A Productive Conversation

This isn't a book about getting more done. It's a book about what it takes to keep going when the conditions around you make that difficult — and once I read it that way, I couldn't stop seeing the overlap with the work I do. We don't talk about care when we talk about productivity. We talk about systems and output and capacity. We almost never talk about what's actually required to sustain any of it.

Dr. Tiffany G. Townsend is a psychologist and former professor, and her book Weathering the Storm: Navigating the Antisocial Justice Wave argues that self-care isn't a luxury you get to once there's time — it's the precondition, and without it burnout stops being a risk and becomes arithmetic. We got into why microaggressions land as surprises you can't prepare for, why you don't owe anyone a response in the moment, what separates tokenism from actual change, and what she means by radical hope: holding a clear-eyed view of how hard something is at exactly the same time as believing it can change.

Six Discussion Points

• Self-care isn't the reward for doing the work, it's the condition that makes continuing to do it possible — which makes protecting it a practical decision rather than an indulgent one.
• AI was supposed to reduce intensity; inside most organisations it's raised the expectation instead, because an assistant doesn't lighten a workload so much as expand what's assumed possible.
• Joy is protective infrastructure, and it's most at risk exactly when the work you care about is under attack — which is when protecting it matters most.
• Microaggressions arrive as surprises, which means you won't be prepared, and that's fine — therapeutic moments don't disappear, so you can protect yourself now and respond when you've decided how.
• Tokenism is representation without resources or power: it produces the appearance of change while quietly eroding the sense of efficacy of the person placed in the role.
• Working collectively isn't only more effective — it's where the healing happens, which is why doing meaningful work alone has a time limit on it regardless of how capable you are.

Three Connection Points

• Weathering the Storm by Dr. Tiffany G. Townsend
• AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It (HBR)
• Productiveness

Tiffany used the word efficacy in this conversation, which almost nobody does — it's one of the nine principles in my own book, and hearing someone arrive at it from a completely different direction was one of those moments where you realise the thing you've been circling isn't yours alone. Her practical starting point is smaller than you'd expect: find thirty minutes a week that nobody gets access to, and find people who share the thing you care about. Not a system. Just protected time, and company.

I spoke at Podcast Movement in New York last month, and the whole conference ran on headphones — every attendee wearing a set, switching channels to pick which stage they were listening to. Which meant that partway through my talk, I watched at least one person in front of me switch to somebody else. It was a bold format. I'm still not sure it worked. But it was a real experiment, and I came away thinking about how rarely we name the experiments we're already running.

Patrick Rhone and I spent this month's PM Talks on that — including a distinction I think matters more than it sounds like it should. Experiments have an end in mind. Tinkering doesn't. One of them produces a decision; the other produces the feeling of progress without ever asking you to make one. We also got into Patrick's unrecorded podcast, which got him mocked by some fairly prominent people at the time and then quietly became the thing everybody does now.

Six Discussion Points

• Most of the choices you make in a day are experiments you never labelled as such — you're acting without knowing the outcome, which is the definition, whether or not you framed it that way.
• The difference between experimentation and tinkering is an endpoint: an experiment asks a question you intend to answer and then stop, while tinkering is perpetual adjustment that feels productive precisely because it never resolves.
• Parameters make an experiment possible rather than constraining it — knowing what you can't control is what tells you what's actually worth testing.
• You cannot predict which thing will land; after thirty years of writing online, the most-linked post of Patrick's career came from a car conversation with his wife and took twenty seconds to write.
• Coming home from a conference with pages of notes almost guarantees nothing happens — picking exactly three (one thing to act on, one person to connect with, one thing to think about) lets the rest fall away without festering.
• Stopping is itself an experiment: quitting something at its peak asks a real question about what you'd do with the time and how you'd fill the gap, and you genuinely don't know the answer going in.

Three(ish) Connection Points

Between us we promised rather more than three of these on air, so here they all are. Consider the overrun an experiment.

