Shaan explains his “unscheduled life” philosophy — deleting everything from his calendar and doing the most important or interesting thing in the moment. Sam pushes back, asks the hard questions, and Shaan walks through maker vs. manager schedules, his one-big-thing morning routine, how to reclaim your calendar gradually, and the barbell strategy for relationships (quick texts plus full-day hangs, nothing in between).
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Unscheduled Life — What Is It? [00:00:00]
Sam: Shaan, you tweeted something that made me incredibly envious. You said “the joy of living an unscheduled life,” and it kind of pissed me off because I want that. I know you got a lot of messages about it — one of our friends emailed you and said something like, “Dude, how on Earth do you have this unscheduled life?” I have the same question. Tell me everything. How can you get so much done by having nothing on your calendar?
Shaan: Let’s do a definition. What do I mean when I say the unscheduled life?
All it means is this: today, right now, even next hour — you are going to do the most important or interesting thing to you right now. Not what you thought might be the most important thing two weeks ago when somebody put something on your calendar. That’s how I used to live. I’d wake up and look at what’s on my calendar and think: wait, why is the calendar in charge? Where did this even come from? Oh, this is a meeting I agreed to two weeks ago, or it’s a recurring one-on-one that’s not necessarily the thing I think I should be investing my time and energy into. It’s not where my brain is. It’s not what I have inspiration on.
So what I did was I went to my calendar and just clicked delete, delete, delete, delete. And I said: I’m going to live an unscheduled life.
Meaning — if you want to call me — I tweeted out a text exchange yesterday. Somebody was like, “Dude, this is awesome, we’re having a good text chat. I’d love to jam on this sometime. Maybe next week?” And I just said: I’m free, call me right now. Because we’re in the moment, we’re both inspired by this right now. Why would we wait a week and let that inspiration go? Inspiration is perishable. It’s like an avocado — it turns brown.
Sam: What were you doing when they started texting you?
Shaan: At that moment I was texting them. But in general I didn’t have a thing I had to do. I have what I call blocks of time.
Maker vs. Manager Schedule [00:04:00]
Shaan: Have you ever read the Paul Graham post on maker versus manager schedule? It’s a must-read for anybody who wants to build anything, or for any creator — whether you’re a content creator, an engineer, a writer, whatever.
I’m able to live the unscheduled life because I’m not a manager anymore. I’m not operational anymore. But that didn’t happen by accident. If you look at a manager schedule versus a maker schedule: a manager schedule is what you described — a zebra calendar, every 30 minutes there’s something on there, usually put there by your assistant or an employee or a partner or a sales call that gets booked. You hop from thing to thing to thing, constantly switching. For me that was exhausting. I felt busier than ever and less productive than ever.
The maker schedule basically says: break your day into a couple of parts. You have a morning sprint, an afternoon sprint, maybe a nighttime sprint. A sprint is roughly 90 minutes to two hours. You might block three hours because you’re going to put around a little before you actually get into it, but in reality you’re probably only going to be productive for about 90 minutes. Then you take a break. And you work on the thing that is most interesting to you or most important to you right now — the thing you want to throw your entire creative being into.
What that leaves is a bunch of free time. So when that guy was like “hey this is interesting,” I have open space I can fill with whatever is the most interesting thing in the moment. It’s kind of like a Zen way of being present.
Sam: During that 90-minute sprint, what part of your home are you sitting in? Who’s around you?
Shaan: I have a place I go to — my special place. For me that’s my office. I also have a bedroom I can go to if I’ve been in the office and just need to switch. And I go on walks. Three venues, each with its own purpose.
This office is for creativity — I’ve got the whiteboard, the camera, my big monitor. The bedroom has an Eames lounge chair, so if I’m doing reading I’ll go there. And I set a timer. I time-box everything. I’ll say: there’s 90 minutes, and I stated up front what I’m going to work on. But the calendar has tons of open space outside of those two or three sprints. The rest could be family time, exercise, a call, lunch with somebody — anything. Because you have that free time, you actually get more stuff done even though your calendar looks less productive.
