Chris Guillebeau
speaker
120 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Chris Guillebeau’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
What do I do with that?
great thing to do whether it's maybe this might not work when you first wake up but any point during out during the day is to just kind of look back i call this your your last 40 minutes okay so you look back and like how did i spend the last 40 minutes i like 40 minutes rather than an hour for some reason it's this really specific amount of time and you can just ask yourself was that time valuable
and valuable doesn't only mean productive you know it can mean like you can find value in lots of different ways but you look back and like did i spend that time well and if so great you know and if not well there's all kinds of times during the day that we realize maybe that wasn't the best use of time then I'm going to kind of regroup and do something else.
And as for like, you know, waking up and there's all these, all these things. Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's the modern world that we live in. And I think we live in this culture in which there is only one speed, you know, there's only one pace.
Like if you, if you're getting directives from different people or you're working collaboratively collaboratively with, with folks, then there is this kind of, insistence that everything is urgent. And as you said, obviously, everything is not urgent. And so beginning to understand what is truly urgent, which is a very small, you know, number of things and what could be done at any point.
And that third category, I think you clued into this as well, when you said some stuff might just disappear, the third category of stuff you could just not do. I think that is a really helpful thing to begin like finding some relief in this process. There's so much I have to do, but what actually really matters here?
What is something that I probably should do at some point, but the time of it is not that important. And what could I just not do? And maybe it'll go away and not come back to me.
you know even if they are mike uh you know i guess this is time this is one of those things where it's like it's helpful to have a big picture view of like imagine that they actually are nevertheless you know what is the goal of your life you know is the goal of your life to be the most responsive person for every person who's waiting for you to hit the ball back and
you know, if you get really good at doing that, then you're going to have more balls coming your way. That's the whole problem with this process of like, I'm just going to become super efficient and I'm going to use all these tools. And now we have AI and, you know, and I like some of the stuff, but like,
Just making it your mission to become hyper responsive is kind of like the mission of accumulating wealth. It's good to have money, right? But if your life goal is to accumulate as much wealth as possible, I think that's not ultimately a very satisfactory goal. So the same thing with being responsive. It's much better big picture to goal to be like, what do I actually want to do with my life?
What is the purpose of my life? How can I then Try to align my day to day with that as much as possible while recognizing that, of course, there are expectations of me and I'm going to need to respond to some of them. But I don't want to start with the goal of like I need to be as responsive as possible because that is ultimately a losing battle. Talk about your idea of the eighth day of the week.
i have this um this whole other activity about the eighth day of the week like imagine you get an extra day every week so it's not just your perfect ideal day like you experience one time in your life but it's a recurring day and on on this eighth day we can also say like nobody's expecting anything from you like you have responsibilities you know family work otherwise.
But on this eighth day, like it's a bonus day, everybody else has kind of gone away. You can do anything you want. I started asking people about this. And the number one thing that they said they would do on their eighth day was catch up. They're like, I feel so behind.
And the thing I want to do most of my life is to catch up on my email or catch up on, you know, whatever these responsibilities are. So you can see how much of a burden it is, you know, how overwhelming it can become. And ultimately, catching up is an elusive goal. So we have to somehow let that go because it's impossible.
And if we really think, what would we do with that eighth day, then that's where things kind of get interesting. And that's when you realize, this is how I want to spend more of my time.
Yeah, well, I mean, let's do big picture and then let's do details. So big picture, you pointed to it right at the top of our conversation. Like, I don't think you put it in these words, but I would say someday you're going to die. And it's actually very helpful to be mindful of that. You know, I had a previous book
where I looked at people who pursued big quests, did all kinds of stuff like I did about going to every country in the world and so on. And one commonality was they had this emotional awareness of mortality. And everybody has an intellectual awareness, like, yeah, everybody dies. But an emotional awareness is more personal. It's more like, yes, someday I'm going to die.
And the interesting thing is when you have this mentality, I mean, it can sound kind of like overbearing or scary, but it actually can feel very purposeful because you're like, OK, someday I'm going to die. Time is running out. Therefore, that might actually that knowledge might actually help me let go of some of those things, maybe not all those things that you mentioned.
But when I once I understand, you know, it kind of gives you this like built in excuse for anything you don't want to do. You know, if somebody asks you to do something and you don't want to do it, you're effectively like, No, thank you. I'm going to die one day, you know, like hopefully not tomorrow, but I don't know, right?
And we might not use that exact language, but my point is the framing of understanding your mortality can be very helpful in making decisions.
Showing 61–80 of 120 · page 4 of 6
← Previous
Next →