#18 – Productivity chat: How to navigate distractions & context switching | Sam Corcos, Michael Mizrahi, & Ben Grynol

Multitasking is not a productive way to spend a workday and the team at Levels works hard to protect everyone’s time so they can accomplish all their goals. Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, sat down with CEO and Co-Founder, Sam Corcos, and Head of Operations, Michael Mizrahi, about the pitfalls of context switching at work. They talked about distractions while working remotely and the best ways to prevent context switching, especially in an asynchronous work environment.

05:02 – The cost of context switching

Sam said people underestimate how expensive it is to context switch and how important deep work time is for employees.

I think the most important thing in my mind is around people really, really underestimate the cost of context switching. I feel bad for people who talk about how they can multitask and how they’re able to solve all these problems concurrently. And really all of the evidence suggests that people are not capable of multitasking. It was interesting seeing Halena, who went on her first sync week recently was saying how it wasn’t until she detached that she realized how incredibly disruptive comms tools are, in our case threads, but in most companies it’s Slack or something, sometimes email. So having long stretches of deep focus work time is really the only way that work gets done. I think Miz, you recommended Cal Newport’s book, he refers to it as the hyperactive hive mind. There’s a role for that, but it is not how most work should be done.

10:28 – Tools are more powerful than willpower

Sam said many digital tools are difficult to resist because they make you feel like you’re working when you’re not actually accomplishing meaningful tasks.

One of the things that I have just come to recognize about myself is that the tools are more powerful than my willpower. And it’s very, very hard for me to not check email consistently or to be able to step away from comms when I feel like they’re waiting there for me. Using new tools like Mailman or some other functionality that we’re considering around comms will help a lot. But I think it’s a Buddhist saying of something like, the problem is not the things that are hard, it’s the easy alternative. If there’s an easy path to make you feel like you’re working, which is catching up on notifications, you feel like you’re being productive, but it distracts you from the things that are actually important. For me, that’s what I struggle with the most in terms of distraction. It’s the things that are easy to check the boxes but they’re actually not that important.

12:03 – Mindset matters

Michael said that being in the right headspace when the time comes to be productive is just as important as the work itself.

The conditions and mindset matter is also something to consider. So having good behaviors leading up to the time in which you want to focus or be able to do deep work and just turn that on, you can’t just do that. You can close your email client or not look at your text, but you know that there’s notifications in there, and that is the distraction. It’s not actually doing that work, which is the easy level of distraction like oh, I’m going to do something else and lose focus, it’s knowing that there’s things elsewhere that could be important that aren’t triaged, people are waiting on you and so you feel that social commitment to get back to them. That on your mind can ruin a three-hour block that you have cleared on your calendar to do deep work but you’re not in the right mindset and mind space to do so. So what’s helpful in order to be able to minimize distraction and focus is to have good practices the other 20 hours of the day that create conditions that allow you to focus deeply. So it’s a systems problem.

16:23 – Onboarding as deprogramming

Sam said that part of onboarding at Levels includes unlearning harmful busywork behaviors that are commonplace elsewhere.

Somebody that I was talking to on the team, one of the managers on the team was working with a new hire who had come from a hyperactive hive mind-type culture, where it was just all day on Slack, constant high-stress communication, no focus time. And they were really having trouble adapting to our way of doing things, which is deep work, long stretches of uninterrupted time. The manager challenged this new hire to just put their phone on airplane mode for three hours. Just see if you could do that for three hours and report back. And the result was that they were able to do it, that it was also incredibly anxiety-inducing to just not be plugged into the matrix for three hours. So we talk about our onboarding program for levels and our culture. And we talk about it as deprogramming, which really it is in a lot of ways. It is changing the way that people interact with work and interact with time in a way that most people really are not used to.

23:26 – Adapting to boundaries

Sam said learning to share and respect each other’s boundaries is key to being productive with a team.

So one thing that came to mind was some of it is really just deprogramming and practice and getting reps in of how it should work. I remember in the early days of Levels when David and I were in New York, we briefly had a WeWork together where we went to the same WeWork because my apartment at the time was very small. I asked David, because I was mostly doing engineering work, if he needs me, to send me an email. And he mentioned how incredibly weird and uncomfortable it was for him to send me an email when he’s sitting right next to me and how it feels wrong to do that. Maybe it feels passive-aggressive or something, I don’t know, we’d have to ask David where he thinks that feeling comes from. But it was so different than the way that he had operated in co-located teams. And for me, it was incredibly valuable because I really needed that deep focus work time. And when I was done with whatever it was I was doing, I could see the list of things that David had sent me. And if I had been distracted and I got pulled away from doing the work I was doing, I would probably end up resenting him and I would be building up these frustrations over time. So I do think that some of this is mitigated because of the fact that we’re remote.

26:28 – Creating dedicated workspaces

Michael said a specific physical space can help differentiate your working mindset from the rest of your day.

I think very practically dedicated workspaces that have some boundaries around them is really helpful. That seems obvious, but a lot of people don’t necessarily set that up. I, for example, rented a desk three blocks away from my apartment. But it gets me out of the apartment and it’s very hard to take calls there too. So when I need to do work, I can look at my calendar, see when I don’t have calls, I don’t have anything shallow to do, and I can just go into a cave and work there for three or four hours. And some of my best work has come from those sessions. I also have a desk at home in the kitchen, but that’s disruptive because someone’s walking by and the fridge is there and there’s just a lot of activity, the doorbell rings. So just creating dedicated spaces. I’ve seen people use their backyards and just create a little crate that they work out of, and I’ve seen some cool setups that way. It’s not really going to the lake and readying the cabin, but finding what works in your context on a daily basis that you can find focus and flow without having to control other people’s behaviors. So that’s probably the easier route.

30:05 – External support systems

Michael said some things other than behaviors can help mitigate context switching, like coffee or music.

