ERP069 - Quarantine Procrastination

If you're having trouble with getting things done and you don't have enough time, one of the solutions is to give yourself even less time. And that works so well. It's kind of like, where's the downside for it? There is none. You will have more time to do what you want, you'll have more energy, and there's a variety of scientific elements for that if you want to talk about them. Welcome to Evolved Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. I'm your host Todd Kane. Today on Evolved Radio, I'm joined again by Pierce Steel. Pierce is a professor at the University of Calgary. He has an interesting field of study, procrastination. I had Pierce on the podcast a while back on episode 41. We explored the psychological roots of procrastination. And today Pierce and I hit on something that I'm sure you've felt in the past year, quarantine procrastination. We also chat about some systems that may help you and of course end up talking about productivity since we're both a bit obsessed with the topic. Enjoy the discussion and I hope you find it interesting and helpful. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. It really helps to spread awareness and bring more listeners to the show so we can share the message with more of the community. Now, on with the show. And joining me on the podcast today is Pierce Steel, Professor at University of Calgary, Hasking School of Business. Welcome, Pierce. Thanks. Glad to be here. So, we're having you back as well, another return guest to the podcast. I had you on originally a little while back. I'll have to find the episode number. It was quite a while ago. A couple of years, I guess. And I was really interested in your work around the psychology of procrastination and you have a book called the procrastination equation. So the last episode we kind of focused heavily on the ins and outs and the whys of procrastination. I think we'll kind of get back into that topic and expand on a couple of areas that are more modern in the pandemic times. And maybe to start things off for for guests that have not heard you on the previous podcast, could you give us a quick introduction and the work that you're doing at the UFC? Oh, sure. I mean, a lot of people say research is me search and that's true. I mean, just because you recognize that fat and sugar, for example, eating it too much is bad for you, doesn't stop it from being tasty. The same thing with procrastination. Though I studied a lot, I I can also kind of constantly kind of having to kind of nudge it down because it wants to become part of your life. It's just a part of the human condition and that's what I study at at Hasking School of Business. been doing this pretty much my entire academic career. In fact, even my PhD was on procrastination. So, it's been my career as well as my leisure, you might say. It's it's all encompassing. Yeah, I'm certainly familiar with that. Part of the reason that I wanted to have you back on was more a recognition of myself and my habits of slipping back into procrastination. And I I wrote a a short blog post in a weekly email that I do about this that I find it odd despite how obsessed I am with productivity, how prone I am to procrastination. And one of the things that we we talked about as a topic for today is that procrastination seems to be popping up a lot for people and you have some thoughts on how this is relevant to the quarantine. Can you expand on that topic? I think that's really fascinating and I think people will will probably recognize themselves in this. Well, I just decided to, you know, pop into my kind of my my scientific search engine, Google scholar. COVID and procrastination. And I think, well, how many articles could there be in like one year on that topic? Because, you know, people would have to gather the research and then publish it and they would still have to get the print. So I I can believe it be oh yeah, there'd be maybe about a dozen. came up with 3,220. Wow. So yeah, it's a thing. It's a thing. Right? And of course it is. It's actually natural that when we became motivated and productive, it we start putting our it into our routines, the framework, the world around us. We don't even notice it, but it's a good thing. Right? You have a, you know, an exercise class, you do it a certain time, you have an environment which cues you to work. All these things, they call it social scaffolding. And when you strip that away, all of a sudden, you know, you're back to your raw core. I mean, like I'm watching like Shit's Creek and it's basically Johnny Rose without his money, he has to rebuild it all again, right? So he has the tools and he's doing it, but he's back to square one. So when we take away the environment and everything that has been helping you, it's almost like a little time machine. You're going back to when you're like 21 and you have to kind of, oh, okay. But now this time, you know the problem, you know how to fix it. You just have to do the kind of the work again. It's like an athlete who was in a car accident and their muscles have atrophied and now they have to rebuild them again. They have all the experience of the first time. It's totally unfair, isn't it? I mean, we did all that work, got our routines and productivity and things were humming and then we get completely undeservingly back to well not square one, but way back to where we actually now have to figure things out again. get the routines, build new habits. It's annoying. Yeah, I think it's stronger probably for the people that are new to work from home, right? Because I saw a lot of people asking for advice and a lot of people dispensing advice on work from home productivity tactics. And one that that I think is relevant here on this is sort of setting for when you're working and people would suggest, you know, actually putting on work clothes as a as sort of a mental trigger for getting you into the head space of working. or