Please enjoy this transcript of a very short and very tactical episode, in which I share some of my personal methods for how to get out of a rut, re-aim yourself at big outcomes, and make progress on a daily basis, despite the self-defeating tendencies that we all have.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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#771: Productivity Tactics – Two Approaches I Personally Use to Reset, Get Unstuck, and Focus on the Right Things
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Tim Ferriss: “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
This is a quote from Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite fiction writers. It’s from his University of the Arts commencement speech.
But let’s bring it back to my story.
A few months ago, I had a birthday party. It was great!
A dozen friends and I gathered for a few days of sun, beach, barbecue, catching up. We do it every year. But on the last day, I didn’t get up until 11:30am. That’s late, even for me, knowing full well that the last remaining friends were leaving about 30 minutes later, at 12 noon.
The sad reality was, I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of being lonely.
Like a child, I hid my head under the covers and hit snooze until reality couldn’t be postponed any further.
But why am I telling you this?… Why am I being so self-indulgent in telling you this ridiculous story?
It’s because we all like to appear “successful” (a nebulous term at best) and the media like to portray certain standouts as superheroes—these people on the magazine covers and so on.
And yes, sometimes, these dramatic stories of overcoming the odds are super inspiring. But often, just as often, they lead to an unhealthy conclusion, maybe an inner monologue, which is something like:
“Well… maybe they (whoever they happen to be) maybe they can do it, because they’re incredible, they have no faults, they’re just karate chopping the day and winning at all moments, but I’m just a normal person. I can’t do that.”
The reality is most superheroes are nothing of the sort. They’re just as weird and neurotic as we are. They’re strange creatures who do big things despite lots of self-defeating habits and self-talk.
To personalize this, let’s bring it home. I am definitely no superhero. I’m not even a consistent “normal.” Whatever that is. So let me give you a little laundry list.
Not too long ago, I…
- Cried while watching Rudy.
- Repeatedly hit Snooze for 1-3 HOURS past my planned wake time, because I simply didn’t want to face the day.
- Considered giving everything away and moving to Montreal, Seville, or Iceland. Location kind of depends on what I’m escaping.
- Used gentlemanly (ahem) websites to “relax” during the day when I clearly have urgent and important shit to do.
- Wore the same pair of jeans for a week straight just to have a much-needed constant during weeks of chaos.
So listening to all that, you might think it seems pretty dysfunctional, right? I assume so. I certainly hear it that way.
But, around the same time, especially the latter few weeks of that, I also…
- Was able to increase my passive income 20%+.
- Bought my dream house.
- Meditated twice per day for 20 minutes per session, without fail. Not winning any gold medals in meditation but incredibly helpful in stabilizing.
- I’ve cut my caffeine intake to next-to-nothing, usually pu-erh tea in the morning and green tea in the afternoon. I’ve had no more than 1 cup of coffee per week. There’s a lot to that. But suffice to say, much improved sleep.
- Signed one of the most exciting business deals of the last decade, including working on a collaboration that is first of its kind for me.
- Completely transformed my blood work, including a few biomarkers I’ve been working on for years.
- Realized—once again—that manic-depressive symptoms are just part of entrepreneurship.
- And last but not least I have come closer to all my immediate family members.
So, where does that leave us? Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly or doing things super well), but I have a few tricks. So here’s my coping mechanism and 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things):
(1) Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. E-mail is the mind killer. So don’t go immediately into reactive mode.
(2) Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. I like to do it analog.
(3) Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually means most uncomfortable, of very frequently it does, with some chance of rejection or conflict. To find those the most important you can often just look for the most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. So write down those 3 to 5 things.
(4) For each item, ask yourself:
“If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?”
Also ask, “Will moving this forward make all the other to-do’s unimportant or easier to knock off later?” That’s a nod to Gary Keller, author of The One Thing. Thank you, Gary.
(5) Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of those. Those are the high-leverage items, if removed.
(6) Block out at least 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. One. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow.
(7) And I’m repeating to be clear: Block out at least 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Uninterrupted. No distractions. No social media. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work.
(8) If you get distracted or start procrastinating—happens to everybody—don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.
Congratulations! That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
This is practically the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away my days with all sorts of bullshit. And it works. It works really, really well.
I’ve learned that if I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. So you gotta pick one thing. On the other hand, I can usually handle 1 must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day, in the beginning of the day. It works for me.
