Change Work Life

Mastering focus: boosting productivity in your home office - with Steven Puri of The Sukha Company

• Jeremy Cline/Steven Puri • Episode 212

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#212: Steven Puri is the Founder and CEO of The Sukha Company where he helps millions of people find their focus, achieve more and have a healthy work life.  He explains the type of environment people are most productive in, how to train your brain to be more productive, and the mindset people working from home should have. 

What you’ll learn

  • [02:04] How Steven went from working in Hollywood to building computer software. 
  • [06:56] The business aspect of the entertainment industry. 
  • [09:18] The benefits of working remotely. 
  • [10:36] The problems of working remotely. 
  • [12:14] How AI can improve your productivity.
  • [15:20] The type of work that can effectively be done remotely.
  • [18:10] How to train your brain to be productive when working from home. 
  • [21:25] How to create a productive working space at home. 
  • [23:18] The type of music that helps you get into a flow state. 
  • [25:26] The type of physical space you need to be productive. 
  • [26:40] The mindset you should have when working from home. 
  • [32:45] How to maximise how productive you are. 
  • [38:09] The importance of intentionality and the dangers of dopamine. 
  • [39:35] How to use time boxing to manage your time. 
  • [42:17] What to do if you find yourself wasting too much time. 
  • [45:11] Actionable steps to be more productive.


Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/mastering-focus-boosting-productivity-in-your-home-office/


Re-assessing your career?  Know you need a change but don't really know where to start?  Check out these two exercises to start the journey of working out what career is right for you!

How do you stay focused? How do you stay productive and engaged on the task at hand? Especially when if you're working from home, there's potentially a lot of distractions around you. For some top productivity hacks, you're going to want to listen to this episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the podcast where we're all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, you can find out more about that at changeworkllife.com/coaching, and in each episode, my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. At the start of the COVID pandemic, many of us were thrown into working from home and had to adapt very quickly. Five years on, and despite what some companies seem to be saying, working from home, or at least a hybrid of home and office working, has become the norm for many of us. But can we do working from home better? Is your setup optimised for focus and productivity, or do you find yourself more easily distracted? How do you balance the flexibility that working from home offers with the need to get stuff done? A former Hollywood executive who worked on films like Independence Day, Star Trek and Transformers, Steven Puri is the founder of the Sukha company. Through an app which provides the tools to help you have a focused and productive workday, Steven helps remote workers conquer procrastination and build healthier and happier work habits. Steven, welcome to the show. Why, thank you for having me. I hope this is an engaging one. I think we need to start with a bit about your experience and how you've gone from making movies to remote working productivity expert. You know what? I will do one better, because I started out actually as a software engineer who then got into film, who then got back into engineering. So it's like the full circle. The short version of the story is, both my parents worked at IBM. My mom was a software engineer. She worked as a systems programmer on the IBM System/360. And my dad designed logic chips, like CPU chips. So I was raised by two engineers. I knew how to code before I realised it was something that you just could also do. It was like I just naturally learned this from my mom. And when I went to USC in Los Angeles, it is a very strong cinema TV school, arguably the best in the United States. A bunch of my friends in the dorm were aspiring Lucas and Spielbergs and that sort of thing. So you end up around a lot of creative people. And I happened to be in LA when film and digital collided. And I lived at that little intersection of, I could speak to a filmmaker because a lot of my friends were filmmakers, young filmmakers, but I also understood engineering because I was an engineer. I was a Watson scholar at IBM. I was working at IBM part time to earn money during school. So that was an interesting left turn in my career, where suddenly there was this demand for this very rare thing, which was someone who could do the two things that I did. I ended up, by luck of the draw, working on some movies that did very well. For example, you mentioned Independence Day. I produced the digital effects for Independence Day. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects in that movie. There were a lot of people involved, a lot of smart people. I became very good friends with the director and producer and the writer of the film. And we set up a company together, which is my first company that I ran. And we raised about 15 million dollars of venture for that in doing the next movies with them and a bunch of other movies, True Lies and Seven and other things. I had exposure to a lot of higher level experience filmmakers, worked on Braveheart, worked with Fincher and Cameron and Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch. And I said, oh, you know what? I think what I want to do with my life is help produce their films, help these films get made. So I ended up on that journey, worked really hard, had a bunch of lucky breaks, end up at an executive vice president at DreamWorks, vice president at Fox, ran the Die Hard franchise, ran the Wolverine franchise, stuff like that. Definitely had a moment, I'll tell you when I was at Fox on Die Hard, where I realised that what I was doing was not going to affect the world in any positive way, in really any way. Die Hard 5, not a great movie, but there was a great reason for shareholders that it should get made. And I just happened to be the guy on it. And I remember that from the studio's point of view, the release date was more important than maybe the quality. Make the date, it's in our financial projections that we will have a movie that comes out on this date and makes this amount of money. And around then I thought to myself, you know what, I'm going to wake up and be the guy who tells kids like, 'Daddy's going to make Die Hard 19 so we can pay for your college', you know. Not too inspiring. So I thought, what do I know how to