The Uneasy Relationship Between Time and the Indie Worker

Cal Newport recently (well, not that recently -- I'm working through a backlog here) wrote about hisstruggles tracking his work. One method involves selecting meaningful milestones and working toward them and the other one involves simply tracking the number of hours spent on a project. Each has pros and cons; tracking milestones prompts greater hustle while tracking hours is simpler.

I've been having my own uneasy battle with this basic issue.

On the one hand I'm a huge proponent of the Steven Pressfield mantra of "do the work." If I've got something I want to accomplish then I need to lash myself to the chair and churn baby churn until I reach my goal. The creative muse isn't going to wait around until my coffee is sufficiently fancy, my keyboard sufficiently clicky, my beard sufficiently hipstery, and my inclination to work ever so perfectly initiated. Nope. Great work comes to those who show up consistently day after day and hammer out those hours as they perfect their craft. I love that mindset.

But. Well -- can't that be a little... I don't know, archaic?

Should indie workers, people who can work from anywhere at almost any time, be showing up 9-to-5 like people with corporate "jobby jobs?" I mean, what's the point of working your ass off to create an independent career if you're just going to treat it like a normal job? Hell, if you're going to do that you might as well get a normal job and enjoy a little job security and some benefits, right?

See what I'm talking about here? I'm a man conflicted.

For the past five months or so I've been tracking my working hours with a nice little iOS app calledATracker. It's not super fancy but it is very easy to quickly tap whatever project I'm working on and let the timer run in the background. I like knowing how much time I'm spending on various projects and on various areas of responsibility when it comes to my ever complex professional life. For some of my projects, time tracking is an essential part of being paid, even. I don't spend too much time analyzing the data after the fact and I'm never really shooting for an overall amount of total time worked in each day. I'm just letting it run almost entirely in the background. This relationship with time seems to be working pretty well for me.

On the other hand, I tried tracking my "start time" and "ending time" for work each day. The idea behind that initiative was to just see how many of my waking hours were spent with me "at" work. For a normal day without interruptions and an adequate amount of motivation, this wasn't a big deal. Many days I work what almost seems like a normal 9-to-5 job except I'm just sitting in my home office instead of a cubicle. But some days I wanted to work from 6-11 AM, take a big break during the middle of the day, and do a couple more hours of work after dinner. Is it fair to say that my working day was 6-10 PM, then? Obviously, not. Why was I trying to track my working day like it was one big contiguous chunk of productivity? What's the point of sticking to my chair and trying to "put in my time" when my brain is fried and doing almost anything else would be a better use of my time? But, dammit, I have to show up and "do the work!" Mr. Pressfield wouldn't take that as an excuse and neither should I!

Does this mean that I just work when I feel like it and spend the rest of the time goofing off? No. I still think a commitment to showing up every day is a huge part of being successful. I can't choose to deliberately practice only when I'm truly feeling like it. At the same time, though, I don't need to slog through a 9-to-5 day like a guy with a normal job if that's not going to be the best use of my time. With this mindset I align more closely with the ideas of Tony Schwartz; managing energy is far more important than managing time.

Where does that leave me? And bringing it back to Cal's point about tracking work, how should I be keeping track whether or not I'm pushing myself to fully utilize my abilities? Track the milestones of my projects? Track the hours I've put toward those projects? Track my overall "butt-in-chair" time?

I don't know.

How do you do it?

Photo by Fabiola Medeiros.

How I Do Email (Sanely)

At the risk of throwing my hat into an already incredibly crowded ring, I want to write about email. Email seems to be a frustrating aspect of many people's work. I've always followed the discussion around email with interest but never felt like I had much to add because, frankly, email is very rarely something that frustrates me. Since I seem to have an approach that allows me to stay sane I thought it might be helpful for me to share my strategies for dealing with email and maybe you'll be able to glean some insights as to how you can improve your own system. 

To set the stage, I should describe the nature of my work and the type of email I get. I am a Ph.D student taking a full load of classes that I attend in-person. My advisor and many of my collaborators are collocated with me. While the option to meet in person is almost always available, everybody is extremely busy and I'd say 75% of all my collaborative work is done via email. My coaching andconsulting businesses are conducted almost exclusively via email because almost none of my clients are located in Southern California. I probably get about 50-60 actionable emails in a day. For some of you, that's obviously a paltry amount. I'm lucky that the nature of my work means that I can get out of my inbox fairly quickly and get back to focusing on the project at hand. This may not be the case for you. It's doubtful my entire system will work for you but that doesn't mean you can't take bits and pieces to try.

