Why the Most Productive People Work Less (Not More) with Joe O'Connor | 133

Joe O'Connor pioneered the global 4-day work week movement. He's coached governments, Fortune 500s, and pilot programs across three continents. But in this conversation, he says something every founder, employee, and student needs to hear: the way we're thinking about AI in the workplace is broken, and most people are about to sleepwalk into the same mistake we made with digitalization 30 years ago.

We go deep on why 65% of knowledge workers say responding to messages matters more than their actual top priorities, the productivity gap that's quietly redistributing trillions of dollars, why "work life integration" is a trap, and the one shift every ambitious person needs to make before the next wave of AI hits.

If you've ever felt like you're working harder than ever and somehow falling further behind, this one's for you.

⏰ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 — Introduction
00:40 — Why the 5-Day Work Week Was Built for a World That No Longer Exists
07:03 — Parkinson's Law and Why You're Wasting Your Best Hours
12:21 — The Atlassian Study That Should Terrify Every Founder (65%)
19:45 — The Cost of Always Being Available (For Founders Especially)
22:14 — Work Like a Lion, Not a Cow
22:40 — Jack's France Story: When Your Body Forces You to Stop
31:10 — Why 23 Minutes Is Killing Your Best Work
35:34 — How AI Could Bring Human Connection Back (The Customer Service Reframe)
38:55 — The Productivity-Wages Gap Nobody Talks About
41:52 — The Two Paths AI Will Take Us Down (One of Them Is Bad)
48:00 — What Universities Got Right (And Where They're Failing You)
51:58 — Give Every Hour a Mission
53:18 — The Two Skills That Will Matter Most in the Age of AI
55:18 — What Joe Is Grateful For

🔗 GUEST LINKS

Joe O'Connor
Work Time Revolution: worktimerevolution.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joseph-l-o-connor
Book: Do More in Four (Harvard Business Review Press, January 2026)

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Joe, you are one of the pioneers in this world on the four-day work week, which is super important as we have all this technology that is allowing us to work less. And productivity is at the top of mind for everyone from founders to everyday employees. I'm curious, in your words, what is your mission? What is the why behind what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:23

I think my mission is for a world of better work and also more balanced lives for people, which I think is something that is both achievable and very necessary. When I think about the work week and why that's you know become my life's work and the reason why I think it's so important, if we look back to a hundred years ago when we invented the five-day work week, it was at a time when one hour of labor was very, very closely correlated with productive output. In other words, the longer people were on the clock, typically speaking, the more productive they were going to be. We know that in most jobs and in most industries, that equation has has really been frayed over the last number of decades. Um the truth now is that you know not every hour is created equal for most people. Um there's lots of different ways that you can fill an hour on the job, and some of them are more productive than others. Um but I when I think about where we're at now as a society, you know, back then we had a workforce that was made up, only 20% of women were part of the paid workforce. Yeah. So even if we think about, you know, we've stayed pretty static since then in terms of the length of the work week for most people. But the average working hours per family for anyone who's married or has kids has gone up exponentially. Really? In addition to that, work is very different now, in that back then when you clocked out at the end of the workday, that was typically the end of your commitment to the firm. Whereas again, in most jobs today, we know that for many people there is this requirement, this expectation that you need to be flexible, you need to be available outside of standard hours. And so for me, a shorter work week isn't just about progress, but it's actually about rebalancing some of the things that you know I feel have got out of kilter in the world of work over the last number of decades. What does that mean, out of kilter? It means that, you know, we've stayed the same with the work week, but we've seen these other things change, and it's meant that I think for families, we're seeing a huge amount of strain on family life. It's part of the reason why, really interestingly, um, we've seen a number of Asian countries like Japan and South Korea look at experimenting with the shorter work week as a way to try and resolve issues with declining birth rates because they see that as being, you know, the the always-on nature, the the expectation that, you know, maybe people can't start a family as early is a big, is a big reason why we're seeing declining birth rates. And we also have, you know, there was a report from Microsoft last year called the Infinite Work Day, which talks about how work is really creeping into the cracks and crevices of people's everyday lives. So to me, a shorter work week is something that can help us, you know, if we accept that we aren't going to be able to change the somewhat always-on nature of the economy, that, you know, we can't move, we can't turn back the clock in that way, where we are going to, and most jobs need to have this flexibility. Um, I think that that what we need to be looking at is, you know, variable hours are going to be higher. What can we do about core working hours? And can we can we reduce that? Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

Why do you think that this is so important to my audience? People that are ambitious, that are striving for goals, that are feeling like work is constantly creeping into every single moment in their day that's available. Why is this important to be at the top of their minds?