do? What do I need to do to change this? And that change for me was, well, I do know engineering, I don't know the modern languages because I've been producing films, but I knew enough about how to run a tech company, and went back into tech. And that's the full circle for me of getting into running a tech company again, as well as getting into remote work and really starting to understand distractions and focus and productivity. Do you ever get friends who say to you, 'Hang on, you left Hollywood to go back to become a software engineer?' A lot of people say that. And I'll tell you this. Yes, it looks from the outside very glamorous to be on the red carpet, to be at premieres, to go to the Toronto Festival and the Venice Festival and go to Sundance and all this. And at a certain point, you have to realise that it is soap. It is a product, you work at a factory that makes it, and sometimes it's very glamorous soap, you have some exotic star and some amazing director from Europe making this thing for you, but the studio is a large corporation, and they know how to market spring soap that smells like jasmine, or they know how to market Christmas soap. And you're sitting in a chair just helping things get done. And ultimately, to me, the breaking point was, I really don't know that I'm changing the world in any positive way. Not that I will change in a positive way, but I'd like to try. Yeah. I wonder whether your thinking has evolved with the way that movies have evolved. So you've talked about some films which, when I was growing up, were quite seminal, so like Die Hard, like Independence Day. But yes, then you get to Marvel franchise movie number 617, and it kind of does feel like there's a barrel whose bottom is being scraped quite hard. Jeremy, let me be very frank with you. Some of my friends who are still in film, which is not a lot, a lot of people have gotten out, they are absolutely developing Ant-Man 7. And it is like, listen, I'm making 450,000 dollars a year, is this noble work? No, but it's better than working in the salt mines. And let me be grateful for this. And yeah, we're working on the script for Ant-Man 7 while we're shooting Ant-Man 3, so I can tell you the next release dates for 10 years. It's a business. Like the old joke. It's not called show friendship. It's not called show art. It's called show business. And you're absolutely right. There's a reason why Marvel releases 19 movies a year, and Lucasfilm, which is owned by Disney, has 19 series on the air right now. Every side character in every film Lucas ever made has his own TV series. There's a reason for that. And if people keep going to see them, they'll just keep making them. And then, the side characters of the things with the side characters end up getting their own things. It's just this iteration upon iteration. It is. And I don't want to knock it because it's a business, it's not an art form. You can go into it aspiring to make art, and hopefully make good business, quality business. And I'll say, not a lot of people that I know actually try to make a bad movie. Most movies are not that good, but it's not for lack of trying. It's just really hard to get everything right. The right cast, the right director, the right script, a lot of luck. The editor pulls it together in an amazing way. So you know what? It's still being made. I think the world has changed. I know when I got out, it was around the time that the studio chiefs, my boss was like the chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, they would rail about how kids are on all these video games now, and the social media was sucking up all the time, they used to go to movies. And you can scream at the cars going past your horse and buggy, or you can buy a car. I was like, okay. So how does productivity show up in this? You've mentioned going back into tech. Why specifically productivity and focus? You know what? Here's the thing. And I want to hit the nail on the head, what you talked about remote work, right? When I said, okay, I think I'm done with film, it's been a good decade or two, and I want to get back to building things where I have some agency, I have some control. Win or lose, it will be because of how well I did what I was doing, as opposed to, oh, I'm just here pushing the soap. And I'll tell you this, the problems that came up for me and came up for teams that I was leading, because I had remote companies where I went into tech, were solvable but pernicious. So the benefits of going remote are absolutely as stated. Oh, my God, I'm setting up this company, I can hire talent globally. There's an amazing designer in Dubai. There is an engineer in Montreal. They can work on our product. How great is that? Right? They don't have to live driving distance to my office in Mountain View, right? And the loss of commute time, what if everyone in the company didn't waste two hours every single day just sitting in traffic? All of these things are so true. But I ran into some very painful problems, and that is really what led me to create this company. And I'll tell you some of those problems. And they're going to sound very mundane, but when you deal with them every single day, you realise that they need to be solved. One of them, and I've spoken to hundreds of our members now for the past few years, I have it, and it's not that uncommon, which is, I call it the cold start problem in the morning. Which is, I work from home, my

entire team is distributed, I know that, okay, tomorrow at 8:

30,

9:00, 9:

30, whatever, I'm going to get started. It's my focus time. And there'll be something that comes up that ends up delaying that. And it's like, oh well, I should probably just return those emails very quickly. Or, oh, I'll throw in that load of laundry before I start because I'll be multitasking. The laundry will be going while I'm doing my work or something like that, do the dishes or some stupid thing. And when I dug down on that, it was not really about getting the stupid other thing done. What it was about was procrastination. And when you keep doing that, you know the six whys, well, why do you procrastinate, why this, at the bottom of it, what was true for me, I found to be true for a lot of people. Which was one of two things. It was, I look at my task list, and it is paralysing, it's so long. I don't even know where to begin. There's so many things on here, they all need to get done. Where do I begin? Right? And that leads to some of those behaviours around, oh, let me just scroll really quickly, let me go do this. The other part of that early morning cold start problem, there's something on there, it's just so big. I'm like, where do I even start that thing? Like, I need to write the book. Okay, you're not going to get that