Mind the Gaps: Get a Little Ahead Each Day
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Be deliberately efficient or deliberately Zen. Never be arbitrarily inefficient.
I tweeted a version of that a few days ago and it pretty succinctly sums up my approach to "time management". In essence, it’s saying do what you do and be 100% there… and do so in a way that isn’t randomly wasting precious time in the present moment due to sloppy planning or weak preparation.
How much downtime did you have today if you counted up the minutes? 10 minutes, 60 minutes, more?
If your house is in order you can use every minute to your advantage, whatever that means to you at that time. You aren’t passing up the opportunity to use that time just because you don’t know what’s next or what you need to do – you can just seamlessly move from one thing to the next at a deliberate pace doing high-quality work or enjoying needed downtime.
Ultimately this approach goes back to having the right system for knowing what the open threads are in your life. Getting Things Done by David Allen is one such system, hugely popular and very common sensical and intuitive, but there are others. Assuming you’re already on your way to productivity black belt status and at any given moment can identify what you need in the moment, one of the best things you can do to act on this data is to start living in the gaps.
Gaps are those small 5-30 minute "in betweens" throughout the day that offer you some level of personal sanctity. They’re part of your daily rituals – your commute, an afternoon walk, a 20-minute wait in the doctor’s office, time between meetings, the 30 minutes your spouse or partner is watching the kids, and so on. They’re time periods in which you could choose to be productive or time you could use to disconnect and recharge. Ultimately it’s up to you how you use it.
Multitasking vs. Background Processing
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Ed. Note: Sorry for the lack of activity lately. We’ve had the trifecta of big change around here requiring a shift in my focus: new baby, new job, and new house. Which means my normal writing time (during kid #1’s Sunday naptime) is no longer tenable. I suspect my writing will be spaced out for a bit while I find a new rhythm, but it’s not going to stop!
If you’re reading this blog, chances are you fall into one of two camps:
- You think you’re a great multitasker and thrive on juggling a million complex tasks at the same time
- You know better
Folks in camp #2 should probably just move on to reading something else (here are some recommendations!) If you’re in camp #1, I’d love a demonstration 
Multitasking is a catch-all phrase that’s used for a lot of different work styles and concepts. First a few words about what it isn’t.
Multitasking isn’t having different areas of focus (family, career, health, and so on). Multitasking also doesn’t incorporate doing unrelated (or somewhat related) things at different times of the day (moving from email to meetings to writing to reading).
Both views of multitasking are fine in that they’re normal behavior; stuff you won’t get penalized by the efficiency gods for excelling at. If you didn’t have different areas of focus, you’d be a robot, a dog, or a Perl script without any emotional attachment or ability to "let go" of a single area. And if you weren’t able to switch tasks to some degree throughout the day, you wouldn’t be the least bit effective at work or at home.
We need to be flexible, but we also need to be focused. And like most things in life, there’s a fair amount of nuance in there.
Become a Runner to Think and Feel Better
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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.
The Beginner’s Guide to Self-Tracking & Analysis
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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.
5 More Ways to Protect That Time!
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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.
The Self-Serving Bias: 3 Steps to Total Eradication!
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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.
Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect
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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.
Real Artists (Plan to) Ship
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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.
Backup: The Most Important Thing Your Computer Can Do
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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.
Always Late? Stop Living in Time Denial
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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.
