有这些事,同时他们看起来也运转得很好——至少我们从外部看到的是这样。也许他们内心也没问题。但据我实际交谈过的每一个人,以及我个人的经验,所有那些东西让我感觉很糟糕,而且实际上削弱了我做那些有意义之事的能力——无论通过工作还是生活所能做出的有意义的贡献,全都被社交媒体、新闻、以及几乎所有的邮件带来的糟糕感受和分心所破坏和削弱。所以如果这对任何人来说哪怕有一点点是真的,我们都必须彻底重新思考自己在做什么。
我认为我们基本上被引导着变成了反应机器——“我要保持收件箱清零,我要完成每一个任务,我要做一个快速响应者,我要参加每一个会议,我要这样做因为我想帮助别人,事情就该这样运作。“我觉得这种想要帮助他人的欲望是一个很大的驱动力。我们想缓解自己的压力,也想缓解别人的压力,而这看起来就是正确的方式。它是糖果,其中一些东西是糖果,很容易。
我们也看到掌权者在示范这种模式,比如 CEO 和老板们,这对他们有效,因为他们通过持续反应和整天开会来施加影响力。这就是他们做事的方式,这就是他们施加影响力的方式。但即使对他们来说,我认为这种方式作为施加影响力的手段也是有局限的。至少对我们其余人来说——而我们中那些认为这些事情带来问题、无法轻松靠意志力和自我管理来应对的人,我认为是绝大多数——如果我们是一个反应机器,我们就没有在做有意义的工作,没有项目 A,而且作为人类我们也不是真正地活着。我们只是聊天机器人。所以如果你不想把一辈子活成一个聊天机器人,值得去尝试一下。
精力与反思
Lenny: 你刚才提到的关于感受的那一点真的非常重要——即使你觉得自己足够高效,事情都在推进,但如果你感觉不好,那仍然是一个需要关注的问题。这个想法是:你是否在把时间花在你想要花时间的事情上?你刚才还让我想起了一个 app,我简单提一下,我觉得你们会喜欢,不知道你们听说过没有。它叫 mailmanhq.com。它可以在特定时段关闭你的 Gmail。你可以说”只在这些时间段把邮件放进来”。这样邮件就不会随时涌进来,你可以批量释放你的邮件。
Jake Knapp: 太好了。Mailman HQ?
Lenny: mailmanhq.com。
Jake Knapp: 好,我现在就记下来。
Lenny: 对,我会时不时开关它,因为有时候我就是想收一封邮件,但它确实有很大差别。仅仅是不知道自己有邮件这件事,就能带来很大差别,这很不可思议。
Jake Knapp: 是的。
Lenny: 好。我们来谈谈这个框架的最后两个部分,精力和反思,然后我们再花点时间聊聊 Sprint,让没读过那本书的人了解一下这个方法是怎么回事。
John Zeratsky: 那么回顾一下整个系统:亮点是关于你今天想为哪件事腾出时间——今天最重要的事。激光是关于为干扰设置障碍,这样你就能把尽可能多的精力或注意力集中在你的亮点上、集中在那一件事上。精力则像是激光的一个助推器。
精力:身心相连
John Zeratsky: 核心想法是,我们的大脑和身体是相连的,我们集中注意力、保持专注、去做那些我们在乎的事情的能力,只有在状态良好的时候才能发挥作用——当我们睡好了、吃好了、运动了、与他人的社交量恰到好处(不多也不少)。所以我们把这作为”为重要的事腾出时间”框架的一部分,因为我们不认为你应该走极端,去尝试一大堆生物黑客之类的东西,但我们确实认为值得用同样的理念来对待你的精力和健康:关注什么有效、什么无效,建立一个系统,尝试一些新方法,留意这些变化,跑这些实验。我们认为值得为你的健康和精力这样做,因为它确实会产生影响。
Lenny: 能不能快速分享一两个关于精力的小技巧,帮助大家在日常中多创造一点精力?
