Eric Mack (4:12)

weren't ready for it.

David Allen (4:14)

They weren't ready for it. They didn't know what the tool was anyway. So if to make a long story short. So I'm going to give Erica right off the front bat here, a paid political announcement called. Look, guys, anybody who's in that situation probably needs somebody like an Eric Mack or Eric himself to come in and help assess that situation and say, you know, what's the strategic way to, you know, get on top of this game instead of feel buried by it? So that's my introduction to Eric Mack, and I would have no reservations to making that recommendation from now on. Thank you.

John Forrester (4:49)

Well, we have. This is the second recording we've done with Eric in a week. We're going to release both of them in short order, but before that, it was late 2019, the last time we talked with you, Eric. So what have you been up to for three years? Almost four years.

Eric Mack (5:09)

Well, let's see. We actually met in late 2021. My mistake there. When we did, we started to kick off this coaching program. And what happened is just two weeks after we launched that podcast, I had my forced mind like water experience.

David Allen (5:31)

Forced, voluntary, forced mind like water.

Eric Mack (5:35)

Yeah. No, no. I know that for many years, we always tried to reach that elusive state of mind like water, David, but for me, it was forced. I ended up in the hospital with COVID double pneumonia, sepsis and ARDS. And what that translated into is spending 11 days getting critical care, but specifically with 40 liters per minute of oxygen, which is like taking the other end of a vacuum cleaner hose and hooking it up to a face mask. And after. After one day, your mind was definitely clear of all thoughts because it was not possible to contain any other thoughts. By the eighth day, I was convinced that if I could get the strength together, which I didn't, I was going to take off the mask and run down the hall screaming, because it was just the silence and the white noise and everything was just a little too much. But what's been interesting from that, and I kind of call that my forced mind like water. But what was interesting in that is that coming home, I lost all short term memory and which in a sense is what we talk about when we talk about mind like water. Right. We talk about the water not tensing up before the rock shows up. That was very much me. In fact, I had to. I resorted to surviving, going through pads and pads of post it notes every day just to give me the simplest cues, like I'm going down the hall to use the restroom or I'm going to the office to pick something up. It literally was that extreme. At its worst, I was probably going through half a dozen post it notepads a day just with these little cognitive artifacts telling me what to think about because I could not keep a thought in my mind from one moment to the next. Now, while I was going through that, it was no fun. In fact, it was pretty frustrating. And at times I'd even get angry that I couldn't remember some of the most basic things I set out to do. But over after a while I realized, wait a minute, I've got what we were all looking to get to, which is this point of responding in the moment or only to what's going on in the moment. And for that I'm very thankful because now as I'm on the other side of recovery, I spent a year on oxygen and other stuff at home trying to get better. Now that I'm on the other side of that, I can see how that's actually benefited me greatly to have experienced that. Just like David, when you, when you coached me and you wanted to get all the way through to an empty inbox to make sure that I experienced what empty felt like. This was like. I definitely experienced that mind like water moment.

David Allen (8:35)

Wow, what a story.

John Forrester (8:37)

Well, we're glad you're feeling better now and you're back to, back to your cockpit there where you have that amazing desk and set of monitors and tools around you.

David Allen (8:47)

By the way, let me interrupt right, for a second. John and Eric, you both probably have run across people as I have, who wound up going to like a 10 day silent retreat where at the end of the sixth or seventh day, instead of going crazy, they suddenly realized, wow, I'm present. But it kind of took them that long to get to the space that was clear space.

John Forrester (9:13)

Yes.

David Allen (9:14)

That all that other stuff wasn't going on. So, Eric, sounds like you just got that in Turbocharged.

Eric Mack (9:21)

Yeah. I don't think I could have handled voluntarily going into the. The Ten days of silence, although it's appealing now. But. Yes, I understand, for once.

David Allen (9:33)

Yeah.

John Forrester (9:34)

Yeah. All right, well, let's move on to the provocative topic of the workplace is broken. Tell us what you mean by that and start filling in on that, please.

