The Estonian police in a few months ago, I think, tried out on a particular piece of roads, an alternative way of penalising people who were speeding in most countries when you get caught speeding, you get a ticket and in some situations the fight can be quite extensive depending on how much you exceed the speed limit. But here in Finland they come up with different ideas and so they stop people speeding and they give them a choice between paying, I think, for sort of an average excessive speed, the fight would be something like 400 euros or it's like a good 20-50 pounds or they could wait for an hour. Just stay there for an hour and then they could go good. They'd have to pay anything but they just had to wait by the road side for an hour.
About half of the people they stopped opted to wait, about half didn't, so you can imagine from that how much these people value their time. I'm joined by Kun Smetz, who I've been fighting to pronounce that name but I think I've managed to nail it. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much Chris.
You did it proud. I think I've heard numerous strange mispronunciations of my name, all the way from a keen to co-ent to co-ent to co-ent and anything between. So I think you passed with flying commas. Fantastic.
Well, we've got over the first hurdle. To the listeners at home, I'm starting to calm down a little bit now. You might not know Kun but I was away in Bali and while I was away it meant I couldn't record. And you do not know true fear until you have a twice a week podcast publishing schedule and no podcasts left to publish.
And that is where I've been over the last couple of weeks. But very fortunately for the people that are listening, I have this episode with yourself which I'm sure is going to be fantastic. Behavioral economics and all sorts of decision making theory that we're going to go into which I can't wait to do. Also coming up, Naval Ravakanth's brother, Naval Ravakanth talking about love yourself like your life depends on it, his brand new book and a bunch of other people that are really, really interesting over the next couple of weeks.
But today we're going to get to talk about some behavioral economics and some classical working strategies for organisations, human behaviour decision making and motivation. That's right. That's the kind of stuff I do, yes? So what have you been thinking about recently?
The world is our oyster. The world of whatever you've been working on is our oyster. Okay. Well, one of the things I've been thinking of recently is time.
As you may know, economics is about scarce resources. It's about allocating scarce resources, weighing up costs and benefits. The economy as we know it is usually is to do with money or with some kind of government of money, some resource that you need to manage. But of course, another very important scarce resource we all experience is time.
We get every midnight, we get 24 hours for the next days that we speak and once that's gone, it's gone. And of course, then there is another 24 hours. But we can just like we can spend a pound or a euro or a dollar or any other currency only once. So we can only spend a minute or an hour or a second once.
And if we spend on one thing, we can't spend it on another. And so our general use of time follows similar patterns to the way we use money in the sense that we are confronted with the fact that we don't have unlimited amounts of it. And so we need to be careful in how we use it up. And I think that is a fascinating topic for me because in many particularly, also behavioural economics experiments and economics experiments, you get people in a lab, you give them some tokens, you get them a little bit of money, sometimes you see people go to developing countries to India, for instance, where a man's in dollar go much further.
So it can really intervene in people's lives on the scale of magnitude that is comparable to a month's wages, for instance, and still be affordable for research. But the problem is with whatever experiments you do with tokens or money is that it's usually in much more quantities than really impacts on us in real life. So my thinking is that if we look more at how we use time, where we all have the same amount of time when you're rich or you're poor, you get 24 hours a day, it's not because you're 36 hours a day, we all have exactly the same amount of time. And I think how we would respond to having to weigh up gaining or losing time might reveal things or clarify things that perhaps are unclear or ambiguous when you work with, you give people 10 pounds or 10 dollars and you make them debt or something or you make them pay for something, it doesn't work the same way I think.
And I think there is some some mileage to be had out of using time in research on economics and on the economics and on the year. What time and money are intrinsically linked, aren't they? They are, as you know, the old age goes, the time is money. But is it really that equivalent?
Is time really always money? And I think if you think about it, not every minute has the same worth to you and to me or to anybody else. If you are in the middle of something that's really important, then your time will be much more valuable than if you're just lacing about on the city watching the Simpsons. And so I think you've seen it as well in overtime, for instance.
People demand to be paid more when they go over a certain limit in terms of working for an employer, for a boss. So the concept itself of being paid 50% more on double time for overtime, people are being paid more for working in the weekend, reflects immediately that time doesn't have an intrinsic stable, unique value. And I think that in itself is an important observation that affects the way we behave and we handle and we manage our time. Absolutely.
There's a short blog post I remember reading quite a while ago that was talking about how as a child you'd happily give up your day for a dollar and as an old man you'd happily give up your fortune for a minute. Yes. Very true. I think it's quite kind of extreme.
As a child, of course, you have no idea of the finiteness of life. You're about five years old, eight years old. Remember, when school broke up at the end of the spring, earlier summer, you had in Belgium, we had two full months of holiday of July and August. Well, the first of July, it's like you can't even see as far as the 31st of August, so it's like an unlimited amount of holiday.
By the time mid-August came and then you need to go and buy out new books and pencils and everything else. Well, I was starting again. So you get a sense of time, but yes, you have no idea of the finiteness, whereas if you're an old person, then yes, you're hunting down and you know, well, maybe my dad is 92. Wow.
That is a testament to some good genetics that you've got there. Well, I hope I know it's his hair. He's quite bold. But the whole bit of the whole bit is a fantastic head of hair.