John Zeratsky: 自从我们写完这本书以来的这些年,随着我的生活持续变化,年纪也大了一些,我意识到睡眠可能是最重要的一件事。我之前提到过,卧室里不放手机、不放电视——希望这是不言自明的——就是要真正构建一个能让我好好睡觉的环境。我最近开始戴眼罩了。
Lenny: 我也戴。
John Zeratsky: 对,确实帮助我更快入睡、睡得更安稳。另一件事是运动,它是我重要的精力来源,但我发现自己总在找借口——为什么今天不需要或不应该运动。所以虽然这不是我们在书里特别推荐的做法,但我最终请了一位私人教练,这样我就有了外部约束,有了固定的日程,有一个人在替我考虑我需要什么,而不只是我自己。这两件事成了过去几年我建立精力的支柱。
Lenny: 我用了一个叫 Future 的 app,声明一下我是投资人,但它基本上就是通过 app 找到一位真人私人教练,帮你设计训练方案,然后在 app 上给你训练内容,你跟着指令做就行。就是它让我做到了每周锻炼三次。
John Zeratsky: 不错。
Jake Knapp: 太棒了。
Lenny: 干得漂亮。好,接下来是反思,也许简单谈谈它的重要性,然后给一个大家可以用来反思日常进展的具体做法。
反思:对每一天保持好奇
Jake Knapp: 反思其实就是回顾这一天,把这一天当作一个实验来看待——而不是刻在大理石墓碑上的成功或失败的记录,它只是你跑的一个实验。实验结果如何?用这个视角来记录,看到了什么。我们书里有一个模板,上面有一些你可以回答的问题,但其实非常简单。
如果你在早上或者前一天晚上写下你的亮点,把它写在便利贴上,贴在一个显眼的地方,那到一天结束的时候你只需要看一眼——“好,这件事做了还是没做?“如果你把它贴在显眼的地方,你甚至不需要刻意去做什么,你自然会看到它,你就知道那件事有没有发生。所以最简单的做法就是:写下来,贴上去,它就会自动为你创造一个反思循环。
另一件我认为很有力量的事是,在一天结束时在床头放一个笔记本,写下一两件或三件你当天感恩的事情——就是简单的感恩日记。这样你就会开始进入一种心态:今天有什么很棒的事,发生了什么令人满足或令人愉悦的事,什么让我感到快乐。然后如果你以”我希望今天发生什么”开始一天,回头再问”今天有什么好事?“你的大脑就会开始主动寻找那些好的事情,寻找那些大的亮点。这是一种很好的日常生活方式:“这是我希望发生的事,这是实际发生的事。现在我对明天可能发生的事更敏感了。哦,现在我对今天发生的事也更敏感了。“周而复始,一个非常美好的循环。所以,你希望发生的事和实际发生的事之间有联系吗?你有没有完成你的亮点?如果是,是什么帮助你做到了?什么有效、什么无效?什么让它变难了?可能是精力方面的问题,那就提示你调整喝咖啡的时间,或者是否要散步等等。可能是专注方面的问题,那也许我该为那件干扰我的事再设一个障碍。无论是什么,概括来说就是:对这一天保持好奇,而不是对自己进行审判。
Sprint 简介
Lenny: 我想我们已经非常深入地聊完了《为重要的事腾出时间》(Make Time)。如果大家想实践这些方法,强烈推荐去读这本书。它叫 Make Time,读起来很快,基本上就是一长串你可以做的事情的清单,我们今天聊到了其中很多,但书里还有更多。这本书的一个前提就是:尝试各种方法,看看什么有效、什么无效,持续反思、迭代。这些方法里,哪怕你只找到两件能改变你效率的事,那就是巨大的收获。
Jake Knapp: 我强烈推荐大家去买这本书,很好。这是我们尽力编写的一份操作指南。说句实话,我们并没有企图打造一个自我提升的商业帝国,这不是我们的全职工作。我们只是希望它对你有用、有帮助。所以如果你不想买书,我们完全理解。去 maketime.blog 看看上面的一些实验和相关资源就好,或者就试试我们今天聊到的其中一两个方法。试试亮点。如果你只打算做一件事,现在就在便利贴上写下你想让今天的亮点是什么——如果时间已经晚了就写明天的——然后把它贴在你明天能看到的地方。