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Because I think that that audience, more so than than any other, you know, and I think we talked about a little bit this before we started the interview. It does mean that if you're very ambitious and if you're always striving and you're driving to try and achieve your goals, you're more susceptible to find yourself burning out. And the reality is that, you know, for performance today, again, the relationship between employees' well-being and their productivity, I believe, is actually even closer than the relationship between the number of hours they spend on the clock and their ability to be productive. Um, you know, we when and this is only going to increase when we think about the age of AI. My view is that in the next five to six years, most of the repeatable tasks and processes that make up people's jobs are going to be outsourced to technology. We're also going to see, you know, the idea of being more efficient, creating and producing more output. These are things that human beings are just simply going to be unable to keep pace with AI on. You know, there's going to be no point racing against the machine. And so what that's going to mean is that the things that are going to be most valuable for us as humans in our contribution are going to be things like our ability to think critically, to make good judgments, contextual awareness, um, you know, our ability to connect and develop relationships with people. These are all things that are not maximized by, you know, hustling more and by spending more time at the job. They're things that really require being very careful about how you manage your energy, your focus, and your recovery.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Yeah. So personally I'm curious because I think that this is kind of a niche thing to be very interested in. And I I completely see why it's important on a cultural level, but what personally got you into uh into this space, into optimizing for maybe more life over more over work? I know I've heard you talk about your parents and how they kind of worked really long days, right? So you weren't necessarily the typical person if you were to look at uh a certain subset of people, you wouldn't say, oh, he's the one that's gonna kind of revolutionize how we think about work. Why you, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 5:54

It was really inspired by something I discovered in my work in Ireland, um, where you know, before I started consulting with organizations to help them to implement shorter work weeks and to work smarter and work healthier, um, I used to be working with a labor union in Ireland. I was their head of campaigns and communications. And I led this research project within the public service in Ireland where we're looking at, quite honestly, we weren't looking specifically at the idea of a shorter work week. We were looking at people's work-life balance, their well-being. We're looking at working time. Um, back then, Ireland had just come out of a very bad economic crash after the Celtic Tiger. Anyone in who who's somewhat familiar with Ireland might be aware of the fact that there was this huge boom and then this massive bust afterwards where there was a big housing crash. And so at the time, there was additional working hours imposed on people working within the public sector. So this was a very hot topic at the time, you know, thinking about people were forced to move from an average work week of 36 hours to 38. And so what I found in this research was that we already had a lot of working parents, mostly women, who had already opted to reduce their work time to better manage their responsibilities outside of work. So, in other words, people very commonly maybe coming back from maternity leave, they would return to work not on a full-time schedule, but on a reduced schedule, let's say four days, but they were doing this for a pay cut. So they were working 80% of the time, they were getting 80% of the pay. But what I found when I started talking to these employees, I started talking to their managers, I started looking at the data, was that in almost every case, these employees had the same job expectations, the same responsibilities. They were effectively doing the same job as they were when they were working full-time, and the same as their colleagues who were still working full-time. And so that was really what led me to this concept Parkinson's law, that a task expands to fill the time available for its completion. I think we all experience this, you know, when we're up against a deadline. Maybe on a week like this week is a public holiday in the UK and Ireland. And for a lot of people, they're going to try and get through their workload within that condensed time frame. And so that was really what brought me to this issue in terms of thinking that we already had at our disposal the productive capacity and the technological tools to be able to work less and to achieve the same or better. Um, and again, you know, this was six, seven years ago now. The, you know, with generative AI um and all of these new technologies bursting onto the scene, um, the possibilities in terms of finding ways to achieve more with less have have you know increased exponentially in the last number of years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Thinking about Parkinson's law, I think it's fascinating because I mean I see it in my own life. When I have more time to do something, the thing that used to take me maybe four hours, if I now have eight hours, it will take me the eight hours. Do you understand the mechanism behind this? Because I have always noticed this pattern, but I have no idea why it works like that in my life.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

I I I think it is when you create a a container for something, you know, it does, it does act as this forcing function to kind of for you to be innovative, for you to be efficient. Um, you know, if you think about um the the um Pomodoro principle that many people might have heard of, the productivity hack where you work, you know, you set a timer, you work for 50 minutes, you take a 10-minute break, then you work for 25 minutes, you take a five-minute break. And again, that's kind of leveraging this same principle that if you kind of create this, you know, explicit container, it will drive you and motivate you to get the work done rather than if you had this very open-ended window to in order to do it. So I think that that's really what's going on at the individual level. But one of the things that I definitely do want to share is that to achieve a shorter work week successfully at an organizational level, particularly in a world where most of your clients, most of your competitors, most of your stakeholders are still working a standard five-day work week, that requires something more than just individual productivity hacks. And it does rely in kind of collective work redesign. And I think one of the other things that's really powerful about um the organizations that I've worked with who have managed to make this a success is that they're really using time as a powerful incentive for people to find new and better ways to work. Um, and one of the things that that I always argue is that the incentive structure that we currently have in modern work is broken because those employees who are always the first in the queue to adopt new tools, who are always challenging themselves to find new and better ways to work, who are always trying to find new efficiencies, usually the only reward that they get is for more tasks and more workload to be amongst their plate. Yeah. Um, and so what a shorter work week does is it creates this really powerful collective incentive, you know, to push people to actually find new and better ways of working.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that because I think in a school setting or as a founder, you kind of have a finite amount of tasks that you can complete. So I would always think about back in my like early school days when there wasn't like assignments you'd get months ahead of time, right? You just had like that week's homework packet, for example. I would say to myself, I'm gonna get this done like in the first hour, and then I have nothing more to do. But that doesn't quite transfer over into the modern workplace where once you get a task done, you just have another waiting for you. So you almost make your life harder by doing the thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Yeah. And again, you know, we've seen this with the advent of digital digital technology. Uh again, you know, you might have heard of the phenomenon work slop, where lots of employees are talking about how, you know, the use of AI, while it obviously has benefits in terms of efficiencies, if used wrongly, it can create all of this additional output, which then needs to be reviewed, which needs to be fact-checked, and it actually creates a greater level of intensification of work. And so I think this comes down to another feature of the modern workplace that I think is quite deeply embedded. And it is because of all of this frenetic activity that employees are incentivized to think that it's more important to be active, to be available, than it is to actually move the needle on the things that are more important. And there's some pretty clear research that points to this. A study done by Atlassian asked modern knowledge workers, pretty large study done all over the world, which was more important, responding quickly to a message or making progress on your top priorities. And I was completely blown over by this result because in many ways it was kind of a lead-in question. You know, you're kind of saying to people, these are your top priorities. Yeah. Is that the most important thing, or is it responding quickly to a message? 65% of people said it was responding quickly to messages. Wow. And I think that that, you know, cuts to the core of this thing that we've we've invented, which is lots of people feel that they are going to be more valued, they're going to be more rewarded, they're going to be more promotable if they are more active and more responsive, which isn't necessarily the same thing as being, you know, as making the biggest impact. Um, and so I think that that another thing that a shorter work week does is it creates this alignment between the interests of the organization. So let's say your OKRs, the big picture goals, and the interests of employees. It creates a much closer connection between, you know, employees are trying to achieve something that will be potentially life-changing for them, but it is contingent on achieving these organizational level targets and goals. And so I think it creates this very powerful alignment that we don't see in many, in many organizations otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