The One Big Thing [00:09:00]
Sam: Where are you keeping your to-dos or your ideas? A lot of times people use their calendar as a to-do list.
Shaan: I don’t have a list. I have two things. I have the big thing — I call it my one big thing. The question I ask myself in the morning is: what’s the one outcome that, if I just did that one thing, this day would be a win?
Part of my morning routine is I set that out. I ask: what is one thing that if I did it, I wouldn’t have to do anything else for this day to still be a win?
Whereas what most people do is: what are all the things I have to do today? Or they look at the last five emails they got: oh, I got to do that now. It becomes this long checklist. But all to-dos are not created equal. So I proactively figure out what’s the one big thing, set that out, do that thing, and then anything else I do that day is gravy.
Sam: What do you say to someone who’s like, “Dude, I have to do these things — I don’t have the same job as you. I can’t just play around all day, I’ve got to do important stuff that people are telling me to do.”
Shaan: There are two ways to look at it. First, are you a manager, operator, or a creator/builder/producer of some kind?
I was a product manager. I had meetings I had to be in, one-on-ones, standups. I couldn’t just say “hey guys, I’m going to create some open space.” That wasn’t an acceptable thing. But even then, I knew I wanted to move towards this. So the first thing is: you decide how you want your life to be.
What I did was carve out a single day. I said: I can have as many meetings and a shitty calendar four out of five days a week — but on Thursdays, that’s my day. Thursdays are sacred. I did that for one day. Then I added Tuesdays. Then I was able to say: okay, I’m so productive on Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is a good method. Now, how do I get myself into a role where this is my default work style?
You work towards that. You set that agenda and figure out: okay, it might not be something I can go full 100% on today, but nine months from now I can work towards it. Tell your boss, tell your team — this is how I’m going to organize things. I’m going to do all my meetings only on Mondays and leave the other four days clear for highest-impact work.
Show Me Your Calendar [00:15:00]
Shaan: Have you ever heard the Charlie Munger thing where he says show me your incentives and I’ll show you your outcome?
Sam: Yeah, that’s good.
Shaan: I have another version of that: show me your Google Calendar and I’ll show you your priorities. People will say all kinds of things — “Oh yeah, this year I really care about getting in shape.” Cool. Show me your calendar. Where are your workouts? Where’s your meal plan? Or: “My goal is to really get this project off the ground.” Awesome. How are you going to do that when 89% of your calendar is filled with other stuff?
Show me your calendar and I’ll tell you what your priorities are. You should literally take a screenshot of your Google Calendar, show it to somebody, and say: if all you saw was my next two weeks, what would you say are this person’s priorities? What is this person going to accomplish? What type of outcomes will they get in their life?
Sam, what are the top three most important priorities in your life right now — not like “the health of my family” or generic stuff. I mean shifts or changes you’re trying to make, things where you’re going to need to put in new effort to get a new result. What are the top three?
Sam: Working out early in the morning instead of during the day, so I can just get it out of the way — 7 a.m. exercising. Second is wrapping up by 6 p.m. so I can be present with family. And third is focusing on content, because if I grow my audience I can continue growing my company.
Shaan: Most people will not have that level of clarity. Part of the reason you have the success you have is that clarity. If you ask most people what are the top three priority changes they’re trying to make in their life, it’s not at the tip of the tongue. And if it’s not at the front of your mind, you’re pretty unlikely to be prioritizing it. Change is not so easy that it’ll happen without you thinking about it.
I think it’s normal to go through funks. The reason we talked about misogi — doing some really hard challenge — is that I had a kid five months ago, and for three months leading up to it and five months after, you go through a period where you’re kind of sleepwalking through life. Doing the same thing every day, being a little bit less purposeful, more reactive. I like to revisit my priorities quarterly. If I do it annually, I found myself sleepwalking at month six.
