my approach to the quantified-self is revealing who/what influences me

if you know me personally, you know a freaking love tumblr. not so much as a consumer, but as a producer. i use tumblr to keep track of SO many things in my life. in fact, i currently operate 11 active tumblrs (meaning they get updated at least once a week) and have started more than 20. i use tumblr because of its flexibility, simplicity, and it’s interoperability (is the right word for ‘functional on multiple platforms’?).

part of my personal system is to keep track of everything that goes into my brain. i started doing this because i was impressed by michael felton’s annual reports. my old roommate, ben golder (love you, ben!) introduced me to the reports and not only they were beautiful, but they allowed him to surface hidden patterns. having those patterns surfaced enabled him to make strategic decisions to live more like he wanted to.

that idea inspired me so i started keeping tabs on everything i consumed. well, not exactly everything (maybe i’ll get there someoday), but at least all the digital media i consume.

so my digital media tumblrs are things i read (web content), watch (video), see (static imagery/photography), listen to (mostly podcasts), and like visually/graphically (graphic design mostly). there are others, like stuffiusedtoown (inspired by my friend, erin) and puns, but they’re less relevant to this convo.

a few months ago, i started adding a brief description of who sent me a piece in the tumblr post (example here).

and then randomly (or not randomly?!) the other day a quote attributed to jim rohn popped into my head:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

i realized in that moment that by correlating my blog (the tumblr you’re reading now) with my other tumblrs, someday i might be able to quantify exactly which people have the most influence on me and my thoughts. i also imagine that, say i were to thread all the tumblrs together into a single timeline or feed, i could map major changes in my thinking and consciousness backwards down the data and resources that led to those changes.

:O

resource

somewhat interesting article that expands on the jim rohn quote a bit. 

most stress comes from not finishing what you've started

david allen, one of my productivity gurus, has as one of his pillars the following idea:

“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.”

even as i read it, i understood the depth of what he was saying. since then, the truth (and implications of the truth) of that statement are essentially everywhere i look.

i notice it in myself when i look at my todo list and thing “dammit. i really was supposed to get more done today,” or “i wish i hadn’t gotten sick so i could have finished everything.” i notice it in others when they feel stressed and they make statements like “yea, i was going to ___ but then ____ got in the way,” or “i really wish i hadn’t committed to __, and ___, and ___, and ___… i’ve just got so much going on.”*

so what’s the remedy? i don’t exactly remember what allen said, but my experience of what he mentioned is two-fold:

1. make fewer commitments to myself and to others. this allows me to focus more fully on the one’s i have made. it also lets me follow through on those things well and sometimes even add extra value. this is diametrically opposed to being committed to too much, getting everything done (barely), but feeling shitty about it. to me, this shows up as practicing how to say no.
2. have a clear process for renegotiating commitments and get comfortable with doing it regularly. sometimes, i just need to look at what i’ve committed to and say that i’m not going to get everything done. it’s important, to take some time (if possible) and set new due dates for say when i am going to get those things done. but the process of looking at a task and being explicit with in my inner monologue (“ok, i’m actually just not going to finish those three other things today. that’s fine.”) is way more important than i thought it was.
   
   after learning how to do that renegotiation with yourself, it becomes much easier to do it with others. and the funny, ironic thing is that most other people are totally fine if you renegotiate a deadline for something. this is a surprising truth, but once you recognize it, it becomes even truer that most people’s stress comes from their own ideas of commitments they’ve made.

over time, making fewer commitments minimizes the number of times the renegotiation process needs to happen, but i suspect it will still always happen.

learning the truth of this idea has been a long journey and one that i’m still on, but the power in it to reduce my stress level has been pretty profound.

* if you happen to be one of my friends and you think i’m quoting you, i promise that almost all of my friends make statements like that on a very regularly basis.

the power of airplane mode

over the months it took to write my masters thesis, i discovered the power of airplane mode. it has totally changed my life and how i engage with my phone and my computer, too.

while trying to do pomodoros (a method of creating focus), i discovered that, like many people, i have developed an addiction to checking my phone. regardless of whether i need to be checking it for a specific reason or not, i check it several times an hour. this, of course, means that whenever something does show up, i engage with it.

unfortunately, interruptions are the death knell of focus (i recently started reading a book on focus; i’m sure i’ll be writing about that soon). despite what people say about multi-tasking, it is still generally less effective than bursts of intense, specifically directed focus.

i discovered that airplane mode really helped me (made it out of my power) to not check my phone incessantly. one big thing i’ve learned on this productivity journey is that highly successful people use as little self-control as possible by building habits and routines that allow them to make progress on their goals without thinking about it.

of course, i could have turned off airplane mode when i wanted to check my phone in the middle of a focus session. but i found that having it on created just enough barrier to allow me to not.

eventually, i found that the best way to focus was to:

1. put my phone completely away so that even alarms and reminders didn’t distract me,
   
2. take imessage/messages (apple’s desktop app that allows text messaging) off my computer, and
   
3. turn off my internet. this internet disconnect thing is what lead to me realizing that i should write first and do research before or after writing. most days i just insert a placeholder and then return to it during editing. example: yesterday, i read an article, [FIND HYPERLINK AND NAME OF ARTICLE], and it totally changed my mind about ham sandwiches.

