Mike Sturm

Adapting a simple practice from world-class cyclists can help you achieve more with less effort

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

What can cycling and aerodynamics teach us about building habits and achieving goals more easily?

One word: drag. It’s a well-known term in aerodynamics, but one we also encounter when we try to build habits or overcome procrastination and get things done.

The faster an object tries to move, the more it encounters drag — the resistance of the air around it. If you’re trying to get somewhere quickly while expending the least amount of energy, drag becomes increasingly important to think about. Drag needs to be overcome and minimized.

But overcoming drag is not just a physical undertaking. We encounter other kinds of drag — namely when we try to form new habits or undertake new or difficult tasks we’ve been avoiding. Call it mental drag, if you like. But whatever you call it, it’s real. It’s what keeps us procrastinating and what keeps us from growing in the ways we’d like to.

But there’s good news. There are ways to overcome and minimize physical drag, that allow you to travel fast while expending less energy. And very similar principles can be applied when overcoming mental drag as well. But as with overcoming physical drag, it’s all about learning how to do it correctly.

Drag and Drafting

I remember when a cyclist friend of mine first explained how professional riders go as fast as they do for as long as they do during races. It’s a simple trick called drafting.

He told me that when you see cyclists riding almost wheel to wheel in a straight line like during a race, they’re drafting. They’re using a quirk of physics to their advantage — so they can go as fast as the person in front of them, while using significantly less energy.

Without getting too technical, the reason why drafting works is because the person (or vehicle) in front is piercing through the resistance of the air, and essentially creating a lower pressure wake of air behind them. Because that pocket of air behind the first rider is less dense, it provides less resistance to the rider right behind them.

In fact, the rider right behind the frontrunner in a group of cyclists can cover the same ground while using up to 40% less energy — just by drafting. Even the front runner gets a slight boost as well by having drafters behind. This is due to the lack of turbulent air filling in the void behind them.

If you think about it, this idea can also work in another area where we’re looking to minimize the energy we spend overcoming resistance: personal productivity and growth. Let’s see how the concept of drafting can work with developing new habits and overcoming procrastination.

Habit Drafting

When you’re trying to solidify new habits, the phenomenon of drag is all too real. And it’s not unlike physical drag. In fact, there are those new habits or tasks we’ve been procrastinating on that make us feel like it’s more difficult to physically get started.

Just think about the last time you tried to start a new morning routine. Whether it was stretching, yoga, meditation, journaling — you name it. It probably felt kind of like trying to run at the front of a pack of runners. You’re trying to cut through the air. You’re experiencing the drag.

So, take the model of cycling, and map it onto habits. Take a habit you really want to start, but it’s proving difficult. Link that up (wheel to wheel) with one you’re already reliably doing. Just like putting a weaker cyclist behind a stronger one, you get the benefit of having the front-running habit pull along the new habit. It becomes easier to do the new one, because you’re already doing the existing one with relative ease.

For example, I was recently talking with a friend who’s struggling to start working out, so she can get fit. She’d tried everything she could to get the habit going, but couldn’t. One habit she didn’t have trouble keeping up was picking up a few new novels from the library each week. She’s a voracious reader, and puts books on hold to pick up with excitement.

My suggestion to her was to link up the library habit with the working out habit. The process was: get in gym clothes before going to the library, pick up the book, then do the workout, and read afterward — or even read during the workout, during rest breaks or while on the stationary bike. Sure enough, it was easier for her to get in some workouts.

Task Drafting

Task drafting is essentially the same strategy as habit drafting, but instead of linking up habits, you’re linking up discrete tasks. And in many cases, you’re actually pairing two tasks that you may have been avoiding, but they become appealing when you can get them both done at once.

Years ago, I was teaching college courses as a side-gig — in addition to my full-time job. A few times during the semester, I’d have a pile of papers to grade — which I’d have to find time to do outside of the normal workweek. I had a lot of trouble getting myself to do them in a timely manner and often found myself waiting until the absolute last minute — which was always a nightmare.

Eventually, I got the bright idea to insert that task into other tasks I had to do as well, but during which I could also grade papers. At least one time per semester, I had to get each of our two cars’ oil changed. It often left me with about a half hour of time alone, where I could distract myself with little else. That became an easy pairing. It actually made both tasks easier, because I knew I’d be able to get two things done at once with relative ease.

Another great example is pairing phone calls to friends and family with light housework, or with the driving that takes place during errands that have been on your list for a while. Many times neither task is appealing on its own. But when you find two that you can get done at the same time, they become appealing to do — because you’re doubling your efficiency. Less mental drag, more productivity, more enthusiasm, more momentum for future tasks.

Go Forth and Draft

The more you can use drafting to link new, difficult habits to existing ones, the better your odds of success are. The same is true of linking up tasks you may have been putting off. You get the benefits of riding the momentum of something you were going to do anyway. You also feel the energy of realizing you can now do two things at once that you had been avoiding doing.

Of course, to do this well, you need to do some preparation. You’ll need to have some kind of list of tasks to look at for drafting opportunities. The same goes for your list of goals and habits.

The feeling you get when you do find these opportunities is itself energizing — and encourages you to try it more. As you do that, you find more ways to do more of the things you want using less energy.

The nature of our work has changed dramatically in the past few decades, but these 4 ideas remain evergreen

Photo by Remy_Loz on Unsplash

Whether you’re a founder, a maker, or both, the work you do doesn’t much resemble the kind of work most people did at the beginning of the 20th century. Since about the 1960s, the term knowledge work has been used to describe what most of us — from the C-suite on down — have to do.

The problem with knowledge work is that it folds in on itself. It’s the kind of work where 50% of the work is figuring out what you need to do, 30% is figuring out how you’re going to manage to get it done given your constraints, and 20% (or less) is actually spent doing it.

That makes it difficult to both be productive and understand what being productive even means.

The Beauty of Good Productivity Literature

When I first found out that this was how my work was going to be — whether I worked for myself or someone else — I knew I’d better get well-versed in personal productivity.

That was just over 10 years ago. And I’m not quite sure I have the hang of it yet. But I have spent a lot of time poring over the personal productivity canon. We’re talking Drucker, Covey, Allen, Tracy, Ferriss, McKeown, and on and on. I read the books, the articles about the books, the podcasts interviewing the authors who wrote the books.

I still do it, to this day. Why? Because I’m a masochist who gets off on finding ways to punish himself by squeezing out just a few more ounces of work per hour? No. Because I’m a hard-driving, Type A, corner-office, take-no-prisoners hustling entrepreneur — hell-bent on taking over the business world? Again, no.

I love reading and writing about personal productivity because at its best, the genre (if you can call it that) conveys a kind of elegance that’s hard to find elsewhere. It’s almost like the best parts of martial arts, French cooking, ballet choreography, jazz composition, mathematical proof, philosophical argument, and an elegantly crafted piece of code — all rolled into one.

Personal productivity writing is not only inspiring to read, but it’s also immediately helpful. A good piece of personal productivity writing can literally make your life significantly better — if you put its advice into action.

What follows is a list of the 4 most impactful ideas I’ve gotten from my time spent devouring work on personal productivity, and how to put them into practice. They represent, at least to me, the foundational pieces of wisdom that have shaped how I approach life and work. They’ve allowed me to advance in my career working for a company, as well as growing my own — while improving as a husband and father in the process.

1. Ubiquitous Capture

In David Allen’s Getting Things Done, he argues that his (quite involved) productivity system is meant to get things off your mind, so you can focus on whatever it is you’re doing at any given time. While his entire system sure does help one achieve that, there’s one practice within it that does more than any other component to change how you use your mind.

Allen calls it “ubiquitous capture,” or simply, putting down in writing anything that comes to mind. The idea is to use your mind for thinking, rather than for remembering.

When you write an idea down right when it comes to you, and then review it later, you give your mind permission to focus on other more important (and more creative) things than trying to remember all the good ideas you had throughout the day.

How to Put it Into Practice

Carry some sort of place to record ideas as you have them. It can be a notebook, note cards, post-its, an app in your phone, etc. It doesn’t so much matter what it is, so long as you agree that you’re going to carry it with you as much as you can, and stop to record ideas you think might be useful later.

You may feel weird at first, but you will get over it. At this point, my colleagues, customers, wife, 6 year-old daughter, and 3 year-old son are all used to seeing me stop mid-conversation to put something into my phone to remember for later.

What I get out of it is a much lighter mind. I’m not weighed down by the feeling that I’ve forgotten something I need to do, or that could have been really cool to write about or look into. For all the other cognitive baggage I carry, trying to remember the ideas I had earlier isn’t one of them. And that’s made a lot of space for me to think about other things.

2. Separating Thinking from Doing

In my experience, much of my procrastination comes from one basic problem: I have not completed the upfront work of thinking through what needs to be done. So my to-do list contains an item like “Call Nadia about the report”. It was on my list yesterday and it didn’t get done. There’s a high likelihood it won’t get done today, either. Why?

It might be because I don’t know what questions I really need to ask Nadia. I haven’t looked a the report enough to really talk to her about it. In the back of my mind, I know this. So the back of my mind keeps the front of my mind from doing the task.

The way to overcome this kind of procrastination is by carving out plentiful and separate time for thinking. It’s time for thinking through projects and tasks. Time for asking yourself the tough questions about what you need to do and why. Time to plan, time to question, time to make decisions. It’s a different kind of time than the time of doing, but it is so very essential to doing good work.

Put it Into Practice

Carve out at least 2–3 hours per week to review the stuff that’s on your plate — as well as the stuff that’s on your mind. I take 2 hours nearly every Friday and run through a checklist of activities that involve looking at and thinking about — but not actually doing my work.

I clean out my inbox as much as possible. I review my list of projects, choose which ones I’m going to defer, pass along to others, or kill (and let others know they’re dying). I open up the calendar and review the week that was: What actions came from those meetings that I need to capture? I review the week coming up: What do I need to prepare for?

I stop and think about how much of this stuff on my plate is serving my goals. If the answer isn’t a lot, I think long and hard about how to change that. I go to the comically small whiteboard in my home office and furrow my brow for a while. I pace. I put on some jazz music. I drink coffee. I reflect. But I don’t mix in the doing of my work with this ritual. This is sacred.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this point: don’t mix the doing of your stuff with the thinking about it. They’re two different mindsets. You can’t really be in both of them at the same time.

And if you think that you can’t afford 2–3 hours per week of this kind of work, you probably need more like 5 hours of it.

3. Choosing not to do something is a valid (and often strategic) choice

When we think of high-performers, we often think of people who do a lot. But when we take a closer look, that’s not the case. It’s not that they do a lot of things, it’s just that the few things they choose to do have a huge impact.

Steve Jobs and Apple chose to make a few extremely impactful products — rather than several lines of products that catered to every little niche. That was at a time when competitors were multiplying product lines and customizations like crazy. Jobs and his team chose not to do a lot of things that were very likely on various lists. And it paid off. It usually does.

Saying “no” pays off. Choosing not to do something — even after it’s been on your list for months (or years!) is always an option. And it may be just the thing to take a burdensome weight off your shoulders — so you can go create your next great thing.

But you have to get over the fear of giving up on things. Get over the pride you have in finishing everything you start. You can (and should) choose not to get many things done, so you can get a few other very impactful things done.

Put it Into Practice

Take a look at your project list. How many of the projects on it really get you excited? How many of them at least hold the promise of making a meaningful change? For those that fit into neither category, consider getting them off your plate.

You can delegate things — or at least ask for the expertise and help of others. You can also renegotiate the things you previously accepted. You may find some of the things on your plate don’t even need to get done, or could actually be folded into other projects (some that others are doing!).

The key is to make sure you regularly look at what’s on your list regularly. Don’t make the assumption that it all still belongs there. When you can free yourself of that assumption, it will serve you well.

4. The goal of productivity isn’t simply to produce

The point of productivity and productivity systems isn’t just to get more done — but rather to be able to confidently NOT produce for periods of time. In fact, if you build a successful productivity system, you’ll be able to purposely NOT even think about producing for periods of time.

For as much flack as Tim Ferriss gets about The 4-Hour Work Week, there is an important message in all his optimization and outsourcing: Your productivity journey should bring you to a place where you do as much of the stuff you want to do, and as little as possible of the stuff you don’t want to do.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done actually has a similar end goal: To be fully present and prepared for whatever it is you’re doing now, so you can get the most out of it.

A great productivity system will help you produce a lot more than the disorganized, undisciplined person without such a system. But if you don’t use all that productivity you’ve gained to make time to enjoy your life — that system has failed. You have failed.

Success, even for the high-performing productivity gurus, is about making time and space in your life to enjoy it. So whatever your system, and however solid your habits, make sure they’re serving that goal.

Put it Into Practice

Make time to rest and do activities that contribute to your life that aren’t work. Spend time with family, friends, or in the community. Get outside, do something active, or simply sit with a good book — reading for pleasure. Whatever it is, do it for the enjoyment of the thing, and not for results.

The benefits you get from this are twofold. First of all, these kinds of activities are what make up a good life. Life can’t be work all the time, otherwise you risk burning out. Secondly, time away from the productive grind actually helps you come back more productive. A change of scenery, focus, location, and giving the active, thinking part of your brain a rest actually benefits your ability to come back and do quality work. That’s quite the one-two punch.

Go Forth and (Knowledge) Work

These 4 ideas are not the be-all, end-all. But for me, they’ve proven to be the most valuable. As more of my work has become this amorphous blob we call “knowledge work”, remembering these things has helped me to do that work, do it fairly well, and avoid going crazy.

In summary, here are the 4 ideas:

1. Ubiquitous capture
2. Separate thinking from doing
3. Choosing not to do something is a valid, strategic choice
4. The Goal of productivity is more than just producing

My experience with not charging for things in the creative landscape

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

What do you give away for free, and what do you charge for?

As a creator, and as someone with both sales and marketing experience, this question continues to plague me. After all, if I’ve sunk my time and effort into something, shouldn’t I get compensated for that? Why should I throw it all out there for people to take for free?

Making a Thing

Just over three years ago, I built a pretty in-depth spreadsheet for running the GTD productivity system without having to use any apps. I built it to solve a problem I was having, to fill a burning desire I had. It took me a lot of time and testing.

Then I wrote about it, and people (a lot of people) started asking me if it was something that was available — it wasn’t.

I just had my own copy, with all my dirty laundry in it. I would need to spend some time cleaning it up, providing self-contained instructions on how to use it, and make sure it was ready for people to use. It was a decent amount of work that I never expected to do.

It was at that point, I asked myself how much should I charge people for the sheet. After a little bit of hemming and hawing, I came up with the answer: nothing.

Rather than charge people to use the sheet, I simply gathered the list of folks that emailed me asking about it, and sent them the link. In the first tab of the sheet, I put the following bit of text and a link.

Screenshot by the author

Rather than charge people to check out this thing I made, I simply invited them to use it for free, and toss me some money if they felt moved to do so.

Over three years later, I still receive a few contributions per month — sometimes with some really awesome emails attached, with people talking about how the sheet has helped them.