It's a good bargain. But he's 92, he's still in good health. But of course, he knows he's unlikely to live another 20 years or maybe another 10 years or maybe five years. So you're really looking at time in a very different way.
That said, it's interesting that we sort of go down this particular rabbit hole. He lives on his own and he hasn't got much to do. Most of his friends and his relatives, except for his children's on his own, they've all died. So there's very few people left of his generation.
And so he's, he lost purpose a little bit. And so he's got lots of time and doesn't really quite know what to do with it. He loves gardening and all that. But obviously, it being winter, it's not a good time to spend too much time in the garden.
So he struggles to fill his days with something. So I think if you look at time as something that you would realize in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to accept, he would be willing to pay for something to do rather than having to be paid to do something in a sense. But yes, I think these are all examples of how we look at time with different, different eyes, depending on how old we are, depending on what day and week it is, depending on what time of day it is, depending whether or not all of that matters and makes us look at time differently. Same at work as well.
At work, basically what we do, we give our employer an amount of time and we get money in return. And somehow we tend to view that time as sunk. We've sold it. So it's now our employer's in a sense.
So we are less concerned with wasting our time. And we're certainly less concerned with wasting our people's time. I did exercise once with a client of mine, where we had a workshop with about 50 people so joining. And one of the things we had to look at was budgets and knowledge, money was being spent.
And I made the newly exercised of what's this workshop costing. And I even revealed my feet so they could take that into account. And then they looked, OK, well, the higher of the venue and the meal and this and that. What they didn't take into account at first was their own time.
When you get 50 people earning what between say 60,000 and 120,000 euros a year, when you get these amount of people together for two days, that's a huge amount of money or time equivalent of money that you divergent into something. So we don't really think about it in those terms. We don't, we think the time we work so now is work time. We don't really worry about what we do with our time, whether we are using it well, whether we are using other people's time well.
And that's why you get so many complaints about meetings being a waste of time and multiple meetings and all day and looking back and say, well, I have no idea what I've done today, but it's not very much. Yeah, that's the point. I think that really is a fascinating topic that is, I think, understood and under researched. I've had a couple of conversations that listeners may be familiar with Laura Vanderkamp's episode, who's a time management expert.
That was more from the productivity side. Nia et al as well, also to do with task prioritization. As a sympathy card, I'll throw out to some of the people that will be listening. Many of whom will be knowledge workers.
I sympathize wholeheartedly with the fact that your days are messy and you haven't got to clue what you did with them. And when you look back at your day and you think, how did I spend my time? We even use that language, linguistically, we're talking about it like it's money. How did I spend my time today?
This allocated number of units of temporal tokens. How did I decide to spend my time today? I feel for you, because it is, as you say, I went into a meeting, then I sat down, I had a coffee, I did a this, and it just frayed us away. But yeah, you bring up a couple of your recent blog posts talking about opportunity cost.
And obviously how that relates to, I'll tell you what, why don't you explain to listen to what opportunity cost is? Yeah, opportunity cost is really what you do not do, what you cannot do when you do something else. So to give a simple example, take a taxi driver, you take a taxi somewhere and you ask a guy to wait for 20 minutes. And then because you're going to do something and then you come out again and you still want the taxi to be there waiting for you to take it back home or something.
So he's not going to say, it's not going to do that free. To the taxi driver, the 20 minutes he's standing there is 20 minutes he could not be carrying somebody else another paid customer. So he's going to have to charge you enough to compensate that. And that's the opportunity cost.
So the cost to him is not sitting there because he could be looking at his Facebook account or reading a paper or just looking at a window or having a sleep. But that's not in there. It could be working as well. And that's how we will measure the cost of sitting there for 20 minutes.
So that is what opportunity cost is. And that applies to time as well as to money. Of course, it also applies to money. If you spend money on a meal, then that money is, you cannot use that money for something else.
So there is opportunity cost expressed in what else you could buy with the money that you spend on going out for a meal. Let's try and dig down into the nuance of the difference between opportunity cost for money and for time, because I think this is really fascinating. You can't not spend time. Is that a fair statement to make?
Yes, absolutely. Time goes time. Not spend money. Yes, absolutely.
You can still, you can still, I'm not going to spend it. I keep it for something else. You can't do that with time or not easily at least in the same way. You can't bank time.
Maybe if you play television, Christmas, sometimes you can bank money and time, but you can practice. Yes, time at the second. The second I've just gone is gone. We cannot reuse this at all.
Of course, you can say I'm going to bring certain activities forward and do the now. And that is a good way of managing time over a longer period of time as it were. When you say, well, for instance, what people do when they travel, they do something useful while they're traveling or while they're waiting. And so they can make time that otherwise be wasted as in time spent without anything tangible, anything meaningful, getting in a gotten in return, you can change that.
You can say, well, I may be waiting for the plane, maybe 30 minutes to late, but I actually can start writing my report. And so you actually make good use of your time. But it requires a degree of awareness and deliberation to do that. And we don't always do that.
And also we are worse on the other hand as well. We waste time as well. We are not always consciously using our time in the best possible way. I want to get you to elaborate on awareness and deliberation in a second, but I'm thinking as you're talking through that I'm hoping that some of the people that are listening might be in a situation like that.