The thing also that we haven’t mentioned in what improves focus, caffeine, substances. Coffee is really, really effective for me when I need to focus and do something and work through an entire session with a lot of diligence and attention. It’s pretty magical to just go for a walk, have a cappuccino, get fresh air, headphones on, same playlist, and just go to work. So there are external things that can help too.

39:48 – Procrastination isn’t all bad

Michael said that everybody works differently and procrastination can help some people focus harder when the time comes.

If I were to take Sam’s approach and time block my calendar and have deep work scheduled on there, I completely lock up, and I’ve tried it. I know there’s four or five things I need to do in the day, each one let’s say is an hour or 90-minute block. And I look at my calendar and I’m a deer in headlights because I cannot bring myself to work on what it says I have to work on, I need to feel what I want to work on. I’m like where my body at, where my mind’s at, where my focus and attention level is. So I’m just completely, completely different. For me, it’s just a matter of knowing what the focus is and the priorities are. And sometimes something will sit in my head for like a week, a week and a half and I know I have to get it done. And the longer I procrastinate, the more it actually helps develop the idea. So I don’t think procrastination is necessarily bad. But then I’ll know that it’s coming on and, okay, the window’s here, it’s going to happen in the next three hours, get the conditions right, set the stage, get the headphones on, and just it’s here, this is the moment. So for me, it’s much more intuitive than it is structured and implemented.

43:34 – Eliminate work in progress

Sam said it’s better to finish projects completely than leave unfinished business to weigh on your mind while you try to start new projects.

Something that comes to mind for me, which is at least tangentially related, is eliminating work in progress. I think for me has a lot to do with this, where seeing things through to completion is very important. And single threading things to completion instead of making lots of progress on different things but not delivering them. Something that we’ve seen as an example of this problem within Levels is we have a lot of memos that are fully written, they are 99% done, but there’s a few comments that haven’t been resolved and they haven’t been moved out of draft and shared with the team. And the problem is that creates cognitive load on the person who needs to finish it. But they’ve already moved on to other projects. And so it’s now extra emotionally difficult for them to come back to a thing that they already have some form of closure on because they’ve already moved on to the next thing and now they’re coming back to revisit something that they already at least emotionally feel like they finished. So there’s something about focusing on as few things as possible and seeing them through to completion instead of creating new work in progress as we get close to completion on major priorities.

48:14 – Defend your time

Sam said it can be challenging to know when to set boundaries on your time, but it’s important to productivity.

There are so many things that feel like they are productive. One of the hardest things is knowing what’s important and what to focus on. It’s so easy to get sucked into the easy to accomplish but actually not that important types of projects. It’s easy to get attached to being drawn into recurring meetings and one-on-ones until it’s all of your schedule. So I think being defensive of one’s time is, I think, just an underlying principle that’s really, really important.

Sam Corcos (00:06):

One of the things that I have just come to recognize about myself is that the tools are more powerful than my willpower. It’s very, very hard for me to not check email consistently or to be able to step away from comms when I feel like they’re waiting there for me. If there’s an easy path to make you feel like you’re working, which is catching up on notifications, you feel like you’re being productive, but it distracts you from the things that are actually important. For me, that’s what I struggle with the most in terms of distraction, it’s the things that are easy to check the boxes but they’re actually not that important.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do, this is A Whole New Level. You can’t really blame people when they’re faced with distractions. The world is essentially a giant distraction, that is the way that technology has made things. We’re surrounded constantly by notifications, we’re surrounded constantly by unrealistic expectations for things like response times, there are flashing billboards. If you go to a city like Las Vegas, there’s a reason that everything is flashing and bright, it’s because you want to get distracted. Well, the same thing goes with notifications, with this thought of why or how can somebody respond to messages immediately. Things should always be taken care of, things are fast moving. These are all these heuristics that are incorrect when it comes to startups, when it comes to really just getting work done as it is.

Ben Grynol (02:16):

Well, there’s nothing more distracting than context switching. You can’t really get into this mode of deep work, focus thinking, and put together a really meaningful and thoughtful contribution for a company if you can’t get into a state of deep work. There are certain things that you can do to mitigate that though. And that comes down to setting and establishing certain behavioral norms, certain cultural norms in the way that companies communicate. We work very hard as a team to establish what we think of when it comes to communication. We promote that people should not have notifications on desktop, they should not get into synchronous text based conversations in real time. It doesn’t help them to get into this mode of deep work. All it is is context switching.

Ben Grynol (03:05):

An example, if as these podcast intros are being recorded I happen to go over to threads or I can see there are five text messages that have popped up on my desktop. Well, if I go to those, the chance of getting this intro out the door is pretty low, probability is decimals of a percent. The idea is that all of these distractions end up forcing you to context switch, to flip your brain to get out of the state that you’re in. So how do you get around them? Well, you turn off notifications and you focus on deep work. Context switching is expensive and it’s something we try to avoid. So Michael Mizrahi, head of operations, Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels and I, the three of us sat down and we discussed this idea of distractions and context switching. How can we minimize that to maximize output? It was a great conversation. And here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol (04:06):

So this is a topic that comes up frequently, I think it comes up in societal conversations pretty frequently. But it’s this idea of distractions. And as a team, we’ve talked about this a lot because context switching is extremely expensive, that’s aside from distractions, just this idea of why we are asynchronous and why we have this lens on it. But let’s go into this idea of what are common forms of distractions? What causes them? How can people mitigate them? And then one of the hardest things is communicating to other people what subjectively might feel like a distraction to each of us. We all have our own ways of going about this. And that can be hard where it’s like, you don’t want to come across to someone as being dismissive but trying to say, hey, here’s what this makes me feel like. So let’s go into distractions and what it means.

Sam Corcos (05:02):

I think the most important thing in my mind is around people really, really underestimate the cost of context switching. I feel bad for people who talk about how they can multitask and how they’re able to solve all these problems concurrently. And really all of the evidence suggests that people are not capable of multitasking. It was interesting seeing Halena, who went on her first sync week recently was saying how it wasn’t until she detached that she realized how incredibly disruptive com schools are, in our case threads, but in most companies it’s Slack or something, sometimes email. So having long stretches of deep focus work time is really the only way that work gets done. I think Miz, you recommended Cal Newport’s book, he refers to it as the hyperactive hive mind. There’s a role for that, but it is not how most work should be done.

