People are least productive in reactive mode.
If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?
Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?
It’s often what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. This is the difference from being effective; doing the right things, and being efficient; doing things well whether they are important.
“Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
Block out at 2-3 hours to focus on one of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. (For more detail, check out this article by Tim Ferriss)
If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day.
It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important.
Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive.
In the last 12 months, I’ve used deloading outside of sports to decrease my anxiety at least 50% while simultaneously doubling my income.
I alternate intense periods of batching similar tasks (recording podcasts, clearing the inbox, writing blog posts, handling accounting, etc.) with extended periods of – for lack of poetic description – unplugging and fucking around.
Great creative work isn’t possible if you’re trying to piece together 30 minutes here and 45 minutes there.
The idea is not to be idle. That’s not something that I advocate. It is to maximize your per hour output.
People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
If you spend your time, worth $20-25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources.
By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.
Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum — create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough.
There has to be enough slack in the system for multi-day CPU-intensive synthesis. For me, this means at least 3-4 mornings per week where I am in “maker” mode until at least 1pm.
If I’m in reactive mode, maker mode is all but impossible. Email and texts of “We’re overcommitted but might be able to squeeze you in for $25K. Closing tomorrow. Interested?” are creative kryptonite.
I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.
The great “deloading” phase. This is what I’m experiencing this afternoon, and it makes a Tuesday feel like a lazy Sunday morning. This is when the muse is most likely to visit. I need to get back to the slack.
If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger, better, or truly different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a conference call in 15 minutes. The aha moments rarely come from the incremental inbox-clearing mentality of, “Oh, fuck… I forgot to… Please remind me to… Shouldn’t I?… I must remember to…”
There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.
What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head? (Inspired by Peter Thiel)
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is not laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”
In my mind, when I’m trying to deconstruct, let’s say a sport, all i’ll ask is to start with: “what rules are people following that are not required? (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
People, even good people, will unknowingly abuse your time to the extent that you let them. Set good rules for all involved to minimize back-and-forth and meaningless communication.
I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.
Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory. Enter the world of elimination.
“What if I did the opposite?”: What if I only asked questions instead of pitching? What if I studied technical material, so I sounded like an engineer instead of a sales guy? What if I ended my emails with “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply, and thank you for reading this far,” instead of the usual “I look forward to your reply and speaking soon” presumptive BS? The experiments paid off. My last quarter in that job, I outsold the entire L.A. office of our biggest competitor, EMC.
What you do is infinitely more important that how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the right things.
Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.