And thinking about my audience who are a lot of entrepreneurial-like people, I think when you're doing something where you don't necessarily have a ton of structure around you, right? And you have this goal up here and you don't know exactly how you're going to get there, it can be really easy to want to be busy, to f want to feel busy. And so you're constantly scattered. You're responding to emails, sending LinkedIn messages, maybe posting some scattered content without a real plan behind it, without a structured plan to get to your goal, which seems to be reflected in this data, right? Where people would rather respond to a message than actually make progress on their top priorities. I don't think that most people even have their top priorities necessarily identified. Uh would you agree with that?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Yeah. And I mean, I I do want to say, you know, to your listeners who are, you know, founders or entrepreneurs and are, you know, which I consider myself one of two, you know, that the rules are slightly different and the baseline slightly different. And what I mean by that is, you know, I don't have a very puritanical view on a shorter work week. It's not all or nothing. It's not, you know, if it's not a four-day work week, you know, it's it's not progress. To me, this conversation is really about how do we, you know, move the dial in the right direction. And so if you are a lawyer that's working 60 hours a week, you know, I'm not going to come into your company and help you move to a four four-day, 32-hour work week overnight, if at all. Um, if you're a leader that right now, you know, is bringing your work home with you at weekends or evenings most of the time, in those organizations, the impact that we've seen of moving to a shorter work week has actually been that for those leaders, maybe a Friday, let's say if that was the schedule day off for most of the organization, that's the day they get their deep work done because they don't have internal meetings. There's not a lot of other things going on. So, you know, the benefit for them is that the work that they previously needed to do in their evenings at weekends, they're now getting the ability to get through on on the Friday. I think the other thing that's somewhat different is, you know, the connection, there is an inherent motivation for a founder and entrepreneur to go over and above because there's such a direct link between them creating new value in their work and them creating new value in terms of their, you know, either their financial position or the status of their business, or maybe, you know, it's not creating an immediate financial yield, but it's an investment that's going to pay off for them in terms of their profile down the line. And that just simply does not exist for the vast majority of the workforce. And so I think that, you know, we often you see these talking heads on LinkedIn saying that, you know, work-life balance, we shouldn't be thinking or talking about work-life balance. It's almost like that's so 1990s. But but the idea that we're going to have a every single worker is going to have a founder's or an entrepreneur's mindset or mentality just does not stack up with the fact that the incentive for those employees is totally different. And so if you're leading teams of people who don't have skin in the game in that same way, then you have to figure out different and more creative ways to actually, you know, get them to uh to want to push very hard in the same direction as you.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Right. Yeah. I think that my immediate response to that would be that we want to build companies and cultures that do have skin in the game in some sense, right? And so like talking to people that are building incredible teams, they are so particular about who they let on because they want people to share this common vision and this common value. They they want a lot of modern companies, I see them wanting to almost create a culture of entrepreneurship within their company, where although they are employees under what the the founder and the entrepreneur, they want to make everyone feel like they do have a part in that mission. And obviously that doesn't apply for every company, but I am seeing a shift in that. Would you would you say you're seeing a similar shift in the culture of modern companies?

SPEAKER_00 17:39

I I think it's interesting because we almost have this push-pull in two different directions. I I think absolutely that is the case. I would say some of the early signals of this were, you know, I remember the whole thing around beanbag culture and big tech companies, where they were doing everything they could to kind of create this, you know, campus workspace, which would, you know, provide people with everything they needed on site, but obviously with the additional benefit for the organization that it meant that people were just spending a whole lot more time around the company, connecting with their colleagues. And I do think that there's been a push against that post-COVID. I do think that a lot of employees, you know, through the collective experience that we all had during the pandemic, almost had this gut check moment where they kind of thought about what are the things that are really most important to me in life? Um, and you know, you'll have always heard this adage that nobody lies on their deathbed saying, I wish I had worked those extra hours. Um, and I do think that we're seeing, particularly amongst Gen Z and millennial employees, last year um Randstad um did a global survey of the workforce. They've been doing this for 25 years. Last year was the first year in the 25 years that they've been doing this that work-life balance ranked as an even higher priority than salary for the workforce. For the younger generations. This was across the board. Okay, it's more pronounced in Gen Z and millennial employees, but across the entire workforce. And that is not a rogue or an outlier statistic. We've seen this from JLL studies, from Bank of America studies. And so I do think that that, yes, lots of leaders are pushing for this kind of hardcore work culture where people are, you know, expected to be, you know, the the return of the 996 schedule in Silicon Valley. And I think that this is is completely counter to I think what most of the modern workforce is actually looking for. And I think there's a tension there, and I think there's there's certainly been a collision there in the last couple of years.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

Yeah. For the founders out there, what is the cost of letting work seep into every area of your life?