Michael Mizrahi (06:06):

I think there’s a lot of work that can be done in the hyperactive hive mind mindset. The problem is it’s not very high quality work. The high quality work comes when you’re deeply focused, when you have time to work thoroughly on something. And I think training that muscle and learning to feel that is really difficult. And that’s the challenge that we’re up against, is just getting people to feel and learn what it feels like to do focus work. That book sets a lot of groundwork, and so just having everyone read that is actually helpful as a start.

Michael Mizrahi (06:38):

Then there’s all the things that we can do in the workplace to minimize distraction, turn off notifications, don’t schedule a bunch of meetings, eliminate or reduce the quick questions, the shoulder taps. Those are helpful, but those are level one. And level two is getting people and then bringing people along so that they can focus deeply so that they’re not carrying a lot of decision fatigue on their mind. And that one’s harder to do that, it’s not as simple as turning your phone face over, it’s a mindset shift that has to happen. And that’s the deeper level here that I think we’re trying to get at.

Ben Grynol (07:10):

Why don’t we go into this idea of some of the common forms of distractions and how much of it comes down to a person being aware of their motivation mechanisms when it comes to work and the way that they understand. I think that might be a part of the foundation, is if you understand what distracts you personally, when a person can really understand here are the things that really hurt my brain versus someone else is going to have a different thing. So I know which ones subjectively break my brain so badly that I try very hard to communicate that to other people to say, please don’t do this thing because it throws me so far off of me being able to be in deep work and I’m going to be really frustrated if this thing happens, so let’s just avoid it all together. So going through some of them.

Ben Grynol (08:04):

And this is down to this idea of how much is controlled behavior, what you choose to do versus things that you can’t control and so you have to communicate that to other people. So some of them, you can control notifications on platforms, that’s a distraction, so turn it off, you can control that. Behaviors on platforms, the idea of checking email all the time, you can control that, just don’t do it. What you can’t control, so in an in-person environment, you can’t control desk bombing. And that’s unbelievably distracting and it kills productivity so much. An engineer is like, it doesn’t matter who it is, but somebody’s writing code, trying to debug something and all of a sudden it’s shoulder tap. And it’s like, “Hey, did you see the Green Bay Packers game last night?” And you just want to scream at the top of your lungs and be like, what are you doing right now? That you can’t control.

Sam Corcos (08:56):

Or bugging you to work on their project that they think is more important than whatever it is you’re doing.

Ben Grynol (09:02):

Exactly.

Sam Corcos (09:03):

What’s that?

Ben Grynol (09:03):

So the idea of letting people know for the things you can’t control. A personal example is I tell Pam very frankly, “When I am in deep work mode.” So I will say, “My text messages are off on my computer, all notifications are off, please don’t come into the office at all until this time. Anytime after this time is fine, but not when I’m writing a memo because it’s really going to break my brain.” And she just knows that it’s okay. Other times I could be in lighter work mode, which might be like responding to some messages or something and it’s okay to knock. I know it sounds maniacal, but that’s this way of what you can and can’t control. The last one that’s a distraction is when small tasks compound and people think they’re less expensive than they are. So transactional things like let’s say uploading receipts to BRCGS and you’re like, oh, it’s just a small task. And it’s like, that’s context switching. And it doesn’t take that many of those to cost a lot of money to a company as far as the way time is invested.

Sam Corcos (10:14):

I might, at least partially, disagree with one of those premises, which is around what you have control over and what you don’t. Maybe I would say that there’s perhaps some nuance to it, which is that in theory, you can turn off notifications, that certainly does help. But one of the things that I have just come to recognize about myself is that the tools are more powerful than my willpower. And it’s very, very hard for me to not check email consistently or to be able to step away from comms when I feel like they’re waiting there for me. Using new tools like Mailman or some other functionality that we’re considering around comms will help a lot.

Sam Corcos (11:06):

But I think it’s a Buddhist saying of something like, the problem is not the things that are hard, it’s the easy alternative. If there’s an easy path to make you feel like you’re working, which is catching up on notifications, you feel like you’re being productive, but it distracts you from the things that are actually important. For me, that’s what I struggle with the most in terms of distraction. It’s the things that are easy to check the boxes but they’re actually not that important. It’s trying to find systems where I can block off the time to really focus for a long stretch on something that’s actually going to move the needle instead of just having myself feel like I’m being productive in some capacity.

Michael Mizrahi (12:03):

The conditions and mindset matter is also something to consider. So having good behaviors leading up to the time in which you want to focus or be able to do deep work and just turn that on, you can’t just do that. You can close your email client or not look at your text, but you know that there’s notifications in there, and that is the distraction. It’s not actually doing that work, which is the easy level of distraction like oh, I’m going to do something else and loose focus, it’s knowing that there’s things elsewhere that could be important that aren’t triaged, people are waiting on you and so you feel that social commitment to get back to them. That on your mind can ruin a three hour block that you have cleared on your calendar to do deep work but you’re not in the right mindset and mind space to do so. So what’s helpful in order to be able to minimize distraction and focus is to have good practices the other 20 hours of the day that create conditions that allow you to focus deeply. So it’s a systems problem.

Ben Grynol (13:03):

Let’s go into this idea of why context switching is not only financially expensive but cognitively expensive. So there’s the financial cost like lost productivity, it’s just expensive. Our time is worth way more than we often allocate capital to it. There’s also this idea of the mental health outcome of feeling a need like, oh, I have to check those comms, and we’re using comms as one form of distraction. But there is a mental health component of when you’re not doing a thing that you feel you should be and you start feeling pulled in all these different directions.