Eric Mack (9:45)

Sure. When I talk about the workplace being broken, I mean that our environment and our tools, as we were discussing in the last podcast, often shape us in unproductive ways. And so it's kind of, you know, a situation where the tools can work against us. In fact, if you don't mind, I pulled together a page that I think I'd rather read just because it allows me to succinctly describe what I mean when I say the workplace is broken. I realize that's a provocative topic. The modern workplace works against us, of course. Work still gets done. It's just much harder than it should be. Constant connectivity means we're expected to be always on with little time for deep thought. Meetings are more frequent, inefficient, unproductive, and disappointing. We spend too much time looking for information, so it becomes easier to just Google or reinvent a process. It's too hard to organize information we receive, so we tend to leave it all in our inbox. Many organizations respond to this by replacing one set of tools with another, promising that your work is about to get easier with fill in the blank tool thanks to some new tool. Paradoxically, the very tools that are intended to make us more productive often have the opposite effect. Thanks to cloud software, the tools we use change often, and new tools are introduced at a frenzying pace, typically with little notice or training. Have you seen that? Yeah, absolutely.

John Forrester (11:25)

I was talking to someone last week that who had just had a new tool dropped into her company, and she said, we're expected to do something with this, but we've had no. No training or other information about how

Eric Mack (11:38)

to use it, or even time to explore. So we barely have the time to learn how to use these tools effectively. Overlapping features often create confusion around what to store, where and which tools to use for what. Distractions abound in the form of interruptions and constant alerts from apps, email, instant messages, and all other tools, each demanding our attention at the expense of the important work we're being paid to do. These things sabotage our focus and rob our productivity, SAP our energy and. And instead of feeling accomplished, we feel mentally drained at the end of the day. Now, here's the real thing that I think is why I call the workplace is broken. I just described the problem. And of course many people would acknowledge that they've experienced that to some degree or other. But we've been conditioned to think that this is normal, right? We've been conditioned to think that it's normal that yet another distraction comes our way on the desktop or yet another tool comes away, or another alert. I was working with a client the other day and they had all kinds of applications from their health and wellness group that were popping up. It's time to stretch. It's time to do this, it's time to do that. And while as an isolated tool, that was a very valuable and thoughtful tool, but as an interruption, it totally took that person away from the deep work that they were just getting into. And I see this happening over and over and over. So as a consequence of this, we become conditioned to think in unproductive ways. And let me give a couple examples. We tend to organize our work around the tools we use, often choosing the most comfortable tools rather than the most productive tools. In fact, I was reading a Harvard Business Review article on the future of work and they talked about the same thing where they talked about how workers are using 50% more tools than they were using in 2014, and that 95% of the respondents say that email is the most common tool they use for work. And yet these companies are pouring small fortunes into all of these other tools that are supposed to make life easier.

David Allen (14:03)

I call that channel creepy.

Eric Mack (14:06)

Yeah, very much so. Very much.

John Forrester (14:07)

David, recently on a, on another recording, David, you were talking about, remind me the number when, when your attention is diverted from one thing to another, there's some kind of a length of time it takes you to switch your full focus back. Does that ring a bell?

David Allen (14:24)

Yeah, some studies said 12. I've seen 20. I've seen various different kinds of things, which is kind of bizarre because if you're a karateist and four people jump in a dark galley, you don't wait 20 minutes to decide who to hit next. So shifting a focus is possible, but only if you have the skills to know how to shift your focus and where to put it to and what the previous input means.

Eric Mack (14:56)

What I found, and this goes back to my post hospitalizational experience, I found that in losing the short term memory, I lost the ability to process non visual cues. And so if I had to jump from idea to idea, I just could not do it. It was so frustrating. And so I often had to leave markers or visual artifacts around to remind me. So perhaps, David, when you drew Your comparison to the martial artist in the alley with four attackers, those were each very visual and in his face so that he knew exactly what had to be done as he made each turn. Whereas in knowledge work, so much of the work that happens happens in our mind before being committed to paper or email or whatever the task may be. And that's the work that is very difficult to switch back and forth because you mentally have to put away what you were thinking on and then you mentally have to bring it back. And I think that's where that 12 minutes, or however many minutes it happens to be for people, that's where that tax comes in.

David Allen (16:05)

Yeah. Unless you had made a note about where you left off.