SPEAKER_00 19:47

I think the cost I and and you know, there most people I think would agree with this idea that having a certain amount of boundaries and detachment from work is a good thing. Having the ability to switch off, to let your brain recharge, you know, one of the things that we always talk about in terms of the importance of brakes to performance is that, you know, cognitively we are just simply not able to perform at a hundred percent all the time. And often we wait until our batteries are empty to take a break. Yeah. And when we do that physiologically, it takes us longer to get back. You know, it's like with a car. You want to fill up not when it's empty, but you want to fill up when you've still got some gas in the tank. So I think in many ways, the way that we think about performance, it's it's so funny. You know, if you're a sports fan, I'm wearing a blue jays hat here, you know, if most people who follow sports, many of whom are in business, buy into this idea that, you know, in order to achieve high performance, rest is important, brakes are important. You know, we've seen this huge rise of the phenomenon of load management in the NBA in recent years. But then we enter the workplace and we think that all of those same rules don't apply. But of course they apply, you know. Um, so I think that that we need to think much more carefully about how are we protecting and managing our energy and our focus. I I love this quote from from Taylor Swift that she said on Travis Kelsey, her fiancé's podcast last year, where she talked about how her energy is a luxury item and her attention is a luxury item, and she treats them that way. Um, and so if you're a founder that's trying to have, you know, your fingers in every pie, needs to, you know, wants to be getting back to everyone, attending every networking event, you know, there is a cost to that. Yeah. Um and and it is going to compound, you know, it it is like a compounding tax on your ability to perform at the highest level. You're gonna end up working more hours at low levels of performance rather than actually managing yourself for for that kind of you know, it's the idea of you don't want to work like a cow. Working like a cow was like industrial Era thinking where you know you chew on tasks for as long as you can, and the more tasks you chew on, the more productive you you're gonna be. Performance today is about working like a lion, where you have these really, really intense, focused, sharp performance episodes punctuated with adequate rest breaks and downtime. Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah. I I think that uh that description you had of working until you can't anymore, and then kind of just like the burnout is something I felt so deeply. And it's been a pattern of mine that I've only recently really had to work on. But when I was 17, I had my first business and I was doing great. I mean, I was living in France, I just learned a complete language from scrap. I knew nobody in the country. Now I had a bunch of friends, I had a company with four employees, and I was doing well, and I was working so hard. I mean, I'm learning this new language, studying for national fluency. Uh, I'm managing a company, going to school, having a social life, and honestly, I was getting like five hours of sleep a night because I wanted to work out, all these things. And there was this point when I just got so sick. And it wasn't like I got sick from anything out here. My body just couldn't do it anymore. I had to sleep so much and like the actual stress and accumulation of just never giving myself time to rest, it caught up to me. And up until then, I kind of did believe that whatever work-life balance is a myth. And I still don't necessarily love that idea for myself of really having to separate work and life. Uh, and we can get into that in a second, but I have realized how important it actually is to give yourself breaks and let yourself breathe almost, or like you don't have to be doing and moving forward and making progress in every spare second of your day. You can have a moment where you're not listening to a podcast or reading a book or sending a message where you can just take a breath and like driving in the car with nothing on, nothing playing is so important, or just going out to dinner with friends for the pure sake of human connection. And I'm hoping that with your work and a lot of work with other people I'm connected with, we can kind of swing the pendulum back toward this idea of not doing things for the sake of I'm going out to dinner because this is better for my productivity in the future, but actually just being like I'm hanging out with friends because I want to hang out with friends. And I'm taking this moment of rest, not because it'll make my work better, but because I actually want to feel rested and present in my life, you know? Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah, I I'd like to kind of share some of my thoughts on this whole, you know, because work-life balance as a term has got such a bad rap over the last number of years. And I like to gently push back against that because there's been this, you know, I see lots of colleagues of mine, lots of people who I love and respect and who agree, I agree with them on nine out of ten topics. And they kind of say work-life balance is is dead. It's all about work-life blend. It's all about work-life integration. I would argue that in many ways, we in the last five to ten years have had too much integration. And what I mean by that is we have blurred the line so much where there's this fuzziness now between what is work and what is not work. Yeah. That people's ability to be fully present in either domain has been compromised. In other words, I don't want somebody when they're at work to be distracted by, you know, checking their social media. But equally, I don't want somebody when they're having dinner with their family to be not fully present because they feel like they need to check their email. So what I'm not arguing for is, you know, I'm not saying we need to go back to a very rigid schedule. Like flexibility is here to stay, and that's a good thing. But it needs to be on terms that are not stacked against the average employee in the sense that I think that they are today. I think that what we need is more intentionality, where people when they're working are fully focused on their work, and people when they're not working are fully focused on whatever else lights them up and gives them value in their in their day-to-day life. And so to me, if like in the age of AI, where we are seeing, you know, anyone who listens to your show who has spent any amount of time experimenting with, using, integrating, particularly the the most recent versions of these frontier models that are out there, knows that the kinds of time savings and productivity gains that are already possible are quite frankly astonishing, even compared to where we were at a year ago. And this is the worst version of this technology we are ever going to use. And so to me, if we're kind of waving the white flag on work-life balance, I'm not sure if that if that represents progress. Um I think work-life balance is achievable and is not something that needs to be contrary to, you know, high performance and ambitious companies and ambitious people. I actually think that it can be an essential driver of sustainable performance.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, I think that differentiating maybe between like work-life balance and then presence in different areas of your life is so important because what I have realized from interviewing so many incredible people and getting to speak with people that have built billion-dollar companies and uh written books that have sold millions and millions of copies is they are so intentional with their time. And their focus is their most important tool. Where so many people that I know have lost that ability completely. And I think AI has actually led to them kind of losing their focus because there's so much incentive to multitask. And um I mean, just being a st university student this past year, people would say, I'm gonna study for the next four hours. And what studying actually looks like if you're sitting behind them or across from them and watching what they're doing, is maybe five minutes of looking at a practice exam and doing a problem, ten minutes of scrolling on Instagram, seven minutes of talking to their friend on the phone, and then another five minutes of maybe looking at the slideshow that they're supposed to be studying. And then again, like the same cycle repeats. So we don't spend our time in these blocks that are actually focused. Where I think spending sometimes with all this technology, there's overwhelm, and people are spending more time doing less because they're not fully focusing on a certain task. And I don't know really how we can get the average person to be able to focus on that. Because for me, it's something I struggle with. I mean, I was studying for this podcast earlier, and I found myself uh in the middle of researching and listening to podcast episodes and taking notes. I found myself on LinkedIn sending messages. I'm like, that's not my goal right now, but I'm able to self-direct and I can recognize that through auditing I've spent I spend less time distracted than a lot of people. Yeah. But I don't know, I I'm really curious to hear what you think about this. I don't know how we can get most people and the average person to increase their focus so that they're not spending so much time kind of spread out and doing many things at once.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

