Catherine Price
Science Journalist, Founder of ScreenLifeBalance.com, and Author
As leaders — and as people who want to be more effective, productive, and joyful — one of the first steps we need to take is to create better boundaries with digital devices in the workplace.
Summary
On this week’s episode of “Leadership Matters,” author, speaker, and science journalist Catherine Price joins Alan for a conversation about her life, career, and the fascinating topics that she has explored as a writer. Having spent the earliest chapters of her professional career as a journalist, Catherine specialized in experiential articles, writing pieces that used first-person descriptions of odd or interesting ordeals to explore deeper trends in the culture. Now, as an author, she has taken a similar approach to her books — her two most recent titles,The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again and How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, both incorporate relevant scientific findings into deeply personal topics.
In their conversation, Catherine and Alan discuss both books, the life experiences that shaped Catherine into who she is today, and the lessons that leaders across industries should draw from her writings. According to Catherine, screen/life balance and and enjoying true fun are tightly bound concepts with implications that extend from the personal level to the societal. In an important sense, they are both exercises in setting boundaries to unlock the deep joy possible when we live our lives with fewer distractions.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, by Catherine Price
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter
Guest Bio
Catherine Price is an author and science journalist whose articles and essays have appeared in The Best American Science Writing, the New York Times, Popular Science, O, The Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post Magazine, Slate, Parade, Salon, Men’s Journal, Self, Mother Jones, and Health magazine, among others. Her previous books include Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food and 101 Places Not to See Before You Die.
A graduate of Yale and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, she’s also a recipient of a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Reporting, a two-time Société de Chimie Industrielle fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, an ASME nominee, a 2013 resident at the Mesa Refuge, a fellow in both the Food and Medical Evidence Boot Camps at the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and winner of the Gobind Behari Lal prize for science writing. You can learn more about her and her work at catherine-price.com.
Clips from this Episode
On how businesses and CEOs can create a more productive workplace through fun
Catherine discusses the importance of smartphone boundaries and our lack of time
Catherine describes how “we keep ourselves so busy all the time”
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. I’m here with Catherine Price: author, speaker, and science journalist. She is not only one of the most insightful writers and speakers I’ve read or watched in long time — she has a knack for transforming unassuming topics into fascinating ones.
Catherine Price is a science journalist and author who has spent her career encouraging people to question their most basic assumptions. From the New York Times to Popular Science, Catherine has written articles for a wide variety of publications on an even wider variety of topics. Her passion for her subject matter shines through in everything she does — from Mongolian dinner parties to evangelical illusionists, she has an amazing talent for uncovering insights about human behavior in the most unexpected of places.
Last year, Catherine published her most recent book, titled The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. In it, Catherine explains that fun is more than just a temporary diversion: It is a transformative state of mind that is critical to our collective wellbeing. She has received a wide variety of accolades over the course of her career, including a Middlebury Fellowship in environmental reporting, that Gobind Behari Lal prize for science writing, and fellowships at the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, among others.
I’m thrilled to have Catherine join us today to discuss her amazing career; her journey; her many many excellent books, including the last two; and the ways that we can all apply her findings to live better, healthier, and more quality-oriented lives.
Catherine, welcome to “Leadership Matters.” It is such a pleasure to have you on today, this is gonna be fun.
Catherine Price
Thank you so much for having me, and for such a lovely introduction.
Alan Fleischmann
I am thrilled. I’ve been a fan, as I mentioned to you offline. As soon as I read the last book, I read the book you had before — both of which we’ll get into today — and I started to recommending them to everybody. I started emailing people, I posted it online. This summer, when my daughters were with us on holiday, I took a picture of both daughters reading your book, The Power of Fun, at two different places on the beach.
Catherine Price
Oh my god, that’s amazing. That’s really wonderful.
Alan Fleischmann
I would love to start with a little bit about your childhood. You grew up in the greater New York area. You’ve written in the past about your experience as an only child. What did your parents do? What was life like around your house growing up?
Catherine Price
Well, I actually grew up in Manhattan, so not even the greater New York area. I grew up on the Upper West Side. I’m an only child, as you said, and my parents themselves are essentially only children. So I didn’t have aunts, or uncles, or cousins or any kind of broader… I had great-aunts. So my home life was small, in terms of our family.
What was it like… My dad worked in finance, he’s retired most recently from Kraft. My mother was a nurse, she’s a retired nurse. I’m not sure really what to tell you about that, except I always felt my dad is a little bit on the spectrum. I don’t know that I am, but I think that I inherited from him this kind of inability to really, entirely fit in, or feel like I fit in. That can be uncomfortable at times, but it also, I think, gives an interesting perspective. I find it very difficult to join in with groups, unless I really understand what the purpose is and want to be a part of it.
So I think my parents’ temperament influenced me in that way, of just looking at the world somewhat critically and a little bit askance. At a different angle, I think, than other people do. For better or for worse, because it can make you feel isolated, but it has been helpful.
Alan Fleischmann
Did it create a more lonely childhood?
Catherine Price
I don’t think I felt particularly lonely. But I was very introverted, and very, very shy as a child. My parents often got calls home from the teachers, labelling me as repressed. You know, “Catherine doesn’t want to do any of the group activities.”
I think I put this in a footnote in The Power of Fun, but I remember there was this thing in second grade where we were supposed to wear party hats. I’ve always, and I still, hate party hats. I hate them. And there’s a picture in the yearbook of all these kids wearing these little crowns that say their names in glitter. Then there’s a desk in the corner of the photograph, and you can see that there’s a crown on the desk that says “Catherine,” because I wouldn’t wear it. I distinctly remember my second-grade teacher saying “every party has its pooper” to me. And that stuck with me; I’m 43 years old, and I still remember that. So I wouldn’t say I was lonely per se, but I also didn’t quite feel like I fit in.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you have the same school growing up, the whole time, or did you have different schools?
Catherine Price
I went to the same school for 13 years, in large part because my father, in his childhood, moved something like 13 or 15 times by the time he went to college. His parents were divorced, and his mom was a doctor at a time when there were not many female doctors. She was an anesthesiologist, and they moved all over the country. So my parents really wanted me to give me a more grounded childhood than he, in particular, had had.
Alan Fleischmann
You write a lot with an infectious enthusiasm for the interesting and the unexpected. I’m curious: Was that also the case when you were growing up? It sounds like that was something you may have curated a little bit. What sort of topics and activities did you find most interesting in those early years that reflect that infectious enthusiasm?