Eric Mack (16:11)

Precisely, Precisely. So if you took that extra step, and that's a valuable point, if you took that extra step of making a note, even on a post it note, and saying, I just got to this point, then you could go take that call, you could go use the restroom, you could go get a cup of coffee and come back and be able to slip right back into where you were. It's when you have those interruptions and you don't process the interruption effectively for what it is. I'm going to leave some of these other things off the list here, but basically you get the idea of where I was going in that, you know, our tools shape our behaviors and they're not always shaping our behaviors for the more productive approach.

Sam (17:01)

Right.

David Allen (17:01)

I would, I would challenge or proffer. Correct me either of you guys if I'm wrong. Most of the people who are deciding about optimizing tools don't get how to optimizing the thought process required to use them. Well.

Eric Mack (17:21)

Correct?

John Forrester (17:22)

Absolutely. Agreed.

Eric Mack (17:23)

I would agree. I think a lot of people look at the tool and figure maybe at best, if they can just master how to use the tool, then they're set. But mastery of the tool is really mastery of the mindset in how we use the tool. The tool is just a way of extending our capabilities.

David Allen (17:42)

Yeah. And we've run across clients and friends and colleagues and people who've implemented some tools. But because they had GDD based as an operating system in their brain, they knew how to structure asana, they knew how to then structure teams, they knew how to then structure slack or make decisions about what it means and then how to spread that organizationally. But boy, that's. I think that's a rare commodity still these days to find somebody, I think it is who gets that.

Eric Mack (18:15)

I think it is.

John Forrester (18:16)

People want to be told how to structure before they've learned the productive thinking habits.

Eric Mack (18:25)

Right. Or instead of solving the problem as you described, David, which is look at the method that they're working with. They attempt to solve the problem by focusing back on the tool. What can the tool do? Oh, we can only think this way because that's the way the tool was designed. And they try to shoehorn their work into whatever the tool in front of them provides or offers rather than saying what do we need to be effective as a team and what can this tool offer us that will support us?

David Allen (18:58)

Well, to be fair, that said, there is some sexiness to the tools. Sure. In terms of triggering thinking you hadn't thought of before, etc. You know, come on. You know, I've just seen Eric, you passed on, you know, Microsoft's 30 minute promotional about Copilot. So that tool is a huge decision support tool.

Eric Mack (19:26)

Absolutely.

David Allen (19:27)

But you have to then decide what,

Eric Mack (19:30)

what are you trying to do?

David Allen (19:31)

I need do, do I need to know.

Eric Mack (19:34)

Right.

David Allen (19:34)

You know, and, and whatever. But the tool itself could just turn you on to lots of cool stuff. You know, I've had many of the tools that I've experimented with that gave me ideas I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Eric Mack (19:45)

Sure.

David Allen (19:45)

Even Evernote or even, you know, certainly Lotus Notes and then even teams, I'm still, still an enigma. Try to hit it. You know, they build all these buttons in that if you go, if you know how to go to which corner to punch that button, then that will solve this issue. But who knew that was the button you need to push?

Eric Mack (20:08)

Especially I find it challenging with the very minimalist design, you know, like the disappearing horizontal scroll bars or things like that.

David Allen (20:17)

You know, again, there are no problems, only projects. So what's the project here? How do we get clear? How do we get on top of this thing? How do we, how do we surf the technology we have available to us? But again, do we have the, you know, Eric's formula? Do we have the knowledge and the methodologies to be able to know how to use the tool?

Eric Mack (20:36)

I was just thinking about this and I think I had left a prompt here that talking about how even just alerts, how costly those alerts are and not that alerts are bad. I mean, obviously if there's a problem and you need to be alerted to it, that could be useful to you. But the fact that these days we have so many things looking for our attention and the cost that that plays. I always tell people, it's like if you're, if you've got all your alerts turned on in your email, it's like training chickens.

David Allen (21:14)

Yeah.

Eric Mack (21:15)

Shall I share that one?

John Forrester (21:16)

And that's just email. Then multiply that by all the other programs that want to be pushing alerts at you.