Sam: You’ve got to shake yourself out of it. By default you will go into autopilot. It’s easier to be on autopilot. It’s easier to not ask the hard questions of yourself — what actually matters, what am I doing, does my calendar match my priorities, what the hell are my priorities anyway?
Texting Habits and Notifications [00:21:00]
Sam: Okay, you’re weird — because I’ll text you something important and I won’t hear back for like two weeks. I’ll be like, “Shaan, I need you to reply on this, we have to make a decision, it’s important.” And then other times we’ll bring up a random topic like “wouldn’t it be funny if we did X, Y, Z” and you’ll type such long texts, so many of them. I’ll put my phone down for 30 minutes, come back, and you guys have already had this massive brainstorm and made a decision. What’s going on?
Shaan: Text I do get notifications for. Not everything else.
Part of this philosophy is offense, not defense. How do I throw my whole weight into what’s important to me, without being distracted or sidetracked by other people’s priorities?
One of the great quotes — I think Naval said this — is that the news’s job is to make someone else’s problem your problem. That’s what they’re trying to do. In Alabama there was a shoplifting at a grocery store, and you’re like “oh my god” — you don’t live in Alabama, you weren’t at the grocery store, it doesn’t affect you. But the job of the news is to take that problem that’s not yours and put it on your plate. I’m very conscious of that.
Quick Hitters: Effective vs. Efficient [00:24:00]
Shaan: Let me give you a few quick phrases that are very helpful to me.
The first is: be effective, not efficient. Most people who want to be productive think about efficiency — how do I get the most done in the least amount of time? Work per unit of time. The problem is it’s easy to mistake motion with progress. Just because you do something well or fast doesn’t make that thing important.
It is far more important to identify what is the right thing to even spend my energy on. I might waste an hour just thinking about that thing before I even put my hands on the keyboard. I focus on effect. I focus on figuring out what is the lever worth pulling. I might be inefficient on the actual execution — I might spend three days on that thing — but as long as I picked the right thing, it was totally worth it. And I did less things overall because I didn’t worry about getting the most amount of stuff done. Stuff is not my goal.
Sam: That morning workout thing — big thing first thing.
Shaan: Yes, big thing first thing. Most of us when we make a to-do list, we procrastinate the big thing and use small things to get momentum. But that means many days you didn’t spend enough time on the important thing, or you didn’t even get around to it.
Big thing first thing is a simple phrase. What’s the big thing? That’s my first thing today. Then you don’t feel like you need to keep working more and more hours because you already got the big thing done at the beginning of your day.
Sam: Dude, it’s so much better to do it in the morning. I don’t ever want to admit this, but Sahil Bloom inspired me to work out. He gets up at 4 every morning and gets after it. And he tweeted something that went right through me — he goes, “I don’t know any losers who work out first thing in the morning.”
Shaan: So true.
Sam: Is there any loser who just wakes up and works out at 7 a.m.? I’ve never met one.
Shaan: I looked at my calendar and thought: the most important thing for me this year is rewiring my habits to be the habits of a healthy person. What are the habits of a healthy person? They wake up and work out. If I looked at my calendar it was like “here’s my workout sandwiched in between two things at 3 p.m.” when it’s most people’s nap time. That’s probably not the ideal time. Why don’t I just start waking up and doing it then?
The Barbell Strategy for Relationships [00:29:00]
Shaan: Last little tip of the unscheduled life.
A lot of people, we’re all looking for love but we settle for connection. We all want awesome relationships with people in our lives, but we settle for 30-minute Zoom calls. Thirty-minute Zoom calls become the default because it’s like the atomic unit — an acceptable ask, an acceptable thing to accept. But it’s death by a thousand 30-minute Zooms. That’s how most people live with other people.
