one of my favorite adages is “less is more.” i’ve learned over time, mostly by exercising my “no” muscle i’ve learned that the less i have going on, the better i tend to do at all of it. of course, there are exceptions to this, but i’ll get to that later. but first, the basic explanation of how this works:
if you have 10 projects going, when you’re working on one, you’re probably not working on the others. and no matter how efficient you are, every project will take some amount of time. so the more projects, the more time you’re using. but that’s not where the real insight is.
the real insight is that the more projects and processes you have running simultaneously, the more “brittle” your time is for several reasons.
in order to make time to do everything, you’re going to have to be rigorous with your scheduling. and this, of course, works only when you schedule the exact amount of time to work on each thing at the you have the energy to do that type of work. if you underestimate anything, you’re thrown off.
the more things you’re doing, likely the more meetings you need to attend. even freelancers or self-employed folks have meetings with clients, delivery meetings, etc. so more projects means less time you get to structure yourself which is less flexibility.
an unfortunate side effect of 1 & 2 is that your open blocks of time ideate disappear. hopping from project to project is counter to creativity [old post link]
having a schedule that isn’t totally flexible isn’t a bad thing at all. diminishing flexibility is necessary to do work in today’s work (for the most part), but i believe everyone needs to have a balance of self-controlled time and time you can’t structure yourself. once you pass that point, you become increasingly unproductive and your workload blocks the work itself from getting done.
analogy: good soup needs to simmer in order for the flavors to meld (input info and reorganize it in your brain in meaningful ways to spit out later), the more soups you try to make on a single stovetop, the worse each one gets.
this is a little trick i learned from paul graham’s post: maker’s schedule vs manager’s schedule. i reference this post atdt. it’s been incredibly helpful, though it does have its limits.
the trick is very simple: if you have one meeting already scheduled on a day and another comes up, schedule it the minimum amount of time before the next meeting so that it can’t run long. example: i already have a meeting at 3p, but someone else wants to meet me that same day. if i know that 2nd meeting needs about 60 minutes, i will schedule it for 145p and let the person know that i need to be at 3p meeting.
this works for me for a bunch of reasons:
impromptu meetings are almost never planned well. minimizing the time they take out of my schedule is critical. not being planned well doesn’t mean it won’t go well, but there is a strong correlation in my experience.
stacking meetings also allows me to optimize my “heavy-thinking” time while still doing the meetings i need to. i started doing this in grad school. i would cram my meetings all onto the same days as my classes so that i had long chunks of free time to write my thesis. this can also be thought about through the maker time vs manager time frame. i know that, at least for me, the more maker time (long, uninterrupted blocks of time) i have, the better i feel. making progress makes me feel productive and feeling productive feels great. meetings, for better or worse, rarely feel productive. even the best ones don’t and i think that’s ok. working in meetings is somewhat futile i think because most “work” can’t actually be done in meetings.
so what are the limits?
well, for one, some meetings run long because they actually need to. sometimes a group gets into a flow around something. in that circumstance, breaking the flow can be less net productive than continuing to go and rearranging the commitments the group didn’t deliver on. if you’ve boxed yourself in, you create the danger of not giving something the time it needs.
another limit is that if you need follow up time from the first meeting or prep time for the next meeting, stacked meetings hinder that.
ok. that’s all i got for me. stacking meetings is a great strategy for keep your schedule clear. but only to a point.
ps - over time, i’ve developed a really good intuition of which types of meetings have a tendency to run long or need prep time and so i can stack accordingly.
in my last post about altruism, i ended on the idea of evolving altruism, but i didn’t really map out, logically, how or why that could happen. hopefully this connects a few more dots.
one point i didn’t make in that post was one problem i see with altruism that i’ve learned from working in nonprofits. when there is no excess, altruistic giving evaporates. because altruistic gifts theoretically have no value to the giver, when times get hard, people stop doing things that aren’t valuable to them.
so this leads to my conversation with last week with kate talking about altruism and self-interest. where we landed, which is where i almost always land, is that we are all connected and the more we can surface that reality, the better off we all will be.