Eric Mack (21:23)

That's right. You know, think about it. Every time you install an app, thank goodness that Apple at least warns you. This. This program is trying to send you alerts. This program wants to take over your home screen, and so on. You know the analogy that I use with training chickens, David, you'll remember this goes back to this little clicker here and when we took the class on how to train chickens, which, by the way, is the thing. And you can do that, and you can train them to do just about anything, because have a stimulus, you have behavior that you're looking for, and then you have a reward. You give the chicken a kernel of grain or something to make that happen. But is that really any different with all the dings and notices we have on the computer? I could be in a podcast with you right now, and all of a sudden I'd have the dancing email ball in the corner of my screen, and I go, ooh, there's my stimulus. Let me go see what it is. It could be exciting. I go, click on it. And, you know, now I've taken an action, I've clicked on it, and my reward is a momentary distraction, a momentary high, which may or may not be in any way related to the task for which I was hired, the task I needed to do, or anything else I think I was mentioning, it comes back to being, are you intentionally productive, or are you accidentally productive? If you're working off of your lists, if you're working off your calendar, I'd call that being intentionally productive, where you've made some decision up front. And of course, David, you've addressed this well within the GTD methodology, which is why I love it so much. But at the same point, if you're somebody who's working out of your inbox and that email shows up to command your attention and take it away for even just a few moments, then the question is, was that email strategic to where you wanted to go, or was it just a distraction that there was a sale last week at. At your favorite store? And in that case, if you manage to get something done, I'd call that even close to being accidentally productive.

David Allen (23:34)

Right.

John Forrester (23:34)

Well, but the chances of that happening are so slim.

David Allen (23:37)

And you can magnify this, I think. I don't know, exponentially or geometrically. Anyway, when you add something like Slack, it gives these sort of Channels that are both chat, they're also business channel, business project channels. They're also all kinds of things. How many things do you need to look at within that whole, you know, ecosystem of let's say slack. And I don't want to put slack on the table. I mean it's probably many of these done, but it's the same thing. It's like, okay, how do I filter that? And we actually have some GTD clients, one in Norway specifically that spent a lot of time figuring out here's how we use our slack, like they weren't using slack, that we did something similar Norwegian, here's how we use that, here's how we use SMS counseling, here's how we use the phone or whatever. And these are the protocols we will now follow. So but they had to take a, spend a good bit of rigorous time actually defining what those protocols were for those different, different tools. And I, you know, I talked to our GTD trainer and coach who is working with these folks. I said, are they still doing this? He said, yes. Six months later, it's still in place, still working, wonder wonderfully. Because as you know, Eric, that's one of the challenges. It's called, okay, are you still going to use this, you know, three months from now, six months from now, as cool as it may be, you know, on your, on your Saturday, you know, Saturday rainy afternoon, Geek out.

Eric Mack (25:19)

Yeah, David, I think that when we look at this, the key to adoption is having agreement as to how we're going to use these many tools. We have so many tools and then on top of that we don't even have. It's not even like reaching into your utensil drawer and saying, I have a knife, a fork and a spoon. Because every tool then adds on so many features that it's more like you open your drawer and you have a whole bunch of Swiss army knives. And so the problem then becomes, well, which, which tool am I going to use to eat breakfast with? Well, any of them. Well, that's okay as long as other people are expecting to receive via those same channels. Otherwise you end up with a disconnect and, and you lead into a lack of trust which we talked about once before.

David Allen (26:08)

Yeah, that's why this becomes a pretty much a top down decision making, implementation making procedure, Eric. And so that's your game now, right?

Eric Mack (26:21)

That is, that's where I'm spending a lot of time. It took a while to, to get clear on the problem in such a way that I could help with, come alongside people and help Them see the impact that it was having on their own work and help them discover new ways of working with whatever tool they have in front of them.

John Forrester (26:40)

When you sent me notes ahead of time, Eric, you mentioned something about eight practices. Can you say more about that?

Eric Mack (26:48)

Sure, sure. So basically, in doing my research about why work is broken and what I could offer to fix it, it's easy to get out there and say work is broken, but it's a little more challenging to come back and say, now, here are some things you can think about and do differently. I tried to. I actually came up with three things, John. I came up with a definition. I call it the T myth, which I'll give you in a moment. I then placed that in context of the value that we create. And David, you already talked about that being the function of our knowledge, the way we work, our methods and the tools that we use. And there's an interesting relationship between those. And then finally, I created a set of principle based practices for how to think about our work. Not too dissimilar from the natural planning model, but really different in the sense that I'm looking at other outside behaviors, but still very complementary to gtd. Let me start with the T myth, for example. You know, the T myth was my attempt to create a definition of what I see going on in too many organizations. So I defined the T myth as the myth that computer software or other tools automatically make us more productive regardless of one's methods or knowledge. The additional part of that is the T myth is also the fallacy that leadership or IT management a understand how their people actually work well enough to select or design an appropriate tool and B can drop said tool on their people. And once it has dropped the tool on their people, that those people will A naturally take to it and B automatically become more productive as a result. And I'm really passionate about this because I worked with a large client back east and they were moving to a new system of tools. And for months they had, by the way, back East.