all this ubiquitous computing and technology has some pretty incredible benefit to society, but we also need to learn how to not let it own us. i think learning how to disconnect periodically is really important.

ps - my friend, casper, practices a technology sabbath based on this methodology… i’m not there yet, but i think it’s going to be a practice i start with in 2017.

theory on being a good manager in today’s world

so i’m trying to understand exactly and maybe historically why managers always seem to be more important than specialists or implementers.

i’ve noticed a trend among friends that managers get a really bad rap. if a friend is being managed poorly, it’s definitely because of bad management (and usually just one bad manager). if the friend is the one in the management position, however, they are often the recipient of those same bad feelings, though for different reasons. statements like “i started doing all these things differently and now everyone hates me,” or “i tried to help improve this thing, but now it just seems like people around me ignore my suggestions because they’re mad that i get paid more than them.”

i definitely understand that there is good and bad management. and still it seems like the situations that managers are put in make it very difficult for them to do their work well. i definitely have a fundamental theory (probably from some psychology class) that people don’t like being coerced (i.e. don’t tell me what to do). and if managers are both higher in the chain of command and telling other people what to do, that seems like a situation destined for failure.

in an industrial system, i can imagine why a manager might be necessary. especially if the manager has done a specific type of work of the team they’re managing, i can see that person adding more value to a team by managing several people doing the same type of work.

however, teams (among my friend set) nowadays are working in very different environments. people are working on multi-skilled and collaborative teams which makes it rare that a manager will have the same types of expertise and experience of their team.

in these types of situations, the role of a manager seems best suited to enable the team to get their work done. you should be removing barriers to progress (technically, interpersonal, political, intra-personal, etc.) and helping your multidisciplinary team improve efficiency over time.

unfortunately, it seems like most managers these days just interrupt people and cause extreme annoyance.

hm. i guess i’m not going anywhere with this, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.

the afternoon slump is normal: work with it; not around it

i’ve written at least twice about how to best structure a work day, but the afternoon slump (that terrible period of time, usually after lunch, where you “can’t seem to get anything done”) comes up so often when i’m talking to people that i figured it deserved its own piece.

high-level summary: everyone’s energy generally diminishes over the course of day. there are exceptions and it’s not a linear decrease, but everyone finishes with less than they started with. knowing that, the way to maximize your productivity is to do the right type of work at the best time of day for that work.

the strategy: in my observation and experience, doing your most difficult or heaviest-thinking work in the morning and saving meetings and tedious/mechanical tasks for the afternoon is the best overall strategy. and, as always, everyone should test and figure out what works for them because nothing works for everyone, but something will work for you.

ok. here are the bits of theory and experience that build up the above insight:

time management fails knowledge workers

the whole idea of an eight-hour workday came about as a worker protection when people’s work tended to be mechanical during the industrial era (details here). however, at that point, because people made more widgets than think, all hours were basically created equal. however, for knowledge workers (people who are mostly paid to think and then occasionally execute on their thinking), all hours of the day aren’t the same.

so we need to evolve past thinking about productivity as time management. my favorite productivity blog, barking up the wrong tree, often gives the advice that you should manage your mood, not your time. tony schwartz, another productivity guru, believes it’s critical to manage your energy, not your time. i’m sure there are other frames through which to analyze this, but either way, breaking your work up into time blocks irrespective of what the particular hour is good for is working against your body and that’s almost never a good call. so the solution: match the work you have to the type of energy you have at a given moment (note: getting to the perfect world of this takes time, especially if you have a highly collaborative, but rigid work environment. however, the more productive you prove you can be, the ammo you’ll build for your coworkers and boss to let you do what you want).

save your “mechanical” work for the afternoon (i.e. don’t do it in the morning, no matter how strong the temptation)

because of things like cognitive budgets and decision fatigue, i have read (and observed) that it suits many people to do their difficult or heavy-thinking work first thing in the morning. i think every productivity book i’ve ever read discussed this.

it works for three reasons:

1. you need the most and your best energy to do your most difficult or creativity-intensive work (i wrote about that over here). people often fall into the trap of doing easy or mechanical things in the morning (email, quick tasks, printing things, whatever) because they make us feel productive, but then we waste our good energy in the morning and find ourselves fighting to do the hard stuff in the afternoon which takes much longer (because decision fatigue).
2. heavy-thinking work is often the most “flow”-like work. interruptions are loath to this type of work. in fact, a single interruption (planned or unplanned) can prevent a heavy-thinking task from being completed (see paul graham’s piece on maker vs manager schedules). doing your heaviest-thinking in the morning, especially between the hours of 6 and 9a, minimizes potential to be distracted. there’s also a good window of low-interruption time in the evening, but if you’ve been up since the morning time, it’s less likely that you’re going to have the right energy by that time of day. it’s not impossible; just less likely.
   
3. when you deploy your cognitive budget on the right things at the right time, you optimize your whole day. almost everyone has creative work (planning, making, producing long and/or complex documents or content) and tedious work (research, email, printing, meetings, prep for other things, phone calls) to do everyday. doing the right work at the right time allows you to get it all done in the least amount of time possible, and then be free to everything else in your life (including love).
   

holy shit i just wrote for 30 minutes. that has never happened before. this piece is 3x longer than most of my others. yikes! sorry! #flowiguess