having a dedicated space where you only work. I think for people that haven't had that in the past, there's so much blend between the personal and business that there's probably a lack of those mental cues to get them into the head space. Is that part of it? Yeah, you you brought up actually two, you know, established scientific techniques there. One is triggers or cues. And at a certain hour, it's like your dog doesn't give a damn about daylight savings time. What do you mean it's not dinner? Right? Feels like dinner. Where's my dinner? And the same type of thing, we're cute. They they they don't they can't read a clock, but they know it's dinner time. So how does that happen? And the same thing as us. We know like for example, we have triggers that certain times of days, certain types of environments trigger us for certain types of behaviors. And sometimes it's sitting down in front of your work desk or, you know, having seeing other people and it's getting dressed up. And now that's all stripped away and all of a sudden, I intellectually know I should be working, but I'm motivationally, you know, open, you might think. I am now capable of, you know, choosing many more tasks than I are ideal. And the other one you brought up was the workspace. It's, you know, having a dedicated workspace, which is kind of like a cue too. It's related to it. But it's the idea is that when you know people will have a office computer and a home computer and when you do it your home computer, you enjoy yourself. And now that is you're trying to make that into your work computer and it doesn't doesn't fly quite as easy as you like. If you can, I always recommend getting a separate laptop or a separate desktop or and ideally a separate location. For some people, it's just sitting on the other side of the kitchen table if they have to. I imagine all the people who are now kind of encountering ergonomic problems as they finally realize, hey, Yeah. It made sense to have that chair and that desk at this certain angle. I was just thought it was all a BS. But you know, if you do it eight hours a day for weeks on end, you're going to find that's inappropriate. Same type of thing though with motivation. So you mentioned kind of the a bit of that fatigue mechanism as well. I'm wondering, you know, maybe for the first three or four months or five months even, people, they were fairly adapted at this. You know, it takes a month or two to kind of get online, but then there's a comfort or a routine that people naturally find in this. And I wonder if a part of the reason and and maybe to bring this to myself as a as sort of an N of one study as well, is as time goes on and you know, people's pandemic fatigue sets in, is that going to be also a detractor from our productivity because, you know, the mental fatigue and inability to focus and and sort of knuckle down and do the things that we need to. Is our productivity going down as we sort of wrestle through the pandemic? Well, a lot of people are reporting exhaustion. The and that has to impact productivity. It's they're just too tightly linked. So you you'd see that as a early warning more as a final, but it does lead to lower productivity. But even if you were just as productive, but if you're feeling exhausted, that is worth addressing. The everything that when having high energy, having optimism, feeling of buoyancy, that's pretty much the foundation for happiness, for feeling good about your life. And when you're feeling tired and worn down, that leads to depression. So, you know, regardless of productivity, yeah, we we should definitely address this. And, you know, there is a lot done in this. It's deposits and withdrawals at the simplest level. So, are you doing things that increase your energy level and then are what are you doing that kind of sucks it away? And for a lot of people, it's when they feel happiness, when they feel recuperated, it's got to deal with having time with friends. It's a simple thing, but virtually nobody in the world can make it without a community. And if you don't have a few people that you feel you can go to and talk about anything. I think you need up to two. And at least one, but two. And after that, you know, you don't brag. Yeah, the one person may grow a little tired of your complaints after a while. So you share the love around. Yeah. That's why you have two. Right. But yeah, and then you can feel better about it. There's a there's a lot of work. It hasn't really been transferred that well into popular fiction, but there's a lot of work on recuperation. And what type of tasks that actually does make you feel kind of re-energized. And one of them, one of the big ones, and we might focus on is psychological detachment. which means are you getting out of your mind space from work? And boy, if you're working at home, ain't that hard. Right. So yeah, yeah, come on. this isn't ideal, but I guess we're here to talk about is like how to play our cards that being dealt to us a little bit better. And we're all going through this. And no matter, usually, no matter how bad you have it, you know, there's always somebody's worse. That's for sure. Yeah, I think the some of the ones that I I've seen and and maybe you can add to this, but certainly exercise. Like exercise has been huge for me. I've never really been one that was like heavy into working out, but that sort of the last year or so, I've I've become like an adamant exercise person. and just really focusing on that as a daily thing. Yeah, daily. Yeah, pretty much. Even to the extent of like one of the ones that I've seen is like if you're feeling kind of lethargic and just, you know, unmotivated to to dig into work, just simply taking a walk around the block. Like getting some sun exposure, just getting your legs moving. I think that's a big one. What are some of the other ones that can be sort of those positive attributions or the positive contributions to the bank that we need? Well, let's slow