The Basics

I use the Gmail web interface (usually in Safari) when I'm on my laptop. On my iPhone and iPad I use the Gmail app. I have all notifications turned off on all of my devices and I think this is step 0 of almost any sane email system. It's nearly impossible to do great work and really dig into the task at hand when you're either being notified, or at the risk of being notified, of every incoming email. A long time ago I read or heard something Merlin Mann said about email and it really stuck with me. He essentially made the point that anybody in the world can email you at any time and if you allow yourself to be distracted every time you get a new one you're essentially ceding the fact that what you're working on is less important than what anybody in the world has to say to you at that moment. I think leaving your email notifications on represents a complete lack of respect for the work you're doing at the moment (except if the nature of your job requires you to leave it open, such as customer support).

Conceptualizing Email

The second important point consists of how you conceptualize email. For some people it is an ever evolving (i.e. expanding) to-do list. For others it functions as a kind of instant messaging program. I like to conceptualize it as a traditional mailbox. A couple times a day it brings in new information that allows me to better complete the work I've already delineated for myself or it provides opportunities for new projects. Each email is simply a vehicle for new information. It's not a place to store reminders of my work or important information I'll have to reference later. My job is to extract the information, put that information in the correct location so I can use it later, and then immediately archive the email. 

The Options

Every email has a finite set of choices around it. Over time I have gotten excellent at quickly discerning the "type" of email it is and taking the correct next action quickly. Here are the only options I consider when looking at a new email: 1) there is information in it I need for an ongoing project which means I need to extract the relevant information into Evernote (my holding pen for all reference material), 2) there is a new project within the email that I need to start which means I need to start a new project in Things (where all my tasks live) and give myself a next action, 3) the email has no useful or actionable information so I archive it, 4) someone needs my response and I can do so very quickly therefore I respond and then archive the email, 5) someone needs my response but it will take longer than 2 minutes therefore I add a next action in the corresponding project in Things (such as, "Respond to Syd re: budget questions" and archive the email (or if I'm super busy I'll star the email and come back to it later -- see below), 6) a meeting or appointment is being scheduled which means I need to extract the relevant information to add to my calendar and then archive the email.

Every email either has actionable information or inactionable information. Very simply, I think of my email as a hub that corrals incoming information and holds it until I decide what to do with it. My job is to come into the hub, make quick decisions about what's in there, and then get back to the task at hand. The key to treating email this way is to be able to quickly identify the type of email I'm dealing with and knowing where that kind of information "lives" in my system. It takes practice and refinement but eventually it becomes automatic. What becomes very clear once you've gotten proficient at using a system where emails are simply vehicles of actionable or inactionable information is that keeping them in your inbox is the worst choice. 

The Nitty Gritty

I've shared my overall philosophy on email and some of the basic logistics for how I deal with it, so let's get into some very actionable behaviors about how I deal with my email:

• Notifications off and only check a handful of times each day: I try to only check my email a few times each day. If things are going well, that means I'll check it for the first time around 7 or 8 AM after I've gotten an hour or two of good work completed. I'll check it again around lunch time and again near the end of the work day. I wish I could say that is the last time I check it but I'll be honest and say it usually gets a quick look later in the evening before I go to bed as well.

• Filter mailing lists out of your inbox: I have many, many filters set up that grab mailing list emails and direct them around my inbox to a label called "Mailing Lists." I only check this label once a day and can usually deal with everything in it in a matter of seconds. You may be surprised how much of the email you deal with on a daily basis is simply a mailing list you could quickly browse and move on with your life. Moving all of them to a single label and keeping them out of my inbox allows me to focus on the email that actually needs my attention. I know if something lands in my inbox it probably has relevance to my work. To set this up, start making filters every time you get an email in your inbox that is from a mailing list. In Gmail you can select an email and say "filter messages like this" and it will catch every future email from that mailing list and apply the filter. In the beginning you'll have to do this a lot but as you catch the main offenders you'll be doing this less and less. Nowadays I have to make a filter maybe once every couple weeks.