There might be in this sort of little pending waiting room of hell in between one thing that they got to do and another thing they got to do and this thing would have sucked. And maybe me and you, Chris and Kona, making this afternoon or this little waiting thing a little bit easier, maybe wearing their ears right now, you've got their headphones in, listening away. Perhaps that's the way that they're doing it. So if that is the case, I hope that we are hoping that we're making your day a little bit better.
But yeah, let's talk about what was it that you said deliberation and awareness awareness awareness and deliberation. Yes. I think it's the panels with money still go a long way here as well. I think we often spend money a little in also big with every, I mean, we are not what economists used to call and some still do homo economic as the sort of rational, maximizing self-interested individual.
So in other words, if you spend a tenor on some gadget or a sandwich or a drink or something, you're not considering what else could I spend this time around? Can I just bring to mind everything else I could possibly spend this tenor on and then sort of rank them and say, well, the very best way I can spend this is this. Not the sandwich and the string. So I'm not going to buy this up as a teacher.
We don't do that. We sometimes spend money totally impulsively, but we also have some preset limits. We think, oh, well, for a tenor, I'm not going to spend half an hour cogitating about where else can I spend this even better than here? But we don't always weigh up the opportunity cost of spending money.
If you go on holiday, it means you come buy a new car, for instance. That's the kind of thing that some people are aware of and other people are not aware of. And so the same applies in a sense. To give an example, when I was little, I was maybe 12, 13 years old, and this is the time when self-service petrol stations started popping up.
Before that, it was full service, so you drove up and you got in the uniform plane along and open your filler flap and fill up your tank with petrol. And then you could start doing it yourself. And these petrol stations gave discounts. And of course, some gave discounts, others gave a big discounts.
And I remember my time, we had another car for a long time. We went, we drove like 20 minutes to get this kind of one frankly to something, not particularly. And I realized even then that there was no calculation being done. So there was no awareness of how much time let alone the distance driven, but how much time are we spending to drive low 10 miles, 15 miles to get pedals that is cheaper?
And I think we often do not think about that. And we think about it even less when it's about time. We don't really think about how much time something takes. We think we need to go to a meeting.
That meeting is like two hours drive away. So we just say, well, there's some traveling time. That's just part of the equation. We don't, especially because time is not even as tangible as money, because it's not salient in the same way.
You just take it as a gift and not, okay, I'll have to drive for two and a half hours and get there. When we're stuck in traffic, we don't really calculate how much time we waste stuck in traffic. I mean, I try to drive as much as I can. But when occasionally I have to take the car and I have to drive during rush hour.
And I see these people are all sitting there in sort of bumper to bumper. And for me, it's just once. And so I say, well, yeah, I had no choice. I really had to do this.
It's not the way. So I rationalize it. But I then think of these other people sitting left of me and right to me and from the ball behind me. And they experience this every day.
Do they ever worked out what is costing them in time? How much time this is wasted for them? Multiply by five days a week. The cumulative load.
35 weeks a year. So we don't think about it. And that's what I meant by awareness. And I think by being deliberate is once you're aware of the time you're spent, you can sort of account for time more easily.
Then you can begin to be deliberate about what you do. For instance, you mentioned where people might be listening to this podcast. I don't particularly like driving, but I see driving as something a great opportunity to listen to podcasts. Sometimes I listen to the radio.
But most of the time I accumulate lots of podcasts. And then when I need to drive and I often drive from here to the continent, so these are long trips, that means I can listen back to back to several episodes of free economics or your podcast or of econ talk or you name it. I mean, there's a whole raft of things I tend to listen to. And I think to me, that is like good management in the way in the same way that you use your management money well, good money management.
This is good time management. Time management is not just about time management. It's about being aware of where there is a sort of downtime, a time that is otherwise not very well spent. Because as you mentioned earlier, we can't bottle up time.
We just go by. And so we either use it or we lose it. And that awareness can achieve you better to use it better. There is a concept in the early economics called mental accounting.
I don't know whether you've heard of it. Maybe some of your earlier early economics, yes, they've mentioned it, but I'll quickly briefly explain it. Mental accounting is like having multiple virtual bank accounts. And you have one account for the rent.
I want to count for the bills. I want to count for going out for meal and one account for food and clothing or whatever. So you cut it up. It basically is all the same money because money is, as I say, it's fungible.
A dollar is a dollar. Whatever you spend it on is exactly the same dollar. But by dividing it up into virtual pots or accounts, you can manage it better. You can have a savings account where you save up for Christmas or for holiday.
And basically it's there. It's got its earmarked as a label on it. And it means that you're not resupposed to take money out of that for something else. And there's an anecdote.
I think it's I forget, I forget one of them is Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman and the other one is, I forget two actors used to live together in Hollywood when they were young and big unions. And one of them goes back home and wants to borrow some money because they've run out of money for food or something. And they actually literally have jars on the kitchen counter.
And there is money for something else in another jar. But they are unwilling to take the money from that jar to pay for whatever they need to pay. So that's a mental accounting. And we can do the same thing with our own time.
We can dedicate time to a certain activity and not use it for something else. All too often we begin a task and we just carry on. And we keep on going. It's like throwing good money after that, because it may not be the best use of our time at a particular moment.