I I think it's I think it's a hard task because, you know, for all of the benefits that we've seen with both workplace technology and social technology, one of the adverse effects has been that it has really diminished people's ability to actually retain their attention on a on a specific singular thing for for any length of time. Um and a lot of the digital workplace collaboration tools that we use day to day, they actually use a lot of the same devices that our personal tools use to kind of drag our attention away to different places. And to me, this is you know, we spend years debating over return to the office. You know, is it best to be hybrid? Is it best to be fully remote? Is it best to be fully in person? And to me, that was such a giant distraction from the key issue, which is if you do your job sitting at a desk in front of a computer, your biggest problem isn't where that desk and where that computer is, it's your ability to actually retain your focus and attention in that digital workplace environment. And look, the the organizational science here again is so clear. Multitasking is not something to be proud of. For most people, it is the enemy of productivity. Only 2% of people can effectively do multiple things simultaneously to the same standard. When we are doing two things, all that we're doing is splitting our brain's attention across those two. When it becomes three or more, effectively the first thing that we're doing just gets completely displaced. Now we're separated across the more recent two. The other thing that we know is that every single time we get distracted or we switch contexts or we switch tasks. So, like your colleagues that you were talking about who are like, you know, they're doing one thing and then they're on LinkedIn. Every time you do that, if you're in your flow state and if you're completely focused on the task at hand, you know that feeling where you're really in the zone, you're really getting through it, and you get distracted, it takes you on average more than 23 minutes to get back to that same level of focus and that same level of flow. So if you're doing that multiple times a day, multiple times an hour, you know, that if you were able to actually spend eight hours intentionally, you would get far more done than if you spend 12 hours operating in that way.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

And it it also goes to a debate around sleep, I think, where it's more we can have more sleep, less work, but more quality work. And a lot of times our output can be higher than if we were to, let's say, work until 10 a.m. and wake up at 6 a.m. and keep work or well go to bed at 10 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m. Exactly. And I I think that uh that's a debate a lot of founders are having with themselves. Like, where do I spend my time? Do I spend my time resting and recovering so I can have more quality work or is more quantity of work important? And I mean, the answers are there, it seems like, where you're saying that having a higher quality of work and doing less work overall, or at least compressing it, is the best way to operate.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

And again, you know, I feel that this is already the case. This is already true for most people. But again, think about the impact that that we're going to see with AI. To me, the framing around AI being a tool to do more in less time is completely wrong. I think the way that we need to be looking at AI is how can we use AI to clear away a lot of the chaos and a lot of the clutter that we've talked about in terms of the modern workplace experience so people can focus on doing fewer things to a higher standard while AI handles the volume. I think that should be the goal that every founder, entrepreneur, every business should be setting themselves in terms of how they think about rolling out this technology. I think the frame around, I think those organizations who are purely layering AI onto their existing process and workflows with a view to doing the same stuff faster and maybe cheaper because they think that they can, you know, lay some folks off in the process. I think that you might see some short-term benefits from that, but in the long run, that is not going to be the thing that's going to create new value, new competitive advantage. It's going to be about how do we redesign and reorchestrate the way that we work around the new things that AI makes possible. And that's one of the things that, you know, I focus on a lot of my work right now with organizations is how do you bring your people with you in rolling out and integrating AI tools? And I think a lot of leaders are overlooking the people side of this technology.