done in two hours. And that was real for me. And the more I realised it was real for others, I thought, we're living in an amazing time, AI and specifically large language models are enabling us to do things we couldn't do before. And I wanted to build a platform that allowed me and allowed my team, allowed others, to multiply their own efforts. And the analogy I use a lot is, there's some people who are talking about AI like, if you are Usain Bolt, and it's like, well, AI will run for you, I'm not that interested if I'm Usain to have some robot run for me. And I'm certainly not, as a spectator, super excited to see a robot run. I came here to see Usain. Right? But if you think of it more as like, the AI is the best sneaker you could imagine, and it magnifies your effort. You go, Usain, you can shave a second of your time with this. That, to me, was very interesting. So we did things like when you start your session in the morning, and I'm going to speak for a moment about my particular platform, because this is our solution, but there are great platforms out there, and I encourage everyone to find the one that works for that. Right? I'm just going to describe Sukha, which is, you have an AI assistant, a smart assistant who greets you in the morning and asks you to help pick the three things you want to get done or suggest them to you. Once it gets to know you, it'll be like, 'Hey, Jeremy, this morning, I know you didn't finish this thing yesterday. You have this thing to do and this thing to do. How about these three things?' And why three? Because I'll tell you this, after over 500,000 tasks done in our system, we found you were 77% more likely to finish three things if we only show you three, than if we show you your whole task list. You'll finish fewer things simply because it's overwhelming to look at 17 things all morning that you have to get done. It's super simple, but it just works. Same thing if it sees something in your task, because Jeremy, you're not going to write your book this morning, and it suggests to you, 'Hey, what if we just outline chapter three?' And you're like, that's actually doable. I had an idea driving yesterday about chapter three. I could bang out chapter three outline in 30 minutes. Done. And once you start having those wins in your morning, your whole day changes. So for me, the reason I created this, I can tell you more about it, of course, I'd love to talk about things that I do, but it solved problems that I have around procrastination, around distraction, and then I realised a number of other people do have. And it's not like remote work is the saviour. It's not like it's the devil. It's just another tool that we have about how to work together. Those things that you've described, so the procrastination, the slow start in the morning, that kind of thing, they feel to me like things that can happen both when you're working from home and when you're working in an office. Now, maybe your boss might notice if you're in an open plan office, like I used to be, if you're scrolling through Twitter for 15 minutes before you get started with work. But yeah, I mean, is remote work a magnifier for these kinds of things? The metaphor I would use for that is this. Before the pandemic, before Zoom became a verb, most people had reds and yellows, oranges on their palette, and they could paint with that. It was very clear. You go to this office, this many hours, you're together, you have meetings in the conference room, that sort of thing, right? And then, especially with the pandemic, which was an accelerant, it was like blue got added to the palette. And now we, as leaders, and we, as individual contributors, have another colour to paint with. Suddenly, you can do skies, you can do lakes. So there are some things, and I'll tell you this, in my Hollywood career, as well as in the creativity in tech, designing things and all that, there are some things I absolutely have seen work better in person. When you are trying to figure out what happens in the third act, the audience hates the thing where he pulls the sword out and kills the dragon, it seems so obvious, what are we going to do there? There's something about being in the room together, whether you're at a coffee shop, whether you're at someone's house, the living room brainstorming, or you're in a conference room, there's something about being in the energy of the other people, where it does bring out a weird kind of creativity. But I'll tell you this, there is also deep work. And there's often the work that moves you, moves your team forward, moves your company forward, and that I've seen work very well, especially with designers and engineers, accountants and attorneys that are in our platform, when they do that remotely. And I think something you joked about was like, if you're in the office, you can still waste time, you can scroll Twitter if your boss doesn't walk by your cubicle, sort of thing. But let's also remember, in the office, there was the whole wasting time in the break room by the water cooler talking about the Knicks game. It's not like Jamie Dimon, when he's saying remote work is going to solve all my problems, is right. What he's saying is, I just want to see that you're actually here, and you're not on vacation, you're not taking a couple hours replying on your phone from a basketball game. So I think that it's another colour in our palette that allows us to paint, and we just have to use it appropriately. We've talked a little bit there about the pandemic and how people who were able to work from home had to find very quickly ways that they could work at home. And quite often, that was in less-than-ideal environments. I mean, leaving aside whether you also had kids at home, that was an extra dimension, but things like working on kitchen tables, or we had at least one person at my last place who was in a flat share and basically had their laptop on top of a chest of drawers in their room, and that was the way they were working. Hopefully, people have found better ways of working from home and creating that space. But I'm interested to explore what are some of the better ways that people could do that. Let's pick up on exactly what you said, because I have an interesting story that I've seen repeated, a lesson about this, that is about how you train your brain about mental space. And I'll tell you, I made the mistake beginning, when I got out of film, and I started running remote companies, of working throughout my house. Oh, you know, in the kitchen early in the morning, I was in breakfast mode, which transitioned to laptop sitting at kitchen table. Then, go to my office in the afternoon. Then, maybe end of the day sit on the sofa and use my laptop on my lap, and move through all these