down actually. There's a lot more that can be done with with that walk around the block. I was just finished teaching my an MBA class on this. And one of the students had a was using it in a brilliant way. So, the thing is about triggering your you need a trigger, you need a cue to get you to work. You're going to work. You know, you get in your car or you take the bus or you bicycle. During that process, the entire process is a segue from your just regular self to your work self. And what she was doing, she was getting up, she was getting dressed, at least somewhat, enough to go outside, which is a big step, and walking around the block. and then coming back home. And she said that worked great. I tried. It does. It's actually it's a great way to start the day. Like a virtual commute, right? A virtual commute. Walk around the block. If you're feeling jiggy with it, do two blocks, right? The, you know, very small step. And that is kind of gets your kind of going and it's certainly I myself don't take enough breaks from my work. that when I'm concentrating, I just go for it and just because it's so hard to get into. But the idea here is, yeah, exercise. The one thing I like about exercise is is that I got we got in the habit, my wife and I of doing it online. taking one of those online and you don't need a lot. You don't it it actually makes it like you get in, you put on your clothing, it takes like a five minutes, you go down and get your space together. And a lot of the classes are half an hour and 40 minutes, right? 30, you know, if you want to get the cool down and it's just like it is, you know, start at 11:30 and you're ready for lunch by, you know, 12:10. And it's easy. It's easy to fit in. So yeah, I do that a lot too, a lot more than I actually had done earlier because you you got to leave at a certain time, try and get to the gym at a certain time, get the lot it became a more of production. This when you just is in your same house and you just go for it, it's actually really enjoyable. I was surprised actually how well that worked. Yeah, I've been big on Apple Fitness. I've been using the the Fitness Plus system for kind of those pre-recorded workouts and they're fresh every week, but where I started was just doing YouTube videos. where for high intensity interval training, hit workouts every day. And that that was sort of my justification is if if I cannot create 15 to 20 minutes to do some simple exercises through the course of the day, that's not a function of me not having time for it, it's a matter of prioritization. And that's one of the things I like I hate it when people one of my sort of my little catch phrases is ban busy, right? Like busy is just not a term that's useful. It's usually a matter of prioritization. And if you actually focus on the things that you need to and create space for prioritization, whether it be your work or your your exercise routine, I think that makes a big difference, right? It does. There there is plenty of ways that we can get an extra 40 minutes in the day. Especially if you're watching three hours of Netflix every day. Right? You do have the time. I don't watch three hours. More like an hour. Yeah. But, yeah, my wife does good life like Instagram fitness elements and it's like it there's a lot of selection, a lot of community. I was surprised of actually how well that worked. I'm going to continue with that part. I'm still going to go to the gym like a day a week. There's a great fitness guru that I go to. Pete Ester Brooks. And but it's been really hard on these we're going to get a little tangent here. really hard on the these fitness professionals during this time rather it has been on everybody. So, I'm just going to add it to my repertoire of things to do. But the idea when you said of making about 40 minutes or so and it's about prioritization. It's also about time restriction. It's about work can expand to fill the time you give it. And actually setting apart some time, some people call that the unschedule where you actually the first thing you put in your schedule is your exercise moment. Actually, you're you're find yourself being more productive giving yourself less time. It's a paradoxical intervention. So, if you're having trouble with getting things done and you don't have enough time, one of the solutions is to give yourself even less time. And that works so well. It's kind of like, where's the downside for it? There is none. You will have more time to do what you want, you'll have more energy and but you have to start at least by kind of doing some time blocking and saying, okay, this is how much I'm going to be giving myself to do this because and there's a variety of scientific elements for that if you want to talk about them. Well, I am curious like on time restriction. So, like can you just set an artificial timeline for yourself? Because I've used this to great effect. I was working on a course a while ago that took a lot longer than I had wanted it to, just quite frankly because of procrastination. And then I went and booked a videographer for a specific time and then I knew I had to finish it before that date. So I basically gave myself kind of a month and a half to finish the course. And I found that was incredibly effective. I was never more productive in the whole time that I was building that course in that last month and a half. But if you just set an artificial date with yourself saying like this needs to be completed by X, you know, similar to like a due date in a to-do system, that doesn't necessarily carry the same weight. Is is there something you can add to that to keep a guarantee with yourself versus some external measure? Yeah, well there there's a lot of confusion between goal planning and goal striving. So, they're usually a three-stage system. And they all have separate psychophysics. So, when you decide that you're going to take on a goal, it's that's great, but then all of a sudden you have to plan