[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Sudddhart here, aka the Focus B, and on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness, and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.

[00:36] Katie: Such a joy to have Rob Krizak on the show today. Rob is an expert of mindful technology and an advocate of the four day work week.

[00:48] Katie: Welcome to the show, Rob.

[00:49] Katie: It's fantastic to have you here.

[00:51] Rob: Yeah, thank you so much, Katie, for having me. Really grateful for the opportunity and looking forward to chatting with you and the listeners.

[00:57] Katie: Amazing. And we both work sort of similar fields sustainable productivity, mindfulness, high levels of performance, but without burning out. That's the aim, right?

[01:08] Rob: Absolutely. Yeah. The world is more stressed than ever now for a lot of different reasons. So I want to help people kind of combat that and make their life easier.

[01:20] Katie: I think one of the key aspects that's part of your business that's a really interesting idea and concept is this idea of the four day work week. So maybe you could discuss a bit more, like, why this concept is important for you, how you go about helping people to have a four day work week. Do you have a four day work week?

[01:42] Rob: Yeah. Tons to talk about. So it's interesting, right? The five day work week emanated from the 1920s, and that was when Henry Ford transitioned to a five day work week with production, this production line, right, with manufacturing cars. And so if you think about it, the concept of the five day work week that we have now is virtually a century old. Yet look at how many different things in society and the world have changed in that last century. And so to me, it's kind of crazy that we have this practice that's almost 100 years old and we haven't thought to ourselves, oh, is this still relevant? Is this still something that we should be doing? We all just kind of do it because it's what is expected, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is what is good for us or what we could be doing. Right? And so I'm here to kind of challenge that thought for people that there is a way where you can work four days a week. And when I say four day work week, by the way, I mean four eight hour days, not 410 hours days. And you're still working the four days a week, but getting 100% pay. So every person is effectively getting a 20% pay increase. Or another way of looking at it is you get one full day back, and that's everyone in the company, including all the employees, the management team, the CEO, everyone. And so I'm really excited to share this information with people because I just think that it's something that can absolutely change their life and give them something that is more valuable than money. Which in my opinion is time.

[03:15] Katie: Absolutely. Time is so incredibly valuable. And do you yourself practice a four day work week?

[03:22] Rob: Yeah, I do. I find that there's a good balance between working and taking time off. And so my wife and I like to travel, we like to do a lot of things. I also like to work out a bunch and stuff like that. We like to see family and friends and so yeah, I find a good balance between working and taking time off and making sure that I get everything done that I need to do.

[03:46] Katie: Okay. So there's two different ways of looking at this. One of them is looking at it from a company's perspective and how that can be put in place. And the other point is looking at it okay, when you have your own business, how do you do it? And they both have different challenges because in the company it's the entire structure and how they can put all this in place. And as a business owner, often feel stress and bringing in income. And it feels like the time you spend will be linked to certain results if you spend it wisely on your pareto priorities. And then it's hard to cut down on a day a week because you feel you're bringing in less. I want to sort of go through this second route, first of all, because I know a lot of my audience are business owners, but also I feel that companies it would be more specific, so you'd need to speak to each company and see how you could put it in place. So I want to discuss why do you feel it's such a challenge for business owners, entrepreneurs, to actually have a four day work week?

[04:47] Rob: There's so many reasons. Well, I guess the first couple are a lot of I mean, I'm an entrepreneur, right? I'm a nine time entrepreneur. This is my 9th business in eleven years. And so I get it. Entrepreneurs love control. Everyone loves control. But I think entrepreneurs specifically love control. And so they want to think that they want to control what's happening in their company. Which totally understand, I would too. But what the four day work week requires is giving up maybe a tiny bit of control and letting people do their jobs in a way that might serve them well instead of how you think it should be done. Because a lot of times when someone is doing a position or doing a job or a task, they might actually have a way of doing it better than you or better than the other people who had done it before them. And if they're given the freedom and autonomy to explore and experience different ways of doing stuff, a lot of times people can make some really good improvements even without your intervention, right? And I'm not saying that the owners shouldn't have a say. Of course they should. But that to me is very impactful if you can kind of trust that your employees are going to do the best that they can for you. Another concern for entrepreneurs and CEOs is, well, what's going to happen to my profitability? Right? Like, am I going to lose money by doing, you know, I consider kind of the father of the four day work week, andrew Barnes. He's a very successful investor and CEO who took a couple of companies public. One of them did over a billion dollars from New Zealand, and he took in 2018. So before this was even on anyone's radar, in 2018, he took a 240 person financial services company and transitioned them to a four day work week. And he basically had no game plan. He even said in this book, I didn't even know what I was doing. I just kind of figured it out. And he had some statisticians from a couple of local universities measure tons of different stuff in this experiment. And what he found is that at the end of three months, profit per employee increased 14 and a half percent. That is insane, right? Like, that is an incredible result regardless of what you did. But taking into account that people actually worked one less day per week and profit per employee increased 14 and a half percent, it's totally bonkers how successful it was.