Catherine Price
When I was a little kid, reading was by far the thing I loved the most. I was just a voracious reader. Then as I got older, I think I did start to have these interests, but the context of my school was such that it wasn’t really supported. I think maybe it would be more now.
I remember really, really wanting to learn how to swing dance. That was extremely uncool in the Manhattan context I was growing up in, and I couldn’t find anybody else who wanted to be taking lessons or doing this with me. It was only when I got to college that I found all these other people who were much more like-minded, who had these passions and enthusiasms and didn’t care as much about their… I don’t know, their image.
I’d also say though, there was a group of guys in high school two years above me who were into theater — something I was never into, because I don’t like performing, it still makes me feel very introverted and shy. But they were very fun. I idolized them, and at some point convinced them to let me hang out with them. They were just so wacky. I remember there was one night… it’s so ironic, my parents didn’t want me to like go out in the streets of Manhattan with these people. But the things we would do would be like, they made a sedan chair and we would walk up and down 79th Street, carrying each other in a sedan chair. Not drinking, not doing anything rebellious, just that. And it was so fun.
So I think that that particular group of friends, they were some of the first people who taught me that it’s okay to be a bit different. You can have a lot of fun being a bit different. It ignited this passion in myself to pursue that less conventional approach to life. They were sort of role models for me.
Alan Fleischmann
That you could be original, too.
Catherine Price
Yes, exactly.
Alan Fleischmann
That finding your voice and letting it be different than others is okay.
Catherine Price
Exactly. Meanwhile, my actual classmates in my grade are out experimenting with hard drugs, going into rehab in 12th grade. I’m like, “Mom and Dad, you should not be worried. If I want to hang out with these guys, you should be encouraging me.”
Alan Fleischmann
Are you in touch with those friends still today?
Catherine Price
I am in touch with some of them, yeah.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s very cool.
Well, you went on to Yale, where you received a bachelor’s in history, right? What led you to study history, and how has that background influenced your career?
Catherine Price
I mean, I could make up an answer for you about that. But the truth is that I didn’t know what to major in because my interests were always too eclectic.
I distinctly remember sitting on a rock next to a stream before my sophomore year, thinking, “Oh my god, what am I going to major in?” At that point, all the courses were listed in this thing called the Blue Book, which was a blue book that I still have dreams about to this day, actually. I was looking through all of the requirements for the various majors, and I noticed that history had the most diffuse requirements, they were very vague. In retrospect, I actually think Yale should have had a much more structured curriculum for the history major, because this was a very pu pu platter kind of approach to a major. I don’t even remember if there were categories of history you had to take.
So I chose it so that I could keep my options open, essentially. I deliberately did not become an English major because there were not many writing classes, and I also realized I was not as interested in traditional literature as I was in the writing aspect of it. So I ended up taking a lot of writing classes on my own, but it wasn’t actually a major.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s very cool. Did you like Yale?
Catherine Price
I loved Yale, I loved it. I don’t know if I would feel the same way if I went to it today — I think a lot has changed about the culture. I also think — as we’ll get to — that the advent of smartphones and social media has just changed the college experience a lot in general. But those were my four happiest years, probably. I felt like I truly, finally found my people, and there was a really playful culture there. We had a lot of very smart people, obviously. Not just smart, but just fun people. That’s where I found my core group of friends, and those are the people I keep in touch with the most today.
Alan Fleischmann
The people that I know that went to Yale — I have some really close friends who did — always seem to have a fun group of friends. They celebrate the fun at Yale. It’s certainly one of the best universities in the world, but it has a very different reputation from so many of the others, where you can be serious but also play hard.
Catherine Price
Yeah. I remember my initial tour of Yale, and I remember that I heard someone playing “Ode to Joy” out a window, which seemed like a good omen. Then I remember that people had drawn chalk announcements all over the flagstones of events going on around campus, there were just so many of them. Improv shows, theater shows, concerts, just all of this stuff happening.
And again, that was right when I was like, “I really want to learn to swing dance.” Whereas in high school no one wanted to do that, when I got to Yale, I ended up starting in something called the Y Swing Club. It was my sophomore year, and I remember filling Beinecke Plaza, which is this enormous open space outside the main dining hall, with hundreds of people. We had what we called the Moon Dance, where we had this beautiful dance under the stars. It was at a time when swing dancing had come into its own, because there was a Gap commercial that made it very popular. With that said, it was just amazing to be in a context in which I could put forth one of these ideas and people actually responded to it in such an enthusiastic and positive way.
I think that that reinforcement really influenced me, and I still try to do that to this day. I’ve never really thought about that — so thank you, I just had an insight. Which is that I’m constantly, still, organizing stuff. I always feel a little bit emotionally vulnerable at it, in some way: am I going to get rejected for this? Are people going to criticize me for this or think it’s stupid? But I still do it, and I think that the reason I still have the motivation to do that is because I had so many experiences at Yale, in particular, where that was responded to positively. So it’s continued to motivate me to create experiences for other people to this day.
Alan Fleischmann
There’s a thrill, probably, that comes from creating these things, encouraging these things, and then people loving it. It’s the risk and the reward; you probably are fearful that nobody says yes, but then when they do, it becomes so much more beautiful, richer.
Catherine Price
Yeah. I just have this wonderful vision in my mind of that plaza that one night, where it was just this huge circle of people who were learning to do the basic steps, who stayed out all night. I think now there might be more of a drinking culture, but it wasn’t like a partying thing. People were just out there to enjoy themselves, to try something new. And it was just wonderful.
Alan Fleischmann
It had a great campus life too, right? Everybody was on campus, primarily.
Catherine Price
Yes. I think that made a big difference, and that’s something I’m interested in now, as well: how our physical environments impact how we interact with each other. I think that at Yale — and some other colleges, obviously, too — the way that they actually structure the residential colleges, where you live with 100 people but you’re part of a larger class and each college has its own courtyard that you get to socialize in — I think that that really does make a difference in terms of the connections that are created between the students.
Alan Fleischmann
You made an interesting point, too. I have a daughter who just started her freshman year. I’m noting that she’s… When I went to college, we didn’t stay in touch the same way with our high school friends, because we didn’t have FaceTime. I wasn’t texting people all the time, and we weren’t direct messaging from Instagram. I think now, when you go to college, it’s wonderful, you can keep this keep this continuity going. And of course, I want her to do with me. But I also think it doesn’t give you that break when you start in college, the way it did for you or did for me. In the sense that, when you went to college, it was a purely, fully new beginning, whether you wanted it or not. If you did want it, then you could thrive. And if you didn’t want it, you had to thrive or survive.