about how to do it and then you actually have to do things during the moment when you're goal striving that makes sense as well. And people don't really differentiate that as you're going along this path towards getting stuff done. that you have to change it. What got you on the train doesn't move the train along. In this case, you know, usually it's just because there's a we choose take on goals, believe it or not because there's some type of payoff that we think we can get. Good. I think it's a good that's a good criteria. There's no one going to come that's rational. But when we actually start to try and go for a goal or strive for it, it's more about the energy level you have the day, whether you have a line of sight goal, whether you have a good concrete idea of what you're doing. And you know, some people actually go into the neurobiology of this and talk about the limbic system versus the prefrontal cortex. And they're they're 100% right, but it's that's not always a useful level decomposition for a lot of people. But it's it's nice to know that you can drill down and say, yeah, this is the way our brains are designed. There should be an owner's manual with it, but you weren't given one. So you're you're trying to you're trying to you're basically got a huge IKEA set and you don't know what it is and the instructions are lost. So just keep trying basically, right? Keep trying. That's right. You touched on an interesting point. It's another one that I've I've heard that I've actually also found really useful is instead of focusing on high productivity, which when I was younger was sort of what I tried to achieve and you know, I I certainly I probably touched a couple of points of burnout in my life, but I I'd never kind of had the full meltdown that I've seen other people have. Luckily. But nowadays I'm more focused on energy management. where like there are certain days where I'm really full of energy and and ready to kind of take on the world and I and I I make sure that I make space to be as productive as those days. Yeah, they're awesome. But those days I can be as productive as I can be. And other days I just if I'm not into it, I I try not to force myself. And I think that the so the difficulty is not excusing yourself to say, oh, I'm just having a low energy day and you know, day after day you make that excuse. But really just kind of capitalizing on that energy when you have it to be as productive as possible and just recognize you're going to have those ebbs and flows, right? Yeah, that's right. That actually, my wife is a big Brene Brown fan. And she talks about 50% days. 100% days are easy. But how can you make use of your 100% of your 50%? That is the question because it's going to be a lot more 50% days than 100% days. And you know, that's even in relationships. You know, being able to say something, you know what, this is a 50% day, everything seems to be getting at me. I'm going to need a little more space. And being able to have that conversation with your partner is great, but it's also now having that conversation with yourself. You know, stuff has to get done, but the internal hanging on as an uncompleted task, that goes back to William James, but if you want something more recent, I'd say, you know, Dave Allen get things done says pretty much the same thing. But it's here, I got I got the quote, yeah. Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. It's William James and he's basically the origin source of psychology. He's the one who who really got it going and the great William James, a lot of people talk about him. It's 100 years ago, so it's okay if you don't know him. But yeah, the idea here is again, how to get more 100% days and then also how to use your 50% days effectively. Yeah. So, you hit on another one of my sort of favorite themes here is the distinction between sort of task collection and task execution. I find a lot of people will live religiously out of their calendar or they focus very heavily on a task list and I think that both of those things are great and important, but unless they're combined, I find that it's really ineffective as one as a single source. So, you know, and I think you nailed it with that quote that most people I think that don't like task lists are beaten down by the psychology of not completing as many things as they want or having to carry those things over. Like I use a GTD system called Omnifocus and I have literally hundreds of to-do tasks in there. Some of them have due dates and some of them don't. A lot of them don't. But it's just the fact that I collect that stuff and the things that do have a due date, if I find that they're lingering and I'm not completing them, I make a specific time to execute them on the calendar. So I think the combination of saying, I will do this task at this time, rather than I have 10 tasks, I only completed two today, so I'm a failure. I think that's the distinction is I've tried to make myself a lot more comfortable with carrying tasks over and not judging myself for that, as long as I feel like I've gotten some things done in the day, right? Yeah, and you're always going to hit the planning fallacy. Yes. Which is that things take two or three times as long as you actually think. Right. So, you're planning and you're not getting things done as much things done as you thought and that is 100% normal. That is as expected. So, the only thing about this is you have to watch out for yourself because it's so easy to lie. So to ourselves. To ourselves. Yes. And you know, and it's like, you know, I'm I don't have the energy. I'm going to reduce my expectations. It's okay for me to put things over. And yes, that if you're honest with yourself, that's true, but you can also use that instrumentally. So, really what happens here is is what happened first? Was it the decision to to delay came first and then the justifications because that is bad. If the reasons come first and then it's okay, you