Jay Papasan
speaker
212 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2016
last heard Sep 2024
Jay Papasan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Our calendars are kind of overflowing. I've had moments in my life where I was literally mapping out my days in 15 minute increments. And there are a lot of people who feel that way. We have a lot of opportunity to do stuff and we have a lot of obligation. And I kind of compared the way we operate
with so many things kind of stressing us out, the need to do them all, to like being a character in a B-horror movie that runs up the stairs instead of out the front door. We make really bad decisions on how to spend our time. And so the antidote to that, that first lie, was essentially, you know, we want you to launch your days by identifying the things that you could do
and then identify the handful that you really should do, and then prioritize them from one to whatever. And that's lie number one. The second lie, people have a lot, they're looking at all the things they might have to do. The other thing they're really tempted in this day and age to do is multitask. And we make a strong argument that multitasking is a lie.
And the big crux there is that in reality, when we think we're multitasking, Researchers call it switch tasking. If they call anything in their research or multitasking, it's just in the headline so they can get it in print. But they call it switch tasking because what actually happens is we're doing our work. And then we decide to switch. And that's instantaneous.
It's like squirrel, boom, we're off to the next thing. The thing that they realized challenged us is when you switch tasks, your brain has to reorient to the new rules of the game. And there's a lag. If you've ever been like writing a really complex email and maybe your spouse walks in and starts talking to you, you know they're talking to you.
You can hear words in the air, but you actually don't comprehend them. And you say, oh, I'm sorry, what were you saying? And you repeat that. That's that lag time. And every time we switch between screens, you know, stopping our email to pick up a phone call, we experience this lag time. And researchers believe about a quarter of our day, 28% is lost to this. And we're not even aware of it.
It's a huge loss. I mean, as an employer, I look, wow, I have five employees when I might need four if they were all just being efficient with their time. There's just tons of research out there that the funny one that always kind of You know, people say this is making me smarter or whatever. You know, I can do all these things.
There's a guy in the College of New London and he did research into IQ tests and he compared the results of people who were focusing. He compared the results of people who were having to multitask. They had to juggle emails and phone calls while they took an IQ test. And very hilariously, he compared them to people who were stoned.
You know, nobody was surprised that on average, the people who were focused scored 11 points higher than the other two groups. They were shocked that the people who were stoned on average scored six IQ points higher than the people who are multitasking. So I could go through six ways. We don't need to go there. It costs you time. It makes you dumb and you're just less effective.
So we really tried to get people, if not stop multitasking all the time, when you're doing your main thing, your one thing, at least stop multitasking then. If I was actually more focused when I was at work, could I have more time with my family? I think there's a real human cost that I think about, and it makes me a little bit sad.
The economic cost is one thing, but what's the cost to my family if I'm working late every day just because I'm not being as effective as I could be? So the next two lies are discipline life is a lie. And then willpower is always on will call is a lie. And what we tried to break out two things. Discipline, one of the meanings for it is training yourself to do something until it's habitual.
When I was giving my one thing talk in Nashville, a guy showed up an hour and 15 minutes early. And I went up to him and I said, oh, wow, you won the early bird award. You know, are you with the team? And he goes, nope, I'm just here. I'm always early. It's a habit. I hear that habit word and I'm like, you know, tell me more. And it turns out that he had been a Green Beret.
He'd been out of the service for almost two decades, but he'd been in it for, I think, I don't know, 15 years. And he said, I was trained to show up early and observe, and I just can't shake the habit. Everywhere we go, we're early. We're early to dinner, to the movies. It drives my wife crazy.
And I love that because it's a perfect illustration that in our sense, and when we were building our construct, we really wanted to hit on this idea that being disciplined all the time, which we go into in willpower, there is some science about how There is an ebb and flow to your, what we often call this phenomenon called willpower.
But this other definition is, if you know what your one thing is, the very next thing you would want to do is make it a habit. Because if that became habitual, you work to build the habit, and then the habit would work for you. And kind of the big aha we had here is, was that when we looked at the research, like how long does it actually take to form a habit?
Most people conventionally believe it takes either 21 or 30 days. But the most recent research we found, they had asked, I think, over 200 graduate students to take on a new health habit. Anything from drinking eight glasses of water to quitting smoking, whatever they wanted. And for a year, they followed them around and said, did you do it, yes or no? And how hard was it every single day?
And what they discovered is that on average, around 66 days is when it got as easy as it was ever going to get. So it takes us about three times as long as most people think to form a habit, even on average. We want to at least keep our foot on that pedal, right, for that long. And so that was the discipline thing.
So clarify the willpower part. So then what's the distinction? What would you call willpower?
So we dove into the science of how we say yes to what we need to do and how we say no to everything else. But the researchers, the scientists, right, the guys in the lab coats, We're calling it willpower. And they defined that as the power to say yes to what you need to do. If I'm on a diet, that means, you know, carrot sticks and hummus and no to everything else. So no nachos for me.
And both of those, they measure it, literally take energy out of your system. And kind of shockingly, your brain is one-fiftieth of your body mass, and it takes up one-fifth of all of the energy you consume. It's the hungriest organ in your body after the liver.
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