SPEAKER_01 34:07

I want to dive more in deeper into that because I think that people and connection in these workplaces can be kind of overlooked. And I've been doing a lot of work recently on the human connection aspect of just overall humanity in this age of automation, in this age of just like pure productivity, pure efficiency. I think that the it may hopefully open up more opportunity for us to truly connect with each other. Right. If we're colleagues, we can have more time to build a relationship with each other, maybe focus more on the goal that we have at hand, like the main goal that we're working toward as a company. Do you see that happening in the future?

SPEAKER_00 34:48

I I do. I think that we are we are heading for a world where taste and discernment and human interaction and connection is going to become more valuable to people. The more AI, you know, takes up, like, and and we're again, we're already seeing this in terms of how frustrated we all are by some of the posts that you see online of, you know, it's not this, it's this, you know, quietly AI is doing this. And you know it's been written by a bot. And so, you know, the the value that we then place when we see something that feels very fresh, very authentic, it has has got even higher. And I think we're going to see this in in whole industries. If you take one one example that I think is worth thinking about is the customer service experience. So let's say you're with a cell phone provider or you know, you're trying to get in touch with your TV company, um, I think most people would say that the impact of technology on the customer service experience over the last half decade or so has been a net negative for the customer. Yeah. Most people, when they phone, like you're going through an automated system, you know, you're maybe waiting on the line for a long time, you're getting pushed from one department to the next. So while in some ways technology might have made that more efficient for the firm, the actual user experience in many ways has been degraded. And I think that we could see a full circle moment here where in industries like that, we see technology instead being used to create more human connection, where AI is almost this assistant to augment the work, but the value is actually in, you know, I can now phone my phone provider and I can speak directly to someone who can give me that for a human service. So I think that that's flipping the role that we see technology play. Um, and and it's no longer a pure efficiency play as I see it.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

I want to talk more about the way that you see AI in the workplace. And you said earlier that you see it doing like the bulk of the work, right? And kind of the humans will kind of guide it, right? But we don't we can do less as actual workers. And uh it's interesting because I I I feel like looking back in time, like we are we have so much more technology to be so much more efficient than we did 40 years ago. Yet we're doing the same amount of work. And uh I feel like it comes down to a human need and craving of progress, where even though we're getting the tools to become more efficient, that doesn't mean that we're working less. It means that we have an excuse to almost do more and spend more time because now that our time is more efficient, our time is more valuable, our time gets more ROI when we're using it, it almost has this reverse effect, I feel like, where humans end up spending more time on work because that time has a greater output. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

I mean, I can see that. And I think lots of us, again, who are solopreneurs or small businesses, and we are just blown away by the kinds of things that AI can do, it leads to this kind of incentive where I want to do more things. You know, I I now have the have the space and capacity to do extra things. But I also would say, you know, for a lot of people, progress isn't defined necessarily by this now allows me to do new and bigger things. Progress might be defined by I'm getting to spend more time with my elderly relative who, you know, I otherwise wouldn't get that time with. I'm getting to, you know, cherish the moments and the years of my kids growing up in a way that I wouldn't otherwise. So when I think about progress for my kids and my grandkids, I define that more in terms of, you know, what technology has enabled them to do in terms of living fuller, richer, more balanced lives outside of just what they're what they're achieving and contributing through work, um, important and all as that is. And I think this is such an important part of the AI conversation because, you know, we talked a little bit about the history of the work week earlier. Um, according to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1948 and 1973, productivity went up by 97%, and average hourly wages adjusted for inflation went up by 91%. So almost like for like, we saw during those 25 years huge increase in productivity, huge increase in hourly wages. Yeah. In the 30 years that followed, from 1973 to 2013, productivity went up by 74%. Average hourly wages only went up by 9%. Wow. And so my view is that, you know, and I'm I'm not seeking to make a political statement from either side here, but I would say most people would agree that right now, particularly in the United States, but but more broad broadly, the US is quite a divided country right now.

SPEAKER_01 39:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

A lot of division. And I think that there's this consensus in the analysis from both sides of the aisle. You know, they don't agree on the solution, but there's this consensus that a lot of that is stemming from people who felt left behind by the last great advancements in digitalization, globalization. And so I think that we need to think really, really clearly and carefully that we don't sleepwalk into making those same mistakes again with AI. We're going to see a huge amount of wealth, a huge amount of value, a huge amount of opportunity accrued through what this technology can do. And I think as a society, we need to be thinking very, very carefully about how are we making sure that the average worker is sharing in the benefits of these gains? Um, and I think one of the natural ways, as it has been throughout history, that we would think about that is think about can this give people time back? Can this give people the benefit of um more time back with with with their family for other pursuits um and other opportunities.