• Patrick Rhone — and his NOW page, which he swears he updates every couple of weeks
• Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
• Fish: a tap essay by Robin Sloan — the one he lost the source code to and rebuilt from scratch
• Microsoft's Biggest Miss — Patrick's most-linked post, written in about twenty seconds, based on something his wife said in the car
• What You Bring Home — my piece on the three picks, which is where this conversation started
• My NOW page
• The poem Matt wrote about my talk — handed to me on orange card stock when I went back for my laptop

The three-picks idea came out of my own notebook after New York, and I wrote about it thinking it was a minor observation. It got more response than most things I publish, which rather proves the other half of this conversation — you don't get to choose what resonates. You only get to choose what you try. So: what have you been tinkering with that you could turn into an actual experiment, with an end date and a decision attached?

We're at a forty-year low for trust across nearly every institution, and the reflex is to reach for something faster — a better funnel, a tighter system, an optimization. Nick Richtsmeier's argument is that the reflex is the problem. The things that actually rebuild trust are slow, uncomfortable, and resistant to being made efficient, which is exactly why so few people do them.

Nick is the author of The Damn Rules: How Vulnerability, Inefficiency, and Love Liberate Leaders from the Trustbroken Economy, and he's clear that none of the seven rules in it are surprising. You don't read them and think he's a genius. You read them and think: that's true, and I wish it weren't, because my life would be easier. We got into why impatience is a symptom rather than the disease, why being a "category of one" works against you, why the customer is wrong without meaning to be, and why efficiency is a fine tool for managing waste and a terrible one for building anything people care about.

Six Discussion Points

• Impatience is downstream of the real problem — going after it directly just produces resistance, because what's actually driving it is exhausted nervous systems, anxiety and isolation.
• We're all playing in an attention casino: miserable most of the time, with occasional payouts just large enough to keep us pulling the arm.
• People move through resistance on a cocktail of three things — better information, more support, or more pain — and better information is the least important of the three, because we can talk ourselves out of information all day.
• "Who am I being in this situation?" does more than any personality framework, because identity is largely repeatable behaviour, and change starts when someone sees their own pattern rather than the problem.
• The customer is wrong, and not maliciously — humans are poor predictors of their own behaviour under changed circumstances, which makes customer will a moving target rather than a North Star.
• Being a category of one is trust-breaking rather than advantageous; competition supplies the contrast that makes a decision easy, and without it you carry the entire burden of proving the category should exist.

Three Connection Points

• The Damn Rules by Nick Richtsmeier
• Damns Given — Nick's ongoing work
• Stop Managing Your Time, Start Crafting Your Time Instead

The line I keep turning over is Nick's: inefficiency is load-bearing. We've spent a couple of decades treating every inefficiency as a defect to be engineered out, and what we've engineered out along with it is most of what made people trust each other. If your strategy is to do as much as possible, as fast as possible, as cheaply as possible, it's worth asking what that strategy is actually building — and whether anyone will care about it when it's built.

Normally I'm the one asking the questions. This time I wasn't. I was in New York for Podcast Movement, my daughter Grace came down from Montreal to meet me — partly for a concert, let's be honest — and since we were both sitting in a studio anyway, we turned the tables. She'd written her own questions. She hadn't read the book. I had no idea where any of it was going.

What came out of it is the most personal conversation I've put on this feed in a long time: why productiveness is a state and not a rate, and why that distinction matters more than it sounds like it should; which of the nine principles I actually struggle with, and the reframe a therapist gave me years ago that changed how I measured a decade of my working life; why I've cut interviews on this show from fifty-two a year to twelve; and why, after eighteen years of doing this, I've never once described myself as a podcaster.

It felt right to put this one out on International Podcast Day. Eighteen years, no breaks, and the thing I keep coming back to is that the show was never the point — it's the connective tissue between everything else.

Six Discussion Points

• Productiveness predates productivity as a word, and the substitution quietly swapped a state for a rate — which matters because a state is tethered to identity in a way a rate never is.
• Data can change your rate. It can't change your state — which is why measurement alone has never made anyone feel less behind.
• "Is this the right app?" is almost never the first question; whether the work is aligned with your energy is, and most systems will never stop to ask it.
• A therapist's reframe — that you're a stay-at-home parent who happens to run a business, rather than a business owner who happens to be at home — leaves every fact unchanged and completely alters what success was ever supposed to look like.
• Cadence is the hardest principle to hold because the seasons of a life keep invalidating the rhythm that was working, and grace is what makes that survivable rather than damning.
• Legacy is built by the ride rather than designed at the end of it, and you don't get a vote in how it turns out — which is an argument for being more interested in the ride than the result.