Catherine Price
I think that’s a very good point, because that was the other thing: I was fine up to middle school, and then middle school hit, when popularity became a thing, and suddenly my best friend to that point completely dumped me. I guess she went with a more popular crowd. I definitely had the middle school experience of feeling like a complete misfit. Then in high school, I think that people definitely respected me, but I just didn’t feel like it was my place. So it really did feel like college was a new beginning, where I much more came into my own and figured out what that person, or who that person, actually is.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you know what you wanted to do when you were in college? Was journalism or writing a big part of it?
Catherine Price
I always had been interested in writing, but I didn’t know how to turn that into a career. So I had a lot of mini-crises, just thinking, “Oh my god, I don’t know what I’m going to do when this is over. How can I possibly just get a normal job that just feels so… That just doesn’t fit?”
I don’t know why I did this, but I remember coming home from an internship that I had one summer, sitting in my room, and just crying. But for some reason, I had a mini tape deck and I was recording this — which is very weird, and I have no idea where this is. I remember just talking out loud to myself, like, “What am I going to do? I hate what I’m doing right now, but I have no idea what I could do after college that would be a career, because I don’t feel like I fit into anything.”
So I was always interested in writing, but I wasn’t interested in journalism per se. The reason I got into journalism is that, if you’re going to be a writer, that’s kind of the natural thing to do. It was shortly before journalism really started to collapse, and I had gotten a catalog in the mail for the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. My college boyfriend’s dad was a film professor there, so I was aware of it. I looked through their catalog, and it had such an eclectic mix of things in it that I was like, “Oh, wait, maybe everything I did in college” — because I had a very random mix of things I took in college too — “makes sense now. This seems to be making sense of what I’ve been doing. I should go to journalism school, try living in California, and see where that leads.” But it wasn’t a direct desire to become a traditional journalist that led me to that point.
Alan Fleischmann
You worked as a freelance journalist a little bit, right? While you were studying at Berkeley.
Catherine Price
Yeah, I worked as a freelance journalist from, I would say, straight after college. I mean, I supported myself by doing things like teaching ice skating to little kids, and then tutoring in Latin and math. Then, I taught for a year at an all-boys school in Manhattan. But most of my career prior to writing books was freelance journalism.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you know what articles you wanted to write about then? How did you pick your pieces?
Catherine Price
Well, my personal passion has always been to have experiences that I enjoy, or learn something from, or that I find funny in some way, and then write about them. So really, reported personal pieces. Those are very difficult to place, even more so now. In terms of books, they’re also very difficult to sell, because very few people buy essay collections. So I had to become more practical about it.
So for most of the initial portion of my career, I would say yes to anything I was offered. Then, I was constantly pitching. It’s very exhausting, because you’re constantly trying to sell yourself to editors, trying to get them to say yes to your idea so they’ll pay you an astonishingly low sum, sometimes months later, for having written this. I mean, it’s horrible. I’m really happy not to be doing it now.
There were two pivotal moments for me in terms of how I ended up doing what I’m doing now. One is that, when I was a senior in college, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes totally out of the blue. I had no knowledge of diabetes before that point; I vaguely knew that my father’s estranged brother had had Type 1 diabetes and died from it, but I didn’t know anything else. That made me hyper-conscious about how food impacts our bodies. As anyone who has Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes out there knows, it turns food into a math problem. You’re constantly trying to calculate the impact that what you eat is going to have on your blood sugar. It’s an art, not a science. It’s incredibly frustrating, but it makes you think about food differently and it makes you think about your health differently. It turns into a full-time job.
Then, the other thing that happened is that I took courses in journalism school with Michael Pollan, the journalist who, most recently, has been doing books about psychedelics, like How to Change Your Mind. This is Your Mind on Plants was his most recent one. But at that point, he was just about to, or just had, published The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Michael was teaching a science writing class and a food writing class. He’s an amazing teacher and a wonderful person. He inspired an entire generation of people at that school to pursue food and science writing, and I was one of those people. So the confluence of Type 1 diabetes, and then having Michael as my teacher, really changed the course of my career.
Alan Fleischmann
There was an article today — either in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or the FT — about Michael and psychedelics, how it’s changed the way people are dealing with depression and anxiety. It’s much more the norm.
Catherine Price
Yeah, I think he really reignited, or helped to reignite, that field of research with How to Change Your Mind. When I met him, it was much more just straight-up food without any psychoactive compounds.
I remember writing an article that ended up in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is the sort of article that I love writing, which was an article called “How Michael Pollan Ruined My Life.” Basically, because taking his class made me think so much more about the source of where my food was coming from, and so much more about the issues behind food. Once you start noticing and thinking about those things, it’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes: you can’t not notice them. Like, where did these strawberries come from?
So I proposed this article, called “How Michael Pollan Ruined My Life.” I actually went to his house to interview him, and at some point, demanded that I be allowed to see the contents of his refrigerator, which he has since told me numerous journalists have done as well, to the point that I think it got annoying. But at that point, I was like, “I want to see if you’re the real deal,” and so I looked in his fridge. I also asked his son if he would tell me what Michael’s guilty pleasures were. It turned out, it was Cracker Jacks.
Alan Fleischmann
There you go. If you’re gonna go off the ledge, that’s a big one to jump.
Catherine Price
I just thought it was so funny.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing.
You mentioned that there are some things you love to write about. You’ve written so many articles on so many different topics: It’s your one topic area, in particular, that you specially love to write about?
Catherine Price
I think it’s less a topic and more the type of article; that’s the experiential, first-person reported piece. For example, the “How Michael Pollan Ruined My Life” piece was that, where it’s like, “I’m taking this class. I’m noticing that I now can’t go to the grocery store without thinking about all these larger issues behind food. So I’m going to get deeper into that, explore it, and then take it to the next level by going to his house and demanding to see the contents of his refrigerator.” Then write a piece that, I hope, makes people smile and laugh, but also, makes them think a little bit differently about something they took for granted. So I think that’s kind of the theme that’s running through it.