David Allen (28:58)

Eric is in the U.S. so back east means yes, eastern U.S. thank you.

Eric Mack (29:04)

And for months this client had posters and newsletters and email advertisements all saying your work is about to get easier with then the name of their new system. And they really built it up and really built it up. And that just, that frustrates me to no end because I've yet to see a situation where that's really true. Usually what ends up happening is on the day of migration, people are told, okay, you're leaving on Friday with this system. And on Monday morning we're going to be switching over to this system. And, you know, what ends up happening is people just take their habits, good or bad, and their messes and they move them into the next tool. And as a consequence, they never quite get the benefit that they could have otherwise received from that very tool because they didn't shift their thinking about the tool, they just moved everything over. The analogy I give, I had a. I was speaking at an executive conference and the host described it this way. He said that he and his brother shared an apartment in University and when they knew they were moving to the next apartment, he, the host, he would do his laundry and he would take it down to the car and put it in a box in the car so everything was neat and ready to go. So that on move day, all he had to do was drive his car to the new apartment, open the box, and he was ready to go. His brother, on the other hand, would just let the laundry pile up in the laundry basket, the dishes pile up in the sink, and he'd throw those in a box and throw his laundry and then he move those both over to the new location and keep working. How is that any different from the way that we're working in the workplace?

John Forrester (30:50)

It's not. It's not. If you get a new email tool, you can either transfer your 10,000 emails in your inbox into the new tool or maybe for a moment you have email Bankruptcy and have 0 in your inbox. But before long, your work habits are going to get you Back to the 10,000 in the inbox.

David Allen (31:08)

Yeah, Eric, let me. But Lotus Notes again, was such a game changer in terms of what that was. But when organizations implemented Lotus Notes, almost nobody knew how to use it. No. All they did was try to transfer. Okay, well, I guess this is my email client, but it's not quite as, as cool as whatever my previous one was, but I'll use it, I guess, if I have to. And that was it. Literally, that was it. At multiple senior levels of people in the organization that should have been much more savvy and aware about this. But I don't know.

Eric Mack (31:44)

Well, and you know, to Microsoft's credit, Microsoft, their way of responding to Lotus Notes, because at the time, they offered nothing at the time was to pigeonhole people into thinking that Lotus Notes was email. And completely overlooking the collaborative, the collaborative aspect of that tool, which was really where the power was. And email was just one small size slice of that.

John Forrester (32:11)

Yeah. The first place I went to work that used Lotus Notes. I was lucky that they didn't treat it as just an email client, because frankly, the email client in Lotus Notes was one of the weak spots.

Eric Mack (32:24)

Absolutely.

John Forrester (32:24)

They treated it as a collaborative workplace workplace where there were applications within notes that managed the workflow. And I got there after having been on email for a few years and looked at this and went, well, this is, this is revolutionary. You mean you're not going to have everything go through my email? You have workflow that comes and goes from me to me where it's clear what I need to do, but it's built into the collaboration part of Lotus Notes. It was, it was an eye opener for me.

Eric Mack (32:54)

And yet 20 years later, we've got some amazing tools out there and yet people are still dealing with the exact same challenge.

John Forrester (33:04)

Thank you, Eric for walking us through this. It's been informative. And David, as always, thanks for being on.

Sam (33:10)

Hey folks, thanks for listening to this podcast with my friend and special guest, Eric Mack. If you would like to receive a PDF of Eric's eight practices of Intentionally productive work, leave a comment in the survey form John mentioned at the end of this podcast. You know, if you want to get more leverage from knowledge, methods and tools you already have, I encourage you to get in touch with Eric. He has my highest level of recommendation. Sam.