A couple months ago, I made the decision on a complete whim to become a runner.  After years of self-identifying as an “athlete”, “martial artist” or a “lifter”, I dove into running with everything I had and studied it like I studied plant biology back in high school.  I’ve learned a ton and feel like I may have found a new escape for myself.

If you’ve never run a mile, or if it’s been years since you laced up running shoes, keep reading.  And if you’re an old pro, you might learn something new here, but I kind of doubt it

The obvious caveat is that all of this advice is coming from someone who’s probably a lot like you and not some ultra-marathoner or Tarahumaran.  I’m not a “real” runner… yet.  I haven’t finished a 5k (my first race is July 31st) or written a book about running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days.  But ultimately that shouldn’t matter much, because unlike learning how to hit a 90mph fastball or drive a car, running is about overcoming the resistance to move more than anything.  And that’s mostly a mental game… it shouldn’t take years of experience practicing impeccable form until you can run well enough to impart wisdom, it requires the will to get yourself up off your ass and onto the street.

That isn’t to dismiss the fact that running, like most physical activities, is something you can dissect down to the most minute detail.  Ankle inversion, foot pronation, stride length, heel vs. toe running, etc.  But I’m not at that level yet – probably never will be – and my guess is that you aren’t either.  We’re just two wanna-be runners right now… so let’s start with the basics together.  I’ll give you some links to follow when we’re done to learn more if you care.

First, a little background: I’ve always hated running.  Loathed it with a real passion reserved only for instant chocolate pudding.  There have been times in my life (college, mostly) where I ran pretty regularly but it’s been something I’ve dreaded the whole way through.

Yet running is the world’s oldest and simplest activity.  Most everyone is born a runner… it doesn’t require a gym membership or any special overpriced equipment (like, say, biking does).  Ear buds, running shoes, headbands, and special socks aren’t required in order to run.  You just need two healthy feet and a bit of willpower and determination.  I mean: you don’t even need to have a destination in mind, you could run in circles around your block and feel better.

And boy will it humble you.  Running will teach you more about yourself than most other sport or activity.  Mostly because it’s you against yourself and you’re in your own head most of the time… but also because it’s just plain hard.  Exercise is meant to give you progressive resistance in order for you to improve, and running does that in spades.  There’s always a new goal to be had no matter how accomplished a runner you are.

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‘An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.’ – Ben Franklin

Self-tracking – or personal analytics as some call it – is a relatively new phenomenon brought about by the ubiquity of cheap sensor technology and the internet.  It’s a space that’s just now coming into its own thanks to the tech getting cheaper and lots of interested, data-driven geeks finding each other on the net and exchanging ideas.

The potential impact of self-tracking on personal health and overall well being could someday rival the discovery of penicillin – seriously – and we’re just at the beginning of what’s going to be a huge wave of self-improvement and individualized health care based on self-tracking and analysis.

I’ve recently entered the world of self-tracking… and there’s no going back.  My weight, body fat percentage, running speed and distance, calories burned, sleep patterns, investments, genetic predispositions, daily routines, mood, and even commute times are tracked and analyzed.  Sound a little excessive?  Maybe.  But only because it’s still not 100% automatic.  But it’s really, really close to being “set it and forget it”, and for me, the benefits far outweigh the few minutes I spend each day tracking things.

What is Self-Tracking?

The basic concept behind self-tracking is simple: our ability to determine cause and effect through our memory or experience alone is inherently faulty.  It’s tough enough for most of us to remember a birthday or anniversary.  Ask us to calculate how many calories we burned yesterday and how that affected our sleep last night and our blood pressure will rise – and we won’t even be able to detect that in order to prevent it from happening in the future! 

Our minds play games with us… they trick us into seeing and believing things that aren’t there in order to "protect us".  We can rationalize most anything we do or say (science shows this) which means deciding not to exercise because we’re busy or just don’t feel like it is easy to justify.  Of course, machines aren’t as easily tricked.

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This post is a follow-up to Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff.  Can you tell I care about this topic?