You’ve clearly looked up a lot of my articles, which I appreciate. There’s one that sometimes people find and then bring up to me, which is one where — don’t judge me, listeners, for this — my husband and I came across this very freshly killed rabbit on a road in California, ended up taking it home, and eating it. So I did this whole article about roadkill. That was kind of a quintessential example of what I liked doing, which is: Here’s this absurd thing. We’re actually going to look into it. Why don’t we eat fresh roadkill, if there’s a lot of deer hit on the side of the road? What’s the story here? Then, weaving in the personal experience of figuring out what to do with this rabbit in our trunk.
I also remember going to yoga classes and hating when the teachers made us do partnering exercises. Every part of my former, introverted self hates that. So I thought it’d be interesting to find out, am I the only person who hates this? And also, why are teachers doing this in yoga? I ended up doing this whole piece for a Salon about the origins of partner yoga, how that does — or in most cases, does not — match the actual purposes of yoga, and then how my practice of yoga is pretty inauthentic if you actually look into the history of yoga. But I got to write a funny, personal essay that also incorporated this deeper research. So that’s my favorite type of thing to write.
Alan Fleischmann
I’ve got to ask you, though: When you ate the rabbit roadkill, weren’t you worried about being poisoned?
Catherine Price
Yes. This is before smartphones, so we had my husband’s BlackBerry. So we were driving back to Oakland — because we lived in California at that time — and I’m trying to look up “roadkill” on the BlackBerry version of the internet. I think I did try to reach out to Michael, actually, to ask him about it.
Then I had this other classmate, Novella Carpenter, who wrote a great book called Farm City about her experiences being an urban farmer in Oakland, where she was keeping pigs under a highway underpass. It’s just this amazing book, and I knew that she tanned rabbits in this abandoned lot next to her house. She was, is, a very interesting person.
So I was like, “Novella, is this gonna kill us?” She’s like, “Well, you might have to worry about tularemia, which is something called rabbit fever. It’s been studied as a biological weapon.” I’m like, “Oh, great.” But she’s like, “You could also just really brine it.” So we salted it for three days, some ridiculous amount of time. Then, I had a friend who was having a hard day, and we were like, “Do you want to come over for dinner? But you should know what we’re having.” She came over anyway, and we all lived to tell the tale.
Alan Fleischmann
You all survived, oh my god. I bet all the vegetarians and vegans are going crazy right now.
Catherine Price
But really, what are you going to do?
I did conclude, though, and the last line of the piece, was something along the lines of: when it comes to eating roadkill, vultures are much more efficient. Because we did end up throwing out a lot of the rabbit, as you can imagine. But I mean, that’s sustainable food right there. I was joking that no food miles that were accrued getting that rabbit, other than the miles it took to drive at home. It’s relatively innocent when it comes to that.
Alan Fleischmann
You’ve written some truly fascinating books, from a guide to breaking up with your phone — which I wanted to get to — to a travel guide of places not to see. Tell us a little bit about your process: How do you select your topics? You’d covered that a little bit, but are there ideas that you love that never made it to publication? I’m sure the answer is going to be yes. Those things that are left on the cutting room floor. I’d love to hear about the ones you’ve loved and the ones that have yet to surface.
Catherine Price
Well, there’s certainly stuff that I’ve written that’s just nearly impossible to find a home for. It’s kind of disappointing at this point in my career to be like, really, no one wants to publish my essay about mom jeans? Nobody?
For anyone out there who wants to publish an essay about mom jeans, there’s all sorts of metaphors about fitting into your identity and waistbands.
So there’s that. I’ve got something in praise of taping your mouth shut while you sleep, because I read this book Breath by James Nestor, which I highly recommend. He recommends that you tape your mouth shut. That’s weird, but it actually helps you sleep better. So I wrote an essay about that; it’s just sitting on my hard drive somewhere.
In general, for the ideas for the book, some have been… I did a cookbook project with the Big Sur Bakery in California, and that just came to me, someone recommended me as a writer for it. But most other things are just something that’s piqued my curiosity or that reflects some reaction I had to something in the culture that I want to pursue.
So in the case of the parody travel guide, 101 Places Not to See Before You Die, that’s because that was a time when an abundance of Blah, Blah, Blah You Should See Before You Die books were coming out. Gardens you should see, golf courses you should visit, all of these things. To me, I thought: Wow, this is ironic that we’re turning this experience of travel into a checklist. So your escape is turning to yet another to do. So what if I wrote a book that poked fun at that idea by pointing out places that you shouldn’t visit? You don’t need to worry about putting them on a list, and maybe that will free you up to have more spontaneous experiences. I worked some personal essays into that, because I also think that, sometimes, the things you’d never put on a checklist end up making the best stories afterwards; the times when travel goes awry. So, it’s actually a very pro-travel book. It touches on a theme that I think carries through all of my work, which is this desire to live a full and meaningful life.
For some of the other ones, I’ve done a couple of guided journals, which cracked me up because there’s nearly no words in them, they’re journals. Those are some of the best-selling books I’ve written — it’s depressing commentary about the state of publishing, but books without words tend to do well.
Then I wrote a book called Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food. That was the result of my husband turning to me one day and saying, pretty much out of the blue: “What’s a vitamin?” I still don’t know, really, why he asked me that question. But I tried to answer him, and I realized the only things that came to mind were stories about scurvy and sailors with rotten gums from some time when I was in third grade; I feel like that’s when scurvy was talked about, with the Age of Exploration. But I didn’t really know anything else, and I thought, god, that’s really interesting, because I spend so much time each day thinking about the macronutrients in food because of diabetes, like how much carbohydrate, in particular, is in everything I eat. But I’ve never thought about the micronutrients. So I said, “I don’t really know,” to which my husband said, “I think you should write a book about that.” Then I took him up on his suggestion, and the poor man had to endure three years of me researching the history of vitamins. Which turned into the history of nutrition, which turned into this far-reaching investigation and exploration into the whole history of human nutrition and the future of human nutrition. But again, it was a word that we tossed it around all the time, vitamin, but we don’t think very critically about. It just fascinated me that there was this thing, in plain sight, that was completely unexplored by most of us.