Ben Grynol (13:43):

How expensive is context switching and how much productivity do you think is lost to distractions if you don’t… So Sam, like you just said, your willpower, you can turn off platforms but you have to stop yourself. So you’re using tooling, you’re putting up all the stops. And Miz is like, I’ll make it up. You might have a different sense of willpower, you’re like, oh, all I need to do is turn my phone upside down. Other people might need to put it in a drawer, 20 yards away, everyone’s going to have a different outlook. But how much productivity do you think is lost when the slippery slope of context switching happens?

Sam Corcos (14:23):

I can address it indirectly in as much as I need a lot of tools to stop me from getting distracted. It is very, very hard for me to protect my focus time. I was actually in Austin talking with Sam Parr from The Hustle, and he is similar to me in that he doesn’t have the ability portion control. Or if there’s Oreos next to me, I’m going to eat the entire tray, I just can’t not do that. All of the suites in their house are under lock and key that only his wife knows the combo too because he just knows himself, that if the cookie box is open, I’m just going to eat all the cookies. So having that, adding some friction, those are the kinds of things that really I wish that a lot of the tools that I use…

Sam Corcos (15:22):

You can use these screen time functionality on iPhone to block websites like Twitter and things that are really distracting. Unfortunately, it doesn’t add enough friction, I can still go to screen time, unlock it. I would love for there to be a five minute delay or something where I press the button to try to unlock it and it just creates even more friction, where by the time it comes around, I no longer have that impulse. I think it was in a book I read recently, Stolen Focus, that talks about how these impulses that we have are not nearly as long lived as people expect, something like 90 seconds. If you can wait 90 seconds between I need to check this thing and actually checking it, by the time that comes around, you don’t really want to do it anymore. So I think that there’s a lot to be said for building in processes and tools to really, really protect that time. It’s also incredibly uncomfortable.

Sam Corcos (16:23):

Somebody that I was talking to on the team, one of the managers on the team was working with a new hire who had come from a hyperactive hive mind type culture, where it was just all day on Slack, constant high stress communication, no focus time. And they were really having trouble adapting to our way of doing things, which is deep work, long stretches of uninterrupted time. The manager challenged this new hire to just put their phone on airplane mode for three hours. Just see if you could do that for three hours and report back. And the result was that they were able to do it, that it was also incredibly anxiety inducing to just not be plugged into the matrix for three hours. So we talk about our onboarding program for levels and our culture. And we talk about it as deprogramming, which really it is in a lot of ways. It is changing the way that people interact with work and interact with time in a way that most people really are not used to.

Michael Mizrahi (17:41):

Have either of you experimented with scheduled summary notifications on iOS? So that’s a feature that came out, I think, in the latest iOS version. You have to dig through the menus and it takes a lot of setup to get it right. But what it does is it batches notifications to X times per day, you can have a morning, afternoon, evening summary, however you’d like it. I currently get mine twice a day. So I have a morning summary and an evening summary. But it’s essentially Mailman for your iOS notifications. So any app that is not time sensitive, and there’s a time sensitive exemption at the system level, so a developer can say, this is a time sensitive notification, overrides it.

Michael Mizrahi (18:20):

But what it does is it batches all those notifications into one summary card that shows up on your lock screen or your notifications center at the scheduled time. So at 8:00 AM, when mine gets delivered, there’s five notifications in it. I’ve got new podcasts from Levels and Overcast, I’ve got Robinhood, bitcoin is doing this. I don’t get email notifications, so no email notifications there. But it’ll have five or six things. And something interesting happens, which is I actually don’t care about them when they’re delivered in bulk. But if each one of those came individually, I would probably tap in, add it to my queue. But now I’m just aware and I dismiss all five of them at once and all those notifications are gone. Now I can trust that I’ll see these things.

Michael Mizrahi (19:02):

There is a work-around where you can request it early, and I had that on for a while, and then the habit just became go check what’s in my upcoming scheduled summary. I actually turned that off, and so now I don’t know what notifications are coming until that gets delivered at the set time. And I’ve become much more passive about it because in bulk, the impulse isn’t there to chase down each one of them, and it’s just a nice habit. So I recommend playing with that and seeing if that helps.

Michael Mizrahi (19:29):

On the onboarding note about deprogramming, we’ve actually had a few folks go through onboarding and then look at it afterwards, and we encourage people to give feedback and suggestions on the program. A comment that comes up from time to time is, onboarding is great, really helpful, really thorough, help me get through my first day, we should probably add a schedule to it so that people know which tasks to do and in what order and add some structure. My pushback there is usually along the same lines, which is, that’s actually the point. We want people to have to figure out how to structure their own day and really struggle with the feeling of the blank calendar.

Michael Mizrahi (20:05):

And regardless of level of seniority or experience, I think that’s uncomfortable for a lot of people because it’s just so uncommon and untraditional as compared to how work is done in other places, where within three or four weeks, your calendar fills up and you’re good, it’s on autopilot. But here, you really have to take the reins and schedule the day, you’re scheduling your own onboarding, you’re seeing which tasks are deep reading tasks that will require two or three hours of a lot of reading, and you’re looking at which tasks or quick kits for like you add your onboarding slide to the forum or you adjust your preferences in threads or do these shallower tasks. Not giving structure there is part of the programming or just the enculturation to how we do things. So the open ended nature is a feature not a bug.

Sam Corcos (20:52):

I just set up scheduled summary for 36 apps, so I’m looking forward to this.

Michael Mizrahi (20:58):

It takes a lot of gardening and tending. You really do have to tweak it over the course of a week or two. But once you get it right, and every new app that you install will request notifications. And instead of just allow, you just say allow in scheduled summary. So you just relegate it to that bucket and you get it when you get it.

Sam Corcos (21:16):

My solution has been my phone is just on do not disturb mode all the time so I don’t get any notifications for anything. But that has its own downside.