• Unsubscribe: Try searching for "unsubscribe" in your email client and see what comes up. Chances are you can unsubscribe from the majority of those email lists and never miss them. Get rid of all the crap emails you get on a regular basis and your overall email system will become lighter and easier to handle. I do this once a quarter nowadays.

• Learn keyboard shortcuts: One of the main reasons I use Gmail is because I love the keyboard shortcuts that allow me to fly through processing my email. I can read, reply, archive, and move on to the next email without ever lifting my fingers off the keyboard to use a mouse. This makes going through my email so much more efficient. Treat it like a game -- see how quickly you can go into your Inbox and process all your email or challenge yourself to never use a mouse when your dealing with email.

• I "star" emails to come back to later -- but clear them out regularly: Sometimes when I'm on the go I'll receive an email that requires more thought than I can give it in the moment. This is when I'll use the "star" functionality to essentially bookmark the email. One of my last tasks each day is to go through my starred emails and extract the relevant information. While it's best to make action decisions immediately upon reading an email sometimes I can't do that. I just have to be careful that starring emails doesn't result in just giving me essentially two inboxes of varying importance. As long as I work through my backlog every evening (or at most, every couple days) I can be sure nothing is falling through the cracks and I'm moving all my projects forward.

• Filing emails is almost never necessary: Other than the filter I use to get mailing lists out of my inbox I don't use any other filters or folders. Every email is archived once I've extracted the needed information. If I need it again later for some reason I can almost always find it by searching. I can't think of a time where I was ever not able to find an email I had archived without filing it away in a complex system of folders. I'm not saying that you definitely don't need a filing system either, but I would encourage you to think about what you're gaining from the time you spend filing emails.

Conclusion

This system has been working very well for me for many years. It allows me to process a ton of email very quickly and not feel like I'm working from a to-do list inundated with redundant or superfluous information (if you think about it, a typical email has a lot of information obfuscating the actual important information within it which makes it a pretty terrible to-do list). However, I also didn't institute this system over night. It's the result of a slow evolution of how I handle my work overall. To get started improving your system I recommend picking one suggestion from above and installing it into your typical email routine. As you gain proficiency you can start adding additional changes and figuring out what works best for you. Undoubtedly you will stumble across some things that work for you but don't work for me and in the grand scheme of things that's all that matters. The key takeaway point is that very rarely does truly influential and important work come out of responding to emails so anything you can do to make the process less stressful and less time intensive is worth the initial effort. 

When it comes to email I think we need to get in, grab the information we need to do incredible work, get out, and get back to what matters.

Photo by giuseppesavo

Hyperemployment

Alarmist description of the relationship people have with their online world aside, this article has some interesting points about what it means to communicate primarily via email and social network. Google's latest Gmail tweak that makes it suddenly much easier for anybody to email you slides right into this discussion. 

"...email has become the circulatory system along which internal outsourcing flows. Sending an email is easy and cheap, and emails create obligation on the part of a recipient without any prior agreement." 

I remember this as one of the first things I took from Merlin Mann's writing back in the 43 Folders days. The idea that an email costs almost nothing to send. There is no scarcity like there used to be with a long distance phone call or writing a letter. Any wahoo can write you an email. Does this mean that anybody in the world, regardless of what you're working on, should be able to interrupt you? If you keep your email notifications on and audible then that's what you're saying. That nothing you're working on -- nothing that you're spending your most precious resources on, time and attention -- is worth as much as whatever somebody wants to email you. And that is insane.

"Increasingly, online life in general feels like this. The endless, constant flow of email, notifications, direct messages, favorites, invitations. After that daybreak email triage, so many other icons on your phone boast badges silently enumerating their demands. Facebook notifications. Twitter @-messages, direct messages. Tumblr followers, Instagram favorites, Vine comments. Elsewhere too: comments on your blog, on your YouTube channel. The Facebook page you manage for your neighborhood association or your animal rescue charity. New messages in the forums you frequent. Your Kickstarter campaign updates. Your Etsy shop. Your Ebay watch list. And then, of course, more email. Always more email." 

Thinking about this stuff matters because the difference between being buried beneath the deluge and making your way confidently through the information morass is a delicate one. With half an hour of work and some careful consideration of what information you actually need real-time notification of, you can cut down your distractions by at least 50%. Change the default notification settings on your social networks so you *don't* get email every time somebody interacts with you. Setup some filters in your email that diverts obvious mailing lists and other bulk email around your inbox. The simple change from you allowing your services to notify you and you deciding to consciously check a service for updates is small, yet huge, at the same time.