I work with lots of people who are booked all day long, 8am-6pm, every single day of the week.  Most of these people complain that they have no time to do any “real” work since they’re “sooooooo busy” all the time.  Yet sitting in a meeting with a laptop open only half paying attention isn’t real work, and most people know that

Still, they let their time get abused left and right and don’t realize that they’re ultimately in control of the situation.  Heck, they may not even identify it as a problem to begin with.  They’re busy right?  Who has time to think about producing, creating, or <ugh> leading anyway?!

When you break it down, time is the purest and most ultimate resource we have for action.  We don’t own many things completely and totally, but time is one of the things that we get to choose how to spend.  And as we’ve discussed on this blog in the past, your life is the sum of what you choose to focus on – so spend it wisely, because you aren’t going to get it back.  How you spend your time is going to impact your life in ways greater than your money, relationships, or job alone ever could.

It’s easy to look at a situation like being booked all week and think it’s unavoidable.  If you’re in a role with a decent amount of responsibility, it’s also easy to assume that responsibility has to equate to meeting attendance and being “busy” all the time.  But of course, it doesn’t… and never will.

Having responsibility for something important means that you’re a decision-maker of some sort.  The best decisions are made based on experience, instinct, and data.  And there are ways to gain practical experience, hone your native instinct, and collect and synthesize data outside of meetings.  In fact, you could make an argument that the more time you spend in useless meetings, the less opportunity you have to gain that experience or practice your craft.

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I love the word eradication.  I don’t know why.

As a part of an overall approach to personal growth, it’s important to know when your mind – which is far more complex than many of us give it credit – is working on your behalf and when it isn’t.  Or, to put it more specifically, when it thinks it’s working on your behalf… when in reality it’s doing the equivalent of tying your hands behind your back so you can’t hurt yourself… but can’t eat or drink either!

In so many ways, our minds have adapted almost too well over millennia.  In an effort to protect us in the short-term, we can frequently be hurting ourselves over the long haul.

The self-serving bias is like that.  It’s the tendency to see ourselves as responsible for our successes, but to see others – or the circumstances – as responsible for our failures. 

This is so clearly a coping strategy – we do this to protect our self-image, improve our confidence, and keep ourselves from dwelling on the negative.  We also do it to (at least seemingly) protect the image of ourselves in the eyes of others by playing up the good stuff and deferring blame for the bad stuff.

But is it healthy?  Is that really who we strive to be?  Someone who takes the credit and assigns blame?

I doubt it.  Most of us would probably say that this doesn’t describe us at all.  That we’re great about giving credit where it’s due and taking blame when things don’t go well.  And of course, most of us would be kidding ourselves (there’s that damn bias again).  Because who you think you are and who you actually are are rarely the same.  That’s one of the core tenets of psychology.

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Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. – Vince Lombardi

It’s admittedly hypocritical of me to use the word ‘perfect’ in the title of this post when I’ve written in the past about perfection being overrated.  But the word perfect does actually have a place in personal growth so long as you don’t take it too literally.

True perfection isn’t really the point though.  The big idea is that practicing your craft has to be done with a level of respect for how you’ll perform in reality at all times.  No ifs, ands, or buts.

The only way to achieve your maximum performance potential is to train your body and mind to do so over and over… and over.

Let’s assume for a moment that talent is overrated (just like perfection).  Sure, there are people who are naturally better at certain things than others – they have talent, that’s indisputable – but no one can achieve great heights without lots and lots of practice.  As Malcolm Gladwell said in Outliers, you need 10,000 hours of practice to be great.  Or, really, to even have a chance at being great.

Peter Norvig recognized this pattern as well in “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years”:

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.

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Ed. note: This post is appropriate because we’re “shipping” our son to the world in just a few hours.  Wish us luck!  Posting may be slow for a little while as we adjust to a bigger family, but if you’re signed up for email updates, Twitter, or RSS, you may not even notice!

If you work in the tech industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “Real artists ship”.  It’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs, the founder and current CEO of Apple, as a motivator for the development team of the original Macintosh computer.

In this context, shipping means getting your product out the door and into the hands of the world.  But it could mean submitting your term paper, completing a big sale, or finishing a year-long boat renovation.  Life is full of projects like these that could go on indefinitely, but ultimately have to ship in order to make a difference. 

