In a world driven by constant busyness, sometimes what you need is to slow down to speed up. Penny Zenker sits down with renowned entrepreneur and author Faisal Hoque to explore how mindfulness and intentionality can unlock deeper productivity and creativity. Faisal shares his journey from the hustle culture of early tech entrepreneurship to embracing the power of mindful pauses. Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, he reveals how slowing down allows us to focus on what truly matters, both in life and business. Whether you’re a leader, creator, or entrepreneur, this conversation will inspire you to rethink how you use your time for greater impact.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Rethinking Time Management: Mindfulness And Deep Work With Faisal Hoque

On this show, we’re looking to challenge you. We’re looking to help you to work smarter, not harder. We’ve heard that, we know that and we want that, but somehow, we don’t follow through with that. That’s why these guests are so valuable and so important in helping you get on that road. I have Faisal Hoque with us. I’m excited. He is recognized as one of the world’s top management thinkers and technologists.

He’s an entrepreneur, an innovator, and an author with close to 30 years of cross-industry success. He’s the Founder of Shadoka, Next Chapter, and other companies. He also serves as an innovation leader for the CACI, a $6.7 billion company focused on US national security. I could go on and talk about all of the great things, all of the companies that he’s worked with, and the amazing media that has covered him, but let’s get right to chatting. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. Thank you so much, Penny.

Mindfulness

We chatted a little bit before about how mindfulness helps us to make better choices in where we spend our time. You’ve worked with a lot of successful companies, and you’ve built your own successful company. Tell us what that key is for you and how you came to realize that.

When you’re earlier in your career, you obviously try to find your path and your calling your definition of success, etc. As you grow older, as I have grown older, obviously Imm not the same person when I was in my 20s. In my 20s, I was this very driven, classic technology entrepreneur. I would run around all the time, never have enough time and never be able to do the things I really wanted to do. As time gone by, I’ve somehow figured out that as you slow down, you actually have more time to do more meaningful work.

It comes with experience, but it also comes from life’s adversity that throws at your face at various junctures. It could be that you had a career setback, or it could be that you have an ill parent or a sick child, whatever the case may be, it allows you to rethink. In my case, I originally came from Bangladesh. I have very deep ties to Eastern philosophy. I read all the classical Eastern philosophical works. In my 40s, I started to get really into this notion of mindfulness. There are a lot of different definitions of mindfulness, but the most practical way of looking at mindfulness is that conscious pause to decide what you want to do.

What do you want to work on? What real interaction do you want to have? What is meaningful? When you approach life from that angle, you actually can decide what are the things that you want to do. What are the most important things you want to do and how does that make an impact for you and the people that you are trying to work with or serve? Essentially, that gives you more time because you detach from the noise that makes us, “busy all the time.” I’m going to stop so that we can have a conversation.

There are a couple of things I want to unpack there. A couple of things I want to unpack. Now, people who are reading, they know that I talk about this conscious pause. In my new book, I call it a reset moment to name it so that we can actually use it more effectively. I want to go back to something you said when you were younger. You were all over the place, that typical ambition.

I wonder if you think, is it age that gets us caught up in that stage of life and that ambition, or is it kind of, I don’t like this word, but it’s what comes up for me, are we poisoned by the hustle culture for us to be sucked into that? It’s about having more, doing more, and being more, without really being as intentional and, like you said, slowing down. Is it age or is it the culture that we’re caught up in?

I think it’s a little bit of both. I started my career when there was no existence of the internet. I’m really dating myself. Hustle culture was not as pronounced, but there was that hustle culture. As the internet boomed and we went through several cycles of it, we’ve seen various iterations of it. Obviously, the pandemic created a whole different work culture in recent years. I don’t think it’s just hustle culture. What also happens is as you grow older, you know more, have more techniques, and know more people, and know what you like and don’t like.

It allows you to channel and focus on what you want to do and the speed and efficiency you gain from having that whereabouts. For example, when I wrote my first book, which was published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press, it took me almost two years. I guess I was an okay writer. In 2024, I’m now about to release my next book. This will be my ninth book. It literally took me four and a half months or five months.

It came with the experience of knowing how to craft it, where to get the research and the writing style, how to tap into other people. All that, I think, comes with experience. I think you get focused on what’s important. When you know what needs to be done, it’s easy to manage your time as opposed to you don’t know. It’s like that thing that thinks several times before cutting your plot is that thinking actually reduces the time.