Ben Grynol (21:29):

Let’s go into this idea of having conversations that are uncomfortable around distraction. So there’s two scenarios, one is communicating. Assume somebody has gone deep enough in introspection where they really understand the things that they can’t control that they find distracting. So it could be, we’re going to use the Billy scenario, got to love Billy, we always call out fictional Billy. Billy keeps coming to your desk with great intent, but you find it really distracting. So having that conversation, opening up with Billy and say, “Billy, this is what it physically does to my brain, it really hurts.” That can be a tough thing, it can be a tough thing to have. Bring it back to Levels, we are a remote company. And if we are working around family members or roommates, whatever it is. Setting the expectation around what feels like when these distractions come up, it’s a really hard conversation to have because it’s not like you do it once and then it’s just done.

Ben Grynol (22:34):

It’s revisiting it over and over and say, this is me, this is not you. I’m letting you know the way it makes me feel, can you help me not feel like this? How can we do this best together? That’s one scenario. The other is when you see behavior of somebody else, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s in person or remote, but let’s go back to Billy. You observe Billy as a coworker and you say, “Billy, I wanted to give you some feedback. It seems to be distracting when you’re going desk to desk, to desk to everyone, you might not want to do it.” So what are some of the ways that we can manage these conversations? Do you have anything that you do, especially from, let’s use people that are very close to you and family members that might not understand? Nobody understands what it’s like in your own brain, and it gets really hard to be like, I’m super broken, let’s figure this one out together. How do you guys approach that?

Sam Corcos (23:26):

So one thing that came to mind was some of it is really just deprogramming and practice and getting reps in of how it should work. I remember in the early days of Levels, when David and I were in New York, we briefly had a WeWork together where we went to the same WeWork because my apartment at the time was very small. I asked David, because I was mostly doing engineering work, if he needs me, to send me an email. And he mentioned how incredibly weird and uncomfortable it was for him to send me an email when he’s sitting right next to me and how it feels wrong to do that. Maybe it feels passive aggressive or something, I don’t know, we’d have to ask David where he thinks that feeling comes from. But it was so different than the way that he had operated in co-located teams.

Sam Corcos (24:29):

And for me, it was incredibly valuable because I really needed that deep focus work time. And when I was done with whatever it was I was doing, I could see the list of things that David had sent me. And if I had been distracted and I got pulled away from doing the work I was doing, I would probably end up resenting him and I would be building up these frustrations over time. So I do think that some of this is mitigated because of the fact that we’re remote. In roles that I’ve been in other companies, where the marketing team comes over and starts tapping you until you start working on their project, it actually can’t happen in remote. You can just put whatever tool you’re using for comms, just put it on silent and they can’t reach you. They’re in maybe a different part of the world. So it mitigates a lot of that.

Sam Corcos (25:23):

I do think that Miz can probably speak more to this. But I think that the way that we operate is much more different than people’s typical work experience than I had certainly anticipated. A lot of the things that I assumed people would be very familiar with and very comfortable with are things that actually require probably a lot more training and teaching. So we’re doing a lot of projects. Our onboarding is incredibly robust, we’re adding the executive coaching layer on top of that. So we’re doing a lot to try to help people adapt to this type of work culture.

Michael Mizrahi (26:07):

In isolation, a lot of these things aren’t so revolutionary, we’ve stolen a lot of these ideas from other companies and other experiences that we’ve had. In aggregate, they add up to a very intentional culture that just feels different, so those all come together in a nice way. To your question, Ben, on what people can do, what individuals can do to improve this, I think very practically dedicated workspaces that have some boundaries around them is really helpful. That seems obvious, but a lot of people don’t necessarily set that up. I, for example, rented a desk three blocks away from my apartment. But it gets me out of the apartment and it’s very hard to take calls there too. So when I need to do work, I can look at my calendar, see when I don’t have calls, I don’t have anything shallow to do, and I can just go into a cave and work there for three or four hours. And some of my best work has come from those sessions.

Michael Mizrahi (27:02):

I also have a desk at home in the kitchen, but that’s disruptive because someone’s walking by and the fridge is there and there’s just a lot of activity, the doorbell rings. So just creating dedicated spaces. I’ve seen people use their backyards and just create a little crate that they work out of, and I’ve seen some cool setups that way. It’s not really going to the lake and readying the cabin, but finding what works in your context on a daily basis that you can find focus and flow without having to control other people’s behaviors. So that’s probably the easier route.

Sam Corcos (27:34):

The physical space one’s definitely a useful lever for people to try to pull on. I actually know somebody who when he needs to do something important will get on a flight to Tokyo because you can’t do anything other than think about what you’re doing while you’re there. There’s no distractions, your phone doesn’t work, so you’re forced into a zone where you’re only able to focus on one thing. I found for myself being really diligent about not doing things that I would find distracting when I’m in that safe space for work really helps a lot. Because I’ve just noticed for me, my body changes when I get there and I feel more motivated and I feel more able to do the work for these projects as opposed to doing something in a living room where we do lots of other things as well. My focus is noticeably different.

Michael Mizrahi (28:44):

The plane used to be a sacred space. And I think with the advent of satellite wifi, it’s gotten worse. So yes, it’s still a great place to focus, but wifi has ruined that. Something that I inadvertently adopted as a habit related to this feeling of always being connected is eliminating threat surface area. And what I mean by that is, there’s this very famous story of Justine Sacco who tweeted something before she got on a plane and then 12 hour flight to Africa and her life was completely destroyed by the end of it over Twitter, and it’s a whole separate story, but terrifying for so many reasons. And the internet, it can be a scary place. Not tweeting before a flight, not having any surface area that could potentially blow up gives you some ease of mind, where you’re not scared that something might happen if you’re disconnected.

Michael Mizrahi (29:40):

So for me, that just meant reducing my exposure to things that could go wrong, even though it’s a very unlikely scenario, just spending energy thinking about what could go wrong. And the same is true at work. If you’re sending a really important wide email to a lot of people and then going to be offline for 12 hours, you’re going to be thinking about it. So build in those buffers to eliminate distraction. The thing also that we haven’t mentioned in what improves focus, caffeine, substances. Coffee is really, really effective for me when I need to focus and do something and work through an entire session with a lot of diligence and attention. It’s pretty magical to just go for a walk, have a cappuccino, get fresh air, headphones on, same playlist, and just go to work. So there are external things that can help too.