[07:04] Katie: And what do you feel are some of the reasons why cutting down to a four day work week actually increases performance or profit? Why is that the case?

[07:14] Rob: Yeah, I know a lot of reasons why, and I can kind of talk through the psychology of that. But what's happening in today's world is about a bunch of different things. People are switching back and forth between tasks. On average, people switch between applications on their computer once every three minutes, and they check their email and slack once every six minutes. And so all this switching back and forth introduces what's called a high cognitive load. In other words, like, your brain and your memory are constantly trying to keep up with you switching back and forth between things every three minutes. And obviously, computers and technology didn't exist in nature 50,000 years ago, and we are cavemen or cave women, so we're not inherently designed to be switching back and forth between things every three minutes. And so part of what I help companies do is essentially communicate better so that their employees can check their email and slack way less often and also be in less unnecessary meetings. And therefore, that dramatically cuts down on how much time they're spending doing those things. For instance, the average white collar worker sends and receives 126 emails per day. That's just email, not even slack. And so if you're taking just two minutes to process every email that means that you're taking on average 4 hours a day or literally half of your workday just for email alone. And so let's pretend that I could help you and your company cut down email just in half. I'm not saying I could ever eliminate email, but if I can cut email volume in half, that saves you more than one workday per week right there alone without doing anything else.

[08:55] Katie: It's incredible how the overuse of communication through things such as emails and slack and even meetings really cuts down on productivity and all the important work. I feel there's some really good points that you said about the constant switching and because one of my areas of passion is focus. I highly believe in the single tasking only doing one thing, checking on your emails in one group at a given time. And this has a tremendous impact on productivity but also just well being because of not having that cognitive load. But also it increases the cortisol in your body when you're always checking. That's super important, that increase of stress. And then the other thing that I was reflecting on right now is how if you only have those four days to do all your work, you have that Parkinson level so you know that by Thursday evening instead of Friday evening, you need to have done all of these tasks or outcomes or results. And the brain thinks differently. If you suddenly have less time and you're cutting down meetings, you're changing emails, you find ways to think and be more efficient. And yes, I think it's extremely powerful and I also think it helps to get then into flow because you've got the sort of high level of challenge right?

[10:16] Rob: Yeah, everything you just said Katie 500%, like we're on such the same page is really awesome. Parkinson's Law flow, I talk about those things all the time. I really love that. One thing though that I just wanted to kind of emphasize and explain psychologically, which I think is super important is so here's what's happening every day to the average person and they don't even realize it. And this is a huge part of humans first. And what we do is to educate people about these kinds of things so that they can make decisions on how they want to change their behavior. But what I believe is happening is sometimes like on a day to day and even minute to minute basis, how and how much we use technology is amping up our nervous system and putting us into this fight or flight mode. It's that adrenaline and cortisol release that you were talking about. And so what happens is so let's take for instance email. There's a ton of data that shows that checking email, especially all the time, actually increases stress, decreases your work performance and makes you feel worse. And the reason is when you look like, let's say you check your email and it's Monday morning and you have 300 unread emails, right? This happens to me even not 300, but like I have 100 maybe. So what happens is the average person looks at those 300 unread emails and they say to themselves, oh my gosh, I only have 30 minutes to check my email and then I have my first meet being there's no way I'm going to get through these 300 emails in the next 30 minutes. And so what happens is then they sense this feeling of overwhelm, right? Like they can't get it all done. And so when humans are overwhelmed, we perceive that as a threat. And anything that's a threat puts us into this fight or flight mode and amps up our nervous system. And so you may not realize it and this is all like subconscious, right? It's not like you say to yourself, oh my God, I'm in fight or flight, your body just actually reacts and you don't understand it or realize it, but every time you check your email and it's overwhelming, which is probably most of the time because you're not ever caught up, right? You get into this fight or flight mode and then that not only makes you feel worse, it increases your stress, but it also degrades your performance and your memory. And so if you're constantly doing that to yourself all day by checking your email and putting yourself in a fight or flight, it's no wonder that you can't get anything done. And I just want to explain that to people in the hopes that they might start to recognize maybe a little bit more when they feel stressed out from their technology use and decide to take a break or do something else or maybe just change their use completely would be the ultimate goal.

