My Wife's Insane Scheduling Fetish is Out of Control

We reveal the secrets behind how we are able to be so productive in our work, creative projects, parenting, health and more as a couple that collaborates closely together. We explain our philosophies and tactics around ambition, laziness, scheduling, office workflows, life hacking through our marriage partnership, outsourcing, and more.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] And we feel a lot of shame in where we are. Like we're able to enjoy the moment, but we're always like, we're this is not enough, could be doing better. This is not to be. And to have a mindset where you are constantly saying, how can I do better? A lot of people would say that that's toxic and it's bad for your mental health.

Whereas we've actually found that it's great and it contributes significantly to our productiveness, because when people instead are saying, I am enough, it's just enough, that's always an excuse to do less and

Malcolm Collins: not more. Well, I mean, I really genuinely think the world, I mean, more than that, I genuinely believe the world is sort of beginning to collapse around us.

We are heading towards an incredibly dark time as a civilization and that. Most people with agency or the intelligence to fix this are not moving towards fixing it. There is a small group of people who are but what that basically means is that to a large extent, the future of our children and our descendants depends on our ability to set up any.

Sort of viable future for our species like our personal ability to do that Well,

Would you like to [00:01:00] know more?

Simone Collins: One of the things that causes me the most anxiety and you see this all the time is when we drive by a giant office building and it's just packed with people. And I cannot for the life of me, imagine what all these people are doing and businesses are starting to wake up to this.

And just firing huge swaths of their employees because they realize, Oh my gosh, we don't need them because they're not really doing anything. And we've met people too, who are like, yeah, I don't do anything in my job. Like

Malcolm Collins: to, to, to pull on what she's saying here, when she looks at like a giant office building, she's like.

Almost any company in the world can be run by like a hundred people. So why is there a building with thousands of people? You know, honestly, I think most companies in the world can easily be run by a team of 30 to 40 people. With the

Simone Collins: exception of like, imagine, you know, hospitals, those that, you know, that in person staff you need to have, you know.

Oh no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no. So this is different. She's talking about office buildings. You

Simone Collins: know, this, this is different from like Amazon buildings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think the thing is that [00:02:00] a philosophy we have, a realization we've made is that the vast majority of people, and this is both from seeing how organizations are run, but also just observing our friends, our family, colleagues, et cetera, do extremely little.

And then we know a couple, like a handful of people who are very similar to us who are just insanely productive. But

Malcolm Collins: let's go on this. So, so, and this is a, an episode that we are doing right before we're going to be in front of 4 million New Zealanders on, on their, one of their major TV shows. So we are...

Exercising time management right now, because we had to set up all this equipment anyway. But, it was a topic that was spurred to us by an audience member. Who was like, how do you guys have time to like, watch anime and as another recent video did, like, read up on random fictional lore and, All of that, while also staying as educated as you are, and raising as many kids as you're raising, and running a [00:03:00] company, oh, and starting that school, oh, and you do a podcast daily.

I am surprised by us not getting more compliments for that. Can even, I am a little impressed that we do 30 to 45 minutes every weekday, and we keep things Pretty fresh. I mean, there's other YouTubers out there who you know, they'll do the same topics again and again and again, which is fairly easy to do.

Whereas I really try to make an effort to never tread the exact same ground twice, but to have a few like themes that we're on the skirts of. But how, how do we do this? Right? Like this is actually, I think an interesting question. There's a few ways that we do it, right. And I'm going to go through them.

The first is just be incredibly intentional about how you are structuring your time. Here is an example. We have published five books. After we published the first book, all the other books we published in pairs of two, where we would publish two books at a time. A lot of people can say, [00:04:00] why would you do that?

Why are you publishing two books at a time? And the answer is. It's because it saves a lot of time to do. It allows us to go out there and do the editing process for both books at the same time while also saving money because we're buying a bulk discount on editing, on cover design, on You know, ad campaigns on promotion tours and it, it allows us to, at every year, create two of what I consider really high quality books.

Now, we stopped making books in favor of the podcast for a while. We might go back to books eventually, but that's... Another thing was the books that has been incredibly helpful is we could choose to do the vein thing, which is go, go through traditional publisher, but that.

Adds a whole bunch of steps, which can add like literally a year to the publication timeline, you know, of finding a, uh, what's the word, a publicist then

Simone Collins: having the publicist. Going through the traditional bureaucratic process. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:05:00] And, and people are like, why wouldn't you do that? Well, one, we can sell the books for cheaper if we don't do that.

Two, we can have all the money go to our, our nonprofit foundation. And three, it's much, much faster if what we are aiming for is reach and not personal vanity. So, and that's how we top the Wall Street Journal bestseller list was one of our books this year. Well, the nonfiction bestseller list. A topic that Simone does not think is that important to it, but I actually think is, is very important.

No, I agree

Simone Collins: it's important. I agree. But we were both very productive before this happened. Is,

Malcolm Collins: marriage. Marriage dramatically, dramatically increases the amount of free time an individual.

Simone Collins: If, if you work together. And here's the thing, I think many people, Even some of the most productive people in the entire world believe that relationships and marriage are actually a net drain on time.

There are, there are very productive people who are like, Oh, you know, like it's hard for marriages cause then I have to take time to pay attention to them and take them out to dinner and, you know, you know, listen to them [00:06:00] talk. And that is. is I think what most people think about when they think about marriage and that is not what we're talking about.

We do not do that at all in our marriage. There is no, Oh, we had to take time just for our relationship. Oh, Malcolm has to take time just to listen to me complain about things. That is no, we only talk about work. We only work together. So I think, you know, we can't define marriage as a traditional modern person's marriage, but More of the traditional concept of what marriage was to begin with, which is a partnership in which the couple works together toward a