know, I'm going to have to schedule this till tomorrow. That's fine. You know, crap happens, right? You know. But sometimes you think at the beginning that you're being honest with yourself and then later you realize you're not. You know, and that's an ongoing conversation we have. Again, that's normal. We try to minimize that, but the thing is is that you're never done. It's not like it's a process. It's like enlightenment. Enlightenment is more of a process. It's not like, oh, I got my enlightenment thing. Now I'm enlightened. Done. What's next? You have to keep it up. You have to maintain it. It's a state of mind which there are certain practices which help you stay in that state of mind. Same type of thing with productivity. We go in and out of it. And it can be kind of very difficult. There's even Stephen King who found it incredibly difficult to get back to writing after his car accident. He didn't really wasn't sure if he could write again. It took him a long time to actually get back in the state of mind where it all kind of start flowing and and working. So it is. It's it's it's almost like a self self-hypnosis. We have to our part of all that we can be that has to be fostered and nurtured and put forth. starting some of those simple tasks, I find is a good primer. If you have a a quick win that you can give yourself in the morning just to feed the the productivity juices, I've seen that as a good suggestion. This thin edge of the wedge. Like, all right, it starts in front for most of us starts in front of the computer. How are you going to get in front of that computer? That's your first goal. And a reasonable one. If you're struggling to just show up at the desk, then maybe you have more severe problems, I suppose, but So that may be I could see just going through, although I dislike it scanning your email might be useful that way. Though I tend to be a advocate for power hours. If you can start and if you can really work, and this is where time restriction also kind of dovetails nicely. If you can really work hard for when you have the most energy and for some people that's three, four hours a day. Yeah. You can outperform and let's say the rest of the day you are not productive. You're just you can usually outperform most other people by just doing using your peak power hours and having focused activity during them. And after that it can all be dreck. But again, that's an advantage of time restriction. Yeah, do you view time restriction and time blocking differently? Well, they're related. Right. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the the sort of the first points that I when I'm consulting with people is to help them out with is when they're sort of struggling to get things accomplished or to be able to focus on something because, you know, naturally there's distractions that just sort of pop up and seem like they require your attention. And, you know, the things that are important and not urgent will always sort of fall to the way side unless you actually create some time to say, I'm actually going to work on this and I can't be disturbed. So Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., I'm reserved this time. I've made a meeting with myself in order to focus on these things because otherwise you know, you never find time. You have to make time for the things that you feel are important, right? Yeah, or the other side of that, there's an infinite amount of work to do. Right. Let's say, you know, you have something and you want to market it. There's no point, oh, I've done marketing, check. No, you can you can do an infinite amount of marketing. There's no end to marketing. There's, you know, if you're writing, there's no end to revisions. Anything can expand and become bigger. But that's so you have to put artificial limits on most things. And because you're now going into artificial limits, add with time, well, what you've done is you've caught a deadline. And you can think about how many times you yourself have to be somewhere. You got a hard stop at 5 o'clock and you got a big problem. How productive were you like in a 45 minutes before that, you know, oh, I got to go. I got to, you know, one more minute, one more minute. And it's amazing what you're doing there. And so we're trying to capture that. like earlier in the day, at different parts of the day. This is all the the joys of goal setting. And you have to and then now you're setting yourself for for goal setting, right? Because that works. So I said, well, I need a goal. I need a time. Well, that's really good when you start structuring your work and saying this is what I'm doing this hour. And instead of like instead of doing work, I'm doing this task. And so you have to have a list of tasks. So now you have to organize your stuff. Or else you're floundering. I play around with this. I'm very instrumental regarding this. So I know a lot of these tools. And I find that sometimes I don't really need them. And things are going really well. And then I'm going well at some point in my life, I'm either overcommitted or uncommitted. I'm never perfectly committed. That doesn't exist. It's like you're either early or you're late. The number of times you're perfectly on time, very few. So, when I'm undercommitted, I can relax, I can do these things. It's something I'm familiar with. I know the process. I don't need a lot of apparatus to get it done. And but when I'm overcommitted, there's a moment where I have to kind of think, okay, I have to there I know a way of using this. I've got to break it down into particular tasks, get my time management done, or else I'm floundering and I'm not happy. And there's sometimes a moment in between there where I haven't decided to pick it up yet and I'm I'm just like everyone else. You know, heart surgeons still get heart attacks, right? And for the same reasons. So, but the thing is that when it's difficult for yourself, when you aren't coping, there's stuff you can