Sam Corcos (30:31):

What you mentioned around threat service area, I think I was talking to Taylor about this. He mentioned how, I think this was Ben, when you went on a think week, you changed your name in threads to, I’m out of office, if you need anything, talk to Tom. When Zach went on parental leave, he had a very clear document, Miz also had a very clear document. It reminds me of one of the things to mitigate anxiety for people who are anxious travelers. One of the common things that I’ve heard is people who are afraid they left the oven on and a strategy is just take a picture of the oven right before you leave so you can go back to the picture. Actually I started doing this.

Sam Corcos (31:18):

I often stay with my friends, Andrew and Ariel, in San Francisco. And I am definitely afraid of leaving their garage door open. So every time I leave their house, I take a picture of the garage door. I probably have 200 pictures of their garage in my phone. I have found that that helps me not have to think about it. It just reduces that anxiety around, oh, did I leave it open? So having that back door. And you could probably speak to this Ben because you actually implemented this with Tom. But I have found that it is surprisingly rare if I don’t have that backstop, I’m thinking about it constantly. And yet when you do have the backstop, nothing ever seems to make it through that gate because it turns out not actually that many things are urgent

Ben Grynol (32:09):

To provide some color on that, it was an experiment on comms to say, hey, what happens if I don’t answer a single email or threads, the goal with threads. But if I don’t do this for an entire week, what is going to happen? Will the company collapse? I know I’m being hyperbolic. But it was like, of course not, nothing’s going to happen because we’re all adults, we can all make decisions. And there’s nothing that somebody else in the company can’t make a decision. It’s not some linchpin like only Ben could make that decision. So we are seeing what it looks like to scale decision making, to start to decentralize things, and to just not answer.

Ben Grynol (32:51):

Again, it gets very personal but I didn’t feel any need to check. I wasn’t like, I really wonder what’s happening in threads. I was like, all that it came to I was like, well come Friday, I’m going to have to answer some threads. It was basically that. And it was documented as far as the amount of time that it took to catch up and stuff. And it wasn’t that bad, it might have been a few hours, I can’t remember, but it wasn’t that bad. And if somebody really needed something, they knew they could phone or text if something was so, so urgent. But that wasn’t the case.

Ben Grynol (33:28):

Getting back to environment though, it’s something that is interesting. And it’s important to highlight that, and I’m not suggesting we are being prescriptive, but everyone has a different sense of place and a different sense of what environmental cues can do for them. So for each of you, it sounds like you like going to different spaces where they can be clean there, aren’t outside distractions. You hear it often where somebody says, “Oh, I just know the laundry is in the other room and I could go put it in.” Whereas again, it’s just personal preference for me, I find it incredibly distracting to go to another space to go and work because that physically takes my mind when I get up. And once the routine goes, it’s just the wheels start going and it’s a boulder going down a hill that can’t stop. And if I had to physically go to another place, it would feel like the boulder just stopping. So what I want to do is just go to the place where I can keep going and I can stop whenever I want to.

Ben Grynol (34:32):

Knowing my brain physically hurts when I’m in a separate space and I know that once it hits a certain time, I’m going to have to leave this place because I just have to get home for dinner, whatever it is, and that’s family obligations. Whereas if I was at home, I’m like, I can keep going in perpetuity, there’s nothing stopping me. You can’t be prescriptive of, is it environment? The important takeaway is, know what your drive mechanisms are, know how you work best, and then do everything you can to mitigate or to minimize anything that you find distracting or context switching for the mind and just double down on not doing anything distracting.

Michael Mizrahi (35:13):

I was behind on the last book club reading that we had to do on a Thursday morning. And the book club notes are due that Thursday and the discussion was on Friday. So I downloaded the audio book and I saw it was three and a half hours or something. I went to a coffee shop from 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM, listened on 1.4X, had a notes document open. And in those two hours, just check that off, was absolutely done. And it felt amazing and I was like, why don’t I do this more often, have a very specific task in a very time bound period of time.

Michael Mizrahi (35:46):

What I didn’t do, which is very easy to get into, is I could easily spend 30 minutes, 40 minutes catching up on the day’s news, reading Twitter, understanding what’s in my email, seeing if any threads are interesting, still enjoying the same coffee. But the output of work product in that time is totally missing. Of course, you need time to unwind and just absorb information and do your thing, that’s perfectly healthy. But there’s also so much value to time if you can focus and you have the right elements in place to get that done that I think oftentimes we can surprise ourselves by how much time we waste doing things that don’t actually add value or move things forward.

Ben Grynol (36:27):

What are some things that people can do then? So we’ve gone through all of these, understand the foundation, understand what breaks your brain as far as context switching. As soon as you start to say, hey, here’s what works for me. Whether it’s tooling, whether it’s environment, whether it’s having very open conversations time and time again with people about, this is the way I feel from these things. What are some things that people can do to get motivated to do the deep work? Because you can create the conditions for minimizing context switching but sometimes people say, I just have a hard time getting going.

Ben Grynol (37:03):

And it does come down to intrinsic motivation, you have to want to do the work. But what are some other things where to get into that mode of deep work, what are some things that people can do? Again, I don’t think there’s like, here it is, here’s the answer. But for you Sam, if it’s on your calendar, you are accountable to yourself, we know that, you say that all the time. Everyone’s got their own way. So how do each of you do it when it comes to doing the deep work? And what are some insights people could glean about getting into this mode of deep work?