And so if we are deliberate about how we going to be using our time and say, right, I'm going to be working on this for this amount of time. And then I'm going to be doing something else that is also important at that moment in time. It's that kind of deliberation that I was only too early on. I understand the listeners will be familiar with Parkinson's Law as well, which is work expands to fill the time given for it.
One of the reasons that time boxing your tasks throughout the day is an important way because everyone will be familiar from when they were at school. If you're like me, you might be familiar of leaving your assignment until the last minute and handing it in. You've actually got some students of yours submitting assignments ready for midnight tonight. So I guess you'll be suffering with the 1159 p.m.
submission deadlines and all that sort of stuff. There are all of you that have asked for extension. Well, I mean, they're just leaving it until 1158, aren't they? And then they can ask for one.
But yeah, I totally understand. One of the examples that you used in one of your blog posts, I thought was hilarious and fascinating. Can we talk about the Estonian police speeding fines, please? Oh, yes.
Yes, that's a fantastic idea. I think the Estonian police in a bit a few months ago, I think, tried out on a particular piece of roads and alternative way of penalizing people who are speeding. In most countries, when you get caught speeding, you get a ticket and in some situations, the fines can be quite extensive depending on how much you exceed the speed limit. But here in Finland, they came up with a different idea and so they stopped speeding and they gave them a choice between paying, I think, for sort of an average excessive speed, the fine would be something like 400 euros, so it's like a good 350 pounds.
Or they could wait for an hour. Just stay there for an hour and then they could go good. They'd have to pay anything, but they just had to wait by the roadside for an hour. About half of the people they stopped opted to wait, about half didn't.
So you can imagine from that how much these people valued their time, because effectively they paid 400 euros for an hour. I don't think even, I think there are very few people who get paid that amount of money. So stopping by and saving 400 pounds for some people, that was not enough, so to speak, so they went off. But the others did stay.
Now, I sort of used on that a little bit because I think if you look at some of some common behavior economics principles, one of them, which comes from an acronym that was put forward by the people that have been inside Steam here in the UK, the former NUD units, and they have a simple, very clear framework for behavior interventions going by the name of East, acronym sounds quite easy, attractive, social, and timely. So any intervention should score highly on those four things, so it should make life easier. It should be appealing, so people would want to do it, it should be social, other people do it, it should be timely. An intervention that is done at the moment that it matters has more effect on intervention that is happening at some unrelated time.
And when you think about it, when you get fined, well, even worse, so you drive along, you get flashed, you get in the scene flashing your rear image, I've been caught. So you get about, you drive it for a while and then you forget about it, and then a fortnight later, you get the notes that you go caught and you got a little payment slip there, you need to pay one hundred pounds or something, it's not a pretty odd one. But the connection between the behavior that you're identifying and the find itself is really very, very loose and unpointed. It's such a long time to go that you don't make the connection.
So in this particular case, with the finished release, the connection is immediate. These people, most of the time, will have been speeding because they were late, they left late, this is another aspect of poor time management, it's leading things to mate. So they tried to make up for lost time by speeding and get through this nation on time, and then they get stopped and have to wait for an hour. So all the benefits they would have had is gone.
So they made the effort to try and get their time by breaking the speed limit, and yet they don't get there on time. So this is kind of reinforcing mechanism applied at the right time. That might, I don't know, they did really properly research it, but I think this is one of the things that I would like to see researched more, to see whether the effectiveness in terms of recurring speeding of this kind of penalty would be superior to the conventional penalty of just basically finding people. It makes me think about when people buy things on a credit card as well, or when people use contactless, there was a study, I think Rory Suddlen cites it, people walking out of a supermarket and they're being asked how much do you think you're a seatworth, and the people that paid cash were within 10%, 15%, people that paid chip and pin were within 30, and people that paid contactless, they might as well have just guessed.
They might as well have guessed what the person next to them's receipt was, and it's that detachment, isn't it? It's not only the timely detachment, but also the detachment from something that's sufficiently visceral in our sensations to actually make us feel like we were experiencing what is happening. Absolutely, and I think because at a point people are being called speeding, time is very important to them, otherwise they probably wouldn't be speeding. So at that time, being delayed even further is extra painful, and is therefore more likely to have an effect than something that happens two weeks later when they're forgotten, perhaps even where they were, when they got caught.
So yeah, I think that's an interesting experiment that I think merits further investigation, I agree. You also had a look at the relative judgements for people who were offering to do charity work, about whether or not they were going to spend money to contribute to a particular cause, or whether they were going to spend their time, and this gets on to a point as well that I'd love to move on to, which is talking about outsourcing tasks to other people based on your own value for your time. So let's get into that. Can you tell us about that study?
Yeah, yes, that's an interesting study. I forget who was done by, it's Soviet University of Cardiff, and they looked at how people value people donating to charity, depending on whether they volunteer or whether they donate money, and they normalised it so that the value of the donation was similar to the value of a week's work, so to speak, so it was entirely equivalent. And what they found is that in the eyes of others, the donation of time was seen as much more valuable. That's 70%, wasn't it?
Yes, yes. So that's interesting in itself, whereas if you take the old time as money, equivalence, that is clearly not true, because people feel that people who volunteer in the net at the time are more praiseworthy than people who simply dip in their pocket and give some money. Why do you think that? Interesting.