do. That's it. But if you and it's not just us, I mean, if you go back, people have been toying and figuring this out for like millennia. We've gotten a lot better at it, I think in the last 100 years. Before then it was all, you know, it was all kind of word of mouth and there's not has been a lot of refinement and exactly how well it works. But you know, you got people like Mark Twain talking about secret success is getting started and to get started, you take large tasks and break them down into small pieces. This enough sound familiar, right? Right. So, it's we've been know we've everyone kind of figures this out to some extent. We just made it more professional. Yeah. Yeah, the breaking tasks down into smaller bite-sized pieces, I think definitely is another important tip that saves you from overwhelm. Yeah, overwhelm. That's the one thing that actually kind of gums up my works the most is grading. It's not my happy place. Oh my god, how am I going to get all of this accomplished? Well, one task at a time, right? I think most people don't realize, let's say you have a class of 25 and you signed a couple of assignments and one of the big essay at the end of 15 pages. I've also just assigned myself a 400 page, I would say intermittently well written. That's fair. That's right. document that I have to go through line by line. And it's like a book you didn't buy but are you're going to have to read very carefully. That's difficult to do. So you have to kind of break it down, all right, so many pages because I have to create the motivation. Right? And then, you know, I do things like I think about the person on the other end of it and that they want their work evaluated well and there's a lot of things I have to layer on that. But this is what we do when motivation isn't there. And it's not there for a lot of us when we're in quarantine. Right. So, what are some of the areas of interest that you're exploring in your research now or with your students? Well, the one thing that I'm doing right now is that what caused me to be this kind of motivation procrastination expert despite my own shortcomings. is that I'm really good at systematic review and a form of research called meta-analysis. And in fact, that was the entire source of the book when was in a 2000 paper in the nature of procrastination where I took everything. Well, the field's about 10 times as big as then. So I've been developing this online platform which helps massive groups of scientists get together to metaze and summarize these topics. I'm revisiting procrastination and seeing all that's being done and getting a start at making an update. So these things have to be done periodically. I've got other ones like on paradoxical leadership and the culture of nations and happy of nations. I'm kind of eclectic in my interest, but that's the advantage of being a professor as long as I produce and I'm allowed to be curious. It's not exactly ideal. I think if you just wanted to be focused completely on productivity, you choose just one or two topics and you just focus on that like a passion. But so it's a luxury good having multiple interests, but that's what I'm up to. Again, one of the keys to productivity is feeding your interests, right? If you just focused on one topic that you were no longer interested, you probably wouldn't be as productive. That's a good point. Thank you for that. That's just that's post talk justification. Yeah, there you go. But it's the uh there is one that's relevant, another one relevant. We're doing one on free writing and social loafing. Is that a combined term? Social like No, no, yeah, it's we're using the synonyms. It's basically you got a team, a virtual team in this case, and one person's not pulling their weight. Ah, common problem in in in college and university settings for sure. Yeah, very common. Yeah. So, it's actually not bad to have one social loafer, one free rider in your team. It doesn't everyone pulls together and they compensate. It's when you have two, two or more, it's really starts having effect because other people feel it's called the sucker effect. Right. You don't want to feel like a chump. And so you start withholding your efforts and it slides down towards the bottom. So it's like the systems, our internal systems, we have a certain level of resistance to, I would say even corruption. But once it gets beyond a certain tipping point, it all falls apart. We there's people in the middle who are kind of go there's a lot of people who go with the whatever the majority is. Right. So if the majority is productive, they're productive. But if people are free writing, they said screw this, I'm not going to enable their success. So what's the logic? I'm curious about this. The single social loafer does not have a dominant negative effect. It's just a slightly negative or a neutral effect. Yeah, slightly. They they they have their contributions are absent. So that's damaging. But they it's not doesn't affect other people's workloads. People actually will kind of work even work a little harder to make up for that one person. Okay, because that's sort of what I was wondering if there was some sort of odd positive benefit to having a single loafer. Like that it makes others work harder. Well, and it also can create some team comradery. We we like it when there is somebody who's an outsider and makes us inside. Uh, interesting. Okay. But you once you have two people and they're reinforcing and they are normalizing their lack of contribution. It starts to go downhill. Huh, because then it's more like which team are you going to be on, the suckers or the the loafers? That's right, yeah, exactly. Interesting. Okay, cool. All right. Well, we'll look to wrap up. Pierce, always fascinating. I love our chats as I'm obsessed with productivity and sometimes why we're we wish we could be more productive. So, really appreciate your time and being on the podcast again. Oh, my pleasure. All right. Take care.