Nobody is going to protect your time for you. You're the one who has to take charge.

On Just Being a Person

Most of my favorite comedy overlaps with philosophy. Good comedy makes you think and laugh because it makes you interact with reality in a way that steps outside your normal perspective. That special brand of comedy that can make you laugh and feel uncomfortable with how close it gets to incredibly core truths about yourself and the world -- that's the good stuff.

Louis CK always seems to have something profound to say when he visits Conan. First, the idea that cell phones are retarding the emotional development of children:

"I think these things are toxic, especially for kids...they don't look at people when they talk to them and they don't build empathy. You know, kids are mean, and it's 'cause they're trying it out. They look at a kid and they go, 'you're fat,' and then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, 'oh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that.' But they got to start with doing the mean thing. But when they write 'you're fat,' then they just go, 'mmm, that was fun, I like that.'"

And then he brings it around to the adult side of things. The idea that we're all constantly distracting ourselves because we can't stand to be alone:

"You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it's all for nothing and that you're alone. It's down there."

Maybe that's a bit cynical, but the overall point is a good one. How often do we reach into our pockets and grab our phones in order to break the awkward tension of not doing something.

We could all stand to have a little bit more of just sitting around -- just being people. When every little free space in our lives is filled with a new bit of information flowing from our phone where is the room for anything incredible to happen? The stroke of insight? The next big idea? Even just a second to let our brains slow down and absorb the fact that we live in a complex, beauitful, and ever changing world?

The Builder's High

I often think about the ratio between creation and consumption in my life. My moods can be fleeting and sometimes I'm not sure what causes me to have a productive week and then a week where I feel like I'm working at half power. The closest I've come to cracking that code in terms of my own self-knowledge has to deal with how much time I spend brining new things into the world versus how much time I spend consuming things other people have brought into the world.

When I feel like crap it seems that my create/consume ratio is skewed completely toward consume. When I'm on top of my game then I'm in creation mode. The scientist in me won't let me confuse correlation with causation -- but I think there's definitely a chance that my creation spurs good moods and is not simply the result of one.

Rands seems to agree:

"When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. It is an effort to simply get past the foulness in order to start building, but once the building has begun, the foul beast loses ground."

I can get behind his rallying cry:

"Turn off those notifications, turn your phone over, turn on your favorite music, stare at your blank slate and consider what you might build. In that moment of consideration, you’re making an important decision: create or consume? The things we’re giving to the future are feeling increasingly unintentional and irrelevant. They are half-considered thoughts of others. When you choose to create, you’re bucking the trend because you’re choosing to take the time to build."

The Surprisingly Hopeful Upside of the Milgram Experiments

Nowadays there are certain hoops you have to (rightfully) jump through when you want to conduct a psychological experiment involving human participants. The impetus for those hoops are a couple of infamous experiments that most people who have taken an introduction to psychology class will be familiar with. One of those infamous experiments was conducted by an individual named Stanley Milgram.

Milgram was interested in the phenomenon of authority and whether people would follow orders even when it went against their own moral code or values. To test this phenomenon, he set up an experiment where a participant would be given the task of trying to teach another individual. When the learner got an answer wrong, the participant was instructed to flip a lever that administered a shock to the learner. There was a series of levers in front of the participant that were clearly labelled with increasing amounts of voltage. What the participant didn't know was that the learner was actually an actor and they weren't truly being shocked. It sure sounded and looked like it, though.

Milgram wanted to see how far people would go in shocking the learner. At the highest few levels of voltage the learner would be screaming and begging the participant to stop shocking them. Eventually, they would go silent, giving the impression they passed out or even died from the shocks. Milgram would be in the same room as the participant and wearing his official looking white lab coat. When a participant would experience unease Milgram would use the following four cues:

• Please continue.

• The experiment requires that you continue.

• It is absolutely essential that you continue.

• You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. 

The results are very well known and quite distressing. The vast majority of people who participated in the experiment went all the way to the end, delivering the most violent shock three times in succession.  At this point it would appear that the learner had passed out, or possibly even died.