Well, I can theorise. My theory is that we all experience time in a much more similar way than we experience money. Money, our experience to money, is very much dependent on our point of reference, and therefore how wealthy we are. So to an economist, Doris Adovar, but to somebody who's a millionaire, Doris will be worth less than two others, who hasn't done money at all.
Time is much more equal for multiple people. And so it's easier for us to put ourselves in a position of somebody who gives up a whole week of their time, of their personal time, to do something for somebody else, than for somebody to give up on $1000. I wonder how much of that as well is effortful signaling about the fact that I know I can tell you people who have donated chunks of money to charity, but I don't know many people that have donated a week. Yes, exactly.
Well, that is because we only have 52 weeks in a year. We have basically, there is no limit to the amount of money we can have. Now, of course, we will not give away half our wealth. Very few people do that.
I mean, that's a few outs. We'll get some of the equation. But generally, the amount of money we give is relatively more than compared to our total wealth. Even though it may have to be quite substantial, it's really something that will make a difference to our lifecycle.
Very few people donate amounts that make a difference to how they will live their life after they've made the donation. But we all have limited time, so we find it much easier to imagine what it's like to give up a week. We have limited amount of holidays, so there's four or five weeks of holiday a year. So that's 20 or 25% of your holiday time you're giving up to do something for somebody else.
That's quite significant. Now, there is definitely the likelihood that somebody is signaling. With donations of money, we can donate anonymously, and some people too. Not many.
The proportion of numbers donations is very, very small. So people really want others to be able to see that they gave a certain amount of money because it gives them a warm feeling, but it also gives them a bit of status in the eyes of others. But you can't donate time, and obviously, so there, that is really obvious that you're donating the time. And so this is something where you can, even if you're a modest, humble kind of person, you can still say, look, see what I did here.
I said, we're talking over there for a whole week. I'm just going back to the study. What's interesting is that even if the participants do the study were told that if they have given money to this charity, the charity could have bought much more time without money from local people than the one week that they were getting up and they didn't have the money they gave up all the time. And still, the party, other people, viewed the donation of time as more praise-worthy than the donation of money.
So the utility of giving time may be less, but the status, it gets you, is still more. So time, and I think there are some interesting implications to that, both in our private lives and at work, I think. I think we should be more aware and make other people aware of the value of our time at work. So when people come and ask for our time, when we go and ask somebody else for some of their time, we should be more appreciative of that time and understand that this is a precious scarce resource they are making available to us.
So likewise, the other way around. And it's the same thing at home. I don't sometimes treat the time of other people as if it has no value. Really just go and do this.
Can you just go to the post office on this one? And okay, what's the opportunity cost for the person concerned? Is that the best they could be doing with the time? I mean, it's 20 minutes walk, either way to the post office.
I could be doing something else. So why are you asking me this? Because you forgot yesterday to go to the post office. So it's very easy for you to forget if you can then ask me today to go to the post office.
So I think, again, more awareness of the value of time can lead to not only a better use of time, but also a better relationship. Because if I come to waste your time, if for whatever reason I have some power over you, and I can instruct you to go to the post office with me, because I forgot to post the letter or to send this package off yesterday, then be a resentment. You will think, well, buddy, how I could be doing it could be doing something nice, something useful for me. But now I need to go to post office and wait 25 minutes to make up for something you forgot to do yesterday.
Isn't it interesting that with that, we've identified that as being something that people might be quite cognizant of at home. But if you were at work in a job and your boss said, Hey, I forgot to do this to take this to the post office to you fancy going, you might actually think, Oh, I'm getting I've got 40 minutes off work. I get to go and have a walk, despite the fact that your time at work could also be spent doing something. True.
But as I said, at the beginning, one of the one of the things that we tend to do when we work is we treated us some time in a sense. We've sold our time to our boss already. So if our boss wants to use that time because it's his or her time now. So if they think that time is best spent by me, that's sending me to the post office, who cares?
I'm happy either way. I suppose this is exactly where it's literally the tip of the spear of where the inefficiencies in wasting time come from within a business, don't they? That people are like, it's eight o'clock, I'm here, it's five o'o'clock, I'm gone, whatever we do during that time. And it takes a very, it either takes a very particular type of mindset or a special sort of remuneration package for people to start to bring that in because you are right.
Some people hate meetings. They don't want to spend their time, no, Val RAVA can't famously, he doesn't do meetings. I don't do meetings. And you're like, well, you know, there's a lot of businesses on the board of all of these angel investment companies and stuff.
How do you not do meetings? And that's because that is how much he values not only his time at the time of everyone that's around him or the companies that I know that their meeting rooms are deskless and seatless. So they are simply a room in which everybody can stand and it just totally reduces down, it increases the effortful friction of someone wanting to call the meeting and say, okay, cool, you can call them me, but everyone's, everyone's got to stand and everyone's got to hold their laptop like a, like a waiter in front of them while they're here. So I mean, it is so interesting, especially for me as someone who's never worked in a typical salaried job that's never been my industry.
I've always worked for myself. But I know that that's non-typical. And you know, I really do hope that some of the people that are listening can start to, if you are in a more typical sort of salaried job, you can start to assess your time while you are at work and think, well, hang on, why can I make my experience either more productive or more enjoyable for me or whatever it might be? Well, yes, absolutely.