But is this approach scalable? Is it better than building something and charging right away? I think it is.

If You Build It…

A few weeks after I wrote about the sheet and gave away the template, I received an email from someone at Skillshare — the online video course company. They were reaching out to ask if I would like to build a course about the sheet on their platform.

The kicker was that I would get paid based on how many Skillshare members took the course, and for how long. It’s the first (and so far only) course I’ve made, but it was a blast. I’m proud of it. I continue to get feedback from folks about how helpful it is, and I continue to get money from it.

The point of all this is: I made a thing. People responded to the idea of it and wanted to check it out. I chose at that point to give it away for free, and let people decide whether they wanted to pay for it and how much. Then, after I did that, I got the chance to make something on top of that which people would have to pay for. So I did, and people continue to pay for it.

Because people could get the sheet for free without taking class, and because they then knew what I was all about — they ended up taking the plunge. They still take the plunge. It has proven to be the right decision.

Give First, Then Ask

This was just me doing one thing — making one product and choosing to market it by giving it away. Is it a strategy that can work?

In a fascinating interview with the folks from Shopify, Ryder Carroll (the inventory of the Bullet Journal) lays out his answer to this question:

“I feel like giving away content that is useful is really important because you’re immediately relevant to your community’s life — because you’re providing a valuable service. Without you, that wouldn’t be there. So once you start that pattern, it’s like you give first and then you ask second.”

Carroll’s assessment is right on, but it needs a little more explanation.

The give first pattern works, but what makes it work is time. When people first encounter you, they don’t know you. They don’t trust you. Why should they? So many people online are asking for their money. What makes you different than the others? What makes your product worth money upfront?

I understand the urge to charge for the thing you made. I do, I was there once. Resist that urge. Provide value first, ask for money later. If what you provide is valuable enough, you may not even need to ask for the money at all. But when you do, you’ll be much more likely to get it — and get it from people who will continue to give it to you down the road — because they trust you.

Remember, you are only partly selling what you made. You’re also selling who you are, your ethos, your work ethic. People do buy from people — even online. Prove you’re a person worth buying from by giving first and asking second.

What’s in It for Me?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should break your back for nothing. I’m assuming you’re reading this because you’re looking to make money from what you create, and that is the end goal.

So what’s in it for you when you give it away first? The short answer is the experience. I would hope that whatever it is you’re making that you intend to sell, you care a decent amount about that thing in and of itself. In that sense, simply making the thing and having it ready to give away provides value to you. You are self-actualized. You had a vision and built something you’re proud of.

In my case, I cared enough about the problem of making a personal productivity tool that I could use in a simple spreadsheet that I went ahead and did it. I solved a problem, and it helped me. I also felt great having done it. After a while, people saw enough value in it that opportunities were there to get compensated. It was that much easier for me to pursue them because people could still get the primary product for free.

I believe that time will reveal and sustain value. Time helps connect people looking for value with the people creating it — and the money flows where it ought to.

I won’t call it faith, but also won’t not call it faith.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting money for what you work hard to make. Just don’t ask for it too soon. You’ll be glad you didn’t.

Why I’ve done away with GTD “contexts” for next actions, and adopted a simple scheduling system instead

Photo by Ann Nekr from Pexels

The genius of a productivity system like David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) consist of two key habits:

• get everything out of your head and onto a list
• think in terms of next actions

Both of these habits are beneficial. But they have their downsides — especially when you adopt them together. A major downside is that you end up with a giant list of next actions — one that overwhelms you as you glance at it. To combat this, GTD practitioners use contexts to break down that giant list of next actions based on when and where they can be done.

Contexts are the restrictions on where, when, and with what you can physically do each next action. For example, GTD enthusiasts suggest keeping a list of next actions under the heading “@errands” — meaning they’re things you can only do while you’re out. There are many other variants, like “@phone” or “@online” — all depending on where you can and can’t do each action.

But in my experience, there are 2 problems with next actions and contexts:

1. For the most part, technology and the nature of work has nearly eliminated the lines between contexts. We can do basically anything pretty much anywhere, with the tools we have on us.
2. Context-based lists have done a great job telling us what we could and couldn’t be doing at any moment, but a poor job of telling us what we should be doing. And thus an even poorer job of motivating us.

As a result, I’ve begun to handle my list of next actions a little differently. Rather than sorting tasks into contexts based on locations, tools, or people, I sort them into an informal, but highly effective set of 4 categories.

Contexts Are Almost Obsolete

While they may have helped a while ago, contexts aren’t what they used to be. And especially for those of us who work from home, and have powerful computational tools that can be carried anywhere with us — contexts are becoming almost completely unhelpful.

Back in the early 2000’s, a context like “@home” did help to distinguish from a context like “@office”. By and large, there were things you could only do at home, and things you could only do at the office. The same thing was true for “@phone” and “@computer”. But now our phones are computers. Many of the things we used to only do on our computers can be done nearly as efficiently on our phones. That’s saying nothing of things like tablets, ubiquitous wi-fi, and hot spots — which make it quite easy to work from nearly anywhere.

In general, contexts in productivity systems are becoming less helpful as a method of sorting next actions because they’re collapsing into one. Now that once neat and helpful way of sorting next actions into separate manageable lists has become almost useless. You’re back down to a giant list of next actions that can be done anywhere, and maybe one or two other small lists that can’t. Cue that overwhelmed feeling once again.

Contexts Don’t Prioritize or Motivate

There’s another issue with classical GTD-type contexts that always tripped me up. Even if I had neat and manageable context-based lists of next actions, there was nothing to push me to do certain actions over others. Looking at my context lists would tell me what I could or couldn’t do, but not what I should do — or at least what I should try to do.

To put it another way: it’s great to see that I can’t have lunch with my boss’s boss now that I’m driving 50 miles to a different meeting. But my productivity system should make it easier for me to see that I should have skipped driving 50 miles away and chosen to have lunch with my boss’s boss.

In short, a next action list should help clarify priority and urgency. And I’m not talking here about calendar urgency — the “do it today or the opportunity goes away” type. That stuff is easy to manage. It goes on the calendar. And the calendar tends to work well.

What I’m really scared of, and I think most people are too, are those tasks that don’t have hard deadlines. It’s those things that you should do, but they’re not urgent; they’re up to you. And they’re so easy to put off until later, because they’re not pulling at you. No one is yelling at you to do them.

And maybe it’s just that I haven’t gotten good enough at continuously thinking about this (as Covey calls it) “Quadrant 2” stuff — the important, but not urgent stuff. But even if I do need to get better at it — isn’t that something a good productivity system should help me with?

I think it is. So I altered my system to make it easier for me to push myself to do that important, but not always urgent stuff. I’m using relative time categories.

Using Relative Time Categories (T-N-T-N)

So rather than separate my actions into contexts by tools or locations, I’ve gone back to a more old school approach. I’m creating a simple schedule. I have 4 separate lists of next actions:

• Today
• Next Few Days
• This Week
• Next Week & After

As I look at my projects and actions associated with them, I decide which actions I want to do soon, and which ones I think I can do later. I sort them accordingly. As each day passes, I move tasks around. As new tasks pop up, I add them first to the “next week & after” list, unless there’s true urgency assigned.

For the most part, these categories are self-explanatory. As I finish the things under “today,” and get ready for tomorrow, I move up some items from “next few days.” Everything else moves up as I feel I have time to accommodate more tasks.

These categories have helped do the two things that standard contexts and a giant next action list never did: feel better about my tasks and push myself more regularly to finish them. There’s something about putting a target date on tasks that just works for me. I think that this strikes a great balance between overscheduling myself and the dizzying decision fatigue of having no deadlines for actions.

I’ve always respected the philosophy of hardcore GTD-ers, which is “don’t put a date on a task if it doesn’t need to be done by that date.” I get it, for many of us, a date on an action represents a commitment. And we don’t want to force ourselves into a date if it’s not a hard deadline. But how else am I going to push myself to do something sooner — rather than later? To me, having these relative lists just makes more sense.

2 Warnings

Using these date categories comes with 2 warnings. Both are important.

First warning: These categories will only work if you review your list of tasks about once per week. I do a variant of a GTD-style weekly review every Friday (or sometime on the weekend). One of my main steps is to move tasks up to “this week” and add new ones to the list. Call me crazy, but it gives me a much better feeling about my giant list of tasks when I’m doing some sort of scheduling.

If you don’t review this categorized list every week, your mind ends up forgetting the importance of the categories. They won’t hold as much weight, and you’re unlikely to keep pushing yourself to do them in the assigned time frames.

Second Warning: You won’t get all the actions done in the time frames. Accept that, and be agile in moving them around. But if you can get 70% of the actions you laid out done within the week, you’re doing well. Of course, you have to make sure to schedule the actions that serve your goals — rather than things that “pop up”. But that’s true with any system — and that’s also highly personal.

In short, I’m still a fan of GTD and systems like it that rely on large next action lists. However, I don’t think contexts are that useful anymore. At least they’re not useful enough to help you divide and conquer your next actions like they once were.

I also never found contexts to push me to get more next actions done each day — especially when my choices about what to do each day can (and did) change the contexts I ended up in.

For those reasons, I’ve adopted a simplified relative scheduling system, that relies on 4 time-based categories: today, next few days, this week, next week and after. It serves to push me to arrange my day around getting key things done. And it works well.

Perhaps it can work for you, too.

A brief manifesto on being an effective teacher, coach, or consultant

Photo by Dave Ang from Pexels

Why do you do what you do? More specifically, why do you do the work that you do? Is it money? Do you do it for praise? Do you want to be known and respected? Or is it something else?

I was talking once with a woman who did a lot of consulting work for manufacturers. She would come into their plants, review how they moved around materials, where people assembled things, and how they did it.

She would do time studies, take detailed notes, and provide presentations to executives. Ultimately, she would be able to provide them with impressive cost savings numbers. If she did her job well, whatever they paid her was more than covered by those savings.

It Comes Down to Teaching

In an effort to make sure I understood what she was telling me, I summarized what I’d heard by saying “oh, so your goal is to save companies money?”

She laughed and said, “in the short term, yes.”

“What about the long term?” I asked.

“In the long term, if I’m really good at what I do, I’ll put myself out of business.”

What an interesting way to approach your work. But in hindsight, it makes total sense.

If she, as a consultant, cared enough to really teach these companies what she was trying to, they wouldn’t just make the improvements she was suggesting. They’d take it further. They would begin to think about their company in the way that she did. They would adopt the mindset of lean manufacturing and continuous improvement. That mindset would allow them to continue to get better day in and day out. They would have become irrevocably changed as a result of her work.

In the end, a company that does that wouldn’t need a consultant anymore. They’d now have the mindset to do it themselves.

It’s About More Than Knowledge

That conversation made me realize something. Teaching a subject effectively means more than just passing along the information and skills involved. It means passing along the excitement and enthusiasm for that subject as well.

Those excited learners are eager to put their new knowledge to work — to test and refine it. That includes passing that knowledge along to others. As it’s been said many times before, the best way to learn something is to teach it.

For those of us who teach, coach, and consult, we have to ask ourselves that primary question of why we do what we do. And we have to look to how we do our work as an indicator of the answer.

If you’re really passionate about what you do — if you care more about the subject matter and the service than the fee or the notoriety — you have the same long-term goal as my interlocutor. If you effectively teach and coach enough people about the stuff you’re passionate about, your long-term goal is to cultivate the mindset that will propel them forward without needing outside help.

Be About More

Teach others well enough, and you make it so that they don’t need you anymore. They’re hungry enough, and knowledgeable enough on their own. The rest is just experience.

But if you don’t love the subject matter enough in and of itself, you probably won’t pass along any enthusiasm or hunger in those you teach. At best, you continue a cycle of half-cocked, half-used knowledge and unrefined skills. At the very least, it guarantees the jobs of other coaches and consultants who will brought in to try to do what you couldn’t.

So whatever your short term goals as a teacher, coach, or consultant may be — go out and work on your long-term goal: putting yourself out of business.

Micro-dosing struggles to build your mental fortitude and self-confidence

image c/o Pixabay

We humans have a skill that is at once both a blessing and a curse: our minds adapt to nearly any situation. When things go badly for us, we may be dismayed, but we can usually adjust and get used to it. On the flip side, when things go really well — and we feel a surge of joy — we also get used to it. That joy gives way to our normal indifference. Then we crave more, just to get that same surge of joy.

It’s called hedonic adaptation. An increase in good things or bad happens to us, but as time goes on, we return to a steady baseline of satisfaction

Unless we can find a way out.

We can. We just have to understand how it is we do adapt, and interrupt that adaptation process. This is something that Tim Ferriss has called a practice of “voluntary hardships”. As a concept, it dates back to the Roman philosopher Seneca. It consists of regularly exposing yourself to deprivation and struggle on purpose, in order to short-circuit hedonic adaptation.

Let’s get an understanding of hedonic adaptation, and how voluntary hardships interrupt it. I’ll also lay out a few ways to put this practice into action on a regular basis — so you can begin to reap the benefits.

Stepping off the Hedonic Treadmill

Because of our ability to adapt so well, we find ourselves on a kind of treadmill. We’re running hard to chase pleasure. But we’re not getting anywhere; we’re running in place. As soon as we stop to enjoy any, we’re carried back to where we started.

The philosopher Seneca knew the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation very well. So in a letter to one of his followers, he advised a way to short-circuit it: subject yourself to regular intentional displeasure.

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

It’s a simple, yet powerful trick. When you find yourself on the hedonic treadmill, simply step off for a bit. When you hop back on, the simple things will be quite pleasurable once again.

It’s not much different from being apart from a friend or loved one for a long time. When you do see the again, you appreciate the time with them much more. It’s the same principle.

Fear and Confidence

Seneca identifies something profound in human nature. Our fear of an experience can often be much worse than the experience itself. The loss or “going without” that we get so anxious about — usually isn’t unbearable. We can bear it. And when it happens, we do bear it.

Furthermore, when we do get through a loss or tough experience, we come out of it feeling stronger. We’ve endured and survived. We’ve faced our fear, and it wasn’t as bad as we feared it might be. We’ve proven to ourselves that we are strong enough to get through it. We were strong enough all along. Making it through what we feared we couldn’t merely proves to us how much we can go through.

It’s much like former Navy Seal, ultra-marathoner, bestselling author, and all-around badass David Goggins points out in his book Can’t Hurt Me:

Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give….Once you know that to be true, it’s simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories, so you can get to 60 percent, then 80 percent and beyond without giving up.

Once you figure this out, we don’t need to fear nearly as much as you do. Once you realize that you can adapt and endure through the fear — the fear gives way to self-confidence. That self-confidence is one of the most valuable things you can cultivate because it will help you face new and greater challenges. That’s how you grow.

Hardship Progression: How to Put it to Use

Like any training, getting yourself used to hardships is all about small, manageable steps. Start with little experiments in going through things the hard way, and build up over time.

