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Organization, Fixed · Humanity Working

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back.
• 0:14
  unknown: Hey.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Today's quick fix is organization.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: What do you mean by that?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We define it as the ability to make sense of the world around you.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that sounds odd.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you don't we usually think of organization as sorting out your emails or putting your desk in order?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it absolutely can include that, but I guess I guess think about why people do those things.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: And think about more broadly, beyond the the term used as a as a person, like a person is organized or a person that is disorganized.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: Think about how information is organized, how like information historically might have been organized in a library that was categorized by a duodecimal system.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or a we organize all of the uh all of the organisms on earth through um through various you know different ontologies.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so this organization is happening uh to help us understand what is there.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Like even a sentence is an organizing structure, a paragraph is an organizing structure.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly chapters in a book are an organizing structure.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, imagine how weird it would be if if uh you had a dictionary where they didn't put the words in order, and you went from you know, dog to zebra and uh and then cat, right?
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: It wouldn't uh it wouldn't make any sense.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: So so we as humans, we need uh a form of organization in order to allow us to make sense of the world.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it is a it's a human characteristic, right?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Of a machine, um now that we've uh you know moved beyond more traditional structured databases and things like that, machines don't need as much organizing structure as humans do, but humans do because it helps them understand what's going on, find things, um, be comfortable with things, and make sense of the of the world around them.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we need it, you know, even though we now have Chat GPT and and Google to solve all of our problems.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean actually, funnily enough, that's one of the things that we're asked the most.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, do I do I even need to be organized now that now that Google is here or Gmail, for example.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Remember when you know when when Gmail came out, um and all of a sudden you could search for your email and get a result inside half a second, right?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Did you still need to to organize your email?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: That still happens.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is still, I bet I bet you, I don't know what the numbers are, but I'll bet you 80% of maybe it's generational.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you were around when email first came out, I bet you 85% of the people who came were around working when email came out still organize it in folders.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: You would be surprised.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually the flip.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: But it is it is, and I know this for a fact because uh I did when I was at Microsoft, I did some work on uh the inside the company when Gmail came out.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they organized people into two categories, filers and pilers.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And filers were the people that consciously filed their emails, yeah, and pilers were the people that just let it let it all pile up.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: And what they found is that about 20% of us are naturally filers, which means we're gonna file regardless.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: If you give us an opportunity to file it, we're filing it.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, closer to 80% of us are naturally pilers.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you allow us to pile, we will pile.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's so it's so fascinating because um you try to turn a filer into a piler, it's almost impossible.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you try to turn a piler into a filer, it's almost impossible.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: But it's one of the reasons why Gmail actually became successful as quickly as it did, was because these people that were naturally wanted to just leave stuff lying around all over the place could, and then they could get away with uh with working with it that way.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So but yeah, it does appeal like it's it's a it's sort of a it's a human characteristic that is sort of independent of the tech of the technology that we use, which is to me is utterly fascinating.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's so interesting.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's so fascinating because to me, like I I was a filer then, and I had to be I had to be converted to a piler.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's actually the exception, is the filer becoming a piler.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely right.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's interesting.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let me talk to you about that then.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So you said you had to be converted.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So how did that come about and why did how did you come to that realization?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually uh at a at a a conference where the head of Gmail was presenting at Google, and they they somebody, it was like a personnel change or something.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: A new president of Gmail came in or something like that, and he was from another organization, and they gave him his Gmail account.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess somebody saw him making folders and something.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, Oh, you don't have to do that anymore.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, huh?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Yeah, it's it's all there.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: You just search, and he instantly just like jumped in on the culture.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But him talking about that at that presentation, I was like, huh.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if that works.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think that'd work, you know?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and it just changed your life because you realize filers, I'd love the the stats on this.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was averaging probably on the low end 30 minutes a day filing to get to inbox zero, right?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Which is an impossible task anyway.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a Sissiphian nightmare.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: So to become a pilot, fancy word for the to read about custom.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's yeah, you know, it's the that is that is so interesting.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um now I ask copilot too.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now I don't even I don't even pile or file.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just ask copilot.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Did anybody email me about this recently?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: So but but what's interesting there though, Madison, you've honed in on something which is interesting, which is that this might imply that we don't need organization period, or we won't need organization period to come back to that.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and what what in reality it is true is that we do need to organize, but we need it for different reasons.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I guess if I if I could give you a s a specific example, if you were about to make a um a major decision, let's say that you're a you lead a business unit inside an organization and you were about to make a major decision, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: What you would want to do is you would want to gather together the information um that is necessary to make a good decision.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so that information might sit in a bunch of different uh in a bunch of different places.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't necessarily rely on a prompt for GPT or a prompt uh for uh for Google to to give you exactly the information that you need and critically all of the information that you need in order to help you make that decision.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if with a complete lack of information, by definition, you're gonna get uh depending on the prompt you choose, you might well get a different subset of information that might influence your decision in a way that you don't want to be influenced.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so having an awareness of what is out there and what is available to you so that you can pull the information to allow you to make a decision is an important part of it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: But then also we found that for a good group of people, um, a degree of organization is associated with positive mental health outcomes.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, um, you know, there's a reason why um superhuman, the email system that helps you get to inbox zero and is doing a is doing a form of organization as you're getting yourself to inbox zero through the mechanisms that superhuman is is using.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: The reason why they've been successful is that a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people feel better when they do get to that point where they uh where the inbox is zero.