The Milgram Experiment, With a Twist

All of this is actually to set up what I really wanted to talk about and something I wasn't aware of until a few weeks ago. Milgram did many different replications and variations of this study. While Milgram's overall study a very distressing look at the human mind and what pain we are willing to inflict upon each other even with a relatively minor amount of official pressure, there was one variation that is incredibly hopeful.

In this variation the participant would be sitting in a waiting room while the person before them finished up the experiment. However, this "participant" was actually an actor and his role was to refuse to go on with the experiment once he realized he was "hurting" another human being (who, remember, was also an actor). When it was the actual participant's turn to be in the study the likelihood of them continuing all the way to the end dropped substantially. Apparently, seeing someone else be willing to stand up for what's right emboldened the participant to do the same thing. Whereas 65 out of 100 participants went all the way to the end and administered the massive shock in the original experiment, when there was an example of someone standing up and refusing to go further only 4 out of 40 went all the way to the end.

Positive Deviance: Do You Have It?

I don't want to beat you over the head with the implications of this because I think they're pretty clear. Where can you stand up and be a positive example to someone today? It's pretty clear we are constantly  scanning our environments for cures about how we're supposed to act. What kind of positive cues can you provide for your kids, your friends, your colleagues, or your employees? What status quo rubs you the wrong way and what small thing can you do to show others it's okay to feel, speak, or act in the opposite direction?

In one of the most eye-opening and distressing psychological experiments of all time there is a dollop of hope. You can be the domino that starts a positive chain reaction. In a world of conformity a few conspicuous non-conformists can have a huge impact. Is that you?

* I heard this story during a talk given by Dr. Phil Zimbardo in November of last year. That name might be familiar because of an eerily similar experiment he did...

Letter Writing as a Tool

"Before the advent of email, many writers maintained a healthy relationship with their correspondence; they found letter writing to be a useful complement to their main literary projects. Letters were not only a way to stay in touch with colleagues or test out ideas and themes on the page, but also a valuable method of easing into and out of a state of mind where they could pursue more daunting and in-depth writing." - Mason Currey

I'm guessing you aren't writing many letters nowadays. I had never thought of the role letter writing may have played in the past quite like this. I think I mostly assumed letter writing was simply a communication tool and not a method for warming up and shifting into other work. This made me think about my own work methodology and whether I have an equivalent of letter writing to "ease into and out of a state of mind where [I] can pursue more daunting and in-depth writing."

I've been journaling using Day One every morning for awhile now, shifting between stresm-of-consciousness and the recent Art of Manliness journaling prompts. That serves as a bit of a warm up but maybe there is something else I could be doing?

Do you have an equivalent of writing letters to ease you into the state of mind that allows you to do deeper and more daunting work?

Thoughts on Mindful Sharing

"Imagine sitting with a group friends who randomly spurt out the titles of articles that they have read. That’s interesting, you think to yourself. So you look up some of the articles and read them yourself. Then you spurt out the title to another group of friends, who are spurting out their own circulation of titles too. Other than impressing one another with our bibliographic prowess, what has all this spurting accomplished?" - James Shelley

I often find myself thinking about how I'm interacting with the deluge of information I experience every day. More importantly, what is my role in others' experiences of the information they face every day? Does my writing enhance the overall quality of the information they take in or does it get lost in the shuffle? Does the way I interact with social media add or subtract from the experience of others?

I'm finding myself drawn more and more to those individuals who are carefully curating what they share on the internet. I'm becoming more interested in what people think about what they're sharing and not the sharing itself. Retweets are less interesting. Even comments on blogs are not quite the right venue for really digging into a topic. I'm a firm believer that everyone should have a place on the internet that is 100% their own to do with as they please. Ideally, that means sharing opinions and reflecting on issues in a form factor greater than 140 characters. I want people to take the ideas I write about here on SamSpurlin.com and expand, respond, critique or otherwise interact with them on their own sites (and then send me the link, of course!)

What if we all just took one main idea, every day, and shared it? You get one retweet. One share on Facebook. One article to write. How would we approach it? 

Chaos Theory, Complexity, and Your Better Life

If you're a mathematical theorist I want you to go ahead and skip this article. It's just going to make you mad, trust me. I'm going to bastardize and vastly over simplify a complex idea for my own purposes. If you don't want to deal with that then I suggest you turn back now!