spaces. And I'll tell you this, something that I remembered was, you do start to train your brain about how space enables a certain kind of thinking. And I'll tell you, one time I saw this early in my career, it was very present, was when Roland and Dean, who had written Stargate and Universal Soldier and a bunch of stuff, when they were going off to write the next one, they had always written at this beautiful villa down in Puerto Vallarta. And they described the space where they would write, the light came in over the pool, white, quite huge villa, both of them were very established in their careers. And they went off to write Independence Day, and their assistant told them on Friday,'Oh, the villa's rented.' And it was around the office this horrible disaster. What to do? Roland called his attorney, John Diemer, who's an amazing attorney, by the way, and was like, 'John, you must buy the house.' That weekend. God bless John Diemer, somehow he bought that Airbnb down in Puerto Vallarta. Whoever was renting it was no longer there on Monday. And Roland and Dean were there, because they had trained their minds, that is where they wrote. And yes, they ended up writing, at the time, the third highest-grossing movie in history. And it was that they knew that their brains were wired to that space for a certain kind of creativity. I've seen that time and time again, and it is something that I've now incorporated into my work life. And I encourage, this is totally a free way to do it, but in your home, try to stay out of the trap of, oh, I work throughout my house. Try to train yourself, if you have a place where you do a certain kind of work, especially if it's a specialised work, I am an accountant, this is where I do accounting, I'm an attorney, this is where I write my briefs, prepare for litigation or something, and if you're a creative, it is that mental space relationship to physical space, and often light, it's really important. So everyone's circumstances and situation are going to be different. Some people may have the luxury of a room which can serve as an office. Other people, when they work from home, it will be on the kitchen table, or it'll be a desk in their bedroom or something like that. So I'm just wondering what are some of the things that anyone with any space can do to improve their environment and make it this this place where they work and conducive to that. And let me say this, I don't mean for the Roland and Dean story with the Villa in Puerto Vallarta to say that in order for me to do my thing, I have to be in this villa. A good example is, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, with whom I worked, they'd met in college, they wrote Star Trek 11, Transformers 1 and 2, Mission Impossible 3, all these huge movies, when they had to buckle down and write, they had their assistant rent a hotel room at the Universal Hilton. Which, I'm going to tell you, is not a luxury property. But for them, I think it worked because it conjured up their memories of being college students sitting in their dorm room on the edge of the bed. Like you were talking about, somebody is sitting on the bed with a laptop, the other person's sitting at the little desk in the room on their laptop, batting back and forth what should happen next. So let me just be clear and hang a lantern on that, it is about finding a space that you routinely use, as opposed to go find a palace and enjoy your palace while you work. Now, that said, you asked about other things that can be done. One of the things I spent a bunch of time studying was how sound and music help you get into a certain mental state. And I'm going to share thoughts. These are not original thoughts. These are absolutely from having read a bunch of books by the smart people on this. So if you want to, go read Cal Newport's Deep Work, go read James Clear, go read Nir, go read Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's book on flow, right? There are a bunch of them there. Having read them, you do find that at the end of that journey, there are very common elements. And they may have a different lexicon, they talk about it in different ways, and they come up about it from a different point of view, but when you really boil it down, there are certain common principles. And we can talk about those as we go on, but one thing I'm going to talk about right now is music, which is, there is absolutely some common ground about the kind of music that helps people get into a flow state. We can unpack flow states in a minute, if you'd like. And generally, it's 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, and ambient, non-vocal, rhythmic music. Sometimes it's done with binaural beats, which is when you have a difference between your left and right channels, which you need to have headphones on, you can't really do it on a laptop without headphones or earbuds to hear that difference. And people say around 40 hertz seems to stimulate creativity. It's one of the things we did. We have over a thousand hours of music in the Sukha, some playlists are binaural beats. And yes, we all have that one friend that has to listen to heavy metal or some weird gangster rap to get into flow, and God bless, that's true, but for most people, it's a very common sort of music that helps them get to that place where they're just focused, and they look up and like, oh my God, my work is done. Is it really lunch? What happened? It just flew by. And you feel great. So to answer your question, that is another example of how you create the aural, and by aural, I mean A-U, aural environment that allows you to block out distractions, which could also be streams or surf or the sounds of birds. We offer a lot of naturescapes in our platform for people who just want to listen to rain. What about the physical environment? So you've talked about natural light. Is there something to be said if you've got the option for avoiding spaces which are also used for other things. So avoiding the kitchen table, if that's also where you have meals. Again, if you've got the option that you don't have to work on the kitchen table. So, yeah, interested to know your thoughts on the physical space. Oh, Jeremy, embedded in your question is the answer. You know where you're going with that one. And you ask it with that wonderful, radio announcer voice. You're like, 'Tell me more about this.' So yes, to reflect back to the intelligence of your question, it is not a question of do you have to have the most luxurious space or maybe a bespoke space, but if you can agree with yourself, here's a space where I'm going to teach my brain that I settle in to do X. It does help. Period. I'm not trying to monetize this. I don't make money off you working from your bed or working