The exercises can be many different kinds, but the formula is the same. Expose yourself to mild to medium hardships for a short, predetermined amount of time. After that time, go back to your normal, comfortable way of doing things. At that point, what used to feel norma and neutral will feel like a relief and a privilege. You’ll appreciate what you used to take for granted. You will have hacked the hedonic treadmill.

Take the Hard Way

One great way to introduce this practice into your day is to “take the hard way.” When you’ve got mundane things to do, see if there’s a slightly harder way you could take to do them. Here’s an example.

I travel a lot for business, so I spend a lot of time in hotels. When I do, I choose to take the stairs rather than the elevator. Sometimes, this isn’t much of a hardship — like when my room is on the 2nd floor. But other times, like when I was on the 8th floor, it’s more difficult. But I commit to it as a practice to help me appreciate my normal days. On the final trip up to my room, I take the elevator. I appreciate it a lot more.

There are many variations on taking the hard way to try. Try walking or biking to places that you’d normally drive to. Wash some clothes by hand. There are many opportunities. Just take a look at your normal activities that rely on convenience, and take that convenience out by adding in a bit of your own toil and sweat.

Deprive Yourself A Little

Another way to condition your mind for hardship is to bring it about in the form of immediate deprivation. Look at something that you take for granted — something that gives you pleasure or prevents some discomfort. Then remove it for a bit. When you bring it back in, you’ll appreciate it all the more.

A great venue to test this out is your diet. There are two different approaches you can try — depending on your level of comfort and health.

The first thing you can try is fasting. Obviously, don’t try this without getting a clean bill of health that will allow fasting. For one day, drink only water and tea or coffee without creamer or sweetener. Don’t eat breakfast, lunch, or a snack. By the afternoon (or sooner), you’ll begin feeling hunger pangs. They’ll be uncomfortable. You’ll want to eat, you’ll want a tasty drink. But push yourself not to give in. Then eat dinner as you normally would. You’ll get more pleasure out of that meal than you have in a long time.

If fasting is a bridge too far, there’s another approach you can try. Eat like an old-world peasant. Strip your diet down to simply rice, beans, and unseasoned vegetables for a day or two. Rather than carrots or broccoli in a dressing, just eat the raw veggies — no spicing it up. Drink plain, lukewarm water. Keep things bland and austere. Then eat a regular meal with seasoning, sauce, and all that jazz. Notice how much better it tastes than usual. Notice how you were able to get by on bland, minimal stuff all day. Feel a bit better about your mental fortitude.

Shock Your System

A third way to put yourself through some hardship is to shock your system. Endure something that seems painful or difficult to endure for a short period of time.

Cold showers are a great way to get started. Take your normal shower, but then turn the water temperature down until it’s all the way cold. See how long you can stand it. Breathe. Push yourself to endure it — knowing that it’s not cold enough to give you frostbite or hypothermia. It’s just uncomfortable.

Another great exercise to shock your system is the wall sit. Get up next to a wall, and act as if you’re going to sit down on an imaginary chair with your back against the wall. Once you get to where your thighs are parallel to the ground, sit there. Within seconds, your legs will begin to feel it. You’ll experience muscle fatigue and your brain will tell you to get back up. Don’t. See how long you can handle it. Push yourself to go longer each time.

Build Your Confidence

As you begin the practice of voluntary hardships, you should start to feel mentally stronger. Each hardship endured will build your confidence in yourself. You’ll begin to see that toughness pop up in other venues, like work or relationships. As long as you keep it up to some degree, you’ll continue to keep that confidence.

As a husband, father of 2, full-time worker, and side-hustler, I’ve found a way to devour books despite being crunched for time

Photo by Elisa Calvet B. on Unsplash

Reading books is one of the best habits you can build into your life. In terms of ROI on your time spent, it’s hard to find a better practice than reading. The more you read, the better stuff you find to read later.

I’ve always felt tremendous pressure to make more time to read books — to sit down and page through them. But I struggle with both a short attention span, high distractibility, and a lifestyle that pulls me in several different directions across a very constrained schedule.

I’m the father of two small children. I have a demanding full-time job that requires frequent travel and meetings. I write articles like this one and a weekly newsletter on the side. I own a home and a rental property, and serve as the CFO of my wife’s company. We don’t have child care, and do all of the housework ourselves. But I still manage to get through about 1 book (or more) a week.

To get done as much reading as I want to, I’ve turned to audiobooks. They’ve changed the game for me.

Below, I lay out how to get the most out of audiobooks, free and low-cost ways to get plenty of books to listen to, and ways to make listening (and learning) a habit.

Audiobooks are Game-Changers

Audiobooks have been a game-changer for me. And while bibliophiles may be quick to remind me that listening to audiobooks isn’t technically reading, I find that I no longer care. I’m reading for the knowledge and insight, not for the sport or bragging rights.

The fact is, audiobooks are a great way to keep learning and growing from books when your schedule makes it difficult to set aside substantial time to read. It has taken me a while to stop feeling ashamed that there are other things more important to me than sitting motionless and devoting my attention to text. I found a way to get the same enrichment by listening to books, and I say without hesitation that it’s improved my knowledge and skills.

Some people learn much better through listening. In Peter Drucker’s classic work On Managing Oneself, he describes two different types of leaders — readers and listeners. Readers, well, read to learn and make sense of things. They read in order to make decisions and prepare for action. Listeners need to hear things in order to process them fully. They may need to stop, converse, or ask for something to be repeated. One isn’t better than the other, they’re just different.

Some of us are listeners. A large part of me is a listener. I can and do read — and will absorb information that way in certain situations. But in many cases, I do very well listening to someone relay information and a story to me. I stay engaged for much longer, and the longer I’m engaged, the more I stick with a book. The more I stick with it, the more I learn.

Great Resources for Getting Audiobooks

Audiobooks are great, but not always as easy to come by, compared to regular books. If you’re not well-versed in how to get audiobooks cost-effectively, here are some resources. Most of theme are low cost or entirely free.

(Somewhat Costly) — Invest in Audible

I’m a big fan of Audible. For $14.95 a month, I highly recommend an Audible Premium Plus subscription. You get one free audiobook per month of your choice, plus access to a whole bunch of exclusive free content.

I’ve had Audible for 2 years now, and though I scoffed at the cost at first, it’s well worth it. It’s added a ton of value to my life. But if Audible’s price tag is too steep for you, there are other free options.

(Free) Your Local Library: Books on CD

Your local library has books on CD and cassette tape. Are these the best option? No. But there are some books that are difficult to find on audio software that you can find on CD or cassette at your library.

It’s also worth it to just walk through the audiobook section of your library, simply to see what’s there. Each time I’ve done it, I’ve walked away with something that I never would have thought to look for. This is a great option for car listening, unless your vehicle is so new that you don’t have a CD or cassette player in it.

(Free) Library Smartphone Apps

While going to the library and searching for books on tape may be a familiar option, there’s another one that many people don’t seem to know yet. Nearly every local library has a bunch of content available through apps you can download to your smartphone for free.

You simply download the app, input your library card number and email address to create an account, select your library, and boom! You have access to hundreds — or even thousands — of audiobooks, e-books, and even music and movies.

The apps have come a long way from their initial forms in the early 2010s. They’re fun to use, allow for speeding up narration, bookmarking, and borrowing multiple books while saving where you left off on each of them.

What’s more, even after you return then re-borrow the same book, the apps remember your place — so you can pick up where you left off. I’ve used 2 different libraries since smartphones really became good at playing audio media. And as a result, I’ve had the pleasure of using a few different apps for renting audiobooks through my library. They’re all great:

• Libby (formerly OverDrive)
• Hoopla
• Sora (if you’re a student)

Many libraries are using more than one app, so if you reach your 4 book limit in Hoopla, Libby is an option to get even more books. I’ve done this during a few months where I had more time than usual to listen to audiobooks.

(Free) Librivox

Librivox is another great free option that has a decent smartphone app. It features a large selection of books, but they’re ones that are by and large no longer under copyright protection. As a result you get an eclectic collection of stuff to choose from — which can be great. However, the search function can be a bit wonky at times.

Librivox works through volunteers reading books chapter by chapter. As a result, you get two things that can sometimes be a bit bothersome. First, each chapter is a track, so you need to download all the tracks of a given book, and listen in order. That’s not hard to do, but if you don’t do it, there can be issues with smooth playback.

Secondly, because Librivox recordings of books are done by volunteers, you can get a huge variance in the quality. Some recordings are crisp and easy to follow. Others can be hard to understand due to various factors. It’s not my favorite solution, but it works well enough for books you can’t find elsewhere.

(Free) Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg has been around since the early days of the internet. Their goal is to get as many books as possible available to people for free on the internet. They have tons of books, from classics to obscure ones — and in various formats. You can download pdfs, epubs, Kindle versions, and even HTML versions of books.

There aren’t as many audio versions of books as there are other formats. And some of the audiobooks use computer-generated speech, rather than live narrators. Luckily, you can go to their search page, and narrow down your type of book or audiobook by using the “advanced search” options.

And if you find Project Gutenberg useful, consider donating to help to keep them going.

(Free) Open Culture: A Mixed Media Treasure Trove

There was a time early in podcasting when some books were read aloud and released as podcasts. There was also iTunesU — which also featured lectures from universities. For books, each chapter would be an episode. Years ago, I listened to The Iliad this way (don’t worry, I also read it in book form in high school!).

It’s hard to find many of those podcasts these days. But the folks at Open Culture have done a great job pulling together various audiobooks captured through these unconventional means. You can find streaming audiobooks, mp3s, and YouTube videos of books being read. It’s yet another treasure trove for the curious and thrifty consumer of audio learning.

Find More Time for Books (When You Thought You Had None)

With all these free and low-cost audiobook options, all you need is to find the time to absorb them. That might be easier than you think.

My strategy has been something I call task-pairing. I find mundane tasks that I don’t like doing, but need to get done, and do them in a longer session while listening to audiobooks.

Here are some examples from my own life that you can use to build your own time to listen to audiobooks.

Lawn and Garden Work

I have a huge lawn and a small riding lawn mower. All told, it takes me about an hour and a half each week to mow, weed-whack and trim. That’s to say nothing of any kind of random weeding, gardening, watering, raking, etc. that needs to be done.

All that drudgery is made enjoyable by a good audiobook. I get the benefits of manual labor, as well as mental enrichment.

Grocery shopping

The wireless earbud has been great for those of us who like venturing out into the world and being around people, but still like to listen to something. Grocery shopping with one ear-bud in my ear, and an audiobook playing has helped me get even more audiobook listening done.

I’ve got the grocery list on my phone. I know the layout of the store, and the list is arranged around that. So I just pick everything up while listening to a book. I get about an hour (sometimes more if the store is crowded) of solid listening in each week as I buy our food.

Cleaning house

I hate cleaning the house. But ever since I’ve begun listening to audiobooks while doing it, I’ve actually looked forward to busting out the old duster or toilet brush. My sinks have never been cleaner, and I’m also learning a lot. To me, that’s a double bonus.

Driving or commuting

Any time I drive, I’m listening to audiobooks. My kids are not always fans of this, so we have to compromise and listen to their stuff as well. As they grow up more, I’ll most certainly get them into the habit of audiobooks.

The point is, driving to familiar destinations is a great time to get some audiobook listening in. I wouldn’t recommend it for when you need to use GPS to navigate. Your focus tends to be pulled away from a book on those occasions.

Listen at a faster speed

Key to getting more time to read audiobooks is to get through them more quickly. A trick I’ve found is to listen at higher speed.

I know this sounds a bit too life-hackey, but try it, and you’ll see. Once you’ve listened to a book at 1.25x or 1.3x — even 1.5x, depending on the narrator — going back to 1x speed is difficult. I’ve found absolutely no degradation in my engagement, enjoyment, understanding, or retention from listening at speeds up to 1.5x. Again, it depends on the original cadence of the narrator.

I wouldn’t recommend any faster that 1.5x. I’ve tried 2x, and it’s insane. I couldn’t comprehend it for long, and I got lost. If you’re listening to a particularly difficult book on a tough subject, slow it down. But by and large, you can got faster. It’s no different than when people read quickly.

How to Get More Out of Your Books

Read and Listen — to Different Books

I still read paper books (I’m not a monster!). But I like to pair paper books with audio ones. I don’t necessarily read the paper copy of the book I’m listening to, but rather, I find a book on a similar topic.

This helps me get different points of view and different insights about the same topic. Usually, that opens my mind to things I haven’t thought of. I tend to be more engaged with both books, or I figure out which one is more on point and focus on it.

Sometimes, I feel the need to bring in another book, and I may end up dumping the others in favor of that. Or, I’ll play the new one against the others. It can be a lot of fun if you don’t get attached to a single book.

Don’t Finish the Book Just to Finish it

I don’t believe in finishing books just to finish them. I never did for text, and I don’t for audio either. Is it easier to finish an audiobook that’s not good than a text one? Sure. But no matter how easy it is, don’t finish a book that’s not interesting anymore. Life’s too short for that.

I get it, if you paid for the book, you probably won’t want to give up on it. I leave that up to you. But I’ll remind you once again that life is short. Don’t waste time on a book that isn’t giving you a return on the (very valuable) investment of your time and attention.

The list of books (yes, even audiobooks) that I haven’t finished is just as long as the ones I have finished. It might even be longer. But so what? That just means I’m curious and I act on it. Don’t be afraid to both be curious and to act on it. And don’t let the guilt get to you. You’re gathering knowledge and testing different intellectual waters.

Go Forth and…Listen

Above, I’ve laid out strategies for reading (and listening) to more books. In the end, it all comes down to a few key things:

• find resources where you can access free or low-cost audiobooks
• identify times when you’re doing necessary (but mindless) work, and pair that with a good audiobook
• listen to (and read) many different books at once
• stop listening to (or reading) a book when it’s not engaging anymore

These 4 things have helped me immensely. I now go through a book per week — sometimes more. I have learned a great deal, and been able to make great connections with people based on things I’ve read (or listened to) in those books.

So identify your next boring chore, download one of the free apps above, pick out your first book — and get to it!

A process to both understand and overcome the feeling of having too much to do but not enough time

Photo by Daniel Schaffer on Unsplash

One day, a few years ago, I found myself at my desk at work. It was 5pm. I felt like I hadn’t gotten anything done, and I felt like I still had so much more to do. But I also knew that I needed to go home. I’d been at work since 6:30 am.

It was another nearly 12-hour day. And it’s not like I was working for a sexy startup as an entrepreneur. I was in an entry-level position at a 9 to 5 job — which had become a 6 to 5 job. And I’d usually end up doing work on the laptop after dinner as well.

The Myth of “Not Enough Time”

My naïve assessment of my situation was that I simply didn’t have enough time to get everything done. But that was a misunderstanding of the situation. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough time.

In fact, for anyone who says that they don’t have enough time, it’s simply not true. You have the time.

You may not be satisfied with the amount of time you have, but it’s the same amount we all have: 24 hours each day, 168 hours each week. So time isn’t the problem.