光是这样就已经是朝正确方向迈出的一大步了。试着跟你的同事聊聊,或者在邮件签名里加一个自动回复,说明你要放慢节奏,或者跟他们讨论一下放慢沟通频率这件事。在我们的风投基金 Character VC,我们就进行了一次讨论,决定把主要沟通放到 Notion 上进行——如果要讨论什么,就以文档的形式呈现,大家对在那里回应和回复的预期,跟在那种设计来让你尽快回复的工具里(比如邮箱收件箱或 Slack)是不一样的。
所以就这些事去聊聊吧。从手机上卸掉几个 app。你不需要买这本书,也不需要完全接受这个体系才能做这些事情,但这就是我们真正想要的——我们只是希望你能为对你重要的事腾出更多时间。
Lenny: 太棒了。我基本上把所有时间都花在聊 Make Time 上了。我觉得我们应该做一期后续节目专门聊 Sprint。我打算这样:跳过快问快答环节,你们原本会在那里分享的内容,我们放到节目笔记里。我会异步把那些问题发给你们。但我们先花几分钟聊聊 Sprint,让大家了解一下这个框架是怎么回事——它非常流行,催生了很多非常成功的产品——然后我们收尾,给大家指引一下你们推荐的方向。
Jake Knapp: 好。
Lenny: Sprint 这个框架到底是什么?人们在什么时候会用到这个理念、这个框架、这个方法?有哪些例子是应用了 Sprint 之后产出的成果?
Sprint 的起源与理念
Jake Knapp: 设计冲刺的核心想法是,在短短五天之内,从零走到原型,并对那个原型进行测试。它是一套配方,是一系列经过脚本化的活动流程,我们花了多年时间开发出来。最初,它源于我在 Google 做的一些项目,我对自己的工作方式进行了一些实验。2000 年代我是 Gmail 的产品设计师,也是 Google Meet 的联合创始人。有那么一周,我们真正催化了一个原本毫无进展的项目——那是 Google 内部一个 20% 时间项目,也就是人们的副业项目,一年半毫无起色,基本上已经岌岌可危了。而在一个专注协作的星期里,我和另外两个人决定把所有其他事情都放下来。
我去了他们在斯德哥尔摩的办公室。我们没有试图制定完美的计划、写完美的 PRD、向高管做完美的提案,而是说:“我们就做一个原型,放到同事面前,让他们用用看。“我们就是这么做的,而那正是真正奏效的东西。从那以后我就想,“我需要为团队不断创造这样的时刻,因为那太有力量了。“所以后来我们在 Google Ventures 与初创公司一起运行了数百次冲刺,不断调整和优化流程,写了一本叫《Sprint》的书。
如今 John、我和我们的同事 Eli 运营着一支风险投资基金,叫 Character。我们帮助团队通过 Sprint 来发现和拓展产品市场匹配。它就是做这件事的工具,而且运用了很多我们在 Make Time 中谈到的原则来改变默认设置——不仅是个人工作方式的默认设置,还包括团队协作的默认设置、人们做决策的方式、我们评估什么是一个好主意、好策略、值得追求的方向的方式——不凭借直觉或猜测,而是基于我们能亲眼看到的客户反馈。总而言之,这就是 Sprint 所做的事情。
John Zeratsky: 这种摆脱困境、把也许一直停留在讨论中的抽象想法或概念,变成一个具体的原型——一个你可以看到、可以点击、可以实际尝试的东西——这个思路在很多不同场景中都适用。我们从读过这本书并在十万人规模的公司、政府机构以及各种组织中运行过冲刺的人那里听到了令人惊叹的故事,但书中收录的故事主要是关于与初创公司合作的经历。
我们认为这对初创公司尤其有价值,因为通常你已经募集了一定数量的资金,这笔资金能支撑你一定长度的跑道。你有有限的时间来证明你达到了产品市场匹配,证明你正在做的产品对某些客户来说是正确的产品。所以你越快做到这一点,就越快知道自己的方向是否正确,越快学到东西、调整路线,最终越快达到一个更好的境地——相比于花几个月时间去做那个原型或产品的第一个版本然后再发布,这要高效得多。
如何开始尝试 Sprint
Lenny: 我觉得这件事最棒的地方在于,作为产品经理,把一个新想法的实验控制在五天之内,而不是让团队持续被这个想法分心——“好,我们花一个星期,看看这能走到哪里。他们不会花几个月去探索。我们不会一直讨论它。理论上,我们就试试看。“我觉得这真的很有力量。那么对于可能想探索这个方向、但在我们做后续节目之前就迫不及待的人,是不是直接看书就行?还有什么其他的资源你可以推荐,帮助他们理解这个想法并付诸实践?