That is the theme that, I think, ties together these seemingly disparate topics. You wouldn’t think Vitamania, How to Break Up with Your Phone, and The Power of Fun would have much in common. But in fact, How to Break Up with Your Phone was a look at what how our phones and other physical objects, that we take for granted and don’t think that much about, are impacting our lives. Then, one of the main reasons I wrote The Power of Fun is that, when I started thinking about fun as a result of the phone breakup, I realized we use the word fun in all sorts of contexts with all sorts of implied meanings, but we don’t actually think about what it really means, or it really feels like, and there’s nearly no research on fun. There’s not even a good definition of it. So that led me to want to explore that more thoroughly.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s interesting, you didn’t choose the word joy: you chose the word fun, which I want to get into. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s an important one, because we all seek happiness and joy in life, even when we feel guilty, sometimes, about it. But the power a fun is that it’s not only a noun, but a verb. It’s the idea, of what do you do to get there? I’ll get back to that.
You’re listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. I’m here with Catherine Price — speaker, author, science journalist, and amazing thinker — and we’re discussing her books. Last year, she published a book called The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. So tell us a little bit about the background on that, Catherine, and why you chose it.
But like we were just talking about, you chose the word fun, not the word joy. I work with CEOs all the time, and we were at lunch. They quoted somebody who said, “The difference between an optimist and a pessimist is, an optimist goes through life happy, and a pessimist goes through life sad.” I thought that was a pretty simple way of describing something that is pretty profound.
Then with my kids growing up, being a dad, I kept on thinking it’s important to understand responsibility, that they feel a certain humility, that they don’t take things for granted. And at one point, I realized that I was taking the fun out; that it wasn’t okay to be happy, in the sense of the playfulness, the fun, because I was making them worry about everything else and everybody else. I didn’t want them to become too isolated and not empathetic. Instead, we started directing our attention towards gratitude. The idea that it is okay for us to have fun, as long as we’re working hard to help others have a healthy, happy, and quality life as well.
But I’m just curious how you got to the fun part. Tell us a little bit about the success of this great book.
Catherine Price
Well, first of all, I’m glad that you had that realization in your family life, because I do think we often conflate fun with hedonism or irresponsibility, when in fact, it’s the opposite. I don’t think that those are the same at all.
In terms of the joy-versus-fun distinction, it’s interesting, because I actually think fun is an inherently joyful state. If you are truly having fun, you are experiencing joy. But you can experience joy without having fun necessarily. I mean, they’re both great.
The origin story of The Power of Fun is that I had written How to Break Up with Your Phone, which is a mindfulness-inspired guide for how to create more intentional relationships with our devices. So that book starts by looking into some of the science of how our interactions with our devices are affecting us, both mentally and physically. As a result of my research for How to Break Up with Your Phone, my husband and I had started this practice — which we try to continue even today — of taking 24-hour breaks from our phones, from Friday to Saturday, as sort of a digital Sabbath. So as a result of How to Break Up with Your Phone, I was spending less time on my phone.
I had this moment, actually, in the very room I’m speaking to you from, where I was alone on a Saturday afternoon. My daughter, who was then a baby, was napping. My husband was out of the house. I had this whole hour with nothing to distract me. Both nothing to distract me in the meaningless sense of what you might find on your phone, but also, I just wasn’t busy. I think that we keep ourselves so busy all the time, and much of that busyness happens on screens. When I took away that busyness and those distractions, I was left with this very disconcerting feeling of emptiness. Instead of being happy that I had this free hour, I panicked, because I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of my time reading already, so I didn’t want to read a book. I didn’t particularly like want to call a friend — I think that that’s a fine use of technology, I don’t count that as screen time if you’re talking to someone. And I just thought, oh my god, what am I doing? Hopefully, it has come across in this interview that I really do try my best to live a meaningful and joyful life. I just thought, what happened to me?
I thought, I should really start asking myself some of the questions that I asked people who were helping me research How to Break Up with Your Phone. One of the questions I’d asked those people was, what’s something you say you want to do, but you supposedly do not have time for? The logic being, we have way more time than we realize if we take into account all the time that we’re currently frittering away on our phones. So the best statistics I found before the pandemic is that the average person was spending upwards of four hours a day just on their phones. Not their other screens, not their TV or their desktop; just the phones. That adds up to 60 full days a year, or a quarter of our waking lives. If you do the math further, it’s like something like a 36, 40-hour workweek. So, how are we possibly manufacturing like nine months of work weeks with the time we’re just scrolling? Some of that is essential or productive, but a lot of it is just a waste.
Anyway, I was like, “What do I say don’t have time for?” And my answer was, to learn to play the guitar. I play piano and I have a guitar that my grandmother gave me money for when I was in college, and I was very close to my grandmother. I just never learned how to play the guitar. So long story short, I ended up signing up for an adult guitar class at this children’s music studio in Philadelphia, started meeting with this group of adults, many of whom were fellow parents on Wednesday night’s BYOB class. We learned things like the Moana theme song, we were not trying to be virtuosos or perform. But there was a sense of playfulness, and I started to realize that Wednesday nights were quickly becoming my favorite night of the week, even though I have a very nice life, I’m very happy most days, and have a wonderful relationship. But Wednesdays were just this feeling. I looked forward to them, and the feeling I was experiencing in the class stayed with me for the rest of the week; it was really lifting my spirits and giving me a sense of buoyancy that was very refreshing and deeply nourishing. I realized it was not just about the skill of learning the guitar; that was nice, but it wasn’t about the skill, and it wasn’t actually about the activity itself, per se, either. It was the feeling. I asked myself, what is this feeling? What’s the best word I can use to describe this feeling? The best word I could come up with was fun, so that’s what ended up launching me on the journey that led to The Power of Fun.
I should note that you and I are talking on a Wednesday right now. This is five years later, and I still have my guitar class from 6:30 to 8 tonight, and it is still a highlight of my week. It’s led to an entire community of people I never would have met otherwise, and it’s totally changed my life.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. And you have one child or two?
Catherine Price
One.
Alan Fleischmann
So the only children continue, from your parents to you.
Catherine Price
Yes. My mother is actually an only child, as opposed to my dad, who had two estranged siblings I never met. So he was essentially an only child. Then I’m an only child, and she’s an only child. So we’re really solving the population crisis here.
Alan Fleischmann
How are you instilling this in her?
Catherine Price
Well, I think she sees me model it a lot. So she knows that on Wednesday nights, that’s mama’s guitar class. Then she herself then has… this is kind of funny, she really loves Wednesday nights herself, because those are her special nights with papa where they eat carbohydrates. So they have pasta, or pizza, or something that I really can’t have. So I think it’s very important to carve out these special times to prioritize this feeling of fun, which we can get into the definition of if you’d like to. I like to think that this ritual of their Wednesday nights is her opportunity to experience this as well.