The feeling of being overwhelmed comes not from a lack of time, but rather from a lack of clarity. When you’re not clear on what you really need to do, and when it needs to be done, your mind flips into overdrive, and then overwhelm.

But you can do something to remedy this. You can get clarity, and get control.

Why We Feel Overwhelmed

When we feel overwhelmed, we feel like there’s just too much to do, and not enough time to do it all. But as I’ve said, the problem isn’t the time, because we all have the same amount of time each day. The problem, then, is the stuff to be done.

But let’s dig into why there’s too much be done.

When I stepped back and looked at the times when I’ve felt really overwhelmed, I realized something. The problem is not that there just is too much to do, but rather that there’s too much I feel like I need to do now. That’s different from there actually being too much to for me to do now. Perception is not reality, but your brain doesn’t know that until you’re able to see it firsthand.

What We Can Do About It

What I found I needed to do was show myself all the things I felt I had to do, and ask two basic questions.

• Do I really need to do this?
• Does this have to be done now?

Once I spend time answer those two simple questions, I can do three super-effective things to get rid of that feeling of being overwhelmed. I can eliminate, delegate, and schedule. When I’ve done that, I have felt a tremendous weight lift off of my shoulders.

Question 1: Do I Really need to do this?

The first question is this: Do I need to do all these things? If I look at all of my projects and tasks — all the things that are pulling at me — do I need to do all of them? Don’t underestimate the power of this question.

There’s two different ways to ask this question:

1. Does this thing need to be done at all?

2. Assuming this thing needs to be done, does it need to be done by me?

These questions alone should help you take at least one or two things off your plate — if not more. And if you ask those questions and find that nothing comes off your plate, try again.

Does This Need to Be Done At All?

Many things don’t need to be done at all. At the time you took the thing on, it seemed important or urgent. But you haven’t done it yet. So how urgent is it really?

Furthermore, of all the things on your plate, how many of them still need to be done at all? I have yet to find a time when I’m unable to take 1 or 2 things off of my plate entirely because they just don’t need to be done anymore.

Does This Need to Be Done By Me?

I’ve also found that I often overestimate what only I can do, as opposed to what others can do just as well. I’ve become more successful as I’ve asked other people to help me out by doing some things on my plate that they could do just as well, and more quickly. That is a huge boon to anyone’s productivity.

A pleasant side-effect of asking others to help you by doing things for you is that you get to build rapport with them. Nothing builds rapport faster than working on something with someone, and letting them help you with their expertise.

Obviously, don’t pick people to help you that just don’t like to help. But most people who are good at stuff will be glad to help you out.

Question 2: Does This Need to Be Done NOW?

Let’s assume that you’ve looked at the stuff on your plate, and that you now only have on it stuff that both needs to be done, and that you need to do. What now? Let’s get back to time.

Recall the problem statement: there’s too much I feel like I need to do now.

There are two parts to being overwhelmed: the volume of stuff to do and the scarcity of time. If I have a bunch of stuff on my plate, but no deadlines or urgency to most of it, I don’t feel overwhelmed — there’s just a bunch of stuff on my plate. So what? I’ll get to it eventually.

So just dealing with how much is on your plate only deals with half of the problem. You also need to deal with the time constraint involved. That’s the now part of the problem statement.

Once again, review what’s on your plate. Do all of these things have to be done now? I’ll save you time, the literal answer for nearly all of it is no.

A Sidebar On Urgency and Cortisol Spikes

If something actually must be done right now, you’re already doing it. You must dodge an axe that’s flying at you. You must pull your hand away from the hot stove when you feel the burning sensation. Everything else is up to you.

You don’t want to become a chronic procrastinator, but just consider something. Not doing something immediately is an important piece of evidence that it actually doesn’t need to be done now. It can wait, it is waiting; because you’re not doing it. So just put a future date on it, and do the same for everything else.

I’m not trying to be glib here. I’m just trying to expose the way that we convince ourselves of false urgency. Very few things are truly urgent, and we’re actually much better than we realize at identifying and acting on urgent things. In fact, it’s basically automatic.

Where we struggle is in assessing when we should do the stuff that’s not urgent — which is most of our stuff. But it’s a skill that can be developed.

So take comfort in the fact that almost nothing on your plate is urgent and needs to be done now. If you let that sink in for a few seconds, you should already feel less overwhelmed. You don’t have to do any of this right now.

As you realize that, your fight-or-flight response should diminish. Your amygdala should give over control to your frontal lobe. Your cortisol should stop spiking.

Give Everything a Rough Schedule

With a slightly calmer mind, you can now begin looking at what things need to be done when. The best way to do this is often by importance. Unless there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the most important things should be done first. The more you ignore this, the more likely it is that feelings of being overwhelmed will creep back in.

As you write out the things that you really do need to do, figure out when you need to do them. The time frames can be a bit vague for now. This thing should get done by today. This thing can wait until tomorrow. This thing can wait until Friday. This thing can get done next week. This thing can get done by next month. And so on.

Once you’ve put a timeframe next to the items on your list of stuff to do, you should feel a sense of relief. You shouldn’t feel as overwhelmed. But the feeling of overwhelm will creep back in if you don’t keep the list up in some way. So just keep an eye on what’s on the list and that the timeframes are realistic.

Conclusion

We feel overwhelmed when we feel like there is too much that needs to be done now. But how we feel rarely matches up with reality. When you gain clarity as to what you really need to do and when, you will feel less overwhelmed.

You can gain that clarity by asking yourself a few simple questions:

• Do I really need to do all this stuff?
• Does it need to be done now?

Once you answer those questions for yourself, you can eliminate, delegate, and schedule things. If you do those three things, you’ll feel more relief than you have in a long time. And isn’t that worth giving it a shot?

There are 2 ways to be self-centered, so be sure your picking the right one

Photo by kevin laminto on Unsplash

Normally, when someone is accused of being self-centered, we consider it a bad thing. It’s portrayed as a lack of concern for others, or a kind of greediness.

But do we have it right? Is self-centeredness a bad thing? Perhaps there’s a bit more to it than we think. Perhaps being self-centered is actually a good think. But like so many other good things, we’ve been getting it wrong for quite some time.

In fact, being self-centered is only bad if the self you’re centered around is the wrong kind of self.

A Tale of Two Selves

There are 2 kinds of selves. The first kind is the lower self. It’s the one concerned with immediate gratification, ignorant of costs and consequences, and lacking care about higher values and purpose. The second kind of self is the higher self. It’s the version of yourself that you aspire to be. It’s the self that embodies your values and lives with purpose.

If you serve your lower self, that’s the bad kind of self-centeredness. You grasp at what you think will give you quick pleasure. You think short-term and with little regard to others. Your values are questionable. That’s vicious self-centeredness.

If you serve your higher self, that’s the good kind of self-centeredness. Yes, you do serve yourself and spend time on yourself. But you do it to make yourself better, more purpose-driven and an embodiment of values. You reflect and refine yourself to be better. And being better means being there for others. You focus on yourself, but you are there for others.

Vicious Self-Centeredness

Vicious self-centeredness is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the one with the bad reputation — and rightfully so. It’s where a person caters to their unrefined demands for pleasure and immediate gratification. We usually think of a self-centered person’s first question is what’s in it for me? But there’s a bit more nuance to it than that.

Yes, the self-centered person is primarily concerned with themself. But being concerned with yourself isn’t a bad thing. The issue is that a viciously self-centered person is concerned with feeding that egotistical and shallow part of the self. It’s not being self-serving on behalf of enrichment and improvement. It’s being self-serving on behalf of hoarding pleasure, possessions, and power. It’s self-centeredness, but being centered around a lower self.

Most of us are trying to improve, but we all have the part of us that just wants to sit around and be given whatever we want right now. That self is a shallow one. And when we center our activity around serving that shallow self — that’s when self-centeredness goes wrong.

Virtuous Self-Centeredness

There’s another kind of self-centeredness — the good kind. It’s the kind where rather than catering to your unrefined demands, you spend time focusing on making yourself better. You reflect and refine. You get to know yourself and your values. You gain and maintain self-worth. It’s truly the good kind.

And believe it or not, begin virtuously self-centered can make you the kind of person that others think of as selfless. In large part, that’s because you do the work to become comfortable enough with yourself that you don’t make things about you around other people. But again, that comes from continuous focus on yourself.

There is an old analogy that in the event of a plan crash, you need to put your oxygen mask on before you put on the masks of your loved ones. As much as you want to help them first, you’re useless to them if you can’t breathe first. You need to be centered on yourself first — to make sure there is a self there that can the do anything worthwhile and sustainably for others.

Know Yourself, Grow Yourself

Getting virtuously self-centered involves really getting to know yourself. And not just doing it once, but consistently. Getting in touch with your feelings, knowing your thought patters (good and bad) — all of it.

It’s also about discovering your values and priorities. You need to put all that together and live with purpose. If you haven’t done that, it’s very difficult to really help others. But it takes work — work on yourself. That’s virtuous self-centeredness.

Key in this process is regular self-reflection — which means asking yourself hard questions. These are questions like: What do I really care about? What makes me emotional? What am I willing to sacrifice immediate gratification for? What would make me proud of myself? What do I want people to say about me 100 years from now?

There are more questions to dive into, and so many other ways to dive into them. Journaling, talk therapy, a mastermind group, or mentors are all helpful. But the key is to remember that you’re looking to serve your higher self — not the lower self that just wants the quick and easy satisfaction.

If you serve that self, there’s no reason to feel guilty. You’ll be doing good for others in the process.

So the next time you hear a warning about being self-centered, be sure you understand what it means. Avoid serving the wrong self. Be centered around yourself, but be centered around your higher self — the one you’re working to grow into — and you’ll be okay.

This 110 year-old book taught me more in 90 pages than many of the newest big books on the market

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

I love stumbling upon a hidden gem of a book. One that I’ve never heard of, but someone well-respected speaks highly of it.

I was listening to an interview with the great Brian Tracy, when I heard him mention a book in passing as one of his all-time favorites on productivity. It was called How To Live on 24 Hours A Day by Arnold Bennett. I had never heard of it. But if the mind behind Eat That Frog! says a book on productivity is his favorite, you’ve got to check it out!

As a bonus, it was only about 90 pages long. As if that weren’t enough, it’s in the public domain. You can get a copy in various formats courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

It’s a rare thing to find a book that is equal parts deep philosophical examination of life and practical guide to time management. But this book is just that. Some of Bennett’s examples are dated (since the book was written in 1910), but the points he makes, and his observations about what we as working people face, are timeless.

Arnold Bennett c/o Wikimedia Commons

Bennett wasn’t primarily an entrepreneur or a productivity writer, but he was prolific. He wrote 34 novels, 13 plays, wrote and edited hundreds of newspapers and periodicals, as well as writing for the early film industry and briefly running the Ministry of Information in the UK.

And his insights into personal productivity and time management are as actionable as they are elegantly stated. Specifically, there are 4 things from Bennet’s book that are extremely useful to understand for those of us trying to be more productive.

I lay them out here, partly for you readers, but also partly for myself, since it’s advice I still need to follow more in my own daily life.

Don’t Underestimate the Big Effects of Small Things

At the end of his introduction to the book, Bennett essentially introduces the idea of the lifehack, a hundred years before its modern incarnation. You know, those little things you can do to make it easier to do more difficult and valuable things? For him, it was the suggestion of getting an earlier start, in order to get more done.

He anticipates the objections of those who want to have breakfast and caffeine before getting started on work. So he introduces a hack. Prepare a tray that night for the morning:

On that tray two biscuits, a cup and saucer, a box of matches and a spirit-lamp; on the lamp, the saucepan; on the saucepan, the lid — but turned the wrong way up; on the reversed lid, the small teapot, containing a minute quantity of tea leaves. You will then have to strike a match — that is all. In three minutes the water boils, and you pour it into the teapot (which is already warm). In three more minutes the tea is infused. You can begin your day while drinking it.

Genius, right? It’s just like putting your coffee and water into the coffee maker the night before — so it’s ready for you in the morning. This was 1910. The man was way ahead of his time!

He also anticipates the critic of the lifehacking mindset, by assuring us that however small we may think these things are, they are anything but. And he pens what’s become my favorite productivity quote of all time:

These details may seem trivial to the foolish, but to the thoughtful they will not seem trivial. The proper, wise balancing of one’s whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

And he’s right. The small things — like not having you breakfast and tea (or coffee) ready in the morning — are a big deal. They’re a big deal because they are often the hurdles to us doing the other things — like getting up and working a bit earlier — that could produce huge benefits for us.

He’s also foreseeing the compound effect here, well before it became a staple of personal growth aficionados. Do this small thing tomorrow morning, and it’s small. Do it over and over again, for a year, and you’ve gained a hundred or more hours of productive time.

Wash, rinse, succeed, repeat.

The 7 1/2 Hour Miracle

We all struggle with “finding time” to get things done. Not just to get the “have-to” stuff done, but also to make progress on our big goals. At times, it can seem like there just isn’t enough time in the day for all of it.

Bennett pushes back on that idea. Particularly, he makes two claims about the 168 hours we all have in a week:

1. Even in the busiest of schedules, you can find 7 1/2 hours each week of time that’s just sitting around.
2. If you could fully focus your efforts in just that 7 1/2 hours per week, you could do some pretty amazing things.

Bennett says that if we prioritized using those hours on the important things in our lives, we could do things that from our current viewpoint, may seem like miracles.

But where do these 7 1/2 hours come from? As you can imagine, Bennett has an answer for that:

What I suggest is that at six o’clock [P.M.] you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions.

That’s it. 1 1/2 hour blocks every other weekday, and one 3-hour session on a weekend day. It’s not asking that much. It’s 4.5% of your week.

Can you afford 4.5% of your week to block off and invest in your growth? It’s kind of a rhetorical question. If you’re serious about growth, the answer is yes.

This isn’t to shame those who haven’t been “finding the time”. It’ actually to do the opposite. It’s to encourage you that the time is there. It’s there for all of us, if we’re willing to do the admittedly hard work of pushing away those things that aren’t helping us achieve our goals.

So in those 7 1/2 hours, what do you do to get the most out of them? Bennett suggests two key activities: honing your ability to concentrate and practicing regular reflection.

Hone Your Most Valuable Skill: Concentration

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the ability to concentrate is a multiplier. As in, if you and another person have 30 minutes in which to work, but you can concentrate better than they can, you can get double the work done.

So setting aside the time blocks is important, but it’s only step 1. You need to be able to concentrate during that time, so you can get as much out of it as possible.

But concentration doesn’t just happen. It’s a skill. And like so many other skills, it needs to be honed. And Bennett has a novel suggestion of how to do that. It’s kind of like meditation, but with a slight twist.

He suggests that you use time you normally spend waiting (like a commute) or doing mindless things (for me, it’s mowing the lawn, vacuuming, or washing dishes). He suggests you pick an idea to think about, and keep your mind focused on it intensely for as long as you can. When your mind wanders, which it will, bring it back to thinking about that idea.