from anywhere. It is just something that I learned the hard way. And then, when I read about it, I was like, oh, duh, that's right. My whole career I've seen this true. I'll tell you, in addition to the Alex and Bob and the Roland and Dean stories, I've seen it with some engineers or with some designers. I was like, oh, wow, really, you have this weird, one of my friends works from a bench in his backyard. And he's one of the original iOS engineers. He was one of the six guys that went into that windowless office when Jobs was preparing for the first iPhone reveal. And he had a couple of engineers that had to write apps to put on the phone. One of my friends was in that, and now he has a very specific bench in his backyard. He's just trained himself. This is where I go and I write my mobile apps. And it just works. So we've talked there a bit about physical environment. Let's talk a bit about mindsets. I sometimes feel like there's this trap of when you're working from home, that work doesn't quite seem so serious compared to when you're in the office, especially if you're in a hybrid role where you spend maybe two or three days a week in the office, and the rest of the time at home. Okay, so I'm going to give you an odd answer. It's about pain. Go on. There are traps, whether you're in an office, whether you're in a home environment or hybrid, where you look up, and it's six o' clock, and you're like, where did the day go? And you feel the pain of disappointment in yourself, or maybe anger and frustration about how the day was stolen from you. And you make the deal with yourself about, oh, well, I'll start early tomorrow, and what I didn't finish today, I'll get done early tomorrow before I begin tomorrow's work. Which is a lie that just doesn't happen. It's just dominoes that fall during your week. You didn't finish stuff Monday, you push into Tuesday morning. Tuesday night, you didn't get done, push to Wednesday morning. And it is the pain of that when it finally gets so great, you're like, I need to arrest this cycle. This has to end. And that is when you make changes. So that six o' clock pain, which I am guilty right now, raising my hand, my name is Stevie P, I have a six o' clock problem, that is something that's very real. And when you look at it deeply, it's often not that there was so much, you just couldn't get it all done. It was the way in which you did it was distracted, or your work time was fractured. And whether you're an IC, an individual contributor, or a leader, there are simple things you can do that make a huge impact on whether you get there. And I'll tell you, actually, a funny aside, if I can for like a minute or two, why I named my company what I named it. Because Sukha means happiness. Sukha company, the happiness company is the name of my company. The way it came about is, we had an early version of this that did not have this name. And I was thinking about names for it, and I had every bad name possible. I was like, Focus Flow State app a team, and like terrible stuff, right? And Laura and I got married, and we were going on our honeymoon. I met Laura in yoga. I married the girl on the mat to my left. We have a daily yoga practise. It's a big part of our life. So we're going to Bali, which is a great place to go, unplug, do some yoga, hang out. Beautiful place. So on the way there, I was talking to Laura. I was like, you know what? This might be a gift from the universe that the next 10 days no one's going to bug me about,'Hey, can you approve the purchase order for the staplers? Or we need to reconfigure the Amazon settings.' So I was like, do you mind if on the first day I talk to maybe two or three of our power members of these early versions, and maybe they'll say something to me that over the next week and a half will just bubble up from my unconscious, like, oh, here's a great name for this. So Laura being super cool is like, 'Absolutely. I'm going to the pool. You enjoy your little Zoom. I will see you at dinner.' So I had like two of those Zooms, and I think I asked mediocre questions. Just, hey, you know, what feature do you like? Do you like the flow music we have? Do you like the smart assistant that keeps you on track? Do you like the timers, the Pomodoro timers? And the third one, I was going to my wrap up, I promised each one, I said just 10 minutes, so about eight minutes in, you know, you're like, 'Oh, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate what you said.' And the member, who's still a member, said to me, 'Steven, you asked the wrong question.' And I was like, really? Okay, what was the right question? He said, 'You should ask me why I pay you.' And I'm like, we charge like 30 cents a day. It didn't seem like a big deal, but okay, I probably wouldn't ask a question that was kind of bold that way. So why do you pay me? He said,'At three o' clock, I can be playing with my kids, or at six o' clock, I can have that where-did-the-day-go feeling. My kids are two and four, and they're not going to be those ages forever. I pay you so I have those three hours to have those memories that I'll keep the rest of my life.' And I was like, wow, okay, that was really good. Thank you. I went to dinner with Laura, and I was like, 'I talked to this guy who was more articulate about my platform than I am.' I told her this, and she was like, 'Wow!' Right? So I was very appreciative. And we were brushing our teeth, going to go to bed that night, and Laura said to me, 'You know what he said? He said you've been pursuing the wrong avenue for this name. It's not about the Flow State app or the Focus app or the distraction blocker. All of the things you're building are the path. The productivity is the path. They're not the goal. The goal is happiness.' And she said, 'We do a lot of yoga. You hear that term, all the Sanskrit terms, Dharma, karma, satya, you hear them in yoga. He's describing Sukha. He's describing that feeling of happiness when you're self-fulfilled, when you're doing the thing you're meant to do, you're good at it.' She's like, 'That's, I think, really closer to what it is you want to achieve.' And from bed in Bali, in our little hotel room, I bought the domain for the Sukha company, the happiness company. That's how we named the company. And that is really, for me, what it is we want to do, is give people some simple tools, like the music, like the timers, like the smart assistant that guides you, that allow you to get to that three o' clock, of I do want to have this time with my children. And by the way, his children are now four and six or whatever. And it's really cool to think of the hours that he's had with them simply by managing his day better. And I'm about to have a child this year, and I think about that a lot. That's