now, some people would say that selfishness is what makes collective systems break. in fact, capitalism is based on the idea that people are rational actors and systems need to be designed to optimize choices of individuals to create the most good. selfishness is what is believed to make all of nash’s theory irrelevant (if cooperation allows all parties to be better off, why do people not cooperate? selfishness - see the prisoner’s dilemma).
self-interest will likely forever be part of humanity. and it’s not even really a bad thing (i don’t think). so the trick is to figure out how to make self-interest good for the collective.
and i think the way to do that is to make it obvious that what’s good for self is also good for society. in reality, this is pretty obvious if one took a moment to think about how the ecosystem and planet works. however, we’ve got lots of (mostly constructed and systemic) barriers to that realization.
so how do we expand/evolve self-interest so that people’s acting in their own interest is also good for the well-being of others (and the planet)?
who knows, but we should figure it out. and probably soon.
ps - although i don’t know the answer, i like rory sutherland’s approach to problem-solving. i’ll be exploring along that pathway if anyone wants to join me…
pps - the idea that what’s good for others is also good for you is basically what every major religion has been preaching for forever. #thereisnothingnewunderthesun
ries believes that most successful startups aren’t the ones that land on a good idea and execute it perfectly. of course those exist but building a strategy with “get lucky” as the cornerstone is a terrible idea. ries believes that most startups are ones that iterate the fastest through the build-measure-learn loop.
i have a theory that the same is true for successful people. setting up and iterating through the build-measure-learn loop for your life not only helps you make progress in the right direction, it helps you make progress faster over time. this happens most meaningfully in the context of a long-term life vision, but i think progress is still possible without that vision.*
the process works like this:
say, for example, you want to iterate through the loop regarding how you think about your diet once a week. by setting up weekly experiments regarding things in your life, you build in systems for learning. of course there will be weeks where you move in the “wrong” direction (i.e. you try something that turns out bad for you), but even that info is useful for learning.
over time, the data you gather should help you learn, over time, Â how to make better decisions. example: i found that when i don’t drink coffee after 11am, i sleep better. that learning helped me structure future experiments: do i sleep even better when i only drink coffee m-f instead of seven days a week? (spoiler: the answer is yes).
then, when you start to make longer-term reflections (example: weeks 1-10), hopefully you’ll find that the subsequent experiments lead you you to make progress in the “right” direction faster. in the visual above, from unit 0-10, there was no net progress, but from 10-20, there was a lot. that learning is built on the 0-10 lessons.
the pithole that many of us fall into is that we go into jobs, careers, colleges, relationships, etc. with the (often implicit and sub-conscious) idea that we’re just going to pick right the first time. again, it’s possible for that to happen (and some companies get big this way – by just finding and executing on a good idea at the right time), but expecting to get lucky isn’t a real strategy.
“life is really just about shitty models and their error correction.” — spencer wilson
* i’m not sure that iterating through the loop can help set high-level direction. in fact, i think it can’t because desired values may not show up in day-to-day actions. that will result in, at best, local optimization, and not global optimization. that said, i could be wrong.
during a recent catch up session with my good friend, kate, we somehow got on the topic of work partners. as she was explaining how she realized the value of having a great work partner (particularly as they expanded their team over the summer), i realized i think i’ve been gifted the same type of partnership.
as we went back and forth, we discussed some of the attributes we’ve noticed in our work partners that make the partnerships great:
different, but complementary perspectives
experiences shape who we are. working with someone who has the exact same experiences is boring. however, working with someone who has no similar experiences is unbearably tough because you have to explain everything all the time. working with someone who has enough experiences to have a different worldview and yet understand your perspective is a huge benefit to a partnership.
don’t sweep hard conversations under the rug
working with someone with whom you can passionately disagree, talk it out, and then keep moving forward is incredible. it allows you both the freedom to be honest. being honest keeps people feeling good (because being dishonest has negative impacts on the self over time []) while also preventing resentment.
it’s easy (joyful even) to work together
the above points contribute to making it easy to work together but there’s more than that. there’s something magically about finding someone who’s skills complement your own. it’s also great when the communication pathways in the partnership flow freely, as well as the ability to pass work back and forth. kate and i have expressed and heard our work partners express the sentiment that working without our partner is just less fun.
honestly, finding a good work partner seems just as rare as finding a good life partner. definitely feels like something to hold onto.
