Chris Bailey is obsessed with cracking the productivity code. He has meditated for 35 hours in a single week, watched 300 TED Talks back to back, and worked 90-hour weeks — all to stress-test the science of human productivity and focus.
In this interview, he shares what he learned: productivity isn’t about doing more, it’s about managing three finite ingredients — your time, attention, and energy — with greater intention.
He introduces his own framework for connecting daily actions to the values that actually drive you, and explains why most goals fail not from lack of willpower, but from a misalignment with what you fundamentally care about.
But what does that look like day-to-day? Bailey has some practical tools like aversion journaling and goal inventories, but also believes that your best ideas come from letting your mind wander on purpose.
About the speaker: Chris Bailey is an author and lecturer who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. His books include The Productivity Project, Hyperfocus, and Intentional.
Timestamps
00:00:13 Chapter 1: Intentionality and how it shapes our goals
00:02:17 The “Intention Stack” explained
00:08:46 Characteristics of intention
00:14:45 Chapter 2: Why values are essential to goal attainment
00:16:01 How to define your values and embrace them
00:24:09 Chapter 3: How to follow through on goals
00:25:35 Why SMART goals don’t work
00:27:06 The four steps to actually accomplishing your goals
00:33:15 What causes procrastination and how to combat it
00:41:36 How to maintain momentum on your goals
00:45:22 Chapter 4: Focus in the age of distraction
00:51:40 How to achieve hyperfocus
00:57:13 The benefit of letting your mind wander
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
My name is Chris Bailey and I’m the author of Intentional: How to Finish What You Start and Hyperfocus.
Chapter 1: Intentionality and how it shapes our goals
There’s a lot of productivity advice out there, but for every minute you spend reading about it or listening to somebody talking about it or watching some video, about somebody talking about it, you have to make that time back and then some. And not all productivity advice falls into that category. A lot of it’s just fluff. A lot of it’s kind of, you know, stuff that sounds good in theory, but doesn’t really hold water in practice.
And what I’ve found is that the best advice that tends to come, rather predictably, from a few places The first is the research. It’s the academic literature about human performance, especially in the workplace. But there’s also the experimental aspect. So, I love using myself as almost a human guinea pig so that I can push on the limits of what I’m able to accomplish, mentally and physically, each and every day. So these experiments have spanned the gamut from working 90-hour weeks to watching 300 TED Talks in a week to meditating for 35 hours over the course of a week. All to push on these boundaries and get to the bottom of what’s the secret to being productive.
And, since I can remember, I’ve always had the same answer, which is that being more productive is a process of becoming more intentional about how we spend our time, our attention, and our energy, which I see as the three ingredients of productivity.
When it comes to the goals that we attain, intention matters more than any other factor in determining whether we’ll attain our goals.
You know, there’s that quote from Wayne Gretzky where “we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take,” even though there’s a 1-5% probability of us scoring. And intention is the same way, right? There’s the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The “Intention Stack” explained
But yet, whenever we do find ourselves having achieved something that we set out to do, there was always an intention behind it. This is pictured beautifully, I think, in the “Intention Stack.” The different layers of intention that are in our life are almost stacked on top of one another.
At the top here, you’ll see our values, which are these broader, deeper motivations that we have in our life. Values sit at the top of the Intention Stack for a big, big reason. They’re the ultimate intentions that we’re after in our life.
Underneath that are the priorities that we have, right? Becoming healthier, make more money, whatever the priorities might look like. Then we have our goals, our traditional goals, which are these broader stories, narratives of change that we’re driving forward in our life.
Beneath our goals, you’ll see our plans, right? The plans that make our goals a reality. And then finally, at the bottom, we have our present intentions.
So, for example, maybe you have a goal of running a marathon, but that might lead to certain plans that you have further down the Intention Stack, which might be run this number of miles or kilometers this week and then that might flow into the present intentions the daily intentions that you have to go for a run after lunch today. But when you look up the Intention Stack, you’ll see that the goal that you have to run a marathon, it can fit with your priorities and your values as well. So it might fit with the priority of becoming healthier, for example. It might fit with your broader value of accomplishment. And so this completes the full stack of what this goal means to you. It’s not just about the goal, it’s about what the plans are that the goal leads to and the daily actions that it will lead to as well. It’s about the priorities that it fits with the broader values that are in your life that it fits with too.
And so we need all of these different layers of intentionality. A goal is not enough. We need our values. We need our daily actions as well. And in this way, a goal becomes the route that our daily actions can take to connect with who we are. So we don’t always achieve our intentions. But when we do achieve something, there was intention behind it.
And that’s why intentionality is so critical to shape, right? It’s a skill that we can get better at. We can incrementally improve our ability to shape our intentions, to deepen our intentions, to align them with the values that we have, to overcome the aversion that we have to doing them, to beat the procrastination that leads us to put them off. And best yet, over time, we can make them more aligned with our values and who we are.
One of the things that surprised me about the nature of intentionality, going deep into the research on it, is that there’s two types of intentions.
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