To the thought leader who never logs off

In 1998, a landmark workplace study found that the average U.S. office worker sends or receives more than 201 messages a day.

Phones, email, post it notes, pagers, postal mail, and more…

A Princeton labor economist summed it up like this:

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"It's gotten far more difficult to measure where work ends and leisure begins."

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That was 1998.

Today, the number is closer to 300.

But back then, a message arrived in your physical inbox a handful of times per day.

Now your phone is buzzing every two minutes.

And according to researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus after a single interruption.

So if you do the math, 300 touch points a day, one coming every two minutes, 30 minutes to recover, no one’s really focusing on anything. We’re all just recovering from the last notification.

Then there’s George Bernard Shaw.

An Irish playwright, Nobel Prize winner, and one of the sharpest minds of the 20th century.

Born in Dublin in 1856, he wrote more than 60 plays, reformed how people thought about theater, economics, women's rights, education, and somehow still found time to be brilliantly funny about all of it.

He said:

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"I have become rich and famous by thinking a couple of times a week. Most people never think at all."

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These days, most people never think at all, not because they don't want to, but because they never have a chance to stop.

The rate things are changing, who has time?

You barely finish one notification before the next one arrives. In those few quiet moments stolen away between work and evening, that's when some of our best ideas actually have room to show up.

But most of us never get there.

Because we never log off.

Here's a quick build-in-public update. I recently mentioned my list growth has slowed down a bit over the past couple weeks. And there’s a good reason for that. I’ve been head-down automating almost everything in my business that was stealing my attention throughout the day.

Nothing was broken.

Everything was working as planned. But only because I was manually keeping all the plates spinning, jumping through tab hoops, and reacting to all the right notifications in a timely fashion. Well eventually I said screw this… I’m automating it.

Now I’ve got much more time to think.

That’s the reason I scheduled twice as many posts to Threads this week as I normally do.

I had the extra time.

That’s the reason I went of town last weekend, I had the extra time. And that’s the reason for today’s email, I’ve got some extra time on my hands, and I’m wondering if there’s something in your business that you wish was more automated?

Something that didn’t take so long, or take up so much time, so you could free up yourself to work on higher leverage tasks?

Instead of simply making it through another day of context switching hell.

Instead of taking another Sunday evening just to “catch up” before the week begins.

The type of things that if they were off your plate, it would free you up to focus on the creative work that you can only do when you’re not living in a permanent state of recovery.

Write back and let me know.

I’d love to know, because I’ve got something cooking up in the background that just might help you take a few hours of undesirable tasks off your plate so you can finally breathe.

I'm genuinely curious what that looks like for you.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood

P.S. If something specific comes to mind, I'd love to hear it. Worst case I point you in the right direction.