One shift I made — I got this from my buddy John Kuogan — is the barbell strategy. I have a lot of quick text messages with people: just a one-off text, a voice note, a random link, a three-word text about something they did. Quick, casual, lightweight. And then I’ll just go spend the whole day with somebody. I’ll clear my calendar and go spend the day with them.
For example, today my unscheduled life: I have my morning workout and then this podcast. That’s the only thing I had on my calendar. Done with the workout by 8:45, podcast at 9:00. For the rest of the day my calendar is clear.
And I met this guy Luke who was awesome, so I said: Luke, pick any afternoon that’s free for you. I want to drive down to where you are, spend half a day together, go for a walk, talk. You’re fascinating to me. Let’s go hang.
That’s the barbell strategy. A bunch of lightweight text messages, and then let’s spend a full day. Let me fly to you, let’s hang for the day, then I’ll fly back. Carve out time to go deep where you have a real experience with somebody — you go deeper past the surface level. It sounds like an expensive hang, but once you eliminate all the 30-minute Zooms, it really isn’t.
Sam: You’re forgetting one thing. You’re different from me — you’re not bothered easily. I turn off my Twitter DMs, I try not to get my phone number out, because I get overwhelmed with inbound messages from acquaintances wanting to hang out, and I feel immense guilt when I say no.
You do something I think you should fix, which is you agree to stuff and then forget you agreed to it. But that doesn’t bother you. That really bothers me. So I just say no to everything.
Shaan: I agree. There is a trade-off to the unscheduled life. It’s not compatible with people who live a highly scheduled life. The trade-off is you’re not going to reply to every message where someone feels they’re owed a response.
There was a founder in my portfolio who emailed me wanting to get coffee. I genuinely would have been happy to get coffee with this guy — I like him. But I didn’t even think about it because that week my sister-in-law had a baby, my father-in-law went to the ER, I was basically watching the kids at the hospital most of the week.
But even if I wasn’t — I still don’t feel like just because you ask me something, I have to comply. That’s not my religion. That’s not the way I roll.
He got a little annoyed. He said something like “not gonna lie, bit of a turnoff that our investor didn’t want to get coffee.” And I was like: that’s a fair thing to say. But I don’t live my life where I have to do all the things you or anyone else wants me to do. There are a lot of requests. There is a trade-off. There’s a selfishness to it. But I also personally feel it’s selfish for other people to make their priority your priority.
Sam: I struggle with this. People message me and I’ll go to bed thinking “that guy texted me at 10 so I can pretend I’m sleeping, but now I have to figure out what to reply with tomorrow.”
Shaan: The only thing that saves you is charisma. It’s like — you’re a bad boyfriend. Oh he’s such a jerk, but when he’s here, when I do talk to him, he’s totally present. He clearly has good intentions. You sort of salvage it. That’s the only saving grace.
The Disclaimer [00:36:00]
Shaan: Let me say one last thing — here’s the out-of-touch disclaimer.
I started doing this when I was 25 years old and had a job where I was the low man on the totem pole as a product manager. It can be done in any position. If you don’t believe me, go read The 4-Hour Work Week. It’s built around this principle — owning your time, using your time the way you want, delegating and automating, being remote and free to live your life the way you want.
Second: there are real trade-offs. Some people don’t like me. Some people think I’m a flake. Some people think I’m not responsive. That bothers some people. I have to live with that trade-off because I really appreciate the benefits it gives me.
Third: yes, it’s a privilege to be able to do this. However, if it’s a lifestyle you want, work towards it. Ask yourself: what type of job, what type of career, what level of financial independence would I need in order to live that life? Then you can decide if that’s important to you or not.
I decided when I was 24 or 25 that it was important to me. I’m now 35 and it’s manifested itself. It took a decade. It was a shift, a transition over time. Learning how to do anything takes some time. But that’s fine.
Sam: I think you answered the crap out of that question.
Shaan: Is that the pod?
Sam: That’s it.