But I think that I think it really is through modeling it and then trying to be more present as a parent. And then, trying to help her be present — I mean, she’s a kid, she’s very good at that — but also for her to notice when other people in her life, like the adults, are not present with her, how it feels, and to talk to her about how that’s actually not okay, even though it’s so prevalent. Like, if someone is on their phone with you in the middle of a conversation, that’s not okay. That’s very rude. So, I think, trying to instill in her some of the values around boundaries with technology that I’ve come to try to adopt myself. And then, trying to prioritize fun, traditions, and rituals as a family. That’s what I’m trying to do.
We’re also trying to expose her to a lot of different activities. Not for the purpose of patting her college resume or something like that — she’s seven, but I know that that actually starts happening around now, which is nuts — but more just to give her a sense of what life has to offer. Not because I think that an activity itself is fun; I think fun is the feeling that is produced as a result of particular experiences. Just to give her more of a sample of what’s out there, so hopefully, she can find some things that she really feels as passionately about as I do about music.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s great.
You draw a distinction in the book between fake fun and true fun. Tell us a little bit about that. What’s the difference between the two? How can we have more true fun?
Catherine Price
So, I quickly came to realize, first of all, that there’s not a good definition of fun. The dictionary will say it’s lighthearted pleasure or amusement. But when I reflected on my own experiences that I described as “so fun,” and then, when I asked people about it — because I conducted a big survey of people on my mailing list, so I collected what is now 1000s of stories from around the world of people’s experiences of fun — I noticed it wasn’t just lighthearted pleasure. There was something much deeper going on. It was joy, being fully present, and this feeling of human connection. When I read through those stories to this day, I have this big smile on my face. But also, I get quite emotional; I can actually be smiling also have tears in my eyes. Because there’s something so powerful about these stories.
I started to think: well, what is this? What’s going on here? Because it’s not just lighthearted pleasure. So I came up with a proposed definition that I ran by the people who were helping me with my research to help validate. The definition that I came up with, which I do believe is true, is that true fun, as I call it, happens when we experience the confluence of three psychological states, or the three factors: that is, playfulness, connection, and flow.
To clarify what I mean by those, the feeling of playfulness refers to having a lighthearted attitude and not caring too much about the outcome of whatever you’re doing. Letting go of perfectionism. It doesn’t require you to play make believe or act like a kid; it’s really the attitude and the spirit you bring to what you’re doing. It’s very difficult for many adults, because we’ve gone through a whole lives trying to perform at our best — especially the people listening to your podcast — where you have this professional persona, you’re a high achiever, and you don’t want to look like you’re screwing up in any way. So you have to let go of that to have fun.
The feeling of connection refers to the feeling of having a special, shared experience. I do think, occasionally, people have fun alone. But in the vast majority of stories that people shared with me, another person was involved. Sometimes an animal; people will ask, “Can I have fun with my dog?” I think, yes, and I think that’s part of the reason we love having pets so much. There’s a feeling of connection. But I asked people straight up, “Is there anything that surprised you about what you just told me?” A number of people said something along the lines of: I’m a self proclaimed introvert, but all the stories I just told you involved other people. That led me to believe, whether you like connection, introverts and extroverts both need human connection. It’s just the type of connection that feels nourishing that differs between them.
And then, flow is a psychological state where you’re so engrossed and present in what you’re doing that you can lose track of time. Not in the sense of hypnosis; not watching your seventh episode of a Netflix show, because the algorithm is designed to play the next episode so quickly you can’t even stop it, and then suddenly, it’s like six hours later and you’re feeling that you’ve wasted your life. Not like that. That’s junk flow, or just being hypnotized. I’m talking about an athlete playing a game, or playing a piece of music, or getting totally engrossed in a conversation or a work project, where time flies because you’re so engaged. That’s flow.
So playfulness, connection, and flow all have solid research behind them as being very beneficial in all sorts of ways. They’re great on their own. But when you experience them all together, that’s when I believe you experience what I call true fun. The reason I use the word true fun, as opposed to just fun, is to help distinguish it from what I call fake fun, which are the activities and products that are marketed to us as fun, but that don’t actually result in playful, connected flow that, in many cases, we don’t actually enjoy if we really think about it. Social media is the biggest culprit there. So you have true fun. And then its evil alter ego, fake fun.
I also think there’s a big middle category of activities that we enjoy that don’t produce fun, per se, in terms of the definition I just proposed, but that we should keep prioritizing because we truly do enjoy them. So reading, for many people, would be an example of that. So are more nourishing, self care-type things like taking a bath. Something that’s more of a quiet hobby, like cooking on your own, something like that. So by all means, keep doing that. I just think it’s interesting, and in many cases useful, to distinguish the subtle differences between that type of activity and the true fun-generating activities. Because true fun is such an energy-producing state, versus something else that might just feel more restorative. You also might wonder, why don’t I feel the same what I do one category of activity versus another? I believe that’s often why: the energy level they produce is different.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing, actually: This idea of making decisions, I guess, on time. A lot of this is built on how you are spending your time. You can do the mundane, the routine, or you can spike it up a little bit, create traditions, or create moments of spontaneity.
Because I’m so scheduled in my life, I seek and just relish moments of pure spontaneity, where I’m free and can just enjoy the day. And if I know I’ve got something even a few hours from now, it’s different than a lot of other people; I look at it like I can’t fully get into a fun groove, because I’ve got to be on later. I do a lot of crisis work and things like that, so I’m always ready to be on. But when you have those moments of spontaneity where you can actually create that fun, and know that you can enjoy it and there’s no limit to the day, I think it does give you a different thing than scheduling it.
I’m just curious: you’re scheduling your fun every Wednesday, so there’s definitely truth to that. You’re creating a tradition that says Wednesday evening is my time for my music, in your case. But I’m sure there’s a part of you that says, don’t schedule everything and create the fun.
Catherine Price
Yeah, I think it’s both. I think allowing there to be room in your life for spontaneity to occur is very important. And also, creating conditions for spontaneity to occur — which in many cases, requires looking up from your device. Because you’re never going to have that magical moment of connecting with a stranger or, when you’re traveling, meeting some local and having this interesting experience, if you’re just looking down at your phone at TripAdvisor all the time. So, changing some of the ways that you interact with the world to make yourself more open, to invite more spontaneity in, is important. As in leaving room in your schedule for that.