Focus on what's important. When you know what needs to be done, it's easy to manage your time. Share on X

Time Management Advice

We need to do that younger. I agree. I feel like I’m older and wiser, and maybe because of that, I’m slowing down. I think the new generation, Gen Z, wants more lifestyle. They’re slowing down. They’re being more purposeful. I think we don’t have to wait. If you had to give some advice to younger people on how they can better manage their time and stay focused on what matters most, what advice would you give your younger self or would you give young people today as to how they can gain that experience earlier?

I have a 21-year-old son. I will tell you what I tell him and what I tell myself. Don’t be in such a rush. It seems like you never have time, but don’t be in such a rush. That’s one. The second is to do the deep work. Deep work requires focused work, but deep work has a huge impact. How good do you get at certain things? Deep work doesn’t come naturally.

For example, we were talking about writing because we’re both authors, so this process. You cannot be always inspired, and the work just flows out of you. You have to force yourself. Having the discipline to force yourself to do the things that you don’t want to do actually allows you to find out about yourself who you are, and what takes how much time and build that discipline where you are forced to do mundane things that you don’t feel like doing it.

As a result, it gets better and better and better. It’s a hustle of a different kind in the sense that it focuses on the skill, not necessarily just on the output. When you’re focusing on results and output all the time, this is a counterintuitive thing. It actually slows you down because you’re so rushed to reach there. In the midst of your journey, you made like 1,000 mistakes. You have to go back and fix those mistakes so your destination is actually backward, not forward.

I really love that. It’s true that there has to be the right balance between, yes, we want to know what we’re working towards and working towards that output, but really to build those skills because if you skip through that, you’re not building the depth or the experience or the quality that it takes to create quality and results.

It takes more time.

The stakes are costly, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It takes more time when you don’t really know how things are done at a deeper level. If you have never read an article and you’re reading it for the first time, you’ll be like, “How am I going to write it?” If you’ve never built a product and you’re building it for the first time, you’re going to make like 100 mistakes. By the time you do it the third time or fourth time, it will get faster. You have to be dedicated to up your skill. As a result, you’re going to actually save time and have more time for yourself, going back to your lifestyle.

By the way, there’s a reason why they call recreation and downtime important because it gives you clarity and focus when you’re well rested and you are in tune with your purpose than when you’re not. If you’re always running around with a chicken with your head cut out, you accomplish nothing and never have enough time to do anything.

Doing Deep Work

How do you create time to do that deep work? What’s your process for saying no and letting go of things that are less priority? What do you do to make that happen? It’s one thing to say you do it. It’s another thing to be able to make it happen.

Manifest it, sure. Everybody has their own personal style. Everybody has their own body rhythm. Some people are more productive in the morning, and some people are more productive in the evening, etc. In my case, I actually have a very set routine for what I do when during the day. I have a certain time that I allocate for meetings. I don’t have non-stop meetings all day. I have certain times that I allocate for writing, I have certain time allocated for design, and I have certain time for reading and thinking.

I have built in a lot of time during the day and during the week and during the month and the quarter. That’s really a downtime. It’s a forced downtime. It’s not about taking a two-week, three-week vacation. It’s actually forced downtime. You may find it utterly ridiculous if I tell you that, I had a busy day, but I somehow managed to take an hour and cook a meal, and feed my son and my wife in the middle of the day on a Monday, and manage to have this show with you, because I do have those break-ins built into it.

I am a busy person. I’m running a couple of ventures. I’m involved with research. I’m writing. I have customers globally, traveling, etc., but it’s a forced pause. As you said in your book title Reset, it’s a forced pause that actually buys you more time. While I was cooking, it gave me escape, but it also gave me clarity to focus on my next thing.

Isn’t that the times like those pauses where we make those connections? Some of the most powerful and important connections that we make towards this thing that’s going on in one part of our life and this thing that we read just comes up with like this amazing idea or a way to present something or solution for a client or a new product idea, whatever it is.

You asked me what is this conscious manager consciousness and I was telling you it is from one of my books called Everything Connects. That very point you made is that it’s like that interconnectedness and the ability to connect the dots. This has been my thing for many years because these disconnected thoughts and ideas, it does connect if you pay attention to it. How you’re cooking can actually help you how you write.

How you write can actually help you build a software product, and how you talk on a podcast can actually help you talk to your team in a team meeting. All of these are connected. It’s the efficiency game or personal productivity gain that comes from being conscious of these unconnected things and being able to apply that to your daily routine. I think that’s very valuable.

Disconnection

It’s being conscious of those connections. You mentioned the word disconnected, these disconnected thoughts and it’s how we bring them together. I want to talk about when we are busy, we’re hustling, we’re running from thing to thing and we don’t give ourselves that space to slow down and make those connections. I believe that’s why we are more and more disconnected in our society.