Three Connection Points

• Productiveness
• The Front Nine-era photo of Grace and Colton
• Grace's ask: She's a psychology student looking for lab experience. If you're a teacher, psychologist or sociologist with room in your lab, get in touch and I'll pass it along.

Grace has been around for this work her entire life — she wrote show notes for this show as a teenager for twenty dollars an episode, which she brought up on air and which I had genuinely forgotten. Getting to have this conversation with her, in a studio, in a city we were both in for completely different reasons, is about as good an illustration of the ride-over-the-result argument as I could have staged on purpose. I didn't stage it. That's rather the point.

I missed two Wednesday livestreams this month, and I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to decide whether that meant I'd fallen behind. Somewhere in there I realized I was asking the wrong question. Falling behind and stopping are not the same thing — they just feel the same and they get called the same name.

Falling behind requires somebody waiting. There's a pace that was set, an agreement, a real person on the other side of it. Stopping is just the absence of motion. That's the whole definition. In this one I get into why confusing the two costs people entire summers, the three predictable ways re-entry breaks, and the distinction between consistency and cadence that finally made all of this click for me. I use my own two missed Wednesdays as the worked example throughout, because it would be a bit strange if I didn't.

Six Discussion Points

• Falling behind requires that someone was actually waiting; if you can't name them in four seconds, you didn't fall behind — you stopped, and nobody sends a bill for stopping.
• A guilty conscience quietly converts a neutral fact ("I stopped") into a moral one ("I failed"), and once it's moral you feel you have to atone before you're allowed to simply resume.
• The Full Restore assumes two weeks away had zero effect on your capacity — an expectation nobody would apply to running or to a language, but that we apply to our work constantly.
• The debt story treats rest as a withdrawal to be repaid, which quietly means rest was never rest at all; it was borrowing, and every day off becomes a loan against a future day of overwork.
• The clean slate delay is the most expensive of the three because it feels like planning when it's actually stalling with a calendar in your hand — a two-week stop becomes a six-week one.
• Consistency is mechanical and treats any gap as a broken chain; cadence is musical, and a rhythm can absorb a rest because rests are written into the score.

Three Connection Points

• Subscribe to The Lantern
• The 10-Second Inbox
• Listen to the Gary John Bishop conversation (APC668)

A system you can return to is worth more than a system you never leave — because the one you never leave is going to get left eventually. Something always happens. When it does, the only thing that matters is whether you built something you can walk back into. If you stopped something in the last six weeks, the question isn't how you let it happen. It's whether this is a rest or a drift, and the only difference between those two is whether you come back.

The appeal of a hard challenge is that nobody's pretending it's easy. Most of what gets sold to us leads with how simple it'll be; programs like 75 Hard do the opposite, and that honesty is a large part of why they work. But the failure mode is predictable, and it's not laziness — it's taking on so many challenges at once that none of them survive contact with an ordinary week.

Zakhar Azatian — Zach — is a founder building Be Hard, a platform for structured personal challenges, and he's failed at more of these than he's completed, which makes him a more useful guide than someone with a perfect record. We got into why one challenge with one focus beats ten, how longer challenges force you across seasons and schedule changes in a way 30-day sprints don't, why "I forgot" is a more common failure cause than any lack of discipline, and why a challenge that looks indulgent from the outside can still be doing real work.

Six Discussion Points

• Programs like 75 Hard succeed partly because they're honest about being hard, in a market that mostly competes on how easy something will be.
• Doing multiple challenges simultaneously is the most common way people fail — one challenge with one clear focus, even if it combines physical, social, and mental elements, is far more sustainable.
• Longer challenges force you across month boundaries, season changes, and disrupted schedules, which is exactly what reveals whether something actually fits your life.
• Most failures aren't about discipline — they're about a rescheduled task falling out of routine and simply being forgotten.
• A challenge should be designed around a specific problem you're trying to solve, which means the same activity can be a real challenge for one person and meaningless for another.
• Fitting a challenge into a full life usually requires removing something rather than finding time — but that removal has to be honest about what's actually optional.