It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you if you learn to single-task. Single, single, single. One. 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. So material over method. The what over the how.
If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, maybe you should put a few things on Post-it notes, put them in your bathroom. And the first that you can add is “Being busy is a form of laziness.”
Lazy thinking and indiscriminate action does not mean that more equals more, in the positive sense.
Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
And when—despite your best efforts—you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, just remember that even the best of the best feel this way sometimes. It happens to everybody.
When I’m personally in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process (highly recommend his books—amazing guy): “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
So don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.
And you are definitely not alone. We’re all in this together. And everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about.
A few years ago, a creature died in the walls of my home. It was disgusting. To be precise, it gave up the ghost in the heating system, so the death fumes were conveniently pushed directly into my bedroom.
My ex-girlfriend and I discovered this around 11pm as we tucked into bed, hoping for a good night’s sleep. We could turn off the heat and freeze. That was one option. Or we could bathe in the stench of what I assumed was a raccoon carcass. The whole thing made my eyes itch. It was horrible. I imagined it downing a last meal—pig entrails? moldy socks? fermented beans? who knows?—before defiantly jamming its bloating body into my HVAC. Don’t worry: we are getting to some sort of lesson here.
But the kamikaze raccoon was just the first surprise guest. The opening act.
In short order, my dog got horribly sick, unrelated to raccoon, overdue paperwork popped out of nowhere, and onboarding a bunch of new contractors ran into trouble. Then, I pulled out of a parking spot and scraped the entire side of my car and the car next to me. Later that same afternoon, all these Christmas presents I’d ordered somehow had run out of stock and were auto-canceled, so I was sent scrambling. On and on it went, more and more clowns piling into the clown car for a shit show that lasted 3 to 4 weeks. It was just a 15-car pileup of nonsense.
There are rare times when I feel like I’m in the zone. Those are great. Those are fantastic.
Then there are times when I ask myself, “How in holy hell have I become the janitor of a mountain of bullshit?” That happens more than you might think.
Put another way, sometimes you’re the boxer and sometimes you’re the punching bag. We all get our turn as the punching bag. It doesn’t matter who you are. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter how “successful” you become, you have always grabbed a number at the deli counter of “Just wait—eventually you’re going to get your ass kicked by the universe.”
During these periods of fire fighting—let’s just call it when stuff’s popping up, this wack-a-mole—I get fidgety and frustrated. I feel like I’m treading water, and patience wears very thin—has never been my strong suit, especially with myself.
My instinct is to try to fix things as quickly as possible. That’s all well and good, but I’ve realized that from a place of “WTF?!,” I often rush and create more problems. This is particularly bad, catastrophic sometimes, when I try to sprint immediately upon waking up.
The mantra that has saved me, and save me during that 3- to 4-week period I mentioned, was very simple, and it was this:
“Make before you manage.” That’s it.
Each morning, before plugging holes, fixing things, calling vets, answering text messages, delegating, or yanking out dead raccoons, answering a million text messages, this mantra was a reminder to make something. You should read Paul Graham’s essays and listen to Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” commencement speech for more on this, but back to any given day and make before you manage.
Even the most time-sensitive items can usually wait 60 minutes, and by make something, I mean anything. It could be anything at all.
You just need to feel like you’ve pushed a millimeter ahead in some creative direction.
For me personally, even a 90-second video of calligraphy could set a better emotional tone for the entire day, helping me to be more calm as I handle problems, as I execute all the rest of the stuff later. Or maybe I attempt to jumpstart my writing with an Instagram caption. Or an email to a friend to take the pressure off. It’s practically nothing, but it’s enough. Even token efforts allow me to reassure myself with “Hey, pal, don’t worry; you did produce something today.”
The psychological difference between zero acts of creation and one act of creation, no matter how small, is really impossible to overstate. It’s binary. Zero to a little bit? Those are two different worlds. If you’re lucky, sometimes that one idea, one sentence, or one shitty first draft can turn into something bigger. When you catch the wave. But the point is to be able to say to yourself, even for five minutes, “Hark! I am a creator, not just a janitor of bullshit! Here is proof that I can—and will!—do more than just manage minutiae of life.”
And I think—at least, personally—I do need that reinforcement.
We all spend time on the struggle bus. Happens to everybody. At the very least, this mantra has helped me to find a window seat when it’s my turn.
So, as a reminder, when in doubt, try it out: make before you manage.
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