Consider it a kind of mental weightlifting.

And here’s the great thing: This isn’t something new. You’ve done it before — probably many times. Bennett gives a great example most of us can relate to:

Do you not remember that morning when you received a disquieting letter which demanded a very carefully-worded answer? How you kept your mind steadily on the subject of the answer, without a second’s intermission, until you reached your office; whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the answer? That was a case in which you were roused by circumstances to such a degree of vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant. You would have no trifling. You insisted that its work should be done, and its work was done.

If you do put this into practice, two things should happen. First, you’ll get better at staying focused on things. You’ll get better at directing your mind to where you want it to go — rather than the other way around. Secondly, if you pick things to think about that are tough issues, projects, or decisions to make — you’ll get the added benefit of working through those problems, as well. It’s a win-win.

Reflect Regularly

Bennett was a prolific journaler. It’s estimated that at the time of his death, he had amassed more than a million words in his daily journals. And that’s in addition to the many books, articles, and plays he wrote during his lifetime.

He recommends not only journaling, but the practice of reflection that it represents, as necessary for making the most of your time.

…as to what [the most important] course of study should be there cannot be any question; there never has been any question….it is not literature, nor is it any other art, nor is it history, nor is it any science. It is the study of one’s self.

It’s hard to argue with this, and actually not many people do. Instead, they insist that they already know themselves. But if you ever find yourself getting distracted, procrastinating, missing deadlines, falling short of goals, or generally not performing — the first question you should ask is how well do I know myself? Chances are, the answer is not as well as you thought.

This is actually great news. What better subject could there be to have to study intensely than one that’s readily available — YOU! Joking aside, gaining self-knowledge is hard work, but the rewards are immense.

Reflection involves getting honest with yourself on a regular basis. It involves talking to yourself (often in written form) about yourself — and rarely about others. This is an important point. Too much of our reflection on our days revolves around what others have done and how we feel about it. That may be a starting point, but the ending point of reflection has to be you.

The reflection needs to involved getting to tough questions about yourself. Here are just a few: What do you want for yourself? What motivates you? What scares you? What are you proud of about yourself? What are you embarrassed of? What beliefs do you have that might be wrong? Do you love and respect yourself, or are you merely pretending to?

Don’t make the mistake of putting off asking these types of questions of yourself regularly. Your assumption that you have the answers without having done the work of self-reflection will be a consistent obstacle in your life. I know this firsthand. So many of my failed projects could be rooted in my lack of having regularly sat down and done self-reflection. Don’t make that mistake. Start today, and do it regularly.

Summary

It’s hard to believe that a book written before movies, TV, the internet, or mass telephone usage could be so on-the-nose about personal productivity. But How To Live on 24 Hours A Day showed me that we humans have always faced the same types of problems. They’ve simply changed the way they manifest in our daily lives.

Bennett’s treatment of personal productivity goes both deep and broad, but it boils down to 4 major elements. If you can put them to work in your own life — as I’ve been doing since I read the book — there’s not telling what you can do.

• Find the small tweaks in your life that make big things easier
• Set aside 7 1/2 hours each week to work on your most important stuff — and YES, you do have that kind of time
• Learn to strengthen your concentration by exercising it
• Practice regular and honest self-reflection, to get yourself properly motivated

5 Elements to get you feeling like you own the day, rather than the other way around

Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash

It’s been said that how you start your day sets the tone for how productive it will be. I don’t take that to be an absolute law, but I put a lot of stock in it. I’ve lived enough days in my 37 years to be able to compare days based on how they began. I believe that starting the day right is important.

To that end, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years fiddling with how I start my days. Some morning routines have been very regimented, demanding, and intricate. Others were very loose, or absent. Some were just indulgent. It’s been a winding road.

But when I did have morning routines that worked, they shared a few key elements. That’s what I’m sharing here. I’m hoping that whatever specifics you want to fill in, the overall structure can help you build the kinds of mornings that make your days productive and positive.

Make some time and space

Having both a period of time and a space where you start your morning is important. You don’t need a lot of time; it could be as little as 15 minutes or a half hour. I have 2 kids, and I’m the one in charge of them for the first few hours of the morning. So I prioritize waking up before everyone — at least on the weekdays. I can usually get 60 to 90 quality minutes by myself. It’s glorious.

Space is also an important element. Find a place in your home that will serve as your place to perform your routine. It doesn’t need to be a space you only use for starting the day, but it does need to be a space where when you go there in the morning, you almost automatically get into the morning ritual mode. The point is to make it as easy as possible for your brain to fall into the morning routine your’e establishing. And your space has a big impact on that.

It should be an uncluttered space, if you can find it. The effects of cluttered space on the mood and your ability to think are very real. Make it as easy on yourself as you can to start your morning off right.

Nourish Yourself First

In the world of budgeting, they say you should pay yourself first. When it comes to building a morning routine, nourish yourself first. This doesn’t have to be food — in fact, I don’t eat breakfast at all. But I make myself a damn good pot of coffee. And before I do anything else in the morning, I drink some.

When I drink the first few sips of coffee, I enjoy it. I enjoy the way the mug feels in my hand. I enjoy the heat as it hits my tongue. I enjoy the flavor. It’s a ritual. And it’s nourishing — both physically, and emotionally. However tired I feel, however high the pile of stuff facing me for the rest of the day, I’m nourished and fortified by the coffee.

Whatever your thing is — be it coffee, tea, oatmeal, bacon, yoga, meditation, a shower, prayer — nourish yourself with something that gives you energy and optimism. Make sure it’s something that doesn’t take effort or a lot of time, gives you pleasure, and is guilt-free.

Reflect

I’ve found that the morning state of mind is a unique one. Your brain has been in sleep mode for some time, and is usually producing alpha waves.) for a while as you fully wake up. Alpha waves are important because they can help you more beneficially process information, reduce anxiety, and get creative and reflective. So part of your routine needs to leverage that. Make it a point to reflect.

Reflection is about thinking more deeply than just about what you have to do. You’ll be doing that anyway in a few minutes. But for now, just contemplate your life. Think about your emotions, ambitions, values. Process things from yesterday that you’ve had time to sleep on. Check in with yourself, to see what’s really on your mind, since it’s currently less cluttered than it will be all day.

I highly recommend journaling, but for some, that’s too structured and too demanding for the morning. So don’t force yourself to sit down and write. But do find some level of reflection that you’re not resistant to. Reflect on yesterday. How are you feeling about it? How does that make you feel about today?

For some, this time is for meditation or prayer. For some, it’s about something less structured. But however loose or tight you make it, make sure that you allow time for your mind to operate in a headspace that’s different from the day-to-day hustle and bustle.

Prepare

One of my favorite quotes about preparation comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower: “I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” And anyone has ever made a plan can probably attest to that. Planning is essential to giving you a positive outlook on the day — or at least making you less likely to feel overwhelmed and stressed.

There will be things about the day that don’t go your way. Count on that; that’s life. But when you’ve planned your day, you can at least prepare yourself for what can (and will) go wrong. The point of planning isn’t to make everything in your day magically happen as you wish.

The point of preparation is to give yourself purpose and the ability to be proactive. The worst days in anyone’s life are the ones where they’re merely reacting to what’s going on around them.

Preparation can take any form you like. I’ve tried so many different productivity and planning systems that I wouldn’t dare say there’s one method to fit everyone. But what I will say is that you need a method that you’re eager to do each day.

Whatever the specifics of your preparation stage, it should involve a few key elements, so that it actually gives you the feeling of being prepared for the day:

• looking at a calendar, or just looking at your time that’s already spoken for — like meetings time sensitive things (like pickups and drop-offs of kids)
• making a list of some key things you want to get done today
• thinking about what might come up today that could throw things out of whack, and how you can deal with it

There are all sorts of sub-steps that you can throw in there — depending on how much you like to plan. But those 3 areas will give you the feeling of being ahead of the day, rather than behind the eight-ball. That feeling alone is worth this entire morning routine.

Move

Studies continue to show that beyond the obvious physical benefits we get from exercise, [it also positively impacts our mental health and cognition](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470658/#:~:text=Exercise improves mental health by,self-esteem and cognitive function.&text=Exercise has also been found,self-esteem and social withdrawal.). And you don’t have to go to a gym or buy expensive equipment. Simply get your heart rate up, and put a little resistance against your muscles. So a really good morning routine should include some exercise.

“But I don’t have time for exercise,” you might say. All you need is 7 minutes. Seriously. The right series of movements in a single 7-minute circuit each day provides significant benefits. Here’s a great routine, based on significant research. There are also some great apps to get you into the habit. Oddly enough Johnson & Johnson has an app that I’ve found beats all the other ones I’ve tried, and it’s free!

If you already work out in the afternoon or evening, that’s great. But morning movement of some kind (like the simple 7 minute workout) gets you the neurophysiological benefits throughout the day.

I’ve even engaged in an impromptu dance party to various Kids Bop songs — thanks to my early-rising toddlers. It turned out to be great exercise.

“But I just don’t feel like it,” you might say. I hear you. I never feel like it. And that’s the point. Your body is probably used to just sitting still and walking here and there. Your mind is also used to that. But the feeling you get from squeezing in a brief workout when your mind was convinced you couldn’t — that’s a great feeling. And it gives you a boost of confidence to start your day.

It will take time — likely a week or two — to get you into “feeling like” exercising. But in the meantime, commit to at least the 7-minute workout. It’s easy enough that it’s ridiculous to say you can’t do it, but effective enough that it will motivate you to keep it up.

Put It All Together

This template for a morning routine comes from a combination of my own experience over the years, along with the research that I’ve found most compelling.

1. Designate a time period and space in your home for your routine.
2. Do something easy, guilt-free, and nourishing to start it off
3. Reflect
4. Prepare for the day
5. Get Moving for a little bit

Getting as many of these elements into your routine is important. But the specifics that you fill in need to be all yours. After all, this is your routine. It’s about getting you in the best position to take on the day ahead.

Are these 5 elements exhaustive? Of course not. You could do more to set yourself up. But including at least these 5 elements at the start of your day should give you a feeling of confidence and calm about what’s ahead. And that can make all the difference on any given day.

Thinking smaller in 2 key ways can both help you achieve more and get better at making resolutions in the future

Photo by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash

For many of us, the first week of the new year holds the promise of being the first week of a new direction, a turning point — the marker of when we began seriously working on our big goals. But 9 out of 10 times, come February or March, what do we have to show for it? Usually, fatigue and disappointment — and not much else.

But don’t fret, it’s not entirely your fault! It’s the fault of that tired old convention of the new year’s resolution.

It’s high time we try something new in its place. It’s time we understand why they so often fail, and a few tweaks we can make that just might save our resolutions this year.

Shrink them. In fact, don’t just shrink the resolution; shrink the year, too. It may mean the difference between achievement and bereavement this year.

Why Resolutions Fail: Regression Toward the Mean

If you’re the type of person who struggles to keep resolutions, it will help to understand a critical factor about the resolutions you usually make. How much of a departure from your normal behavior are these resolutions? Chances are, the further they are from your normal behavior, the more likely it is you haven’t kept them.

To give an example, let’s assume that your resolution is to workout 4 times per week. How many times have you worked out in the past week? Taking a larger sample size, how many times per week have you worked out — on average — over the last 3 months? The further that answer is from 4, the more likely it is you won’t keep that resolution.

Why is this so? It’s a simple statistical principal called regression toward the mean. It describes a phenomenon whereby data may seem to initially be all over the place, but eventually over time, it begins to largely fall within a certain range: the mean (or average).

Put very simply, you can make huge changes in your behavior in the short-term. But in the medium and long terms, your behavior will tend toward its usual patterns. That’s called your baseline.

So, while a big resolution can very often push you to make big changes in January, come February and March, those changes will likely have dwindled — or gone away.

But here’s the thing. Your baseline can move up over time. You just have to do it gradually. And to do that, you need to tweak how you look at new year’s resolutions.

What You Can Do: Shrink It Down

To avoid falling victim to the spectre of regression toward the mean, you need to shrink your resolutions and shrink your year. Make your goal a smaller jump from your baseline (or mean), and make your timeframe smaller. These two work hand in hand, and if you use them, your likelihood of success this year should be much better.

Tweak 1: Make Your Resolutions Smaller Than Normal

As I mentioned above, even those of us who initially make huge jumps of progress in our goals can tend to wander back toward (or below) where we started. And the larger the difference between where you start and what your goal is, the worse it feels when you end up dropping back toward your baseline.

But if you aim for smaller, incremental progress, your chances get better. Shrink your resolutions.

Think of it like climbing a staircase. You can try to move up the staircase by jumping 4 stairs at a time. But if you’re used to climbing only 1 stair at a time, you won’t be able to sustain that for long. You’ll tumble back to where your stared — and be in for some pain and frustration.

But if you aim to climb 2 stairs at a time for a while, your chances of making it are better. You can even throw in a few reversions back to 1 step. You’ll probably climb just as many steps as if you tried to go to 4 steps right away, and you’re much less likely to break your back tumbling down said steps.

Once you’re comfortable climbing 2 steps each time, that becomes your baseline, and you can try 3 for a while.

Tweak 2: Shorten Your Timeline

A year is a long time. And while we can understand intellectually what a year means, we can’t really process that emotionally in our day-to-day existence. We see this play out in two ways when it comes to new year’s resolutions and goals.

On one hand, we believe that a year is such a long time, it’s totally plausible for us to lose 60 lbs., write a book, get a 25% pay increase, find a partner and get engaged, and so on. After all, a year is 52 weeks, 365 days. Why shouldn’t we be able to do those big things — if we’re really serious?

But on the other hand, that same belief that a year is a long time allows us to go more slowly than we probably should. In the moments when we’re “not feeling it,” and we don’t want to work on the big stuff — there’s 40 or so more weeks to pick up the slack! But that 40 weeks gets whittled away fast. And before we know it, it’s August, and you’re on page 20 of that book you’re writing.

If you shorten your timeline, you can leverage a sense of urgency to keep you serious about your goal or resolution. You can also leverage the ability to quickly celebrate to keep you motivated. If you don’t have to wait until December to celebrate having made it, you get to stay excited for more time during the year.

If your resolution is to lose 12 weeks in 3 months, it’s pretty clear that you have to stay on things to meet that goal. But you also get that feeling of satisfaction of having kept your resolution much earlier.

As an added bonus, you get to revise your resolution for the next period of time — depending on how hard or easy it was to keep. The more often you get feedback, the better you’ll get at making resolutions for yourself — and that means you’ll get better at keeping them.

The Takeaway: You Can Alway Do Something

Tweaking the magnitude of your resolution and the time period can help turn daunting resolutions into a reality this year. But the key to making it work will always be embracing two things:

• when it comes to personal growth, something is better than nothing
• you can always do something

You may not be able to write a book this year. That might not be where you’re at right now. But you can write something. Is it 100 pages? 10 pages? Try out 10 pages on a 2 week timeline. When you smash that resolution, ask yourself how easy it was. If it was easy, do 15 over the next 2 weeks. If that was tough. Try 15 again over the next 3 weeks, or go back to 10.