Three Connection Points

• Be Hard — Zakhar's challenge platform
• Connect with Zakhar Azatian on LinkedIn
• Check out Mike's books

If you've been circling a challenge you keep not starting, the useful question isn't whether you have the discipline. It's whether you've picked one thing instead of five, and whether you know what problem it's actually meant to solve. Get those right and the difficulty stops being the obstacle.

Patrick's wife has an iPad mini she uses for exactly one thing: reading. She's never called it an iPad mini in her life. She calls it her Kindle — and she isn't confused, she's being precise. The name follows the job, not the packaging. That's the second time in two months we've stumbled into how the words people choose quietly reveal what a thing is actually for.

This month's PM Talks opens there and lands on a question Patrick puts plainly about twenty minutes in: what problem does this solve? We get into Clayton Christensen's milkshake, why a tool that does everything usually does nothing especially well, why the unused device in the corner is a capital-P project you've been sitting on rather than a small privileged annoyance, and — less comfortably — what happens when you point that same question at a friendship, a marriage, or a default nobody ever asked you to agree to.

Six Discussion Points

• What people call a thing reveals what it's actually for; a device used only for reading becomes "her Kindle" regardless of what's printed on the box or which app is open.
• The jobs-to-be-done question cuts in both directions — it explains what you should buy, and it exposes what you're still holding onto that stopped doing its job a while ago.
• Deliberately refusing to install certain apps on a device is a forcing function, not a limitation; knowing what each device is for is what makes any of them work well.
• An unused device sitting in the corner isn't clutter, it's an open loop — and in David Allen's terms it's a full project with multiple tasks underneath it, not a single thing you can dash off.
• Capturing an open loop doesn't close it; what actually relieves the weight is having a plan and knowing the boundaries of the thing you captured.
• Asking what problem a relationship or a social default solves sounds cold, but it's really a prompt to notice when something has stopped doing the job you originally needed it to do — and to stop treating inherited arrangements as settled.

Three Connection Points

• Read more from Patrick Rhone at patrickrhone.com
• Growth in Reverse
• Get Productiveness

The move worth stealing from this one is Patrick's double-take in the Costco aisle: the walk past, the stop, the walk back. Most of us keep walking. Whether it's a device you've stopped using, a phone you pull out without deciding to, or an arrangement you've never actually questioned, the pause is the whole thing. What in your life is still there mostly because you never stopped to ask what it was for?

Most people describe work stress as one undifferentiated thing: I'm stressed at work. Amy Leneker's research says there are actually five distinct kinds, and the one doing the most damage to working people isn't the one that shows up most often. It's the sudden kind — the unexpected thing that yanks you off whatever you'd planned to do — and it has a nasty habit of multiplying into all the others.

Amy is the author of Cheers to Monday: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Lead and Live with Less Stress and More Joy, and her book is built around a sequence — see, sort, solve, and then celebrate — that has to be done in that order, though almost nobody does. We got into why writing a stressor down doesn't make it bigger, why "just forget about it, it's not important" is terrible advice your brain physically can't follow, the research on how you ask for help mattering far more than who you ask, and why the shortest section of the book might be the one people skip most.

Six Discussion Points

• A ten-word question — what are your hobbies, what do you do for fun — can expose how completely you've lost track of yourself, which is exactly how Amy's own unraveling started.
• There are five distinct types of work stress: schedule, suspense, social, sudden, and system — and sorting your stressors into the right one is what makes them solvable rather than just heavy.
• Sudden stress does the most damage despite occurring least often, largely because it snowballs — one person's missed deadline instantly becomes another person's social stress.
• Writing a stressor down doesn't make it more real or bigger than it is; those stressors are already running in the background like open browser tabs whether you name them or not.
• Telling yourself something unimportant isn't worth thinking about doesn't work — your brain hates open loops, and simple acknowledgment is what actually lets it move on.
• New research shows that how you ask for help determines whether it builds trust or damages it — framing it as learning and problem-solving reads as credible, while framing it as handing off your problem does the opposite.