But I also say, yes, that scheduling time for what I think of as fun magnets is very important. My definition of a fun magnet is the activities, settings, and people that are the most likely to generate the feeling of fun for us, personally. To reiterate the point, fun is not an activity: fun is a feeling. I think we get that wrong over, and over, and over again in our society. If you feel like you’ve tried to have fun, but you ended up just feeling stressed out and over-scheduled, it’s probably because you fell into the trap of thinking that activity equals fun; “If I like an activity, it’s fun.” Then, you get really confused when you don’t feel as good as you thought you would.
So, fun is the feeling. But there are certain activities, people, and settings that are more likely to produce that feeling for us than others. Each of us has a different collection of those fun magnets, as I call them. So I think that the first step in building more fun into your life is to do call to mind some past experiences that you would describe as having been so fun — that’s the technical term. And then, look for themes: Were there particular people who were involved? Were there particular settings that pop up again and again? Were there particular activities that often resulted in fun? Where did these things overlap?
Pickleball comes up all the time now — which cracks me up — I’ll use that as an example. Pickleball itself is not fun; it’s how you feel as a result of the pickleball game. If you’ve played pickleball — which I do think is a very fun, friendly sport, for reasons that are tangential to our conversation — you could play it with someone who’s taking it too seriously and have a miserable experience. But if you recognize, “Oh, there’s actually this couple, and every time I play pickleball with them, it seems to generate fun.” Well, they’re a fun magnet for you. I say this all to say that, once you know what your fun magnets are, you can carve out time for those fun magnets on your schedule.
So you’re not scheduling fun, per se — because if you do that, fun is going to run away from you. I think of it as being like romance, where you can light some candles, but if you try too hard, it is going to run away. But you can carve out time for that fun magnet, and therefore, set the stage for fun to occur. So for me and my guitar class, it usually produces fun, but there’s definitely nights that are way more fun than other nights. I can’t quite predict that. It sounds ironic, I guess, but creating boundaries around time that you can devote to pursuing a fun magnet also creates space for spontaneity to occur within that scheduled timeframe. In the case of my guitar class, we’ve now expanded it. Since we didn’t really want to go home at eight — our classes run from six-thirty to eight — we now hang out in the next door parking lot. I’m 43 years old, and I go and hang out in a parking lot on Wednesday nights, and we continue to play music together. We never know where that’s gonna go, if that is spontaneous: we don’t know who’s going to be there, who’s going to stick around from our class, what songs we’re going to play. Often, that does lead to fun, but it’s different degrees, because you can’t really tell — if that makes any sense.
I think that you do need to you need to balance both those things: to carve out time, which does require scheduling. Being intentional about what you’re going to do with that time by thinking and reflecting on what your fun magnets are. And then, allowing space within that time for spontaneity to occur. Because if I came into guitar class, and I was like, “Alright, in our post-class hangout, we’re going to do these 10 songs that I picked out ahead of time, we’re doing them in this order, and this is what everyone’s gonna play,” that would not be fun.
Alan Fleischmann
A lot of what we’re talking about has to do with the individual, but I know that there are a lot of listeners who are very focused on culture. They are leaders, they are managers, and they are trying to figure out ways in which they can create stronger cultures. I imagine creating a culture of fun is the best way to make your professional life a fun part of your life. So, it’s not like you’re working all day and then you go home to fun, or you’re going out for fun; you can actually make the work itself more purposeful and fun. Any thoughts on that?
Catherine Price
Yeah, a lot of thoughts. For me, one of the most useful insights that came to my mind as I was thinking about this is, another misperception we have about fun is you have to go somewhere else to experience it, or that you have to spend a lot of money on it. I should also say: I was writing this book during the lockdown period of the pandemic. I signed the book contract in April 2020, so I’m looking into all this research on playfulness, connection, and flow at a time when we could not connect with other people in-person. It made me realize that one of the benefits of breaking fun down into these three parts — playfulness, connection, and flow — is that it makes you realize that you don’t have to go anywhere exotic to experience that. Sure, vacations can be great, and I think you should prioritize taking vacations and having experiences. But you don’t have to do anything exotic and you don’t have to spend a lot of money.
I remember one person telling me a story about how he had had two hours of true fun. All he was doing was sitting on a park bench with his nephew, and they were trying to catch leaves as they fell off of a tree. I just love that. To me, that was a metaphor, too; I was like, “Oh my god, you know, there’s opportunities for fun floating in the air, we just need to grab them. And here you are, on a park bench, grabbing leaves and having fun.”
I think that’s useful in the workplace context, because it helps you to recognize that you are probably already having little micro-moments of fun sprinkled throughout your day that you have not been labeling as such, and therefore, haven’t been appreciating and benefiting from as much as you might. That little side conversation you have with your colleague, whether it’s in-person or a little text someone sends you during a meeting — just little moments of playfulness, or connection, or flow can really brighten a workday. Then, it also gives you a little bit more of a recipe for how you could manufacture more of a feeling of fun in the workplace.
The least effective thing you can do is have this top-down approach, where it’s like: “Now we will have fun. We were putting in a ping-pong table.” And everyone’s like, “Why are you doing this? This feels forced and bad.” Instead, think of what can we do as a company or as a culture to encourage more playfulness, encourage more micro-moments of connection, and protect our employees’ ability to stay in flow. If you focus on supporting the three ingredients of fun, I think that that’s the first step in making it more likely for people to be able to have fun. And helping them understand what it is, right? Because they might not even register it themselves. That’s very useful, and a much more practical way to approach it than to just have a top-down approach to try to make it fun.
To that point, I would also say that, sometimes, leaders and people in general will think, “Well, work’s not supposed to be fun. Fun happens out of work. Why would we try to make work fun? That’s not central to our purpose: we’re doing serious things, and that’s a diversion, that’s frivolous.” I have many thoughts on that, but one of the things about fun is that it is very motivating. It is intrinsically motivating. If you have fun doing something, you’re going to want to keep doing it and you’re gonna want to do it again. So, if you’re a leader of an organization and you’re trying to figure out retention, or you’re trying to increase employees motivation — well, you should be making it more fun. Again, not in the hedonistic sense, but in a much more profound and meaningful sense of making people feel more connected, more playful, and more present in their job.