It may take some tinkering to find out what goals are workable for you. But a shorter timeline allows you to experiment without having to waste a full year trying find out how much you can do.

Again, you may not be able to everything you want to this year, but you can do something. Use short timelines and smaller goals to figure out what that something is.

Go beyond merely scheduling time for tasks, and build a schedule that helps you guide your days toward achieving your goals

Credit: Content Pixie from Pexels

I’ve known about the importance of time management for a long time. I’ve understood that you need to schedule time to do the work that you know needs to get done. But what I didn’t fully realize until recently is that effective time management means more than just blocking out time to get tasks done. It requires scheduling time to do 3 entirely different — but entirely necessary — kinds of things each week over and above simply getting things checked off your to-do list.

To effectively use the time you have, you need to block out 3 key types of time. In their book The 12 Week Year, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington spell out 3 basic types of time blocks you need to schedule during your week in order to make the most of it: buffer blocks, strategic blocks, and breakout blocks.

The trick is to both schedule them in the right lengths, total amounts of time per week, and to prioritize them correctly. As I’ve begun doing this, the effect it’s had on my productivity have been significant. Once you understand these blocks of time, and what they can do, it’s hard to go back to any other way of looking at your days and weeks.

Buffer Bocks

Buffer blocks are the blocks of time most of us are familiar with, but usually don’t schedule. They’re meant for low-level activities, like checking email, messaging services like Slack, and other information and communication fees that can tend to be a source of work or vital information for you. It’s the time we spend catching up with what might have gone on while we were doing other work — deeper work.

And while we tend to do these sorts of things quite often, because we don’t schedule them, two things happen. First, we’re fragmented in how we deploy the time. We often revert to checking email while we’re trying to do deep work on a project. When we get stuck on that deep work, we hide away by checking email. But we’re rarely ever checking email in a meaningful way. We’re not processing the email. We’re not putting into our prioritization system, or integrating the information from that email into our project planning document. We’re usually cherry-picking the easiest emails, replying to them, and moving on.

Scheduling a buffer block allows you to take care of things like emails, phone calls, chatting with people — whatever comes up. And it allows you do so while being present, not being guilty, and with the goal of taking care of whatever it is that you’re working on.

According to Moran and Lennington, these blocks should be 30 minutes to an hour long, and happen 1 to 2 times a day. I see no problem with 3 times, for those of us who tend to handle urgent customer-facing issues on a regular basis. Ultimately, you can judge what works. You’ll know after a while.

Strategic Blocks

The most important blocks of time to schedule are strategic blocks. They’re exactly what they sound like. They’re blocks of time for thinking and planning for the big, important stuff in your life and work. When you schedule your week, these should be scheduled first — because they are the most important.

I shouldn’t say ‘they’ because you only really need one strategic block per week — so long as it’s 3 basically uninterrupted hours. Yes, you read that right: 3 hours. 180 minutes of thinking, prioritizing, planning. 180 minutes spent building out your next week, month, quarter, and year.

While you may feel like you’re doing work during buffer blocks, the real work is done in the strategic blocks. There may not be a lot of typing or mouse clicking going on. It may not be fast-paced, but the most effective thinking in slow and free.

The important thing about strategic blocks is the when and the how. When you schedule the time is important. It needs to be when you’ve got enough energy to think and assurance that you’ll be uninterrupted for 3 hours — which is no small request.

What you do during the time is up to you, but there is no shortage of suggestions out there. My go-to is a weekly review — a la the GTD system. Another good choice is a Shultz Hour, where you spend 60 minutes just writing down things as they come to you, and think through what’s going on in your head. If you’re a Bullet Journal adherent, go through your journal.

Whatever your chosen organizational methodology, spend time deliberately working through it. Review, rethink, reflect. This is where the big things start, where the big decisions are made.

Breakout Blocks

When you work hard, it’s important to recharge. And the harder you work, the more recharging you need. Ideally, this time should come in a big block, just like your strategic block. And like your strategic block, it’s a big part of sustained high-performance and productivity. Also like strategic blocks, we tend not to prioritize scheduling them, because we don’t see them as vital. But we should.

Breakout blocks are time for you to decompress. They’re blocks where you can explore hobbies, pursue relaxing interests, or just unwind. The idea is to get your mind off of work and other demanding stuff in your life for a decent chunk of time.

Moran and Lennington suggest that like your strategic block, your breakout block be about 3 consecutive hours. While it may seem self-indulgent or unproductive to spend a block of time like that on essentially leisure, the benefits are real. Taking time away from demanding work and personal projects helps you more effectively address them when you get back.

But that time has to be significant and not punctuated with other projects. Hence the 3 hour block. Schedule the time, so that you don’t feel like you don’t feel like you should be doing something else. So you can truly relax. You need to immerse yourself in something else, and relieve your mind of the weight of all the other stuff you normally exhaust yourself on. You may often find that you come back to your work with truly productive and creative energy after such breaks.

So be sure to schedule a breakout block, and stick to it. The benefits will show themselves in short order.

Making the Time

These blocks should all be scheduled in the following priority order:

• a strategic block first — whenever you can fit in a 3-hour long block that probably won’t get interrupted.
• a breakout block second — whenever you feel you could comfortably check out of work for 3 hours or so and play or recharge in a constructive way.
• buffer blocks last — because on most occasions, they tend to schedule themselves almost automatically. And once you’ve scheduled and executed the other 2 blocks of time, you’ll be more likely to be efficient in your buffer blocks.

Once you’ve scheduled those blocks, you can pencil in everything else. I’ve found that scheduling these 3 blocks each week gives me a feeling of control over my week. It makes me less anxious about my work, and it makes me feel like I actually have more time.

Taking a tried and true method of relaxation and turning it on its head

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

There’s been a boom in recent years around meditation. People have realized that it’s an excellent practice for mental and physical health. Apps like Calm, Headspace, and 10% Happier have become wildly popular in the past 5 years, all due to the positive buzz around meditation. It’s been a vindication of the idea that sitting and doing nothing for some period of time is highly beneficial.

But there’s one huge problem: meditation is difficult and frustrating.

The trouble most people have with meditation is that the mind is so hard to calm down and sit with. For most of us, it’s always churning — always thinking of something else. There’s worry, anxiety, planning, fantasizing — it’s all there in waves that seem to wait for us to sit down and try not to think.

But what if instead of getting frustrated at that, and giving up on meditation, we used it to our advantage? What if you could use your overactive mind that seems not to want to meditate, and get it to benefit you? I believe you can.

Recently, I’ve adopted another practice that helps me to both be more mindful, and also be more productive and motivated. It’s like meditation, but not quite. It embraces all the normal roadblocks to traditional meditation, and uses them as fuel for good. For lack of a better term, I call it “reverse meditation”.

Regular Meditation Works, but…

There’s no doubt that disconnecting from the barrage of thoughts and feelings for a bit is healthy and helpful. But that’s only one end of the spectrum of how we can handle our overactive minds. That is, classical mediation handles the overactive nature of the mind by refusing to engage with what’s going on in it.

That provides a helpful departure from what we do for most of the day. For the most part, we usually half-heartedly engage with the stuff that pops into our minds. We recognize it, react to it (worry, wonder, etc.), and then get pulled away by the next thing that grabs at our attention.

But what about the other end of the spectrum? What about engaging with the stuff that pops into our head — in a decisive way — rather than hoping it passes? I think there is a way. And though in some ways it’s the opposite of classical meditation, it can yield the same benefits.

…so Does Meditation…in Reverse

Anyone who has tried meditation probably remembers the simple instructions you get. And they remember how frustrating those simple instructions can be.

Sit and focus on your breath, or some object of focus. As thoughts pop into your head, merely observe them and let them pass. Keep doing that, being sure not to go down the rabbit holes your mind tries to go down. Most likely, you fall down various rabbit holes of distracting thoughts, and feel frustrated.

This practice can be effective, but you have to be disciplined about it. You also have work on detaching yourself from your thoughts and feelings. It’s beneficial work, but it’s also difficult to get into.

I’ve found a slightly easier practice that may prove to be the gateway into regular meditation. It can, in a way, prep you to start embracing mindfulness, by helping you to deal with the distracting thoughts that pop up.

I’ve found benefit in setting aside a different period of time to do the opposite of what meditation teachers tell you.

How to Do It

Find a place that’s somewhat quiet, where you probably won’t be interrupted for 10 minutes or so. Sit quietly and still, don’t try to think of anything at all. When things pop up in your head, it’s your job to engage with them. Follow them where they take you. But there’s one rule: each thought you engage with, you need to make a decision. There’s a helpful process to help you do that. Which I’ll lay out below.

In the simplest terms, the process is this:

• Get a pen and a piece of regular paper.
• Sit in a comfortable position and be as still as possible.
• Let your mind wander however it wishes to, without trying to think about anything in particular.
• Write down anything that you start thinking about that seems like you need or want to take action on it. Basically, anything you feel pulling on you. This could be an idea for something new to try, or something you had previously forgotten you needed to do.
• Do this for 5 minutes at first, but 10 minutes would be better. Even 2 minutes is better than nothing.

After you’re done, take another 5 minutes and decide one of three things to do with each item you wrote down:

1. Assign a next action to it, and load it up in your to-do list. Then cross it off.
2. Put a little light bulb symbol next to things you’re not going to do anything about now, but perhaps later.

Why This Works

The reason this practice works is related to the reason why we come up with our best ideas in the shower. It’s when we’re not trying to think of something or when we’re actively trying not to think of something that we often think about a bunch of things.

This taps into what neurologists and psychologists call the default mode network. It’s been noted in studies across disciplines, as well as lauded by writers who talk about creativity and brainstorming. Basically, it’s the part of the brain that begins working when you’re not focusing on anything in particular — like when you’re just sitting, doing nothing.

Reverse meditation taps into this network, and helps to extract the magical things that can come out of it. The best part is that reverse meditation tends to have 3 sneaky side effects that really help both productivity and mindfulness.

3 Sneaky Benefits

First, doing reverse meditation helps your become better at mindfulness and regular meditation. I’ve found that by setting aside time to record those ideas that keep popping up in my mind, I get better at leaving them alone when I’m trying to be mindful. I know I’ll take care of them another time, so I’m less likely to get pulled away by them — which helps me be more mindful in general. I’m more present during other parts of the day, which means I’m more likely to do traditional meditation for longer, and not get so frustrated.

Secondly, it helps you get more creative and get more done. The more I write down things as I think of them, the more I’m likely to find good stuff to do. Some of the best ideas I’ve had came to me during sessions of reverse meditation like this. I’ve written many articles that came to me when I was just sitting and letting my mind go wherever. I’ve also had things I forgot I needed to get done pop into my head. Writing them down then and there was key to moving on them quickly.

Thirdly, this practice tricks you into another highly beneficial practice: journaling. Think about it. All journaling is is writing down what’s on your mind. And what did you do in the reverse meditation session? You wrote down what was on your mind — as it popped in there. How simple!

This gets you the benefit of journaling, but without having to sit in front of that daunting blank page you have to fill up! In fact, you started off by trying not to fill up the page, and I’ll bet you filled that page up.

In fact, slapping the date on the top of each page, and reviewing them periodically is a great way to evaluate your habits and productivity over time. If you see the same actions pop up again and again, that means that they’re important to you, but you aren’t treating them that way, because they’re not getting done! It’s amazing the patterns that appear when you look back at your mind’s history.

Summary

Traditional meditation provides benefits by calming the mind and allowing you to observe what’s on it without acting. Reverse meditation is a method for sitting and waiting for things to pop up in your mind, then recording them and committing to doing something about them, or letting them go.

It leverages the default mode network of the brain to pull out things that may need your attention or action. It makes it easy to journal consistently, because you’re not actually trying to journal, but still achieving the goal of journaling. It also helps to generate better to-do lists than when you’re sitting and trying to think of what you need to do. Finally, it actually helps you to be more mindful in general, because it acts as a way to put on paper the things that are normally pulling you away from the moment.

While I still highly recommend a consistent classical meditation practice, it can be really helpful to add some reverse meditation to your toolbox as well.

Did you derive value from this? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get stuff just like this, and other helpful information each week in your inbox.

It’s all about relationships, and about 3 nouns and 3 verbs

Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash

Every once in a while, I trip over an interesting reframing opportunity. A few years ago was a great example of that. I moved from a more tactical role in my day job to a strategic sales role. But I wasn’t given a pre-packaged training plan, and had to hit the ground running in adjusting to the new job.

I ended up going to a 1-day off-site training session on sales management. It was eye-opening — mostly due to one phrase that I heard there: it’s all about relationships. That is to say, manage the relationships, and you do 90% of the work needed to get the things done you want to get done.

As months passed, I found that this was true not only of sales, and not only of professional life — but also of life in general. Manage the relationships in your life, and you do 90% of the important work, if not more.

That’s not to say that the remaining 10% takes care of itself, but it is to say that the remaining 10% of stuff relies on having a solid relationship in place. If you don’t have a solid relationship in place with those involved in doing the rest of the work, that 10% becomes pretty difficult.

Relationships are Work, But the Best Kind

So I started thinking about my work in terms of relationships. Rather than looking at list of goals, projects, and tasks, I began looking at a list of relationships. It looked more like a list of people, but it served two important purposes.

First, seeing what work I was doing for what person helped me prioritize better. I can get a rough idea of which projects are more important for the person in question pretty quickly. And as I continue to track and prioritize work, I can see which relationships and which projects for each relationship were more important. It’s the kind of sorting and ranking criteria that’s intuitive, and feels much smoother as you’re doing it.

Secondly, looking at relationships above tasks and projects calmed down my anxiety at seeing so many projects and tasks I wasn’t doing. I realized that rather than 70 projects on my list, I had 16 significant relationships I was trying to manage.

So if one person had 10 projects associated with them, it was a lot easier for me to go to that person. I could talk with them about what it was reasonable for me to be doing now — which was definitely not all 10 projects. Just like that, a lot of anxiety out the window.

The 3 x 3 Matrix

When it comes to the work of relationships, it fits into 3 categories or types. Those 3 types of work match with 3 types of things to work on, for a grand total of 9 types of actions to take.

They come together to build a 3 x 3 matrix — which can help you better wrap your arms around what you should be working on.

The work you’re doing falls into one of 3 verbs: you’re meeting, managing, or monitoring. You’re doing that work on three different things (the nouns): desires, expectations, and commitments.

So let’s talk about those.

The Nouns

The nouns are things you’re working on. They’re the building blocks of the various relationships — personal and professional — in your life. That includes the most important relationship in your life: your relationship with yourself.

Desires

Desires are weak ties between people. They carry the least amount of weight. You may have a very strong desire for someone to do something, but that alone doesn’t create a reason to hold that person to it. The same is true of yourself. You may desire that you do a certain thing, but until you commit to taking action on behalf of it, don’t beat yourself up for not meeting those desires.