a fantastic story. You very cleverly trailed there some very simple solutions to the getting to six o' clock and wondering what on earth you've done kind of feeling. So I feel like I really should ask you to give the game away on what some of those solutions are. Oh, I'll tell you. And these are not going to be something where someone slaps themselves on the forehead, how did I not think of this? Right? It is rather, how do you create a world where these things seem easy and obvious? So again, the distillate of a lot of the smart books by the smart people, and anyone who has not read Flow, I just encourage you to read it, or at least a synopsis of it, because if you've ever had that experience of a flow state, you want to get there again. And my first experience was on a plane. It was an American flight where the Wi-Fi was out. I was flying, I think, Dallas to San Francisco. And we took off, and we landed, and I thought, how could we be landing? We just took off. Something's wrong. We're landing in Austin or something. I looked down and two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. What was that? Because I'd been in Figma doing some designs, there was no Wi-Fi, no one could bug me. All the designs were done. I completely lost track of time. I don't even remember if there was meal service, Jeremy. I didn't go to the bathroom. But I was astonished how suddenly I didn't have to go to my hotel after I landed, try and finish the designs for the next morning to meet with the engineers. It was rather a sense of like, oh, I can go to that great place that has the lobster roll by SFO and have a lobster roll and be relaxed. And when Mihály Csíkszentmihályi studied all these high performers, it is interesting the commonalities that he found and codified. Like, the name flow state comes from Mihaly. He was the one who said, when you listen to them, there is a state you get into where it is not just your actions that bring you towards your goal. It's almost like you're on a river that everything flows toward it, towards where you want to go in this concentrated state. And people call it a lot of things. Michael Jordan, some athletes call it being in the zone, right? And there's that great quote about Michael Jordan talking about, it's just him and the ball. He's like, when I'm in that state, it's me and the ball. There are no defenders, there's no one in the stands. It's just there. That is how focused my world is. And I think I always mangle the Picasso quote about, you know, I stayed up all night last night, I forgot to go to the bathroom, I forgot to eat, but hey, look what I painted, you know, and turn around, there's like Guernica or something sitting behind him. To have that experience and to know that the result of having that experience is you're not only doing great work, but you're back in control of your time, and you can use it for what you want. And if you don't have children, maybe you're not playing with children at three o' clock, maybe you're going windsurfing, maybe you're going for a bike ride, maybe you're just going for a walk with your husband or your wife or your partner. That, I think, is really interesting. So it is about packaging together these techniques, these principles, which are, don't get distracted. We built a smart assistant using an LLM. If you pick up your phone while you're working, your assistant's like,'Jeremy, do you need to be on your phone?' Sometimes that's all you need, because then you can make a conscious choice. No, you know what? I'd rather finish at three. And sometimes it's all you need, because let's be honest, some of the top engineers and top designers in the world make the highest paychecks by working for the companies that steal your lives. You want to make a lot of money, go to a social media company and find some way to design or engineer something that takes one second more of a billion people's lives, you will be wealthy. Like Chamath level wealthy, right? So you have all of these smartest brains there making a lot of money to make sure that you think that dopamine hit would be, it feels so good to pick up my phone. You know what? When you can make a conscious choice not to, you get back in control of your life. And that's all it is. All we built was, when you're working, there's a QR code on the screen, you can shoot with your phone, put your phone down. If you pick up your phone, your assistant knows and says, 'Hey Jeremy, do you really need to pick up your phone? Is that what you want?' You can choose to say no and finish at three. Same thing with opening something on your computer. Maybe you open WhatsApp or YouTube or something on your computer. Again, hey, Jeremy, do you really need to be in YouTube while you're supposedly writing a book or whatever, or preparing your briefs? You know what? I really don't. I'd rather finish at three. Those principles, timeboxing, monotasking, not being distracted, that's really the core of what we built. And there are other great platforms. This is not to say we built the best one or the only one. But you find the one that works for you. There are a lot of great shoes. Find the shoes that feel really good for you and allow you to run and perform at your best. So I thought this was going to be a conversation about remote working, but I think we should be shifted into something a bit wider than that, which is productivity more generally. And from that perspective, I'm not sure that there's necessarily all that much difference between remote working and office working. When I listen back to what you've been saying, the word that's coming to mind is intentionality. So being intentional about not checking social media, intentional about timeboxing. So I guess if you treat office days as meeting days and know that you're going to get absolutely no work done apart from going to meetings, then fine, then you just make it your intention that your working from home days, you don't have those, you turn Teams or whatever onto Do Not Disturb and that kind of thing. Can we pick up on that? Go for it. So there are two things I want to pick up on. Number one, the intentionality. To have an effect on the world, you have to have a belief. And what I believe is, we all have inside us something great. We may or may not get that out of us in this lifetime, but it's there. Whether it is that book, whether it is that case that you win that changes history, whether it is that painting you make, whether it is a blog that you write that inspires people, whatever it is, you have something great. I believe this. We have something great inside us. The question is, will it get out? And the way in which it gets out, like you said, is with intention. Mindfulness is a word I use a lot. Am I deciding how I use