[12:51] Katie: And I know that some people that I've worked with, they had this feeling of they couldn't step away from their computer because A, they had too many things to do and tasks to do, but also because they always wanted to be up to date with emails. Because I think there are situations where when there's really too many and it's just not possible, then people have to accept that it needs to roll into the next day and prioritize. But when there's just the right amount that people are able to keep up with it and do their tasks but sort of without taking any breaks, that's when it gets dangerous. Like I'll just quickly answer this one email and they'll go for lunch, and then suddenly three more come in during that time and there's this sort of constant reactivity and fear of stepping away and not being responsive to the emails that makes people sort of run in circles, like whereas instead, just having clear boundaries. That's the time you cut off and go for lunch or walk or whatever, and you come back, you do your work, you answer the emails, you prioritize, you delete certain things, but thinking clearly is harder when you're in that fight and flight response. And I think this links directly to the other topic we wanted to discuss today, which is around mindful technology. So how can people sort of step away from this? How can they use technology more mindfully and not be so sort of responsive and hooked in some ways to the email and the fast pace of technology?

[14:16] Rob: Yeah. So I guess one of the first things that I want to say about technology mindfulness is I define that as being aware of ways that you can use technology that make your life easier instead of harder. And there's lots of ways that we're totally unconsciously or subconsciously using technology that doesn't serve us well today. Let me give you just a very simple example. So let's pretend again. I like talking about email because we use it so much, right, and it's involved in everything in business, yet there's so many things about it that we don't realize are possibly harming us. So let's say it's 10:00 P.m. And you're like, I'm going to just check my email one more time before I go to bed, right? I've done this so many times myself, or I used to anyway. So it's 10:00 P.m.. You check your email, and let's say you get an email from your boss and the email says something kind of uncomplimentary to you. It's not very positive. And so you read this email and you're like, oh my gosh, you get really upset, right? You're like, I can't believe my boss said this to me. So what happens then? Well, you're probably not going to respond to this email at 10:00 P.m. Because that's going to send a message to your boss saying, hey, I'm available and checking my email at 10:00 P.m.. You don't want to send that message to him or her, right? But the other thing is, now you're in this amped up fight or flight state because you read this unsavory email and you're not going to be able to resolve the situation in your mind by sending out something and responding. So now you're just amped up and you probably don't have a good way of releasing this stress. Well, now there's going to be two repercussions from that. The first one is going to be that you're going to go to sleep way later than you thought, probably because you're in this amped up state. But the other thing is, even if you fall asleep on time or when you wanted to, the quality of your sleep that night is probably going to be way worse because you got amped up right before you went to bed, like your body was in the opposite of a restful state. The takeaway is even checking just one email before you go to bed can ruin your entire night of sleep and therefore ruin your entire next day. Because sleep is vital to everything and you performing at your best. And so people don't think about this like, oh, checking my email before bed isn't a big deal, but I had a client who said, yeah, I checked my email before I went to bed, and it was about my divorce proceeding with my ex husband. And that obviously was really catastrophic to her mentally, and so that prevented her from going to bed. So just imagine how many times this is happening to millions of people around the world every day. And if they would just maybe consider doing something like not checking their email after 06:00 P.m., it could dramatically change our sleep quality and really everything about our life just from that one single thing.