Expectations

These often begin as desires. If I desire something for long enough, it can turn into an expectation. Expectations carry more weight, because if they are not met, that negatively impacts the relationship. That is why managing desires is a key practice — if you can keep these desires from maturing into expectations, you can save yourself a whole lot of pain.

There are also negative expectations — which aren’t rooted in desire. A person may become disillusioned or pessimistic about someone or something, and begin expecting things that they don’t desire. A good example is a parent who continues to miss their child’s games or recitals. The child desires that the parent be there, but after that desire continues not to be met, they form an expectation that it won’t be.

Commitments

Of the 3 nouns, commitments carry the most weight. A commitment is exactly what it sounds like. When one person tells another person that they will make something happen. Commitments have the power to form additional expectations and desires, or they can be the culmination of a desire, turned expectation, which is then solidified by someone else.

Either way, commitments are the most important thing to meet, manage, or monitor. Your commitments are your currency. If you fail to meet your commitments more than a few times, it has a negative impact on your relationships. It damages them by eroding trust and/or confidence — which takes a lot of time to get back.

The Verbs

The verbs are the actions your taking that have to do with the building blocks of your relationships. They’re a broad category of action that can take different forms, depending on what’s at stake. But the actions we take on any given day can be classified into one of these 3 categories.

Meet

Meeting or exceeding your commitments is paramount to being effective at whatever you do in work or the rest of your life. Meeting the expectations of others is important as well. And meeting or exceeding the desires of others you care to can be a great way to build that relationship when it’s new or has been lagging.

However you look at it, the work of meeting is difficult, because it tends to require clarity. You need to be clear on the commitment, expectation, or desire you’re aiming to meet before you can have any hope of doing so. That often requires a lot of communication.

Manage

When something changes from a desire to expectation, you may not notice it — until it’s too late. There is a difference between the two. An expectation holds a lot more weight in a relationship than a mere desire. However strong a desire may be, it still isn’t expected.

If you can manage to make sure that unrealistic desires others have of you don’t turn into unrealistic expectations, you’ll prevent a lot of stress. Managing requires a lot of strategy and communication work. You need to listen and read between the lines. But doing it now will prevent a lot of other work later — after expectations have gone unfulfilled

Perhaps the most difficult, but important work is managing commitments. There are all sorts of things that we commit to, or that others think we committed to, and we know we won’t be able to meet them. So we manage them. We call and explain the situation. We apologize. We ask if we can move the timeline out, or deprioritize other stuff, so you can meet this commitment. It’s tough at times, but it’s effective, and it retains trust and confidence.

Monitor

Both meeting and managing things require a lot of activity. Monitoring usually doesn’t. It can require regular check-ins, conversations, or just emails and texts. But generally, it simply requires being aware of how things in are in the relationships in question.

When it comes to your relationship with yourself (again, a truly valuable relationship), this is where journaling is key. A daily journaling habit is your way of monitoring yourself. You can see what things are bubbling up in your own head. Have you made commitments with yourself you’re not going to keep? What desires do you have that are pulling at you? What expectations do you have, that you might need to better manage — before they lead to disappointment and anxiety?

Prioritizing

The great thing about this matrix is that it provides a framework for prioritizing effectively: Start with your commitments, and work your way down.

Meet the commitments you can. Manage the ones you don’t think you can, and monitor things to make sure you’re not casually committing to things (which happens).

Manage people’s expectations (including your own), so you can meet the ones that will help your relationships. Monitor what kinds of expectations are out there. They pop up randomly — even within your own mind. Make sure expectations that pop up, but are unreasonable, get addressed (managing).

Monitor desires, and when you see really strong ones that are affecting the relationship, manage them. If you can, and it will really put the icing on the cake of the relationship, meet some of the desires. But don’t put yourself in a position to try to meet every single desires people have of you (again, including yourself). That’s a fast track to burnout.

Of the 3 nouns at play here, desires are the ones that are least rational, and that you have the least influence over. So simply monitor them and manage the ones that become significant. Otherwise, focus on your commitments and the expectations in play.

If you found this useful, consider subscribing to my newsletter, Woolgathering. You’ll get a roundup of my writing, and other stuff to help you get more productive.

Recognize the two kinds of work we need to do and help rebuild the trust in yourself needed to be more productive

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

To-do lists are great…in theory. We record the things we need to do, and we cross them off as we do them. Nothing could be simpler.

But so many times, in practice, one of two things happens. We do a bunch of things on the list, but still feel like we’re not getting anywhere. Or, we end up procrastinating, or doing things other than what’s on the list, and again, feel like we’re not getting anywhere. Neither one of those is being productive. And we feel this, so we’re uneasy.

So what’s wrong? Why do these things happen? Why do we feel unproductive when we get the items done? Or alternatively, why do we procrastinate or get distracted so easily?

It’s because we don’t trust ourselves.

Specifically, we don’t trust our ability to recognize the difference between to fundamental types essential work for being productive: red work and blue work. Understanding them and implementing them in the right balance is critical to being productive and feeling productive along the way.

The Two Types of Work

In his bestselling book about leadership — *Turn This Ship Around — *David Marquet identifies two fundamental types of work, red work and blue work.

Red work is work that is fundamentally about reducing variability. Red work is the kind of work we are very familiar with…Red work is about doing…It is about execution….. Blue work is fundamentally about embracing variability. Blue work is thinking work, not just doing. Blue work is about achieving excellence, not just avoiding errors. Blue work is about decision making, not just executing our tasks.

Another way to think about the difference is this: you can think of red work as just plain doing stuff. Blue work, on the other hand, is fundamentally about determining what work you should be doing.

Red work is the stuff you can start doing right now, because it’s just about following the process. Blue work isn’t defined. In fact, blue work is the work of defining what the red work should be, and how it should be done.

When it comes to your to-do list, the red work is what’s on the list. The blue work is figuring out what should be on that list, whether or not you can do it, and how you’re going to get it done.

It’s when you don’t do that blue work — when you just throw any old things that come to mind on your to-do list — that you lose your own trust. That’s when you fail to get motivated. That’s when you procrastinate. That’s when you find yourself in slumps.

The classic example of blue work is a weekly review — made famous as part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system. But any activity that centers around reviewing or coming up with goals, major projects, values, or things like that is blue work. It’s high-level and focuses on deciding what red work is important to do.

Doing Better Blue Work

Productivity starts and ends with blue work. You can do a million things on your to-do list (red work), but still feel like you’re going nowhere. You may be busy, but you’re not getting the right things done. That happens when you haven’t spent enough time doing quality blue work.

Like anything, blue work can be done either well or poorly. What determines how well you do it is two things: time and mindset. Allow yourself enough dedicated time to do good blue work, and get yourself in the right mindset, and you’re 95% of the way there.

There are two little secrets about blue work that are helpful to know.

First, if you carve out the dedicated time to do blue work, the mindset will usually come with it. Once you stop letting your mind gravitate toward red work (like checking your inbox), it will settle into blue work mode. A great way to jump start that is to have a list of projects or goals in front of you to review and change. Alternatively, you can have a blank sheet of paper in front of you, and just begin writing down the things that you want to do something about in the next week.

The second secret is that blue work is actually easier to do than red work — but only once you’ve started doing it. The enthusiasm and energy to do blue work feeds off itself. Once you begin actually planning how to control all the seemingly out of control things in your life, you get energized. You want more.

Once you start acting like a thoughtful, proactive, and encouraging coach to yourself — rather than a reactive, thoughtless, and verbally abusive one — you’ll be all-in on tomorrow’s to-do list. You know this deep down, which is why planning ahead feels so good. A good session of blue work will fly by, and will leave you feeling much better about the week or month ahead.

Rebuilding Trust in Yourself

The problem of self-trust boils down to a few key things:

• no trust in prioritization (i.e., I don’t believe these things on my to-do list are the most important things for me to do now)
• no trust in practicality (i.e., I don’t believe I’ve really thought about how much time & energy all this will take — I’m expecting too much of myself today)
• no trust in process analysis (i.e., I don’t believe that I’ve defined the process of what I need to do here) — we see this when we have lists like “Fix car” or “buy a present for Vijay”

There are likely more variations of these, but most self-trust failures fall under these 3 categories. And getting in good blue work is all about remedying these three problem areas. So when you set aside time to think through what you need to do, keep these things in mind.

Remember today that you have 3 long meetings tomorrow, so don’t put 10 things on your to-do list that you won’t have time or energy to do. Remember that the most important project you have on your plate is sitting there with undefined next actions. You need to define those today, or you’ll rebel against tomorrow’s to-do list, which doesn’t include stuff about your most important project.

Respect the Difference Between Blue and Red

Perhaps most importantly, you need to respect the division between the two types of work. Don’t mix blue work and red work. Don’t make yourself think about the work that you’ve put on your list to do.

Treat your red work self as completely different from your blue work self. Your red work self just wants to be told what exactly to do. She doesn’t want to be given vague directives that require a bunch of thinking about how to do what’s on the list. That’s where procrastination, poor quality work, or a feeling of empty achievement comes from.

Again, do your blue work during blue work time, and don’t leave it for your red work time. Divide and conquer. Leverage the difference between the red mindset and the blue mindset. You’ll get stronger and more consistent results.

As you do this more — as you set aside time for quality blue work — you will get used to taking a well thought-out to-do list and getting to work on it. Your red work self will fly through the items excitedly — with the confidence that they’ve been thoroughly selected and defined. There are few greater feelings in the day to day grind than that.

Would you like to see more stuff like this about productivity and self-improvement sent to your inbox weekly? Subscribe to my newsletter, Woolgathering.

Understanding the psychology of feeling stuck and powerless, and how to address problems more effectively

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

In 1972, Martin Seligman published a paper in which introduced a troubling psychological phenomenon. It explains why a lot of well-meaning people get stuck in bad situations. It’s the reason why we find ourselves feeling unable to change our circumstances. It’s what keeps us from making changes, getting creative, and innovating.

The phenomenon is called learned helplessness.

Seligman demonstrated it with a simple experiment. He set up a room in which dogs were given shocks, but as soon as they crossed a designated barrier, the shocks would stop. Those dogs quickly learned why the shocks were happening, and learned that they could prevent them. They stopped crossing the barrier.

But a second set of dogs was given the same training, but before that, they had been given random shocks that they couldn’t control. Those dogs were shown to be significantly less likely to learn how to escape the same shocks as the first group. Because of the prior random shocks, they didn’t learn that they could prevent shocks by crossing the barrier.

The only reasonable explanation for what Seligman saw was that an exposure to random, uncontrollable pain predisposes a dog to think that other instances of pain are also uncontrollable. Essentially, the dogs were conditioned to believe they were helpless.

Learned Helplessness

The behavior that Seligman discovered in dogs also happens in humans. We experience our fair share of pain, and we often don’t grasp its causes. So we’re conditioned to feel helpless. We train ourselves to stop trying to do anything. Like the second group of dogs in Seligman’s experiment, we accept the suffering and give up.

But how much of our suffering are we really helpless to change?

Of course, some pain, loss, anxiety, and other negative emotions are both random and uncontrollable. But much of it is not — at least not to the extent that we think it is. More of our suffering is within our control than we think. But until we come to some crucial realizations, we’ll continue feeling that our suffering is something we’re doomed to suffer.

Separate Events From Experiences

The ancient Greek Stoics pointed out that there is a difference between events and how we experience them. Our naive way of experiencing negative things is usually something like this: this day has been terrible; all of these bad things happened to me!

But the Stoics would tell us that we’re overreaching. It’s not that the day or the events are bad. The events that happen every day are neutral. They’re simply the workings of the world and its people. What makes events good or bad are our experiences of them.

We humans almost automatically form desires and expectations. We want things to go a certain way. We want people to act in certain ways. We invest emotional energy in hopeful anticipation of how things will turn out.

When things don’t turn out the way we desire, we get disappointed, upset, or sad. But if we hadn’t invested as much emotion in how the events of the world panned out, our emotional reaction would be different. That is to say, if we hadn’t invested so much emotional energy in an outcome up front, we wouldn’t lose so much when things didn’t work out.

Separate Pain From Suffering

Another related distinction is the one between pain and suffering. Pain is a sensation. It’s what happens automatically when you receive some sort of trauma — be it physical or mental. Pain just happens. We can’t control it.

Suffering is different.

Suffering is the anguish that often comes when we encounter pain, and let it build into a bunch of negative emotions. It comes from the “why me?” or “this isn’t fair!” response to pain or other undesirable feelings. We desire pleasure or think we deserve pleasurable feelings all the time. So when we feel pain, we can often become frustrated, angry, then anxious, then hopeless. That’s suffering. But it’s something we can learn to prevent.

Your Mental Energy is an Investment

At a basic level, Stoicism is a philosophy of wise emotional investment. Don’t put in what you can’t afford to lose, and you’ll stay relatively happy. The suffering and helplessness we feel comes from losing a large emotional investment. Stoicism reminds us not to invest so much in things we don’t control. In a word, it’s detachment.

But the key of Stoicism isn’t to completely detach from the world. It’s simply to remember that like time or money, your mental energy is something you can invest or save. And like any investment, it carries the risk of loss.

The best way to avoid losing your mental energy is to invest more wisely. Be picky about what you invest your emotional energy in. Here’s a simple criterion to help you guide your mental energy: focus on what you can control or influence. Let go of what you cannot.

Stay In Your Spheres

The term “sphere of influence” is used in numerous disciplines — from politics to business. But the idea is simple and useful for daily life. There is a small set of things over which you have significant influence.

image c/o the author

Notice that the term used isn’t control, but rather influence. You can only control your non-immediate reactions to things and your behavior. But outside of that, while you don’t have control over other things or people, you do have influence. You can do things that, depending on other factors, may serve to tip the scales toward your desired result — but that’s as much assurance as you’ll get.

Outside of the spheres of control and influence is, well, the rest of the world. And while it can be fun or educational to learn and wonder about it, you probably can’t influence it, and you definitely can’t control it. So to invest much of any of your emotions into it is wrong-headed, and will likely lead to suffering.

Focus as much of your mental energy as possible in the sphere of control. Focus less of it in your sphere of influence. Focus as little mental energy as possible in the outermost sphere you can neither control nor influence.

When you stop investing mental energy outside your sphere of control, you’ll stop feeling helpless. Rather than wondering how you’ll get out of this terrible situation, you’ll remember that there’s much of the situation you can’t control. Then you can focus on your innermost sphere — where you can work on your own self-talk, mood, and behavior.

So long as you can choose to invest more mental energy on things you can control — namely your thoughts and behavior — you’ll never feel helpless. Remember that you’re an investor. Choose to invest your mental and emotional energy wisely.

On communicating more elegantly and effectively in an age of attention scarcity

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

I received an e-mail the other day from a salesperson. It began with two introductory sentences, then a third which read “I’ll keep this brief.”