the energy of my day, or am I letting someone else do it? Huberman has a great episode where he talks about how hard it is to overcome the fact that you can now get dopamine with no effort. With your thumb. You can literally just sit there on the sofa and scroll, and you get dopamine hits. You don't have to do any work. You don't even have to write something, a sonnet that someone gives you praise for, and you feel good, you feel the dopamine. You don't have to write a haiku. You just literally have to scroll, right? So that's what you're up against. And if you do want to be mindful, to express your intentionality with your life, something you brought up is that concept of timeboxing. You've experienced this. The fact you bring it up, I can tell you know how this works, which is when you're actually intentional, you say, 'You know what? Before I begin, let me think, how long does this take? It should take about 45 minutes. I'm going to set my timer for 45 minutes.' It is astonishing how frequently you will finish in 45 minutes. It does not sprawl. We built our assistant in Sukha that tells you halfway through, like, 'Hey, you know what? You should be about halfway through.' Just check in, you know, hey, you have five minutes left. And how you stay intentional to that. And I used to believe that timeboxing didn't work. And what was pointed out to me, and I realised it was very true, was, oh, I procrastinated, and I timeboxed, but I didn't call it that. What it was is, I used the deadline of when that apron school, when that design, when that meeting slide deck had to be done, I used the deadline as the boundary of my timebox. And I would just not start the work until I felt the time box was, well, there's no way I can get it done in less time than this. So it's an unintentional, it's a time box without any mindful intention. So when you say to yourself, 'Hey, you know what, I could do this thing in two hours and be super stressed out, but have it ready at Tuesday

at 11:

00 am.' Or you could say, 'It's going to take me two hours. What if I did an hour on Friday, an hour on Monday?' It's the same two hours, but you take control of your life. You do it with intention. So it's not time box just because of the deadline, it's time box because you control it. So there are a number of ways in which I think intention, when you arrive at a point in your life that you want to control your life, I mean, we can't control all of our lives, but I mean, you want to be more mindful and more intentional with how you use the moments of your day, there are great tools and techniques. So I suspect this is something that you can practise, and so it becomes less frequent. But I also envisage a time where no matter how much you practise, there are going to be the times where the distractions happen, or you're just not in the zone. And even if you've got your app going, 'Are you sure you want to look at your phone?', you just go, 'Oh, shut up. Yes, I'm going to go and look at X', despite what your electronic app is telling you. Absolutely right. We're imperfect creatures, Jeremy. You've seen the movies. You know. Exactly. So what are some reset tips that you have for people where that kind of thing happens? Okay. I will tell you one thing, and this word is probably used too much, which is grace. There are many expressions of how our brains do irrational logic. Matter of fact, there's a fantastic book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational, and he has many examples in that where he says, here's something that happens, he describes to you a decision making process around buying ice cream. And when you actually look at it, it is irrational how you arrive at the decision. But you listen, you read the story, and you're like, yeah, I would totally do that. So there is the sunk-cost fallacy. So one thing is this, suppose exactly what you said happens, and Jeremy, you have that moment where you're like, 'Oh, shut up, I just want to check my emails real quick', you tell yourself five minutes, it becomes 15, you can spiral, and I've done this, where you go, 'Oh, God, I wasted 15 minutes. Well, what does it matter now? The morning's blown. I'll just do this. It's all shot.' Right? Or you can give yourself a little bit of grace, a little bit of forgiveness and say, 'You know what? This is totally normal.' Even Usain Bolt takes off a morning every now and then, where he's like, 'You know what? Yes, I might be the fastest runner in the world, but I'm only going to do one practise today. This morning, I just want to spend doing something important to me or doing something fun.' And when you allow yourself that, and you say, 'Okay, you know what? I took 15 minutes. I didn't take five, I took 15, and I scrolled, and I returned some stupid emails, and maybe I bought something on Amazon.' But the point is, you're spending your time at the margin. That time is spent. The moment that you are choosing to spend right now is the one that begins right now, end right now, end right now. And at the margin, when you say to yourself, 'Well, what do I choose to do now?', you can make a decision that is different than the last decision you made. I'll tell you a funny story. A friend of mine who was the director of operations at DreamWorks when I was there, she would say this to me sometimes when I was beating myself up or thinking too much or overthinking, she would say, 'Listen, just make a decision, and if you don't like it, make another one.' And it really liberates you. And you say, 'Okay, yeah, I spent 15 minutes doing this, whatever, that was a choice. And now I'm going to choose between now and lunch, I'm going to finish this slide deck. I have 45 minutes. I can do that.' And time box it, by the way. Time box it. I'm aware that we have discussed lots of things that people can try, and there's a risk of overwhelm. Well, should I start with this? Should I start with this? Should I start with the other? Let's give people one thing. The person who's listening to this now, maybe they, I was going to say maybe they're commuting to the office, or maybe they're on a walk before work. What's one thing that they can try that's going to give them great bang for their buck? Here is one thing, and it is something that Cal Newport has written very eloquently about, many people have written about, but I think Cal does it very well, where he talks about when you are doing deep work, you're in the zone, you're in a flow state, however you want to express that thing of I'm doing something in a concentrated way, I'm doing it really well, when you are interrupted, it takes you up to 22 minutes to get back into that state. What do we learn from that? What's the easiest thing to do? Say, you know what, I should block out my