I think we share a little bit of similar DNA and I have been and love talking about productivity

and time management. It's just a topic area I can't get enough of. We talk about it a lot on the

show. So I'm really curious, where did you develop this love of this topic? How did this start

for you? Yeah. Well, I wish there was a really good story of, you know, hitting rock bottom

and then, you know, that would make a much better self-help book. But I've always been interested

in productivity, you know, and it really came to a head when I had my first kid several years ago.

And I was trying to figure out how I could make the pieces of work and life fit together.

And so I started studying people who were making it work. And as I looked at their schedules and asked questions about it, I thought that, you know, a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about where the time goes may have some problems with them. And I find that fascinating. So I decided to write about it. Yeah. And so then it just was, because I know for some authors, they could, you know, go on to a topic and be like, okay, I kind of did this. But there must have been something about it for you that you're like, and I'm going to do it again and look at it from a different point of view. Yeah. Well, I find the topic fascinating because we all have the same amount of time. Yes. We all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week.

And so when you find people who are doing all these amazing things in their lives, both personally and professionally, it's not because they have any more time than the rest of us. They may have other things going for them, but they don't have that. And so I, you know, enjoy studying. What are they doing with their hours? How are they making the pieces of work and life fit together? And what can the rest of us learn from that? Yeah. So being off the clock, which is the title of your latest book, as you call it, it implies time freedom, yet time freedom requires discipline. I want to talk about the time paradox, meaning that time is both precious and plentiful.

I thought this was so fascinating.

Why do you feel it's important to really dig into this paradox and like really understanding both where the minutes go and then almost simultaneously not wanting ourselves to be obsessed

with where the minutes go?

Yeah, there really is this paradox about it.

And I mean, the whole genesis of off the clock came when I was feeling off the clock while on a run this morning in Maine where I was there all by myself. Nobody was expecting me to do anything. I could do whatever I wanted. It was this very sort of liberating sense. And yet I realized in the moment when I was having this wonderful run along the main beach that I had had to

figure out so many logistics to get me to that place in terms of making sure I didn't have work

at that time, the logistics of getting there, childcare, all this other stuff. And so all that

time discipline is what had led to time freedom. And as I explored this more with people,

I saw that many of the people who do feel the most relaxed about their time are also the people who are most in

control of their time. They have figured out where the time is going. They have figured out what

needs to happen in their life. They have put the systems in place to make it work. And when you

have that going on, well, then you can relax. Then you can enjoy time because you're not vaguely worried that something's not happening that's supposed to. You've got some deadline coming up you're not sure about. So that's when you can really feel off the clock. For me, the more discipline I am, I do feel that's true. The more freedom I have. And I've seen that in the decades of my career, it's like the more organized I've become then when it's time for me to be truly off the clock, I don't need to check into email. I don't need to pick up the phone. It's like things are taken care of. But so many people, I feel like don't do the first basic steps, which we're going to get

into, about figuring out, you know, where does it all go?

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