If these projects don’t ship, they’re just hobbies.  If they don’t ship, they were just fun ideas – and ideas are a dime a dozen… everyone has good ideas.  But shipping… that’s hard.  And the rewards of shipping are reserved for the few that are able to do it, not the people who first thought of the idea.

The “problem” with starting a project with the expectation that it’ll ship is that it imposes all sorts of constraints.  The technology isn’t where you need it to be, you don’t have the time you need to do everything you want to do, or you don’t have the people or money.  In order to truly think “outside the box” you need a team that’s twice as big with twice as much money and faster computers!  Of course that’s all bogus.

Constraints are why things ship.

If you didn’t have a deadline to submit your term paper, you could tweak it forever.  If you didn’t have customers waiting for the next version of your software or competitors breathing down your neck, you could add every feature you’ve ever thought of.  You need constraints to really think about how to best solve a problem.  Constraints are good.

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Taking a break from your regularly scheduled focus program for a public service announcement about backing up your computer.  Chances are good your computer isn’t backed up… and for some reason, you’re not the least bit worried about that.

My job is to make you worry.  So please stop all your focusing, getting things done, sleeping, and goal setting to read this, and then backup your computer right now.

Let’s start with the basics of your situation:

• Your memories (baby photos, loan documents, and old music from college) are stored on a hard drive.
• Hard drives fail every second of every day.  There’s nothing “safe” about a hard drive.
• When your hard drive fails, chances are solid you’ll lose everything with no way to recover it.
• It happens to everybody at some point.

Having a hard drive fail must be every bit as bad as having your house burn down was fifty years ago.  Every photo and song you own, every scan you’ve made, all of your personal documents and emails… this stuff is no longer stored in cardboard boxes in a dark attic… it’s all stored on a super-complex piece of mechanical equipment with a seriously bad failure rate that is by no means inversely correlated with its importance.  For many people reading this, your entire livelihood is being held together by little screws.  Crazy.

To be clear about why backup is important: it’s not a matter of IF your hard drive someday dies, it’s a matter of WHEN.  And it’ll probably happen without warning, like an earthquake or major power outage.  Eventually they all fail, and chances are it will be the day before you decide to backup.  50% of people have lost data from their computer at one time, and many, many people have experienced the nuclear meltdown of full data loss… that moment when the guy behind the counter tells you there’s nothing he can do: IT’S ALL GONE.

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The predominant cause of chronic lateness is a basic inability to determine – or admit – how long something takes to complete.  Of course this probably isn’t a scientific fact (yet).  So for now, just take my word for it.

Similar to how some people can’t navigate their way out of their own driveway (myself included), some of us just weren’t born with an ability to gauge elapsed or remaining time.  We consistently think we have more time than we actually do, downplaying the reality of the situation: that whatever time we have remaining, even though we think it’s enough, isn’t even close.

We forget about the little things, we assume the best of every situation, and we get caught up in a "right here, right now" mentality instead of making a clean break from the present and moving onto what’s next.  

It’s called time denial.  And you’re living in it.

Time denial isn’t just specific to chronic latecomers, most everyone falls prey to this mentality at one point or another.  Yup, even you my friend.  So stop judging the dude in the next cubicle.

You know the drill… You’re right in the middle of something that has your complete attention, all the while your next commitment is creeping up on you.  You glance at the clock, trying to squeeze in another few minutes to finish that email – or frag that alien with your rocket launcher – thinking that no matter what, you have time because it "only takes" 15 minutes to get to the office. 

By the time you pull away from your current activity, grab your coat, and run to your car, you’re already down to 14 minutes… and you need to get gas.  And of course, traffic has started building up.  Before you know it, you’re not 5 minutes late, you’re 25 minutes late!

Avoidable?  Certainly.  Acceptable?  Most certainly not.  Maybe you can get away with it the first time… if you’re a nice person.  But great things weren’t achieved showing up 25 minutes late.  Trust isn’t built by letting people down, making them wait for you and your bad habits.  Real artists of life don’t show up late all the time.

Real artists of life have integrity.

Look, time management is only as good as your relationships.  If you’re a master at managing your task list but people don’t want to work with you, or don’t trust you to show up when they expect you to, it doesn’t matter how many to-dos you’re checking off each day.  Commitments are the most important thing in business, and are pretty high on the list of "personal life" as well. 