SPEAKER_01 40:37

Yeah, because I guess in a way you're appealing to a human or a really overwhelming human want, which is to kind of get better results or keep the same results and do less. I mean, that's uh a value that drives social media and clicks, right? It is we want the same reward or more reward, dopamine, whatever, for less effort. And that's almost in a way what you're proposing, which I think is pretty hard for people to say no to.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

And and I think another reason why I believe that this isn't a left or a right issue, is if we think about the potential impact of AI on jobs, and there's a lot of pretty grim and concerning um predictions out there, you know, from people like um, you know, The Atlantic ran a story last month about, you know, America isn't prepared for what AI is going to do to jobs. Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, wrote an article called The End of the Office. And you know, not everyone is that doom and gloom about it. I do think there's lots of new work, new opportunities going to be created. Yeah. But I do think that something like if there's a choice, there's two paths we can take. We either use AI to deliver the same with less. Um, in other words, we can deliver the same level of output with less resource, or the other opportunity is we reinvest the benefits and the gains of AI back into the workforce to deliver more with the same. Yeah. And I think that this path is the one that allows us to protect jobs, protect salaries. Yeah. It allows us to protect the tax base, you know, like nobody wins from a scenario where we see mass job losses in the future. Yeah. And so I do think that that has to be part of the conversation that we're having here quite proactively. Um, because one of the concerns is that, you know, if if you're uh running a Fortune 500 company and you've invested a whole lot of money in AI technology, the the fastest, quickest, easiest way that you can show return on investment is through reducing headcount. And so if that is the shareholder incentive, then I think we need to be thinking about how can we create a counter incentive? How do we create a high road that actually incentivizes firms who instead of choosing that path, choose to protect employment and reinvest those benefits back into the workforce? I think it's a conversation we need to be having.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

Yeah. Especially for my generation who, with the elimination of many entry-level jobs, is going to be kind of at a uh at a really tough point in the next few years as these jobs continue to be eliminated and people with very basic skill sets are going to be graduating college or high school looking for job opportunities. I think this is really, really important that we do start thinking about that.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

I mean, I I I'm not I don't necessarily think we're going to see entry-level jobs wiped out. I don't. No. Um I think they're going to change radically. I think that our universities and our skills programs and our learning and development approaches in most businesses isn't prepared for how that needs to change. In that, I'll give you an example, a closer Friend of mine runs a peer and marketing agency. Very, very people-centered, people first leader, not looking at AI as a way to lay people off. He's looking at it as a way to kind of create new value. And he's talked about how for somebody who has, you know, when it comes to drafting a press release, the first draft of a press release, he would never ask a junior entry-level grad out of college to do that anymore because AI does it so much quicker and so much better than somebody coming straight out of college could do. What their job now is, is to review the outputs of AI to improve them, to critique them, to apply their contextual judgment so that the version that then goes to the leader or to the client is better. So it's this idea of the kind of human AI collaboration where both are bringing their unique strengths to the table to create something that neither would be able to do on their own. But if you think about the skills involved, and this is within a year, that job has gone from being effectively a research and copywriting job to something that is much more about your most human skills. And I do think in many ways, our education system, you know, has been obsessed for decades with job ready degrees, with how do we get people as close to job ready as they graduate college as possible. And the trouble is that when you've got a world and an economy where, you know, the jobs that people who are starting college today, they're probably not going to exist. And so we need to be thinking much more about, you know, how do how are we actually building the holistic skills and capabilities of the person so that they can come out and they can be adaptable to changing conditions rather than, you know, like one great example is coding. I mean, so many, you know, like my first cousin, both of his kids, they did physics, they did maths, they did computer science, you know, they were software was was the the big opportunity area. It's now one of the areas that is the most susceptible to AI job displacement.

SPEAKER_01 46:07

Right. I'm really glad you brought this up because I think this has been at top of mind for me a lot recently. Where I don't feel like universities, high schools are are preparing students in any way for the world that they're going to enter into. Because we're learning in a system that was created year decades, decades ago, right? And isn't updated in accordance with what's actually happening out there in the real world. It it feels as if uh it's an equivalent to there being massive inflation and uh wages staying the same. Uh a similar thing where something is way ahead of the other. And being a student and of this age, I feel like I'm doing something that is very much creating a moat around me, but not everyone can do this.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 47:02

And I'm trying to think actively, I don't have any answers, and one thing that I'm always curious hearing is how we can quickly, because it is an issue that matters now, implement certain things and changes into university settings that will make it a better investment for students. Because currently I'm somewhat struggling to see the validity of these extreme prices that students are investing into a system that isn't preparing them necessarily for the world that they're going to enter into.

unknown 47:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

I mean, I think the the price issue is particularly pertinent in the United States, where obviously the the cost is is astronomical and it's not something that, you know, someone originally from Europe that that we experience in the same way. The UK, though. The UK has some pretty expensive. Trevor Burrus, Jr. The UK have higher fees and introduced a student loan scheme um many years ago. But in defense of the university, I would say this. Um, I think a lot of the ways that universities have lost their way has actually been driven by industry. It has been driven by politics and industry, saying that the old traditional role of the university, which was to develop the whole person, develop someone's critical thinking, it was a more experiential experience, has been we we have pushed for this, you know, the idea that, for example, you know, I doing an arts degree. I remember years ago, that was almost like a laughing stock in business. You know, if you're doing an arts degree, that means you don't know what you want to be when you grow up. It means that you're just kind of. I would argue that one of the best things that you could possibly do to prepare yourself for the future now, given that it is our most human abilities that are going to be more important, our create curiosity, our creativity, our decision-making, that actually doing something like that is way better for you than doing a very technically, you know, a technical degree that could be out of date by technology in a couple of years. So, and the other thing I would say that universities have got right in a way that actually I don't think businesses have got right, is if you think about as a student, look at all of the autonomy that you have in that you you you manage your own schedule. Yeah. It's very outcome focused in that, you know, at the end of the day, you are responsible to yourself. If you don't show up for class, if you kind of fool around, you're going to be held accountable because you're going to do your exams and you know the outcome is going to be the outcome. There's no hiding from that. So there's a real accountability that goes with that. So I do think that that in many ways we treat people like adults when they go to university, and then they enter the workforce, and there's a lot of micromanagement, and there's a lot of you know people being rewarded less for the outcome and more for, you know, the activity. And so I think that actually, in some respects, we kind of put people through this system where people have are given all of this responsibility and all of this agency, and then they enter the workforce, and maybe in some respects, um, that's taken away a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 50:11