[17:10] Katie: I think a big part of this comes down to the fact that there's a real lack of boundaries, especially with so many people working from home. It's now become, I feel, almost the default. And if not the default, then 50 50, then it's harder to have that separation because it's in the same geographical place. So unless you have a real clear rule in your mind, like you said, no emails after 06:00 p.m. Or 07:00 P.m. Or whatever time you finish, unless you have a clear way of separating them and having that boundary, it's very easy to slip back into it. I know that at one point, for instance, I would check my WhatsApp, and if I didn't have any WhatsApp, it's like my brain was still craving the dopamine. And so I'd quickly go LinkedIn email just afterwards. And I would think, why am I doing this? Because I do it after coming home from work, for example, or the weekend. And then I thought, this isn't helping me in any way. First of all, because all the emails on LinkedIn I like to answer on the computer. It's just faster, more efficient. Second of all, it's not in the right space. So if I'm in my free time in the evening or the weekend, then checking it, it sort of brings me back to my work. And as a business owner, I'm sure you also understand we're always on. So it's really good when you're not on, not to get back to that space. And so then I stopped that habit. But the thing is, to stop it, we first need to become aware that we have these patterns. So we first need to start to see, oh, I'm developing this pattern that when I don't see any, WhatsApps I have this dopamine missing. And so I start checking all the other inboxes to see if anyone else wrote me anywhere else, instead of just being like, okay, no one write, put the phone away, continue my life. So I think this is super important, having the awareness of these habits and then thinking what habits serve us and what habits actually are detrimental to our well being and our health. Like you were explaining with checking emails before sleep, for example.

[18:58] Rob: Yeah, and that's absolutely one of the aims of my company is to educate people about these things so that they have awareness. Because if you don't have awareness that these things are happening, you can't change your behavior. It's not even in your sphere of consciousness to be able to change your behavior just simply because you're not aware. So that's why I'm really excited to share this information with people though, because once you're aware of this, you're like, oh my gosh, yeah. Whenever I check my email, I feel like **** most of the time, so maybe I shouldn't check it as much. I don't know. The reason that I know that all these things work that I'm sharing with you and the listeners is over the last four years I've read over 100 books and 2000 psychology articles and studies related to all this stuff. And then I've run hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments on myself to try to see what works and what doesn't. And so every single thing that we've talked about today, I have tried on myself. And I know that it works because I've experimented a lot, an awful lot.

[19:57] Katie: That's always the best way to see if something works. Okay, so I'm curious, after all these experiments, what would you say are some of the three best practices that you have in order to have increased technology?

[20:10] Rob: Mindfulness well, there's so many. The first couple are difficult for people to hear, but I truly believe that they are a total game changer. The first one is to delete social media from your phone and instead use it on your computer or laptop. So you can still use it as much as you want, as often as you want, as long as you want. It's just less convenient. It's just on your computer or laptop. The second one, and people think that this is even more crazy than the first. I also have deleted email completely from my phone. Like no email whatsoever. I don't have an email app and I only check it from my desktop computer usually once or twice a day and not before 11:00 a.m.. And so I really think that that's super beneficial in terms of being able to focus and not worry about stuff. And then the last thing that I don't think that people are aware of is when you're using your phone for something business related, like productivity related. If whatever you're doing on your phone, if you can do the same thing on your desktop, it would take you about half as long on your desktop. So in other words, if you spend 10 hours per week checking email from your phone and you could probably see that on the screen time app on your phone, you would spend about 5 hours or you would save 5 hours per week just by moving all your email checking from your phone to your computer. Because it has a way bigger screen and it has a physical keyboard. And so by using your phone for productivity related stuff, the trade off that you're agreeing to is I agree that I want this to be more convenient, but it's not more productive. And so you have to decide for you, how important is that convenience? I know some people travel a lot or whatever, they're not in front of a computer and that works for them, but for me, I really try to divert every single thing humanly possible to the computer and not do any business or productivity related stuff on my phone.

[21:59] Katie: 200% agree on this and yeah, I aim to have like less than ten minutes screen time on my phone per day. And so that's possible because I do everything on the computer and I literally use my phone for WhatsApp? Calls and Google Maps. Actually, when I use Google Maps, I generally go past my ten minutes constantly checking the Google Maps and taking photos, and those are pretty much the four only things. And if you just do that, phone calls don't actually cost screen time because you turn the screen off. And so just checking WhatsApps if you're super efficient, don't do it once a day, which I tend to do maybe twice, but once or twice depends. If I'm waiting for certain messages, I might check more often, but generally it's sort of at the end of the day and then I find you don't really need a lot of screen time at all. You don't actually need to be on your phone, really. Like phone calls, WhatsApp obviously Google Maps, you know, life moving around. And then the OD thing, like, I'm in Sweden, so things like train tickets and tramp tickets and all those things tend to be on there, but that's it. And I think it's all about the habits. One of the reasons that I'm able to have such low screen time, though, is because I never developed super strong habits around scrolling instagram for hours and all these things. For a really long time I didn't have a proper good not iPhone, but phones that do loads of things. It was sort of an old school phone forever. Then I went traveling for four months and then we needed a proper phone so we could book accommodation with it and all these things. And so, yes, I agree with you, doing everything on the laptop and then laptop is work. Put it away, phone. WhatsApp? A few friends or texts and phone calls and then do stuff, real stuff. Go out, have fun, exercise, read, play games and cook, just do real things. And I feel that, yeah, I really wish the whole world functioned this way. I think it would be so much nicer, people would be so much more present and peaceful. I know people that are sort of constantly on their phone and it really detracts from you being present.