Alan Fleischmann
I know we’re at the end of the show, but I don’t want to forget about How to Break Up with Your Phone. You were just talking about the distractions in life and that you have your own digital Sabbath between Friday and Saturday — which I am struggling with, but really trying to have.
If you’re an effective leader, you can apply that to the workplace. There’s so much distraction that goes on, as you said — things beyond the casual text or that important email — that keeps people from feeling present. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Catherine Price
First of all, one of the reasons everyone feels so overwhelmed right now is not actually a lack of time. It’s that our time is getting shredded into what Brigid Schulte calls “time confetti.” This state of constant distraction is having an enormous impact on our productivity, and if you’re able to concentrate your attention more, you’re going to feel mentally less frazzled and you’re going to get more done. If you can work in more fun into your life, you’re also going to find that you’re going to waste less time on meaningless things.
So right now, I think that we’re simultaneously overwhelmed and starving for things that nourish us. As a result, we end up wasting time on social media — it’s kind like junk food — instead of spending it on things that fill us up with true fun. And then, we’re so distracted all the time that we can’t get anything done. We’ve really had a very bad mental state; we’re like the metaphorical frogs in the pot of boiling water, where we don’t notice how bad it is because it’s heating up around us without us noticing.
I think that the first step we all need to do is take a step back and try to see more clearly the impact that our relationships with our phones and other forms of technology are having on us. Because the thing about these devices… and I should also say, I’m not a technology-phobe at all. I’m very grateful for technology — we’re doing this interview over Zoom. But smartphones and their related ilk have crept into our lives so quickly, we didn’t really question what effect they were having on us. We never established any etiquette or boundaries around them, so we end up doing things that are really crazy if you were to think about them in a different context.
If you and I were having this conversation, and I had a book next to me, and every 30 seconds or so I picked up the book and just read one sentence out of it to myself while you were still talking, kind of just uh-huh-ing you, then put the book back down on the table and acted like nothing had happened… And then 25 seconds later, I did the same thing, again and again, you would send me in for an evaluation or maybe never talk to me again. But of course, we do that all the time now.
So as leaders — and as people who want to be more effective, productive, and joyful — one of the first steps we need to take is to create better boundaries with digital devices in the workplace. I think that there’s a lot to be said for creating no-phone zones, where phones are not allowed and people are encouraged to put them away, like in meetings. You don’t want to be in a meeting where everybody’s also checking their phone. I think creating some more guidelines within the culture itself about how and when it’s appropriate, for example, to send someone an email, is very important. Email is killing people’s productivity and their enjoyment of their lives. It’s such a flow killer, and anything that kills flow is going to kill fun by definition, but also make you a total, unproductive mess. So I think that companies should set guidelines for what constitutes an actual emergency, because that’s one of the reasons people are so tethered to emails; they don’t want to miss anything for fear of missing out on an emergency. You shouldn’t alert people to an emergency at work over email; that should be a phone call. It should be something that doesn’t require people to be on email.
They should also be setting clear boundaries on when it’s appropriate to send work-related email. I see a lot of people now trying to do that; they’ll send an email, and then the signature will say, “I send email at odd hours, don’t feel obligated to respond.” That’s meaningless, because the person, if they don’t respond to you, now has that email just floating around in their brain and it’s going to stress them out on some level. So, you’ve kind of ruined their moment and made it so the only thing they can do to really get back their equilibrium is send an email back — which, of course, puts it on someone else’s plate. So instead, figure out a system with, like, scheduled emails. Most platforms have this now, a scheduled-send function, where you can write the email to get out of your head, but then send it to purgatory so that you’re not interrupting your colleague in the middle of bedtime with their kid with an email.
So I have many suggestions in How to Break Up with Your Phone. But my bottom-line point is that the effects that our interactions with our devices are having on our ability to be present, focus, be creative, enjoy our lives, and have relationships with people cannot be understated. It is a huge, huge issue that is only beginning to be acknowledged, let alone addressed.
But it is possible to make changes. One of the most inspiring things people say to me after reading How to Break Up with Your Phone — which has a 30-day plan in it — is that, unlike other self-betterment programs like exercise, which might take weeks if not months to see results from, if you start to create boundaries with your devices, the effects are immediate on your mental clarity and your feelings of calm. So, I really encourage people to try to take one step at a time. Delete an app that you know is a time suck for you. Get your phone out of your bedroom and buy a standalone alarm clock so you can, at the very least, protect the hour or two before bed and the hour or so when you wake up. There are little steps you can take that can make an enormous impact. Once you begin to feel the effects of those steps, you’re going to be much more motivated to continue.
Alan Fleischmann
This has been amazing. I will say, this has been one of the most wonderful conversations we’ve had on “Leadership Matters,” and we’ve had great ones.
Catherine, this has been such a pleasure. I look forward to having you back on.
Catherine Price
I’d love to do that.
Alan Fleischmann
Let’s get another one scheduled, a part two, and get into some of the advice that you’re sharing in both books.
Catherine Price
I should probably say, I have a website called screenlifebalance.com, which is my passion now, screen-life balance. That has a lot of resources and courses. Then there’s my newsletter, where I try to give practical suggestions to people who are struggling with this, which we all are.
Alan Fleischmann
Let’s do that. Let’s schedule a part two for another hour, because I think we’re going to get a lot of folks wanting to hear more. I think your books, these two books in particular, which I read and then shared, are two of the best books out there right now. It’s so important for us to be present.
You know, I carry around a notebook wherever I go now. I find that, when I’m in people, if I write down something in my notebook, it doesn’t distract me and it doesn’t show to them that I’m distracted. But if I pick up my phone and write an email, I look rude.
Catherine Price
It’s interesting, it’s like a sign of respect. It’s funny you should say that — I know listeners can’t see this, but I’m holding up a little notebook that I carry around. It makes a difference, because that’s like, “Oh, I’m listening to you, and I care so much about what you’re saying that I’m gonna jot it down and follow up on that later.” It’s a real difference, it’s very subtle. And also, just to get out the stuff in your head, when you’re trying not to check your phone but your brain is spinning. Jot it down in your notebook.
Alan Fleischmann
That way, when you get back on your phone you’ll know what you needed to do, but you’re not actually showing yourself or anyone else that you’re distracted. It’s a re-wiring.
So, this is the commitment to those who are listening: We’re gonna have Catherine Price back on. It’s been an amazing hour with you, Catherine, and I’m looking forward to the part two. Let’s make it happen.
Catherine Price
That sounds great. Thank you so much.