Alright, with that out of the way I want to talk about chaos theory. While you may immediately think of dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum it's actually a little bit more complex than that. Chaos theory itself is a branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems that are inherently unpredictable (but not random). For a system to be truly chaotic it has to meet three requirements, which I'm not going to go into (mostly because my understanding of the whole thing is tenuous at best). However, there is one characteristic of chaos theory that I do understand and is actually very, very relevant to thinking about how we live our lives.

A complex system is made up of many, many parts that are extremely interconnected. In chaos theory, a very minor alteration in one part of the system can have huge ramifications in another part of the system. Another way to think about this is as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Over enough time and space, two objects that started very near each other but at slightly different angles will end up at completely different end points (which I understand is more an example of exponential differentiation and not chaos -- but you get the idea).

One of the most complex systems I can think of is human life itself. Our relationships, habits, emotions, cognitions, work, physical environment, etc. are all deeply interconnected in ways where changes in one domain may (or may not) effect every other domain. It can be tempting to accept this apparent complexity as impossible to untangle but I prefer to think of it as a very optimistic way to think about personal development and growth. If you're facing challenges or a desire to improve in one area of your life it often makes sense to tackle it head on. You aren't happy with a relationship so you decide to do something that directly effects the relationship in question. Sometimes, though, that doesn't work as well as you'd like it to. Luckily, chaos theory and complexity can come into play and give you a different avenue to improving your situation. A small change in another area of your life, perhaps in your personal health or mental outlook, can have reverberations far more widespread -- perhaps even improving the relationship in question.

Here are two more examples from my own life to get you thinking about how this idea can be applied to your life. Something I seem to try to improve every couple of months is my diet. I'll go through phases where I eat very well but eventually end up sliding into bad habits. The obvious way to fix this problem is to focus specifically on the food I purchase and eat in my daily life. This works to a certain extent, but I always have more success when I expand my thinking and effort beyond food. If I start working out regularly I find myself unconsciously making better decisions about the food I eat. My ostensible goal is to "eat better" but the effort I place in achieving that goal is actually in "start working out." The connectedness between these two concepts allows changes in one area to have a greater effect in another area.

Another example involves times when I'm feeling frustration in my relationships. My first impulse is to do things that involve the other person -- have a conversation, write them an email telling them how I'm feeling, have an altercation, etc. However, I've discovered that when I am disciplined in my meditation practice my relationships throughout my life improve. Meditation is a distinctly private and individual effort but its effects reverberate far beyond the confines of my own body and mind. It effects how I interact with everybody on a daily basis.

Admittedly, this is not an earth shattering idea. Of course there are multiple paths to the same goal. I think it's easy to get stuck in a rut of failure where the initial effort to make a change fails and it seems like it's impossible to break out of the habit that's holding you back. In those cases, I encourage you to think about how everything in your life is connected like a giant web. Your efforts to directly change one node of the web may be thwarted, but you have an almost limitless array of more indirect approaches you can take. Harness a little chaos to bring more order to your own life.

Thoughts on a Career Worth Having

"How can we explain this? Certainly factors like the sluggish economic recovery and stuck wages play a role, but I think the real answer is even more straightforward: It’s not clear how one designs a satisfying career in today’s professional culture, especially if lasting fulfillment (as opposed to salary maximization) is the goal." - Nathanial Koloc

The quotation above is one of the main ideas that's driving my research efforts as a Ph.D student. People move jobs more than ever nowadays and the traditional plan of getting a "good job" and working your way up an organization over 40 years is largely a relic of the past. There needs to be new ways to think about what a successful career looks like in today's more fluid job market.

Koloc argues that we should seek legacy, mastery, and freedom (in that order). I have qualms with that order, but fully support those concepts otherwise. I think mastery often drives freedom and legacy but I'll leave my quibbles with the specific order for another time. I'm particularly interested in the idea of freedom and how more and more people are consciously choosing careers as freelancers to fulfill this need. A career of conscious freelancing or solopreneurship is becoming more and more viable and I want to understand the forces that preduct and support success in this kind of work.

The final point of the article is one that I predictably throw my full weight behind: treat your career like a grand experiment. 

"I use the word “grand” to describe this experiment because the reality is that your career is not just a way to earn a living. It’s your chance to discover what you’re here for and what you love."