Sam Corcos (37:36):

I would say for me, it’s not something that comes easily. So I would say I eliminate all possible alternatives is the only way that I’m able to get to that zone, is I block all websites that I find distracting, I make sure that nothing can come up. To give you a sense of just how challenging and sensitive my ability to stay in a deep work mentality is, if I have a nine hour deep work block on my calendar and I know that around two o’clock, somewhere between 12:00 and 2:00, an Instacart delivery is going to show up. I have to punt that entire nine hour block to another day. There’s no way I’m going to be able to get any meaningful deep work done.

Sam Corcos (38:30):

I’m somewhat envious of authors who talk about how they do. They have their one or two hours of writing every morning. And I wish that I could operate in those kinds of increments. For me, if a deep work block is not at least six contiguous hours with nothing at the end of that, I have a hard time just getting the motivation to even start. So for me, it’s really just about adding friction to things that I don’t want to do and ensuring that I have just full calendar to be able to focus on it.

Michael Mizrahi (39:10):

Some of those are intense. The Instacart delivery really just knowing it’s coming. I think acknowledging and accepting that this is a behavioral change that you have to get through, is not a tactic or just something that you can schedule on your calendar to focus, it’s a mindset. So exposing yourself to all the different philosophies and approaches to productivity and time management and focus and doing work and then choosing the bits and pieces that work for you is important. But there’s just a longstanding effort and quest to figure out what works and incorporate the pieces that do. If I were to take Sam’s approach and time block my calendar and have deep work scheduled on there, I completely lock up, and I’ve tried it. I know there’s four or five things I need to do in the day, each one let’s say is an hour or 90 minute block.

Michael Mizrahi (40:00):

And I look at my calendar and I’m a deer in headlights because I cannot bring myself to work on what it says I have to work on, I need to feel what I want to work on. I’m like where my body at, where my mind’s at, where my focus and attention level is. So I’m just completely, completely different. For me, it’s just a matter of knowing what the focus is and the priorities are. And sometimes something will sit in my head for like a week, a week and a half and I know I have to get it done. And the longer I procrastinate, the more it actually helps develop the idea. So I don’t think procrastination is necessarily bad. But then I’ll know that it’s coming on and, okay, the window’s here, it’s going to happen in the next three hours, get the conditions right, set the stage, get the headphones on, and just it’s here, this is the moment. So for me, it’s much more intuitive than it is structured and implemented.

Ben Grynol (40:50):

Interesting. The thing that I find is helpful is date commitments. So if I’ve committed to a date to myself and then I commit to somebody else, hey, this thing by this date… And digression for a sec, I’m plus one on Sam. If a doorbell rings, I am in deep work and a doorbell rang, an Amazon package shows up, I’m so upset about this like, how could you dare? You just distracted me so much that I was in the deepest thought and now I have to get back. It gives me a sense of anxiety internally when that happens. If somebody rings a doorbell, I’m like, what are you doing? Don’t you see I’m sitting here working? How dare you?

Ben Grynol (41:36):

But anyway, if there’s a date that’s been committed to, I have a hard time not hitting that date. To me, I’m like, that’s your accountability. And for some people it’s like, I’m going to go for a run every day. I’m going to go for a run, I’m going to do whatever, I’m not going to eat this or I’ll eat healthy. Everyone’s got their own thing. So it’s just I find that the date is what makes the difference because you’ve got that commitment and you’re not willing to let yourself down with it.

Michael Mizrahi (42:06):

Just to play the opposite side again, having a date makes it worse for me. I’m less likely to be able to deliver and I will find any excuse or way to get around the due date and to just prolong something as long as possible. We’re all wired differently, it’s strange.

Ben Grynol (42:27):

I think that’s the main takeaway. If we summarize some of the takeaways from this is, know that everything that is being said is not prescriptive, everyone has to figure out what works for them. The one thing that does hold true is everyone has to be aware that context switching is more expensive than they think. And everyone has to be aware of what causes them to context switch and how it makes them feel. And as soon as you can start to dissect all of the little pieces of the puzzle and go, oh, for me, it’s environment, for me, it’s somebody bringing a doorbell.

Ben Grynol (42:59):

As soon as you dissect all of these things, that’s where you can start to control what you can control and what you can’t control, you have to let the mindset back to, what you’re saying is, let your mindset not get so disgruntled by these small things and say, I can’t control that, I can’t control the doorbell. It’s also not worth investing the time to say hello, mail person, please don’t ring the bell again. There is a point of being on the bridge of being overly maniacal, and sometimes it can take us there.

Sam Corcos (43:34):

Something that comes to mind for me, which is at least tangentially related, is eliminating work in progress. I think for me has a lot to do with this, where seeing things through to completion is very important. And single threading things to completion instead of making lots of progress on different things but not delivering them. Something that we’ve seen as an example of this problem within Levels is we have a lot of memos that are fully written, they are 99% done, but there’s a few comments that haven’t been resolved and they haven’t been moved out of draft and shared with the team.

Sam Corcos (44:23):

And the problem is that creates cognitive load on the person who needs to finish it. But they’ve already moved on to other projects. And so it’s now extra emotionally difficult for them to come back to a thing that they already have some form of closure on because they’ve already moved on to the next thing and now they’re coming back to revisit something that they already at least emotionally feel like they finished. So there’s something about focusing on as few things as possible and seeing them through to completion instead of creating new work in progress as we get close to completion on major priorities.

Michael Mizrahi (45:07):

Very practically, when this comes to productivity tools, to-do lists, you can add an infinite number of things to your to-do lists into your list of priorities. And slotting to specifically have only five options open until one of them is checked off and fully checked off, shipped, completed, edited, whatever needs to be is a good practice and one that I’ve tried to take on. Because I’m the camp of making a lot of progress on a lot of things but don’t take them over the finish line. And if I were to guess, Ben, you’re the opposite. I think you’re just quick to ship, get it over, get it done in a day. And then if it needs work later on, we can come back to it. So finding the sweet spot there for each of us I think. Well, yours is good, I’ll come closer to your camp.