Jake Knapp: 是的。如果你正在考虑创业,或者处于非常早期的阶段,一个好办法是通过 character.vc 联系我们。实际上我们刚刚开放了 Labs 项目的申请,网址是 character.VC/labs。我们的 Labs 项目是一个面向初创公司的高强度项目,我们会运行一系列冲刺,包括一些书中没有的新格式,但效果非常好。
这将是我们的第三期。我们发现它对 AI 初创公司尤其有价值。这恰好是因为,当你试图把一些最初可能并不值得信赖的东西变成可用的产品时,往往需要让习惯了另一种工作方式的客户做出重大的行为转变,而且有时候人工智能生成的东西让人感觉很陌生。
所以让这些东西真正有用——不仅仅是一个藏在角落里带小星星的聊天机器人,问”你想就这个问题向 AI 提个问吗?“——而是真正有意义的东西,通过这种反复的、我们运行一系列冲刺、一次又一次地做,你和 John 还有我直接合作,我们发现这是一种非常有力的起步方式。
总之,这是 Character Labs 的一条大广告。但总的来说,去看看那本书。另外,如果你还没准备好一下子读完整本书,可以去 thesprintbook.com。我们上面有大量资源,包括一个新的东西:我创建的一个 Miro 模板,里面为每一个步骤都提供了逐步指引,还有三十多个我讲解每个步骤的视频——而且我想我在那些视频里穿的也是同一件卫衣,所以如果你在 YouTube 上看这个的话,可以在那个模板里看到更多穿这件卫衣的我。那个是免费的,网站上也有一堆其他免费资源。所以任何人、所有人都应该能获取到这些东西。
Character Labs 适合什么样的团队
Lenny: 太棒了。再问一下,对于想了解 Labs 项目的人来说,除了 AI 方向之外,还有什么样的团队是理想的?多早的阶段?还有什么其他市场特别适合 Sprint 这个流程和你们的方法?
John Zeratsky: 对,这是一个为期四周的冲刺项目,面向种子轮之前的软件初创公司。Character 只投资软件初创公司,而这个项目非常适合那些已经知道自己要做什么的公司——他们不是那种”哦,我想创办一家公司”的状态,他们对市场机会有认知,有明确聚焦的市场,但绝对还没有达到产品市场匹配。
他们可能甚至还没有一个可以用来验证假设的产品。所以是非常早期的阶段。我们在行业领域上比较灵活。但我们发现,当存在比较大的行为风险时,这套方法的效果最好。所以如果你只是在做一个已有东西的稍好版本——也许便宜一点、快一点、好用一点——你可能不需要这些东西,你大概直接做就行了,大概率也会成功。
但如果你像我们的一家投资组合公司那样——他们做的是控制工业设施的 AI,团队来自 Google DeepMind,之前在 Google 数据中心做过类似的事情——在这种场景下,你需要说服那些戴着安全帽、操作着巨型设备的工厂运营人员去信任 AI。那是一个巨大的行为转变,一个巨大的行为风险。或者在医疗领域、教育领域——在这些技术真的能为人们带来巨大改变的地方,但要跨越信任和理解的门槛却很困难。这些就是我们认为真正能够帮上忙的机会类型。
Lenny: 在地狱模式下玩游戏,这些听起来极其困难。我喜欢。
John Zeratsky: 是的。
Lenny: John,Jake,非常感谢你们来参加,感谢你们为这次播客对话腾出时间。
John Zeratsky: 谢谢你的邀请,这期很棒。
Jake Knapp: 是的,谢谢邀请。
Lenny: 当然,我的荣幸。
Jake Knapp: 真的很高兴,Lenny。
Lenny: 荣幸是我的。大家再见。
非常感谢收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你喜欢的播客 app 上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的能帮助其他听众发现这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| 1Password | 密码管理工具,保留原文 |
| Apple Podcasts | 苹果播客平台,保留原文 |
| Arianna Huffington | 阿丽亚娜·赫芬顿 |
| attention residue | 注意力残留 |