And I think your parallel is quite interesting. I think if you're self-employed, then you are really owner of both your money and your time and you will treat them with more respect, I think, none the time that you spend at work, because you've already sold it. It's not yours anymore. I think the comparison is with, imagine that you're going up on a business trip and you get some cash from work, you get 150 pounds to spend on a hotel, a meal or whatever, will you be worried about how much you spend?
Probably not. You can't keep anything. So you can't keep the balance. You have to give back what you have to do.
You have to receive for a certain amount of balance. You need to give back, but you can spend up to 150 pounds. So you're not going to be too concerned about how you spend that money. Well, I think it's very much the same with the time you spend at work.
You've given it to your employer. So if for whatever reason you need to go and sit in meetings five hours in a day, that's what you're going to be doing. Now, of course, it's not true for everybody, not to 100% of the time. But too much of the time, we really treat that time as if it has no particular value to us.
We just do whatever comes along and we don't we're not deliberate enough with it. I understand. I think that's such a brilliant example. The people that do have a company card that are listening will know that if you're 150 pounds to spend it's 149 pounds, 50 pounds that goes on the snake and you've bought a milkshake that you don't even want to have in this, that and the other.
I think you're right. There's something probably a little bit more worrying or a little bit more sort of malicious going on. It feels to me a lot when I speak to people, some people who have these sorts of roles, there's almost an adversarial relationship between the employer and the employee and the employer that it's like they will drag their feet, spend the money, slash do whatever they can as much as possible, sometimes, especially in a job, perhaps that you might be not too enamoured by. I don't really know either from an employer or an employee standpoint, if there's not a passion to sort of make the most of every minute, as Ben Bergeron would say, I don't know what the solution would be for that.
I don't know if there is one. Yeah, I think it's not normally malicid think, it's just no appreciation for something that has no value. I mean, even in social policy, a case can be made for making people pay for much of the services they get because once you pay for something, you actually good value to it and you start caring for it more. So I'm not even remotely suggesting that at work, we should pay our colleagues for their time, although as a principal, it's probably not bad.
And I think there have been experiments even at Google where there was a virtual Google dollar being used that you could buy colleagues' time. But I think another concept that I use in my work as well is the economics concept of externalities, where this is where a transaction between two parties involves a third party or actually does involve the third party, there are the consequences of it. So I mean, a good example of externalities in society is pollution. So you take plastic pollution, for instance, the plastic that is filling up our rivers and oceans.
So you go down to Tesco's or Sainsbury's and you get some plastic bags because you can't be bothered to take your own bags, you get out of the free bags, you get home, you load them and then you just put them away and they blow out of your waste bin on the outside and they blow into the local river and they find a way to the sea. So the seas are being polluted, whereas the transaction was just between you and Sainsbury's, you got some free bags. And so somebody else is suffering the consequences. Likewise, blue industries that put the air or the water and salt.
The same can happen within organizations where, I mean, to give an example, where finance tells procurement, you need to squeeze down our suppliers. We want to pay less because we have price erosion, we need compensation for that. So we're going to pay less for our raw materials next year and this year. So they're going to negotiate and they get a better price.
What they don't at that moment, realize is that the suppliers say, right, okay, if we are getting less money for our products, we're not going to give as much support anymore. So if there is a problem with our supplies, they're going to be on their doorstep within half an hour, we might give them some telephone support, but obviously it's not part of the, it's not part of the official written contract, it's part of the unwritten total cremence. And so the people somewhere else in the organization who need the help of the supplier will suddenly find out they don't get the help anymore. So that's an externality.
The finance and procurement were happy because finance said, you must shave 5% of the bill of materials and procurement, six percent, look at us, we did it really well. And then somebody else is suffering the consequences. Operations and logistics are flocked, yeah. Yes, those kinds of things precisely.
So, but I think there are so many situations at work where what we do on our own or what we do with another colleague affects third parties and we don't know in what way and it may well waste their time. But if we don't know, we'll happily waste the time because we don't pay for it. It's not even visible. So that's why I, again, I keep on having this notion of awareness.
We need to be aware of the consequences of what we do on other people, including of their time. And it may not, it may, I mean, we could do it this way or that way, it doesn't make much difference to us, but if we did this way, it's going to waste somebody's time, maybe half an hour, half a day, if we do that way, it won't waste any time at all. But if we don't know, we can't do the right thing. And this is because within an organisation, you don't have a market mechanism to show the expense of something that is a specific burden to a colleague, if you see that.
Absolutely. So I've got a question I want to finish on, but before we get on to that, is there anything else, do you want to bookend the discussion on time or are you happy with everything we've covered so far? Well, I think maybe one final thing I wrote about recently is deadlines, the use of deadlines, particularly self-imposed deadlines. We sometimes set deadlines.
Yeah, I mean, we must get this done by then. And it can be a very good mechanism for making the limited amount of time we have salient and we have a countdown clock mentally, or we can have a real countdown clock. And so we okay, this much time left, we can plan and we know that we as we get closer, we really need to get it done, whether that's at work or whether it's at home, we can do this. But we should be careful not to be too dramatic about using deadlines like this, because there's always a trade-off to be made.
And so sometimes time not spent, because a deadline is basically saying no time spent beyond this amount of time. And if you don't go beyond that, then presumably there's some kind of value or finishing whatever you have by then. I mean, you give the example of my students and their final assignments for this course. So they need to submit it by midnight tonight.