It can be easy to lose sight of this in the quest to make enough money to keep food on the table but I think we do so at our own peril. I think work should be more than a transaction where you shut off your brain and emotion and dreams for 8 hours a day in exchange for a modicum of security. 

We can do better than that.

Using the Bi-Weekly Approach to Habit Formation

Standard operating procedure when trying to develop a long-lasting habit is to do it every day for a period of time (usually a month) until it becomes second nature. This seems obvious, right? I recently had a conversation with one of my coaching clients that made me question whether there might be another approach toward habit development -- something we ended up calling the biweekly focus.

What if you shifted your focus between two habits on an every-other-week schedule instead of focusing full-bore on one habit for a month or longer? In the context of our conversation, my client was talking about how she wanted to get back into playing the piano regularly while also working on her fitness. Conventional wisdom is for her to pick one of those, focus on it for a month or so, then move on to the next one. This can be frustrating for many people because even though it's fairly accepted that trying to do more than one habit at a time might be a great recipe for accomplishing nothing, some habits do not lend themselves to full focus for a long period of time. In this case, practicing the piano in a very intense and focused way for any longer than a week made her feel tired and less motivated to keep working at it. Likewise, when she focused on trying to be healthier and improving her fitness she felt other areas of her life falling by the wayside to the point where it was difficult to keep up with the fitness habit.

Instead, she started a pattern where for one week she would focus intensely on piano while just doing the bear minimum to keep her fitness habit moving forward (attending one spin class instead of three). The following week she would shift piano to the back burner (practicing for 30 minutes or less instead of the usual hour or more) while elevating the amount of time she spent on fitness. By alternating between "Piano Weeks" and "Fitness Weeks" she was able to cultivate two habits that mattered to her without getting burnt out on either one.

When might this biweekly approach toward tackling multiple habits work best? I think attempts at establishing smaller habits will generally benefit from the tried-and-true approach of focusing on it exclusively for a month until it starts to become second nature. However, if you're trying to establish a habit or routine that is mentally or physically taxing, it may be beneficial to think about developing it in a cycle that allows you a week of focus followed by a week of recovery.

This approach may also be beneficial for anyone who really struggles with only focusing on one thing at a time. While I don't think this is a solution to trying to do too much at once, I do think it'll allow people who are a little bit more impatient have a higher level of success accomplishing their habits than usual. For even greater success, using the biweekly approach with two habits that tax separate systems may be a good idea. In the piano/fitness example, my client was able to spend one week taxing her body while letting her mind rest and then switching to a mentally taxing week while her body rejuvenated. At the end of each week she was mentally and physically ready to shift gears into the other domain.

I'm always on the lookout for advice that seems overly simplified or heavy handed. Humans are incredibly complex creatures and the mental conditions behind our behaviors and attitudes should not be oversimplified when greater complexity will give us a more accurate picture of what's going on. Why should all habits be cultivated one at a time for around 30 days? Starting a flossing habit and a piano playing habit share similarities, but I would argue that they're different enough to warrant different approaches. 

If you've been struggling with a habit change I encourage you to try a one-week-on-one-week-off approach to developing it. At the very least, you'll learn that this doesn't work for you. At most, you have successfully begun cultivating a meaningful habit. 

If you've done something like this or are planning on giving it a try I'd love to hear about it in the comments. What habits did you pursue in tandem? How did it work for you?

How I Use "Things"

Sometimes I feel like one of the kids looking from the outside as all the cool kids play with their fancy new toy. In my nerdy internet circle it seems like OmniFocus is the weapon of choice for task management. People love to write about it, share their approaches to using it, and generally high five each other in cool OmniFocus-ish ways. But I don't use OmniFocus. I use Things -- and it's time it got some more love. 

This isn't going to be a blow-by-blow comparison between Things and OmniFocus as I've never really used OmniFocus. Instead, I want to share how I use Things every day and how it has become the backbone of the way I work. If you haven't jumped into using a specific piece of software for task management, maybe Things will become a little bit more alluring. 

The structure of this article is going to be something like this:  an overview of what Things actually does, a description of the basic structure of the software, how it fits my specific workflow, and a few tips and tricks.

Let's get to it.

Overview

Very simply, Things is a piece of software that helps me track my projects and to-do list items in an organized and logical way. It borrows heavily from David Allen's "Getting Things Done" personal productivity system but doesn't necessarily have to be an extension of that specific approach. It keeps track of Projects, Next Actions, Areas of Responsibility, and presents them to me in a way that allows me to manage all my work.