| Ben Williams | 人名,保留原文(播客往期嘉宾) |
| busy bandwagon | 忙碌跑步机 |
| Cal Newport | 人名,保留原文 |
| Character VC | 风险投资机构,保留原文 |
| design sprint | 设计冲刺 |
| Do Not Disturb | 勿扰模式 |
| Eli | 人名,保留原文(Character 基金团队成员) |
| Energize | 精力(书中策略类别) |
| escalation path | 升级渠道(指紧急联系替代方式) |
| feedback loop | 反馈循环 |
| Frodo | 弗罗多(《指环王》角色) |
| Future | 健身 app 名称,保留原文 |
| Gandalf | 甘道夫(《指环王》角色) |
| Google DeepMind | AI 研究机构,保留原文 |
| Google Ventures | 风险投资机构,保留原文 |
| Groundhog Day | 《土拨鼠之日》(1993年电影,此处为书中比喻概念) |
| hamster wheel | 仓鼠轮(比喻不断重复的循环) |
| Highlight | 亮点(书中核心概念,指一天中最重要的事) |
| infinity pools | 无尽池 |
| Jake Knapp | 人名,保留原文(播客嘉宾,Make Time 合著者之一) |
| John Zeratsky | 人名,保留原文(播客嘉宾,Make Time 合著者之一) |
| Krissa | 人名,保留原文(读者) |
| kryptonite | 致命弱点(此处为比喻用法) |
| Laffy Taffy | 糖果品牌,保留原文 |
| laser | 激光(书中策略类别,指专注模式) |
| Lenny | 播客主持人 Lenny Rachitsky,保留原名 |
| lennyspodcast.com | 网站,保留原文 |
| lightning round | 快问快答 |
| MagSafe | 苹果磁吸充电技术,保留原文 |
| mailmanhq.com | 邮件管理工具,保留原文 |
| Make Time | 书名,暂译《为重要的事腾出时间》(保留原文书名) |
| maketime.blog | 网站,保留原文 |
| Miro | 协作白板工具,保留原文 |
| Nanit | 婴儿监控 app/设备品牌,保留原文 |
| Neer Eyal | 人名,保留原文(播客往期嘉宾) |
| Notion | 协作工具,保留原文 |
| Odysseus | 奥德修斯 |
| OKR | 目标与关键成果(管理工具术语,保留原文) |
| out of office autoresponder | 外出自动回复 |
| PRD | 产品需求文档(Product Requirements Document,保留原文) |
| product market fit | 产品市场匹配 |
| Project A | 项目 A(指最重要的项目) |
| Reclaim | 公司名称,保留原文(日历工具公司) |
| Reflect | 反思(书中策略类别) |
| show notes | 节目笔记 |
| Siren | 塞壬 |
| Slack | 即时通讯工具,保留原文 |
| Sophie Leroy | 人名,保留原文 |
| Sour Patch Kid | 酸味软糖品牌,保留原文 |
| speed bump | 减速带 |
| Spotify | 音乐/播客平台,保留原文 |
| Sprint | 书名,保留原文《Sprint》 |
| The 4-Hour Workweek | 《每周工作4小时》(Tim Ferriss 著作) |
| The Economist | 《经济学人》 |
| thesprintbook.com | 网站,保留原文 |
| Tim Ferriss | 人名,保留原文(作家、播客主持人,《每周工作4小时》作者) |
| white-knuckle | 咬牙硬撑 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)