It's midnight central time. So they've got another 11 hours, I've got a little bit to go. But so some of them have asked for an extension and they got it because they were in time. If they ask for one now, then they won't get it, they will get penalized.
But so they need to think about should I submit my assignment on time and meet the deadline? Or should I submit it late, get a penalty, but have a better assignment? And I think that's the kind of trade-off that we don't always make. We can become obsessed by a deadline and not really work out what the true cost would be of exceeding a deadline.
Or meeting the deadline as well. Both indeed. So to become set, set a self-imposed deadline which forces you to make a suboptimal decision, one that potentially given only a small increase of the deadline would have increased the quality of the decision by a significant margin. Correct.
Correct. And I think I need to give another sort of practical example. You need to catch your train. And it's really quite important you get that train, but how important is it?
Are you going to be leaving the house without checking that you actually close the windows and doors? Because I really need to get the train. Or are you going to say, well, I'd rather check the house and I'll take the next train. Okay, there's going to be some costs involved with that.
But at least I know my house will be secure and the iron will be unplugged and I'll switch up the gas stove and everything so my house is not burning down. So when you put it so extreme, then clearly nobody's going to say I'm going to rush out of the house, leave windows and doors open and the iron on the ironing board, because I need to catch my train. Nobody's going to do that. But if it's not that extreme, we don't always think about it, about what gained by catching the train and meeting our deadline or what we would lose by not meeting our deadline or what we'd gain in terms of the benefit of our house being secure on the equivalent.
So I think deadlines can be useful, but we should be careful not to treat them as something that then begins to dictate us. I think we need to be willing to look at compromising, by the way, and what the cost and the benefit of going outside would be. It's interesting that I love thinking about where the rubber meets the road with these sorts of discussions. Exactly.
Would you be prepared to have one window half open? Would you be prepared to have one window fully open but it's an upstairs window? Would you be like, so we do this and it's ruined. We used to have a big section on the Pro Fitness Podcast, which I was a guest on before I started this one.
We used to have a big section called Would You Rather, and it was Would You Rather Submitted By Listeners, and there would always be something which had a value that was negotiable, and we would find a value that someone would accept and then ruin it completely ruined the segment and we got rid of it, because we just kept playing the same game, which was we would pick the value someone would accept and then take it down by unit and then take it down by unit and then take it down by unit. So you do it for 50 grand. So would you do it for $49,999? Would you do it for that?
And you just go, oh, well, like, you just, I don't know, I don't know exactly where, but where the rubber meets the road with those sorts of discussions, I think is really, really interesting. And you spoke about, I'll tell you what before I ask the question, I've been really excited to ask you, you mentioned that one of the ways that people can insulate, slash protect themselves from this is through planning. Can you just explain how you think planning sort of ties into the deadline and sacrifice sort of interest? Well, I think, yeah, yes, I can.
I think I actually planning somewhat, firstly, I'd say I'm not the person who's gotten, I mean, sometimes when I work with people, I see they open their eyes with diary into all these nice boxes. I don't have that many boxes, but I do it, I did mentally in a sense. So I think about what I need to do, I think about when I'm roughly going to be doing it. To me, it's about this awareness and being deliberate about the time.
So for me, that is planning. And I think what's important also is what is my purpose? If I'm going to finish my blog post Friday, then that's what going to be my main focus. But it doesn't mean I'm going to be doing this until midnight and drop.
No, this is where the mental accounting comes in. I'm aware that I need to take a break. I'm going to have a cup of tea. I'm going to maybe watch something on the television and then I'll carry on working on it.
So it's, it really is, I think it's probably a parallel with mindfulness as well. There's a lot of time, mindfulness that is involved here. Being conscious of time, being conscious of the fact that it's valuable and that you need to use it well, but also that you, I mean, interestingly, I just tweeted a story earlier today about the value of doing nothing. So I actually, I sometimes literally do nothing.
And I think it's very valuable doing nothing. So there's, I don't look at my phone, don't look at anything, don't even think about anything, just basically float can be very useful. And so making time for that is the case of being aware of the needs and being deliberate about creating the time. It's not necessarily going to be doing nothing between 11, 44 and 12 or five tomorrow lunchtime.
But it's about being, basically being in control of your time. To me, that is what planning is. If you need your diary to do that, then fine, but you don't necessarily need a diary. It's the sense of being in control of what you do when.
Yeah, the tool doesn't really matter, but the deliberateness does. It's, I can't remember, I read the quote earlier on today, so I'm kicking myself and not being able to remember it. But many of the problems of man, are due to the fact that he can't sit alone with himself in a room for half an hour. And you know, it sounds like you are also, interestingly, if my meditation coach Brian is listening, he will know that my particular pathway of meditation at the moment is do nothing, meditation by Xin Zhan-Yung.
And that specifically for anybody that's interested is what he calls completely taking the hands off the wheel. And it is the practice of no practice. So my meditation on the morning doesn't even have me clearing my mind of thoughts. If thoughts arise, they're allowed to, there's no fixation or suppression.