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that's like a, you know, in order to feel comfortable about my work, I need to uh I need to be able to uh to uh to do some level of organization.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And some of this can apply to physical things, it can apply to uh to digital things, it can apply to the resources that we use to help us, right?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, do I do I have an organizational structure in my head that helps me know when to reach for Chat GPT and when to reach for uh Claude if I'm using both?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um have I organized my prompts in a certain way?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: Have I organized the questions that I'm uh that I'm gonna ask more broadly of AI of AI?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: Have I organized the various different automations that I might use to help me do work and put them in a specific order to allow me to do it efficiently?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Have I organized my calendar in such a way where I'm doing the things that I'm most productive at at the start of the day and and when my energy level is running lower, am I doing uh the lower energy things at that time?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: So all of these different things we are organizing, we're just organizing them in uh in a new world.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Can somebody be over-organized?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think you I think you were, by essentially, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think what you discovered that was for you, and this might be different, but for you, that half hour that you were spending was wasted time.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, another human, right, because of their own psychological makeup and what they needed to feel comfortable, that half hour might have been useful for them.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: But that half hour was not useful for you.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, so absolutely, somebody can be over-organized, somebody somebody can be underorganized.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's sort of right-sizing the level of organization.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's so personal too.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it it depends on you as a human, and it depends on the nature of the work that you're doing, and it depends on the on the context of the work that you do as well.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you might have like the most efficient people that we've seen, right?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: They can actually maintain different levels of organization for different aspects of their lives, and they're comfortable with those different levels of organization for those different aspects of their life.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: So they go, ah, that stuff needs a lot of organization, so I'm more organized.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: This stuff needs less organization, so I'm less organized, that kind of thing.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we park it for another episode, but I it strikes me that um one of the aspects of organization is your ability to be able to delegate whatever it is that you're organizing.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's one thing if it makes sense for you.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's another thing if you could hand it off because of your organization.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if it's like uh my example is I was working with my dad and he has his tools all over the place, but they're organized as far as he's concerned, right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I he said, Oh, go go get me this screwdriver.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the back of the truck in a bucket under a red lid.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he knew exactly where it was.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I was like, man, if you weren't here to tell me where the screwdriver was, uh I wouldn't have found it for a long time.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a system, but not a great one for for um shared organization, right?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of the the idea is there's there's a yeah, there's a splinter there, right?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I love that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it, let's do an episode on on uh shared organization.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a bunch of uh work that we've done on that specifically.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are some amazing, I won't I I won't uh I'll I'll save it for the for the episode when we do it, but there are some amazing um statistics about that and work satisfaction or pain points that people feel associated with work.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll definitely we'll definitely come back to that.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Cool.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so so what is just right organization for today?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, well, I alluded to a tiny bit there, but it it is like this Goldilocks thing, and so it is it's it's centered on self-awareness as factor A, and then it's centered uh as factor B on what I just likely loosely call work awareness, right?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in other words, you have a you you have developed an understanding of what is necessary for you to be um to uh to be uh content and consistently productive in your in your work.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there will be a level of organization that feels right to you.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if you deviate too much from that, it will feel wrong to you.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hence we go back to that point that like I know you said you were a filer and you and um and you became a piler, you you were not that strong a filer.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you were able to to shift from it and be okay with it is um is an indication of that.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: So so like understanding what's right for you to be able to to sort of be grounded in the work that you do, content that you're you've got to hold on work.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna do a future episode at some point on uh on control, I think even next Tuesday, actually.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll and we'll talk about sort of the relationship between organization and control.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: But the have enough so that you feel kind of in command of of what you're doing.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: But then that that's the self-awareness part.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the work awareness part is about understanding what is necessary for the um for the work that you do.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that in itself comes is is in a couple of layers because there's your own work, and to your point, there's the work that you're doing alongside other people, and that's when things can get really complicated, but it is something that we will fix in a future one of these quick fixes.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, what would you want someone to do first as they figure out how to improve their organization?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a uh I think it's a bit of an audit of those things, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: So um the biggest um problem that people have with organization, that most people have with their organization, is their approach to organization is the same as it was five years ago.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they've over-indexed on that, you know, this feels right, this feels comfortable.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they've never they've not recently challenged themselves on it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or, and this is equally common actually, they they constantly try to get that in quotes, get better at organization, or in quotes, get more organized.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so they they constantly try these different things, and none of them stick, right?
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: It they've discovered, they've seen something on YouTube, and it's like sort out your email and these with these five buckets, and all of a sudden you'll be much more productive than you would be.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you see, a lot of what we call product productivity hacks or productivity fixes and so on are actually organization methods under the covers, and it's somebody else's organization method that probably isn't going to work for you.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the first thing that's really important to understand is to hone in on that self-awareness.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we encourage people to do what we would call almost like an organization audit, which is what are the things that need to be that need to be organized, and what what is your simplest possible repeatable approach to that, uh to organizing it, that is the lowest um the lowest amount of effort, but still you are comfortable with.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: So in your case, that would have been um I today file my uh emails.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: I use Gmail, I don't need to anymore.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: That is less effort.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna see what happens when I use Gmail and don't worry about uh and don't worry about filing anymore, and then I'll check in on myself and see how that uh and see how that works for me.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that kind of like thing.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: What's the lowest the audit followed by what's the lowest amount of effort that you need to do, but still allows you to get the job done really well.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's great.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, organization fixed.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time, Paul.
• 17:22
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• 17:26
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• 17:27
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• 17:29
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• 17:34
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