calendar for tasks that are actually deep work, not shallow work, as he puts it, but I need to do this meaningful thing that moves my life forward or my team forward. Block that time. Tell people, 'I will not be responsive during this time.' If you send me an email, send me a Slack message or a Teams message, I'm not going to hop right on it and be like, 'Oh, I'll meet you at three o' clock for that thing.' No, you know what? And this is something I did in my last company, and I do in this company, our entire company blocks out on our calendars nine to noon. We don't set external vendor meetings, we don't set member interviews, we don't talk to each other. When we have our app open, when you start playing the music, and you start your assistant, it marks your Slack as Away. So that if someone slacks you, it says, 'Oh, I'm in a focus session. I'll get back to you afterwards.' And that ability for you to say, 'Hey, man, I'm going to take these three hours. I'm going to do six hours of work in three. In order for me to do that, I need to ask you, don't expect anything from me from that time.' And once you've done that for a week or two, it sets a rhythm for your entire company. So whether you are a leader, and you simply institute deep work time, focus time, whatever you want to call it, or you're an individual contributor who says, hey, you want me to do the stuff that is going to make our company successful, I need this time every morning or every afternoon or whatever works for your chronotype. That is one simple thing you can do. It doesn't even require anything but a calendar. But make that commitment. And you've mentioned a few books. Similar question, for someone who hasn't read any of them, what's the one book they should start with? Okay, I'm going to give you a funny, because anyone listening to this, and I hope this is helpful, I'm going to give you a very offbeat answer that's not obvious, because people are expecting me to say, 'Oh, go read Flow, go read Deep Work, go read...' No, I'm going to tell you this. There is a book that has influenced my thinking so much. And it is not necessarily about productivity. It's not necessarily about anything other than who are we. What are the rhythms of humanity, of civilization? And it was written by Will and Ariel Durant who wrote The Story of Civilization, like the 9000-page, 11 volumes. At the end of that, and not many people know this, they wrote a very short book called The Lessons of History. And it is sitting with, I mean, practically your grandparents, who've studied the history of civilization, and over dinner they're going to tell you like, 'You know what, here's what we noticed.' There are chapters that may be three pages long. You could have an entire dinner party about those three pages and have a fascinating dinner conversation because it is that distilled. It's like the Blaise Pascal thing about, I'm sorry, I did write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time. Right? When you have that time, you spend your life thinking about what are the rhythms of humanity, what are the cycles we see repeated. It allows you to write something that is that pithy. And it is a fantastic book. I have no relationship to it, but it's amazing. And by the way, you can put my email address in the show notes. I'm happy if anyone has a question about any reference I've made. What was that Dan Ariely book? Is there a blog post about Cal Newport? Anything. You're welcome to reach out to me. I do my absolute best to return every email within one working day, assuming I'm not sick or travelling. It may not be a 19-paragraph email about the history of my life. It may be three lines, here's a great link, read this. But I am here to help. I'm having, as you know, a child this year, and it's really influenced my thinking about what do I have to give back. This is something I have to give back. And I'm happy if anyone reaches out to me saying, 'I have this problem. Can you recommend something?' Happily send you something to read or something to listen to. Well, thank you for that. I will definitely take you up on that. And other than that, where can people find you, find out more about the app? Where would you like people to go? Oh, well, I'd like people to go to happiness, which is why I call it my company, the Happiness Company. But you can find the app that we built, and we are building every day at thesukha.co, which is T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot C-O, thesukha.co. It's a Sanskrit word. It's a seven-day free trial, no funny business. You can try it without a credit card, and we don't bill you if you forget to cancel. Sign up in 10 seconds or less. All you need is an email address. If you get in there, say hi. There's a chat. There's a group chat everyone has. It's a whole community of productive people. Drop in the group chat, introduce yourself, say hello, I might see you there. And I'll say, 'Oh, you were listening to Jeremy. That's so great.' Awesome. Well, Steven, this has been a fascinating conversation. It certainly went off in directions that I wasn't expecting, but I've really enjoyed it, and hopefully the listeners will take something from it. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Okay. Hope you enjoyed that interview with Steven Puri. I mentioned in the interview that I thought we were going to be talking mainly about remote working, but as the interview went on, I realised that the productivity hacks and tips that Steven was suggesting really apply in any setting. And one of the things he said earlier on about the task list, that really hit home. I'm definitely someone who's been guilty of writing down everything they've got to do and then looking at this enormous list in front of me and thinking, where on earth do I start? And then, I find myself distracting myself, because I don't want to have to make that decision. Focusing on the three things to get done today, I really like that. That's definitely something that I'm going to try going forwards. Show notes are on the website at chanworklife.com/212, that's changeworklife.com/212. And I will be astonished if you don't know anyone who couldn't benefit from a few productivity hints and tactics. So do them a favour and share this episode with them. Not only is it going to help them, it'll make you look good as well. In two weeks' time, we're going to be talking about ambition. For me, ambition can be a bit of a double-edged sword. I mean, it gives you goals and something to work towards, but you can be over ambitious or maybe ambitious about the wrong things. That's what we're going to be chewing over. So make sure you have subscribed to the show if you haven't already. And I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.