What followed was two dense paragraphs rich with detail, names, and data. A third paragraph following them was one sentence with a vague “it’d be great to connect” wedged in there. No call to action, no specific request of how and when we might connect. Just an inkling that it would be “nice” to “connect”.

I don’t plan to respond the e-mail.

Why? I have no idea what the objective is. I lost it somewhere between the author’s initial promise to “keep it brief,” him smashing that promise to pieces in the 2 dense paragraphs following that, and the concluding sentence which seemed like the equivalent of wishful navel-gazing.

If you make it a point to say you’re going to keep it brief in an e-mail, be sure to actually keep it brief. Failing to do so is a reflection that you haven’t taken the recipient of the e-mail into consideration. You haven’t thought about what it’s like to receive a huge, sprawling e-mail with a bunch of dense text in it.

E-mail Empathy

At some point in the past — perhaps 10 or 15 years ago — it may have been helpful to send a detailed and dense e-mail. After all, the more words you include, and more detailed of an outline you send, the more time and thought you put into it, right?

Wrong.

From the sender’s point of view, it may feel great to write those long, dense e-mails that lay out a bunch of information in one place. Usually, writing that e-mail is the first chance the sender has had to really think through all of that information. As a result, once that e-mail is written, the sender is proud of that accomplishment and wants to send it off. But 9 times out of 10, that’s a mistake.

As any writer will tell you, it takes significantly more time and thought to write fewer words than it does to write more. The first draft of an e-mail will be too much — too many words and too dense. It shows your eagerness and nerves, but neither of those things add value to the recipient of the e-mail.

The recipient of your e-mail — just like all of us these days — has precious little time. Their lack of time also means precious little attention — specifically for your e-mail. So be sure the e-mail they receive is as short, direct, and clean as it can be.

Knowing the purpose of your e-mail 70% of the battle. Are you looking to get information from the recipient? Are you trying to set up a meeting with them? Are you looking for a commitment, a document, an introduction to another person? That goal is the first thing to type in the e-mail. Then start filling in all the other stuff to help you ease into your request.

If you’re really struggling to state a simple, short objective for the e-mail — or there’s so many objectives, that you can’t pick one — stop. Don’t send this e-mail now.

Instead, sit and think about the most important objective — the objective which, if the recipient acts on that, will snowball into achieving the other ones. Make your e-mail about that objective. And make it compelling enough that there’s a natural progression to the other objectives.

Again, think of the goal of that e-mail and practice some e-mail empathy. Put yourself in the shoes of the recipient of your e-mail. Ask yourself how much time you will likely want to spend on the e-mail, and whether you’d find it easy to find the actionable content.

The easiest way to do that is to practice the concept of less = more: fewer words, and less dense content.

Word Count and Density: Less is Almost Always More

Keeping an e-mail brief isn’t really about how long it appears, but rather how much work the recipient has to do in order to process it. A relatively short e-mail can actually take quite a bit of time to process. That’s where density comes into play.

Brevity isn’t just about word count. It’s also about information density. You can send an e-mail that only has only one paragraph. But if that paragraph is loaded with a bunch of information that forces the reader to slow down and have to process, analyze, cross-reference, recall, or do anything but leisurely read — the e-mail ceases to be brief — no matter how few words are in it.

So aim to not only limit your word count, but also limit the amount of stuff packed into even a low word count. If you must put a bunch of information in an e-mail, use bullet points or numbered lists.

But when you do use bullet points or numbers, keep the items short. Try not to exceed 10 words per item. Also, don’t — under any circumstances — use an outline form. If you are promising to keep it brief, but your “brief” e-mail has indented sup-points — you’ve broken your promise.

The Follow-up Rule

In most cases, the more urgent you feel a response to your e-mail is, the less likely the recipient will respond in your desired timeframe. Truly, a watched pot never boils. But that’s why there’s the follow-up! Follow-ups can be a great way to get the desired attention — but you need to do them in the right way.

The best follow-up to a long e-mail that didn’t get answered quickly is a phone call. Yes, people still use the phone — especially in the professional world. The reason a phone call can help is because people get to interrupt you when you’re bowling them over with a bunch of information too quickly. They get to ask you questions. There’s conversation, with the ability to confirm whether or not there is both understanding of the information and a shared urgency about it.

But if you must follow up with an e-mail, here’s the rule of thumb: your follow-up e-mail should be about 10% of the length of your original. Whatever you do, do not send another e-mail with multiple pieces of information in it. That obviously didn’t work the first time, so pare it down aggressively this time.

When All Else Fails, Just Use the Golden Rule

The simplest way to get more things done using e-mail is use a kind of golden rule for e-mails: E-mail others in the way that you would like them to e-mail you.

When you sit down to craft an e-mail, think of how you would handle receiving the same kind of e-mail in the recipient’s position. You don’t want a long or dense e-mail with an unclear action item. So don’t write one.

If you have dense thicket of information that you need to make sure the recipient understands, e-mail them to ask for 10 minutes of their time on a video call. Then read out the long, dense e-mail you almost sent them. Be sure that you confirm that they understand and care about the information.

Sure, you may be worried that they won’t respond to a request to hop on a call, so you still want to send the e-mail. That’s fine, just manage your expectations. If they won’t give you 10 minutes of their time to make sure they understand your e-mail, what do you think will come from sending that e-mail? Surely not much.

E-mail is a unique form of communication, but it’s still a form of communication. So it shares one crucial thing with every other one: you’re doing it to engage with someone. The more you think about the person or people you’re trying to engage with — and remember that they’re short on time and attention like you — the better your e-mails will be.

The one decision that makes 1,000+ decisions.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

We’re all pressed for time and low on energy these days. We all have important decisions to make-things that require us to weigh pros and cons, think though possibilities, and strategize. But we often find ourselves pushing off that work because we’ve spent a lot of our mental energy on other decisions throughout the day.

Enter the idea of a strategic intent. Greg McKeown sums up the power of strategic intent in his classic book Essentialism:

“Done right, a strategic intent is really one decision that makes 1,000 decisions.”

There’s no better strategic decision than establishing a personal code of conduct. It is that one decision that makes a thousand (or more) decisions. When you decide upfront what kinds of things you will and won’t do in general, you limit the mental energy you spend later.

Put simply, a code of conduct is a rule or set of rules that govern what you will and won’t do in certain situations. They tend to be general, but can cover specific situations-if those situations pop up somewhat frequently.

Decision Fatigue and Optimizing

A code of conduct is valuable for three main reasons:

1. It helps you solidify and uphold your personal values.
2. It minimizes decision fatigue, and all of the negative effects that come with it.
3. It establishes a clear pattern of why you made the decisions you made-which is helpful when you explain your past behavior.

Decision fatigue happens when you are confronted with so many choices so frequently that your cognitive ability becomes sapped by them. The less those individual choices matter, the more important it is to avoid them. But you can’t avoid decisions, so you need to minimize the amount of time and energy you spend on the ones that shouldn’t require a lot of deliberation.

Once you have a code of conduct, you radically simplify your decision-making process. All you have to do is decide whether the specific decisions you face fall under the scope of the code of conduct.

The result is one decision that reduces the time and effort spent on many others. You gain time and energy that would have been used agonizing over small decisions, so you can use them on the bigger things that really deserve it.

Crafting Your Own Code

Coming up with a personal code of conduct may seem daunting, but it’s actually fairly simple. You don’t need to start high-level or lofty; simply start where you are.

Think back to a time when you had to make a difficult choice, and you were proud of how you handled it. It could be a time when you were put into a tough position by someone else. It could be a time when you chose not to pursue something. It could be a time when you took a risk that paid off.

Pull out the parts of that event that made you proud, and make those part of your code of conduct. What things did you think about as you made your decision? What process did you use? How did it make you feel afterward? Roll that into a long initial sentence that starts with something like “I shall-.”

Let’s examine both a professional and personal example.

Professional Example

Here’s an example for your work life:

I shall not do business with clients who counter my asking price with a lower one.

It’s simple and clear. It’s general enough to apply to many different cases, and yet specific enough to provide guidance for most instances of interactions with clients.

Will it always be easy to follow? No. There will be times when you think there are other things that override it. That’s fine. The point isn’t to establish a rule that guarantees a desirable outcome. Few rules like that exist.

The point is to stop agonizing over whether or not to take on a certain kind of client. It’s always possible that despite their initial behavior, they could be a good client. But hopefully, your code of conduct was created based on your previous experience to the contrary.

That’s the price of a strategic decision: you lose the small benefits of the few exceptions to the rule as a cost for the benefit of not having to waste time and energy on a million little decisions. But it’s a price worth paying. The benefits far outweigh the costs.

Personal Example

The example above is just a work-related example, but the same kind of format applies for examples in your personal life. Here’s an example:

I shall apologize immediately when I make a mistake, and ask who I’ve wronged how I can make it right.

As with the first example, there may be times when following this rule doesn’t get you the optimal result. But again, a code of conduct isn’t about every single result being optimized. It’s about getting the best long-term results and minimizing the time and energy you spend doing it.

The quest for certainty is what cripples us. There are no guaranteed results. But the results are not the point. The point is that you act intentionally, and act on your own terms.

Review, Revise, Repeat

A code of conduct should stand the test of time — but not an infinite amount of time. As you have more experiences, you’ll find some cracks in your code of conduct that might need repair. You might need to add an exception clause — a phrase usually preceded by the word “unless”. You may need to be more specific, so as to narrow what kind of situations your code applies to. That’s all up to you.

But whatever you do, you should review your codes of conduct on a regular basis. How often you do that is up to you. If you’re actually using your code of conduct — that is, if it’s guiding your decisions on a regular basis — this shouldn’t be too hard. In most cases, some situation will pull you to take a look at your code, and consider altering it. But the good news is, that will only make it more your own.

It bears repeating that code of conduct is not meant to guarantee results every time. Like any rule, there will seem to be exceptions here and there. But the point of the rule is to reduce how much you agonize over whether each case is an exception or not. You simply follow the rule, save your mind for the important stuff, and move on.

When you follow the code regularly, you also don’t need to wonder what you were thinking when you made a decision. You know what you were thinking; you were following the code of conduct you set for yourself.

Over time, a code of conduct solidifies a sense of self-assurance that’s hard to get in any other way. The steadiness of mind and the trust in yourself appear as you make more and more decisions. That trust will help you navigate through the hard decisions. The result will be a life that you built intentionally — because you spent the time on the right decisions, rather than on the wrong ones.

Mind Cafe’s Reset Your Mind: A Free 10-Day Email Course

We’re offering a free course to all of our new subscribers as a thank you for your continued support. When you sign up using this link, we’ll send you tips on how to boost mental clarity and focus every two days.

A guide to letting things go, so you can move on and move up

Photo by Junior Karrick DJIKOUNOU from Pexels

There was a time where I lived in a fairly downtrodden boarding house in a downtrodden city in the Midwest. As it turns out, the time I spent there was cut short. That wasn’t because I found a better place, but because that place had bedbugs and a few other “quirks”. You know, that kind of place.

Needless to say, that was a “transitional” period in my life — to put it nicely.

During that time, I was the proud owner of a Pace bus pass. There didn’t seem to be anything cool about the bus pass at that time. After all, I had previously owned a car, so this was a step down. What was cool about having a bus pass is that it afforded me the opportunity to have a few memorable conversations with people I wouldn’t have otherwise talked to.

One such conversation was with an older gentleman. He was on the latest of several rebounds in his lifelong battle with addiction. It’s basically what he led our conversation with. I didn’t get as much of his background as I’d have liked. But part of his journey involved getting back to a good place with his family, and opening up about mistakes that led him astray clearly weighed on him those many years later.

What led me to talk to him was my own heavy emotional weight of the day: a heated argument with my long-time girlfriend. She had a certain way of saying the kinds of things that really hurt me — on a regular basis. The relationship had been toxic for a long time, and had come to head now that we were living apart from each other. I’m certain that this was somewhat visible on my face as I got on the bus that day.

As I sat next to the old-timer, we gave the usual “hello” nod. I must’ve sighed or something, because the old man inquired as to whether it had been “one of those days” — or something like that. I replied that it had. His reply was that more often than not, it seems to be “one of those days”. Or at least, we tend to remember more of them, because they take more of our energy to get through. We rarely remember the easy things.

If it Don’t Apply…

As I unloaded my troubles to this generous old man, he began to smile. That smile hit its peak when I voiced my frustration at an accusation that my girlfriend had made of me. She accused me of cheating on her. It was blatantly not true. I’d never cheated on her — nor had I come close. I’d never cheated on anyone.

I’m certain she knew this, but she made the accusation anyway. I fell for it, and got dragged into an argument where I was forced to defend my character as a whole, while she sat in the seat of judgment.

There’s a lot of the conversation with this old man that I’ve forgotten over time. But one thing I haven’t forgotten was his advice. He said “if it don’t apply, let it fly” — meaning if someone is wrong about you, don’t take it to heart. Don’t internalize it or grapple with it. Don’t let it whip you up into a furious and desperate attempt to disprove their accusations. They’re wrong about you. You know it. You know yourself. Be confident in that, and proceed accordingly.

…Let It Fly

So often, we get dragged into defending ourselves against accusations because we believe that deep down, on some level, there’s some truth to them. But if we are secure in our knowledge of ourselves, we’re less likely to let things get to us.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment: If someone were to yell emphatically at you that you had 4 arms, how much would you fret about that? Not much. You know that you only have 2 arms. It should be clear to anyone with eyes that you don’t have 4 arms. So that claim is so obviously false that you will spend zero time or mental effort being anxious about that person’s inaccurate claim.

Now imagine someone said that you were selfish. That might be enough to get under anyone’s skin. It calls into question your entire character. It seems like you’d need to voice a strong defense, right? But my old friend would advise you “if it don’t apply, let it fly.”

Ask yourself: am I selfish? In my own honest appraisal of my motives and my actions — am I selfish? If you honestly evaluate yourself, whatever conclusion you come to will be one you’re comfortable with — even if it means you have work to do on yourself.

Know Thyself

The result of becoming this self-aware means letting go of having to argue with others about who you are. If someone tells you that you’re selfish, and you know you’re more selfish than you’d like, you can stay calm. You can calmly acknowledge that you are struggling with being selfish, and you still have work to do. But if you’ve done the work, and know that you’re not selfish, you can also stay calm and simply tell the person: I know myself well, and I know that I’m not a selfish person. I guess it just doesn’t seem that way to you.

And that’s it. That’s the trick. It goes back to Socrates, over 2,000 years ago. The temple at Delphi had the inscription “know thyself” above its entrance. That’s the most impactful single piece of advice that anyone can use. It’s also a task that will take an entire lifetime to complete — and many people don’t ever complete it.

If “know thyself” is the most impactful piece of advice, the old bus-rider’s advice comes in a close second. You can put them together into a single, elegant piece of advice. Know yourself, and don’t allow others’ judgments of you to override that knowledge.

If you can do that, almost nothing will get to you. Your path will be about becoming the best person you can be, based on your honest evaluation of yourself.