If you find yourself showing up late all the time, you simply need to get a fix on it.

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“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” – Some Anonymous Idiot

We’ve all heard this quote, most likely from an interview in a business magazine with some mega-billionaire CEO.  Of course this person is either a walking collection of crazy or some genetically gifted mutant.  I’m actually not kidding about that mutant option, as those who thrive on little sleep may have a rare genetic mutation according to a recent sleep study at the University of San Francisco.  Of course, that mutation was found in just 2 out of 1000 study participants – so rare is right.

The rest of us need sleep and need it badly.  And we probably need more of it than we think, or at least more than we’re inclined to let ourselves get by on.

In a 2002 study conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (PDF), it was found that the majority of American adults (68%) don’t get the recommended 8 hours of sleep needed for good health and optimum performance, and more than one-third (39%) sleep less than 7 hours nightly.  Strangely (yet ironically) enough, a staggering 85% of those surveyed said they would sleep more if they knew it would improve their health.

Guess what?  It does improve your health.  And your sex life, body shape, and ability to stay awake during Avatar in IMAX 3D.  It’s also the best way to improve your mood and the way you respond when you’re frustrated or stressed out.  In other words, good sleep can keep you from being a jerk AND help you look and feel better.

Lack of sleep can also have a profound effect on memory and other cognitive skills.  In an interesting study, researchers measured cognitive function in sleep-deprived, right-handed men and found that sleep deprivation has a negative effect on cognitive functions associated with "right-brained" functions such as "motor, rhythm, receptive & expressive speech, memory and complex verbal arithmetic function." (PDF link)

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Happy first birthday Refocuser!  Check out the “best of” page for some fun posts after reading this.

So much has been written about the Weekly Review as a part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system that it feels sort of ridiculous to even entertain writing about it.  I pride myself in making this blog different – not just another GTD/life hacks wannabe poser blog thing – but at the same time, a lot of the best practices in productivity fit under the GTD umbrella.  So there will be times I feel compelled to write about GTD in all its glory.  This is one of those times.

If you’re new to GTD, this post really isn’t the best place to start as it’s only covering a small piece of what GTD is all about.  You should dive in and read the official book.  If you’re the type of person who can’t stay on top of the most important things in your life, you won’t be sorry.

First a few words about GTD.  GTD isn’t a panacea by any means.  It’s just a framework for “thinking about thinking”.  It’s updated software for your brain that will help you make sense of all the inputs and outputs in your life.  It’s also a set of habits that for some people can be hard to get into, because they require a change in behavior.  But hey, it’s ultimately just “advanced common sense” as David Allen puts it, so there’s really no excuse for not giving it a shot if you feel you need it.

The funny thing about GTD is that people tend to get so fixated on the “how” and not on the “why” of the system.  Whether you use post-it notes, Microsoft Outlook, a Moleskine notebook, or your pet hamster to track your work isn’t the important thing – the system is adaptable and should be used in the way that works best for you.  In other words, the implementation details aren’t what matter, but the way the system is used at the macro level does.

In a lot of ways this reminds me of Bruce Lee’s unique approach to fighting, Jeet Kune Do.  Stay with me for a second; other than just being three-letter acronyms, JKD is actually quite similar to GTD.  One of Lee’s most famous quotes about JKD is:

I don’t believe in different ways of fighting now, I mean, unless human beings have 3 arms and 3 legs – then we will have a different way of fighting. But basically we all have two arms and two legs so that is why I believe there should be only one way of fighting and that is no way.

In other words, there’s a reason why the best fighters in the world learn to throw a jab and execute a choke the same way.  While there are subtle differences in their own personal styles, and certain techniques that work best for some people, they’re still fighting using the same basic systems.  Chokes may be executed a little differently from person to person, but there’s a “right” way to choke that everyone starts with. 

GTD is the same way.  There are differences in people’s approach to GTD, but the foundational physics of the system are the same.  Show me a super-productive person and I can point out how that person is implementing GTD – even if they don’t know it.  It may not look exactly like the next person’s GTD (just like fighting) but the core pieces are almost always there.  And if they aren’t, well, there are likely improvements to be made!

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