Ben Grynol (45:54):

It’s a good thing to bring up though because when we talk about distractions, it’s so easy to paint the picture of notifications are distracting. Everyone’s going to nod their head and be like, yes, that is true. But we don’t talk a lot about exactly what Sam mentioned, which is the idea of project debt. That is a distraction to carry in your mind all of these things that you need to do. And this is where some of the tasks could be small, like uploading receipts to BRCGS times a million. You have a million of these small tasks and you don’t scale your time, that takes up your mental bandwidth. But then there’s all these balls in the air and you’re like the cat in the hat, and you’re trying to juggle all of these things and there’s all this project debt.

Ben Grynol (46:40):

The problem is it’s hugely distracting to your cognitive focus of being able to take on new projects. So the nice thing to do is you do a project, you communicate it, you ship it, you make a decision on it. And that decision is park it lever with a reason, like the team decides collectively let’s park this or let’s iterate, let’s do V2. And this applies to product, this applies to any business project. But by making a park it decision, you’ve eliminated that distraction out of your brain, you don’t have 100 of these things going on.

Ben Grynol (47:21):

So just knowing that project debt is real and is distracting and can sidetrack your mind, you become less and less cognitively efficient the more weight that you carry around every day. And some of them could be small conversations about the person who bumped your shoulder in the subway. Oh my goodness, you I’m disgruntled. We carry around all this things. So minimizing as much of that as possible and knowing how much of it relates to just carrying around memo in draft mode, that is hugely, hugely distracting because you always feel behind, you feel I’m just not on top of my work. And it’s like, well do less faster, get it done, make a decision, figure out what’s next, and figure out a way to scale your time so that you can keep handing things off or retire them.

Sam Corcos (48:14):

There are so many things that feel like they are productive. One of the hardest things is knowing what’s important and what to focus on. It’s so easy to get sucked into the easy to accomplish but actually not that important types of projects. It’s easy to get attached to being drawn into recurring meetings and one-on-ones until it’s all of your schedule. So I think being defensive of one’s time is, I think, just an underlying principle that’s really, really important.

Michael Mizrahi (48:52):

Having clear priorities and objectives from the start helps inform what’s worth spending time on. We throw around the term bike shedding from time to time. But I think that comes about when you’re not clear about what you’re actually trying to achieve. It’s very easy, too easy to come into an organization and just start working without clarity on what the actual goals are at the organizational level, at the team level, at the company level. So there’s hard work to do before you can just step in and start focusing and being productive. You have to know what you’re working for and towards, and sometimes that’s easy to miss.

Ben Grynol (49:32):

One of the things that we’re trying to get better at, because everything is an evolution, we’re completely imperfect in what we do. We try optimize things like comms as best as possible, and this happens in… We’ve all been part of physically in-person meetings that it’s a meeting about the year end event. And then somehow we start talking about the headline for some Instagram ad and we go into the visual and it’s just derailed, and that’s a distraction. And assume there’s like six people there, which is a whole different conversation. But there are all these people there and it feels productive, but it’s actually distracting to achieving to being, to Miz’s point, of narrowing your focus and being clear, setting expectations about what it is that you’re there to do.

Ben Grynol (50:25):

So relaying it back to us, what we keep trying to do as a company, and we’re all trying to hold each other accountable is a lot of times in threads. We have a thread that starts out as one thing and it morphs into a long conversation about something unrelated to that thing. And that becomes a distraction to everybody who’s trying to keep up with maybe the original thread or maybe the new conversation. So then you go shortcut is D but you go D, noise, I’m going to wait till I’m tagged. And that can be a bad strategy too because you go, well, what if there was actually something where somebody just wrote my name and didn’t tag me. And it’s like, well, I’m going to miss it then.

Ben Grynol (51:08):

But these are things that what makes it easier is if it becomes hey new thread, this is about this other thing. This is about the headline for some Instagram ad because we started out as year end event. We’re taking the conversation here, anyone who wants to participate, let’s have at it. But then you can start to contain what you are trying to achieve and talk about. And that becomes less of distraction because then you go, oh, I can ignore the original thread this thing was in, this has nothing to do with the thing that I’m trying to achieve right now.

Sam Corcos (51:39):

Some of this is just a problem with the tools themselves. Because we can use Notion as an example, where you don’t really know if somebody is going to see a mention in a Notion comment, you don’t really know. Some people do some people don’t. I am now at a point where I get like 200 notifications per day from Notion. So there’s basically no way that any comment that gets put in Notion that tags me I’m going to be able to see it. There’s just so much noise. So the problem with some of these tools is they don’t let you know the relative importance of certain information. So all of these things, this is the biggest problem with email, is everything gets jumbled into one large priority box. The signal to noise ratio in email is so incredibly low. So that’s definitely something that as an industry, people need to figure it out. But we’re going to be putting some thought into it ourselves.

Ben Grynol (52:47):

Let’s push back on one thing. There is tooling, but no matter how great tooling is, there is the human behavior element of it. So the important thing is when everyone, when team members see this happening, to encourage the behavior to say, hey, this thing’s happening, let’s carry this on over here. The right thing to do at an in-person meeting, there’s no tooling, but if that’s happening, you say, hey, this is a really great conversation to have, let’s talk about this after, let’s take this to a different form or format.

Ben Grynol (53:15):

And sometimes it’s a fine line because if there is a healthy conversation happening that can open up new doors, that’s something. But more along the lines of knowing when to contain bucketing work. If you start to have a memo that starts out as one thing and then it ends up as another and somebody looks at it and they’re like, what is this thing about? Started out about the future membership and now the bottom is about your love of popcorn. That’s the analog, is something could be that ridiculous that conversations do go to these ends of the earth if we let them. So knowing when to pull it back and be like, there’s a better format or a better form or a better place to have this conversation. Anything else?

Sam Corcos (53:57):

I can’t think of anything other than it takes practice, it does not come naturally to people. And even people who have been at Levels for months still struggle with it. And it takes intentional effort to be able to have that focused mentality around work.

Michael Mizrahi (54:21):

It’s a practice, there’s no reaching nirvana on this and arriving.