In this episode you’ll meet Jake Kahana, the co-founder of Caveday, a company helping you improve your relationship to work. Their global community has participated in over 50,000 hours of deep work “In The Cave.” Learn how Jake and his co-founders started with a specific job to be done and then wrapped an experience around it to create a game-changing solution, how they use internal and external research to contextualize and inform their experience, and how they’ve adapted their product to current conditions. Be forewarned, you’re going to ask yourself while listening if the way you’re working is working. If not, Jake has some ideas for you.

Key Takeaways

• Benefits of working in a flow state: generating more creative and novel ideas, faster learning, clearer communication, and higher quality work. 
• Employee and Customer Experience Strategists need to focus on Modes (a mindset and a set of behaviors that people get into temporarily) 
• No one taught us how to work so when we’re doing work that feels really hard or really challenging, our brains want to bring in dopamine. It’s like when we’re having an awkward silence and we want to fill it with something comfortable we take our phones out.
• Top lesson learned: Identify an unmet need and then listen to your customers to find out if you’re meeting it.

 

Keep exploring

• Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.
• Flow Research Collective by Steven Kotler and Huberman Lab in Stanford by Andrew Huberman.

Parkinson’s Law: the old adage that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. The term was first coined by Cyril Northcote Parkinson; The Economist talks about the essay he wrote for them here.