But the only thing that I do is drop an intention to control. So it's like either the thought about putting my hands back on the wheel gets, that's the only thing I'm allowed to think about thinking about. And that's it. Which is doing that, like learning to let go of controlling thoughts, even in a meditative practice, is because meditation in itself in some forms, especially some of the ones that I've been doing is still about we're bringing the focus back to the breath, we're bringing the focus back to the somatic sensations in the body or the self-talk or the mental imagery, whatever it might be.
And yeah, the power of literally doing nothing is an interesting one. I think it was really, really good to go through that. But I have a final question for you, which I asked Richard Schotten. I'm going to ask you the same thing as well.
So you strand it on a desert island, stranded on a desert island on your own. And you're only allowed to have three mental models with you and take three mental models onto the island with you. So they can be either the most novel or the most interesting, they can be biased, heuristic, whatever it is that you want. But you got to choose three and you're going to take them with you.
Which three are you going to choose? And it can be on my own there. Yeah. Oh, well, I'll tell you what, you can imagine that there might be other people there as well, because that'll probably broaden the broadening.
You got to choose three, you got to choose a favorite three. I'm not quite sure what you mean by by mental models. So any, any bias, any heuristics, so you could have some cost fallacy, opportunity costs, you could have the platform effect, you could have anchoring, you could have self-serving bias. Well, I think one thing I would definitely take with me is cost benefit analysis.
Okay. That's the way you make deliberate decisions. So it's considering what the cost and benefits are of the multiple options that are in front of you. I think that would serve me well, even if I'm totally on my own on this island.
I think what I would also take is optimism bias, because I think life can get depressing if you're not optimistic. Optimism might be, well, go knows maybe it's ship might appear on the horizon and take me away from the island. Or I might discover important things that help me make my life more comfortable on the island. What would be the third one that would serve me well?
Well, maybe I don't know whether you treat as a mental model, but I would take mindfulness. I find even when I'm driving occasionally, and it's probably the right side of doing nothing, but just sort of taking in the site, taking in the landscape, taking in the way the trees look, maybe there's a bit of frost on the trees, and being really conscious of that, I think that's also something that would serve me well on a desert island. That is the ability to experience my environment to the full, might be mindful that way. Even if I have nothing else, if I have not any of my accoutrements, I make my life interesting and pleasant these days, if I could be mindful in whatever the nature would be on my desert island, I think that would certainly well.
I think it would stop you from getting bored as well. The resolution that you're looking at, if you're on this small desert island, you've seen the same trees every day, you need to be able to look at them with optimism, you need to be able to see them freshly. There's a couple of mental models that come to mind, so George McGill, who I did a mental models podcast with, this Hanlon's Razor and Ockham's Razor, and he made McGill's Razor, and McGill's Razor was, when offered two choices, choose the one which suggests which offers the most look or adventure, and that actually, interestingly, the look or adventure side might be how you ended up on the desert island. You might have thought, I'm going to take, this sounds like a great adventure, and now you shipwrecked, and now you're stranded on a desert island.
Well, the question is, when I take you off the island again? Ah, yeah, exactly. A lookie. Create, get Wilson, a volleyball ball on there, strap some bamboo shoots to a raft.
Cohen, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. If the listeners want to find out more, if they want to see some of your work, where should they head? Well, I should probably head to my medium side.
I mean, I published both on WordPress, they're my addresses, Confucius, and I'll spell that in my first name, Fusius, as in my Illustris ancestor, Confucius.net, or on medium, I'm medium slash at Confucius on medium. Can always call me on Twitter as well. I'm a prolific Twitter app, tweets, not least my own stories, but also other interesting stuff to do with even the paper that I discovered on the Net, the Trenton Center. I can agree.
Massive, massive appreciation for you for coming on. And you're publishing weekly at the moment on your... Every week, yeah. That's a serious schedule.
A piece every week, yes, that's right. And I try to stick to it. To the point, I actually, I published in English and Dutch as well, so it's published on a Dutch, Belgian Dutch language news website. So I translated, usually, in the early hours of Friday morning.
Oh, wow. I know that feeling of completing my show notes a couple of hours. There's been a few interesting times because of the publishing, the time that these episodes go live six AM in the UK, and there's been a couple of times where I've been away in Bali, which is 13 hours ahead, or I've been in Boston, which is eight hours, like six hours behind. And I'm thinking like, shit, I've got half an hour to get this episode up because it's actually, I don't need one AM here, but it's six AM at home and blah, blah.
Well, it's said for me, even though it's a self-imposed deadline, because nobody tells me to publish my 10 o'clock on the Friday morning. But it helps. I'm totally convinced if I didn't set myself a deadline, I would long have given up posting a post every week. And not discipline, I think.
It's a very good discipline to think as well. I mean, writing is the best way to learn to think that. I couldn't agree more. And I think as well, what we've both got is a level of accountability.
There will be people waiting for your blog post. And if the blog post doesn't go up, maybe no one will actually say something, but you know, they'll probably think it. They'll be like, I'm a second. Where's Coon's article from today?
And that social fear, that social pressure, it's enough of a motivation to keep us both going each week, I suppose. Even if it's totally imagined that it's actually nobody's reading my talks, it's still works. Coon, thank you so much for your time. Everything that we've talked about today will be linked in the show notes below, including the medium page for yourself and your Twitter.
You know what to do. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to comment below. Like, share, and subscribe. I would really appreciate it.
But for now, Coon, thank you so much. Chris, thanks very much. Thank you.