Even though technology potentially has us more connected than ever, we have the greatest level of loneliness and signs of true disconnection, regardless of whether we can text somebody or send a picture or whatever. People are feeling disconnected. Where do you see this going from here? Where do you see this going, and what types of solutions do you see as necessary?

I think it’s deeply personal. If I can use this word, spiritual, in a sense. I use this word that you have to be not just devoted but also detached. What I mean by that is that if you have 100 goals, it’s hard to accomplish 100 goals. You have to detach yourself and boil it down to maybe you should have only three goals, and maybe those goals should be impact-driven. If I do this, what is the highest impact I can do? You can boil it down to, this is my 33 major goals for the quarter, 3 major goals for the year, or 3 major goals for the day. I like to think in threes because it’s manageable. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is, let’s take anywhere else, we’re saying, we are so disconnected. If you post like ten posts in the hopes of how many more people can see me, that’s not really the goal. Do you want to make a meaningful connection? If you want to make a meaningful connection, spend the time to craft what you want to post and maybe just post one. That one post a day is enough. You don’t have to be tied to every single reaction and every single response because it cannot have meaningful people, meaningful relationships with thousands of people.

You cannot have a meaningful relationship. I forgot who came up with this. You can only have maybe 150 or so meaningful relationships in a given time. If you want to have thousands of meaningful relationships, then all of them become meaningless. I want to build a company, but I want to have ifferent goals, you. You’ll You can apply that theory to just about anything, relationships, things you’re trying to do, more actually, less is actually more, and being detached from the illusion that the more goals will have, the more you will accomplish. It’s not true. If you want to do more, then you have to actually focus on less things.

I think it comes down to, you talked earlier about deep work, it’s depth. It’s the depth of our relationships and of the impact that we’re creating. We are so surface level. If you’re going to have 1,000 goals and 1,000 friends, you’re at a surface. It’s just not possible to stretch yourself that thin. I think the meaning is in-depth. That’s what I hear you saying as well. The meaning and the impact is in the depth. I want to say, as I was looking at your profile, I see that you have 40,000 followers on X. What about that? Is that something that you sought after as you were looking to create meaning that people actually flock to you and connect?

Twitter is an interesting platform, as you know. When Twitter was Twitter, I was actually publishing a column or two columns every week. I would post them. That actually grew the following. I went into hiatus during the pandemic and post-pandemic because I got very involved in my public sector work. I do a lot of work for our federal government, and I have gone away from the media. Post-pandemic, I published a couple of more books.

I don’t really push out a lot of content on social media. These days, most of my interactions are on LinkedIn because my content is for professionals. It’s related to business innovation, leadership, transformation or AI, on that sort of topic. Most of my content is on LinkedIn. Not as many as X, but I’ve got like 15,000 people that follow me. I only post one post a day. That’s all I post. It’s not that I’m asking something; it’s not that I’m constantly on social media.

I do take the time to craft a post that gives something to whoever is reading it. I’m not asking anything from my post; I’m just trying to share what I have learned to make it something meaningful for the reader. When you look at it from that point of view, I think it has more meaning because people find it valuable. It wasn’t with a goal that I wanted X number of following. Therefore, I’m going to do X number of things. It’s totally organic. I think that’s the best way to build a relationship in any context.

I guess that’s the point that I was trying to make for people. When you’re true to creating that depth, you will naturally create followers because people will want to capture internet depth. That doesn’t mean that you’re close friends with 40,000 people. It just means that you’re putting your content out there.

I don’t think I can claim that I have 40 closest friends either. I have a lot, 40,000. That’s the best on most people’s minds.

Reset Mindset

One of the things that I like in celebration of my new book that’s coming out, I like to ask, even though you don’t know what this is exactly, how would you define a reset mindset? From your lenses, why is that valuable?

Even though I haven’t read your book, this notion of the conscious pause or notion of reconnecting or reinvention and connecting the dot and mindfulness, meditation, these are various terms for reset, which I live by. I write about it. My personal goal with whatever I do is that I want to lift others through my work, but I can’t lift others if I can’t lift myself first. Hence, I published a book called Lift. If you want to lift yourself, then you have to connect with yourself.

The only way you can connect with yourself if you take time for yourself. Reset, to me, is about connecting with yourself. You have to figure out who you are and what value you want to bring to the world by leveraging who you are and the unique value that you can bring to the table. I’m a firm believer that each one of us has a unique value proposition, and that’s why you are unique.