Yeah, and that almost creates extra frustration because once you have a sense of freedom and then get it taken away from you, it it introduces the knowing-doing gap, which I think is very pertinent in today's society where we have so much knowledge at our expense, but it it's sometimes difficult to actually take action upon that knowledge, which leads me to how I want to conclude today. I think we've heard a lot of ideas, and today's been pretty philosophical talking about um, you know, what the future is going to look like and why certain practices would benefit certain people in the in their work and how they think about their work and work-life balance and what that really means. But I want to hear from you what you think my listeners should take away from this conversation in terms of action that they can take in their lives to maybe increase their overall happiness. A lot of them will remember just a few episodes ago I interviewed Jess Ma. I'm not sure if you're familiar with who she is. Yeah, yeah, I've heard of her, yeah. Yeah. And so she has worked with a lot of very high-level CEOs, and she's found it, which is somewhat in accordance with your work, that the happiest CEOs are the ones that diversify their happiness. So they somewhat uh, I guess, take their identity and separate it from their work and allow maybe their family, their social life, their working out to also contribute to their happiness. So they're not kind of all in one invested into the outcome of their work and providing an internal outcome. Um and I think that it would be interesting to hear your opinion on this and how my audience can leverage what they learn today to have a more fulfilling life going forward in this age of change.

SPEAKER_00 51:51

I think two things. One, and probably similar to what Jess shared, you know, I I subscribe to this idea of giving every hour a mission, whether that's at work or or outside of work. I think that um being very intentional and purposeful with how you spend your very finite resource, which is your time, um, the most precious resource that any of us will ever have, um, will lead to both a more fulfilling career for your ambition, but also to the gratitude side of your pod, um, will give people more meaning in their in their lives outside of work. I think that when we think about AI, I think most of us, even who haven't spent a lot of time with AI, are familiar with prompting. Yeah. You know, which is you need to ask the the better question you ask, um, the better output you're gonna get. And then at the end, you need to exercise your own, you know, you can't just go with whatever comes out the other end. You need to exercise your own discretion, your own judgment to be able to kind of your own discernment to make sure that that the the end product is is gonna be the best it can be. I think that that value chain speaks to what work is gonna become in a lot of ways. I think the 80%, the middle, for a knowledge worker in particular, we are gonna see more and more being taken up by by technology. And the two ends of that are gonna be the most important. So the 10% of the front, in a world of infinite answers, the ability to ask the right questions is going to become more valuable. So curiosity is gonna be so, so important for people. And then at the other end of the scale, the ability to, you know, curate and distill lots and lots of complex information and be able to present it in a way that adds value, that makes sense, be able to kind of you know determine between what's the value here and what's the slop, though those are the things that then in almost every job are gonna become more and more important into the future. So I think for anyone kind of seeing where the puck is going and really investing in developing those those capabilities is gonna pay off for people in the future.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

Canada's gotten the best of you. See where the puck is going, I see. Yeah, how to do it. Yeah. Joe, I I really, really enjoyed today's conversation. I think that it's uh it's extremely important, especially for uh a world where there's this kind of tension that you described earlier between the people that want to make work their life and the people that want to work less so they can live more life. And figuring out that those aren't necessarily polar opposites and understanding from your perspective and a lot of research and implementation how we can truly live a life of purpose where work can be hugely meaningful to us, but it doesn't have to bleed into every moment. And we can have presence and other moments are that's really important. Uh so thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

Thanks. It's been a pleasure. Where can my audience find you? So I run a future of work consulting research and advisory firm called Work Time Revolution. You can find us at worktimerevolution.com, also on LinkedIn. I've written a book called Do More and For, Why It's Time for a Shorter Work Week, with Harvard Business Review Press. That is out since January, so available in all good bookstores now. And yeah, that's really it.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

Amazing. I end this podcast every time because it is the Grateful Podcast with just the simple question of what are you grateful for? And I encourage you to not just say the the basics, right? Like the your house, your car, or even this podcast right now. Uh I find that gratitude when we have deeper levels of it to maybe people that you can share it with and send a message afterward, or yourself for showing up in a certain way, that's really when it starts to make an impact on your life.

SPEAKER_00 55:41

Right. I would say having spent the last six months in a pretty dreadful Toronto winter, I'm very grateful for the fact that it's a gorgeous day today and that good weather is coming back. So Yeah. Oh, me too.

SPEAKER_01 55:53

I'm gonna gladly had uh good weather here. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:56

Yeah, it's it's not been like this. No.

SPEAKER_01 55:59

Ah, amazing. Joe, thank you so much, everybody. This has been The Grateful Podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the Grateful Podcast and staying until the end. You're committed. I respect that about you. If this conversation meant something to you, subscribe to the show and share it with just one person who could benefit from hearing this today. Thank you so much. Stay grateful, stay hungry. I'm Jack Wagner. This has been the Grateful Podcast.