Three Connection Points

• Cheers to Monday by Amy Leneker
• Find Amy and her work at amyleneker.com
• Stop Managing Your Time, Start Crafting Your Time Instead

The average person works roughly 2,109 Mondays in a lifetime. Deciding in advance that you're going to dislike all of them is a big thing to sign up for without thinking about it. If this conversation gets you to sort even one stressor into the right category this week, that's a start — and the book will take you the rest of the way.

We treat retreats as something you earn — a reward that shows up once you've worked hard enough, long enough. I don't think that's right, and I think it's the exact reason most people never actually take one. A retreat isn't a break from the work. It's part of it.

I had just wrapped a multi-day virtual retreat inside our TimeCrafting Trust community and was about to head into another one at a conference, so I was sitting right in the middle of two different kinds of retreat as I recorded this. That felt like the right moment to break down what a retreat actually is, the two forms it can take, and the five most common ways people sabotage their own attempt at one.

Six Discussion Points

• Treating a retreat as a reward for hard work puts it at the end of effort, contingent on having "done enough" — which means most people never feel like they qualify for one.
• The military root of "retreat" isn't surrender, it's a strategic withdrawal to regroup and reassess before moving forward again.
• There are two forms of retreat — retreat as place (the getaway, the conference, the cabin) and retreat as practice (a daily or weekly stepping back) — and the practice is what makes the place valuable, not the reverse.
• A retreat is not the same as rest; the deepest retreats can be genuinely challenging and often leave you needing an actual break afterward.
• Most retreats fail not in the stepping back, but in the reentry — without a plan to carry intentions forward, a retreat becomes a pause instead of a strategic reset.
• A retreat requires a balance of both time and space: too much space with too little time invites rushing, and too much time with too little space invites drift and procrastination.

Three Connection Points

• Get the free Retreat Map
• Join Time Crafting Trust
• Stop Managing Your Time, Start Crafting Your Time Instead

A retreat doesn't require a flight, a mountain, or a week away from your life. It requires a boundary and an intention — and permission you give yourself instead of waiting for. If you take nothing else from this episode, take this: the practice is what makes the place richer. Not the other way around.

Most of us don't drift into quitting a job. Something happens — a single, identifiable moment — and that's when the relationship with our work actually changes. Anthony Klotz calls these moments "jolts," and once you have the word for it, you start seeing them everywhere: in your own career, in the people around you, in decisions you made years ago that you never quite had language for until now.

Anthony is the organizational psychologist who coined the term "the Great Resignation," and his new book, Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters, is the deepest treatment I've read of why people actually leave jobs — and just as importantly, why they sometimes shouldn't. We got into direct jolts versus honeymoon jolts, why positive jolts are rarer and more powerful than negative ones, the "power surge" that hits right before someone quits, and why silence is usually the smartest exit strategy. I shared my own Costco story along the way — a demotion that turned out to be one of the clearest jolts of my working life.

Six Discussion Points

• A "jolt" is a single identifiable event that knocks you out of autopilot with your work — almost half of all quitting decisions trace back to one, rather than a slow, logical decline.
• The instinct after a jolt is to react immediately; the better move is almost always to reflect first, because doing nothing right away is often the strongest default option.
• Positive jolts exist but are rarer and less discussed than negative ones — our brains are wired to dwell longer on the bad, even though a compliment or a big win can just as easily be the moment that changes everything.
• The "honeymoon hangover effect" explains why job-change regret is so common: we see all the flaws in our current role and only the upside of the next one, until the new role reveals its own brown spots.
• "Leaning back" — quietly renegotiating your extra, unpaid job tasks — is an underused alternative to quitting that doesn't require dramatic action or public declaration.
• The "power surge" that hits right before someone resigns is real, and the discipline to sit with it quietly is usually worth more than any parting message ever could be.

Three Connection Points

• Jolted: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters
• Connect with Anthony on LinkedIn
• Stop Managing Your Time, Start Crafting Your Time Instead

If you're sitting in a job right now wondering whether what you're feeling is a real signal or just a bad week, this conversation is worth the full listen. And if you take one thing from it: remember what Anthony's colleague Kim Scott says — don't forget to quit. Not as a threat, but as a reminder that it's always been an option on the table.