Collectively, that uniqueness creates the world that we call our world. It is very important to take that pause, reset or whatever you want to call it and connecting with yourself so that you can bring out that value, which is bringing out your value has value to yourself, but that has value to the world as well. We all learn from each other, and we should be learning from each other if you want to get ahead and make a meaningful impact on the globe.

What didn’t I ask you yet before we shut down that you would have liked me to ask and you would like to share?

I don’t know. There are so many topics we can talk about, but I think you can ask me why I write and what got me into more writing. My answer would be that when I first started writing, I didn’t know, some twenty years ago, that was for professional reasons because I’m a tech entrepreneur. I don’t make a living from selling books or speaking or that sort of thing. I sell technology, build technology, and sell technology that’s been my profession. It started out that I wanted to increase my profile and thought leadership through writing.

These days, I write because I want to share my knowledge, but also, all the proceeds from my book go to cancer research because my son is a cancer survivor. It goes back to the impact, which we started talking about your goals and who you are changes over time. The meaning and the impact that you’re trying to create, that’s where you want to spend the time. Once you get really focused on that, that’s when you find the time. It’s whatever you want to do, that’s how you find time. You will always have time. It depends on what you want to do.

It’s that’s so true. What I like to tell people is, “If I got you two backstage passes to your favorite artist, you’d find a way to get there.” Sure, you don’t have time, but you would do anything, come hell or high water, to get to that concert. You’d say no to people, you’d move it and you’d do what you needed to do. Sometimes, we forget that that it’s really about setting priorities and being clear on what’s important and we’re clear on the extreme.

As I said, if it’s something like that, or God forbid something happened and you needed to be for a family member, you’d leave in a second. You know where you need to be. It’s that messy middle that we just don’t set any criteria to create clarity for ourselves or as to what really is a priority. We get lost in these “competing priorities.” It doesn’t really exist. It just means we don’t have priorities.

You have to be devoted to what’s important to you, what gives you meaning, and you have to detach yourself from the noise. Easier said, but a lot harder to do in practice.

You have to be devoted to what's important to you and what gives you meaning, and you have to detach yourself from the noise. Share on X

Tell us where we can get more information about you and your books.

I guess you can go to Amazon on Barnes & Noble and find my books. As I said, I post something on LinkedIn every day. You don’t have to buy anything. You don’t have to subscribe to anything. It’s purely knowledge sharing, so you can follow me on LinkedIn. I guess that’s about it. I can also go to my website. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for being here.

Of course. I wish you the best of luck with your book. If I can do anything, let me know.

Thank you so much. We’ll talk about that after the show. Thank you all for being here. Less is more. Slow down and get clarity on what’s most important. You read some valuable nuggets. Go deep into those things that are important to you and make the time for it. Block it out and have time for those things that are important and also block out the times that are blackout times that are those pauses, those conscious pauses. Take those reset moments and make them part of your daily practice. You’ll see that you’ll actually be taking back your time. You’ll be more creative, you’ll be more productive, and you will get more of the right things done when you do just that. We’ll see you in the next episode.

 

Important Links

• Faisal Hoque
• Shadoka
• Next Chapter
• Reset
• Everything Connects
• Lift
• LinkedIn – Faisal Hoque

 

About Faisal Hoque

Faisal Hoque, recognized as one of the world’s top management thinkers and technologist, is an entrepreneur, innovator, and author with close to 30 years of cross-industry success. He is the founder of SHADOKA, NextChapter, and other companies. He also serves as an innovation leader for CACI, a $6.7B company focused on U.S. national security.

He is a three-time-winning founder and CEO of Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500™ awards; and a three-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author for his books: REINVENT (#1), Everything Connects (#2), and LIFT (#1). He has developed more than 20 commercial platforms and worked with leadership of U.S. DoD, DHS, GE, MasterCard, American Express, Home Depot, PepsiCo, IBM, Chase, and others.

He has authored 10 award-winning books (his 30 plus awards include Axiom Gold, Nautilus, Foreword, Book Excellence, Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards 2023 Shortlist, and others) on humanity, business, and technology. He volunteers for several organizations, including MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Program. He is also a contributor at the Swiss business school IMD, Thinkers50, Program Management Institute (PMI), and others.

He has been named among the Top 100 Most Influential People in Technology by the editors of Ziff-Davis Enterprise and Trust Across America-Trust Around the World (TAA-TWA) named him one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders. His work has appeared in Fast Company, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Fox, CBS, Financial Times, Forbes, Inc., and others.

An engaging and popular global thought leader, Faisal has 40,000 followers on X. Faisal also speaks on a wide range of topics and has very active engagement, with over two million content impressions annually from nearly 15,000 LinkedIn followers.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://pennyzenker360.com/positive-productivity-podcast