[24:10] Rob: Yeah, well, I'm glad you mentioned that, Katie, because that's the whole reason my company is named Humans First. So the statistic in America, at least, is and this is before the Pandemic. So the Pandemic did not factor into this statistic. In America, the average person spends 12 hours and 21 minutes a day in front of screens and media. That's three quarters of our waking lives. And so, unfortunately, then, humans aren't first in our world anymore. And that's why I named the company Humans First. It's a reminder that the most love and meaning and joy and happiness in our lives comes from connecting with and being with other people, not technology. And I just want to be clear. I'm not anti technology. I'm pro humanity. I love technology. I'm a nerd. I built my first computer in middle school. It does amazing things for us, but it isn't the center of our existence, or I don't think it should be. Yet the way that we're voting with our time and minutes spent, it is. And so I really hope that my mission is to change that for the world and hope that people will reconnect with other people and spend more time with the people that they matter most.

[25:20] Katie: Yes. That's so beautifully put. And before we finish, because I don't know how, but 30 minutes flew by, what would be some of your recommendations in terms of books? Because you said you read around 100. So if people listening are sort of really inspired and they want to dig in and read, like, a couple of books which were some that you really found were total game changer in terms of increasing mindful productivity, maybe tapping into that four day per week work.

[25:47] Rob: Yeah. So I can give you three of them. The first one is Deep Work by Cal Newport. C-A-L. Cal newport. Amazing book. It gives a really good summary of a lot of this stuff. It's somewhat specific to email and a few other things, but it really is a good overall summation of this. Another one is hooked by NIR. N-I-R-E-R-E-Y-A-L. Really good book about how technology is literally engineered to be addictive and distracting. But I think the most important book that I've read in my life by far is a book by Robert Green and it's called The Laws of Human Nature. My wife kept on bothering me about this book. She's like, you really need to read this book. I was, you know, and she just bugged me enough. And so I finally read it. And the way that I put it is there's life before this book and there's life after this book. And once you read the book and if you really understand it, everything about human nature becomes so much clearer. It's like you have x ray vision to see people's motivations and desires and wants and how they function. It's just unbelievable. And so I recommend that book more than anyone. The laws of human nature by. Robert Green. It's a long book, but it is so worth it. And the way that I kind of like to read it is I read each chapter as like, a mini book. There's, I think, 17 of them, and so it takes about an hour per chapter, but it's so impactful. It really changed the game for me.

[27:17] Katie: Wow. Amazing. Never heard of that one. I heard of Hooked and I heard of Deep work. I read deep work. I haven't read Hooked, but read a lot of summaries around it and also Indistractable heard Niraal speak Mindviley. But, yes, I didn't have never heard of the laws of human nature, so I'm super curious. Probably going to check it out as soon as we hang up. But anyway, thank you so much for being on the show today. If people want to get in touch, what's the best way for them to contact you?

[27:44] Rob: Yeah. Thank you, Katie. Well, I'm happy to direct people to my website. You can reach me at HumansFirst us. And then one other thing that I just wanted to offer the listeners is a free 30 minutes technology Mindfulness consultation. Call with me. All you need to do to redeem that is just email me. My email address is rob. Rob at HumansFirst. US. Just email me there and then mention this podcast in the subject line. And I'm happy to set up a free 30 minutes call with you to help you with your technology mindfulness.

[28:13] Katie: Amazing. Thank you so much, Rob. Thank you for being here and thank you for sharing all this value. Thank you.

[28:18] Rob: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

[28:24] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the Focus Bee show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. So let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you, and feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member. Wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.