Basic Structure

The basic building block of Things is called a Next Action. Essentially, it's a to-do list item that can be placed within a specific Project, in an Area of Responsibility, or stand alone by itself. The starting point for a Next Action is the Inbox. With a simple keyboard shortcut you can bring up a window that lets you quickly add a Next Action and it gets placed in the top-most "container" of the program -- the Inbox. You can also add Next Actions directly to a Project or Area of Responsibility, but I'd say 80% of my Next Actions start in the Inbox.

After the Inbox the next most relevant list is Projects. Each Project holds Next Actions within it (kind of like a folder). I can have a project called "Write Paper for Class" and within it I can have as many discrete Next Actions as I want (such as, "Research Social Identity Theory," and "Look up APA formatting"). Projects are anything I've undertaken that's going to require more than one Next Action to complete it.

One level of abstraction above Projects is Areas of Responsibility. This can be thought of as the various domains of my life in which I have projects I'm responsible for. For example, some of my Areas of Responsibility are "Student," "Relationships," "SamSpurlin.com," etc. Each Area acts as a folder that contains Projects that are relevant to that area.

These three components (Inbox/Next Actions, Projects, Areas of Responsibility) represent the vast majority of the functionality of the program. There's also an area to place Projects or Next Actions that you aren't actively working on but might want to re-visit in the future (called the Someday list). With this basic structure the program allows me to very quickly get a snapshot of my overall work picture, figure out what to work on in the moment, and make sure I'm not letting anything fall through the cracks.

Things and My Workflow

At least 15 or 20 times a day I hit CTRL+OPT+SPACE to bring up the Quick Entry window that lets me enter whatever text I want that then gets saved to the Inbox. I use it to capture any ideas unrelated to what I'm currently working on as well as anything I remember I need to do at any time. If it makes it into the Inbox, I know I will see it and make a decision about what to do with the piece of information. At a very basic level, this is quite possibly the most important habit I've developed that makes Things useful. Once something makes it into the program via the Inbox I know I'll have to interact with it again and make some sort of decision about what to do next. This allows me to trust my system and focus my cognitive power on what matters -- actually doing the work.

Sometimes an item in my Inbox represents a new Project. If it's going to require more than one step to complete I'll go ahead and create a new Project. A lot of the time an item in my Inbox is a Next Action for a Project I've already created. In that case, I simply drag and drop it onto the proper Project. In some cases, the Next Action doesn't belong to an active Project, isn't a Project itself, but is still going to take longer than a couple minutes to finish. In that case I'll just drop it into the Area of Responsibility to which it corresponds. For example, my "Do Weekly Review" Next Action isn't a Project in itself, doesn't belong to an active Project already, but I need to make sure I see it at the proper time so I drop it into my Personal Administration Area of Responsibility.

Another cool feature of Things is that it allows you to tag Next Actions. I use it to denote the context in which the Next Action has to be completed. This allows me to sort my Next Actions by my current context. For example, sometimes I want to see anything I can do at my computer but don't have to be on the internet to complete. In that case, I'll search for all tasks I've tagged with "@computer" (as opposed to "@online"). Another way I use the tagging feature is to tag extremely easy tasks that I can do when my brain is fried as "@easy." That way I can very quickly get a list of tasks to do when I'm not feeling my best.

Things also helps me actually do my work and not just create and organize reminders of the work I have to do. Every morning I'll look at my active Projects and Next Actions to figure out what I should work on today. I can drag these items (or use a keyboard shortcut) into a Today view that only shows those tasks and projects I've selected for the day. Anything I've tagged with a specific due date will also show up in the Today list when it comes time to actually complete it. This helps me filter through the insane amount of information that's actually being tracked within the program to focus on what actually needs to get done (while I can also trust that everything else I need to complete in the future will still be there for review later on).

Things is the central hub that my Weekly Review revolves around. Once a week (usually Sunday morning) I go through all my Projects and make sure they have at least one Next Action. I make sure all my Areas of Responsibility have at least one active Project. I make sure my Inbox is cleared out and all Next Actions are in the proper Project or Area of Responsibility. This lets me go into each week knowing that everything I've committed to doing is safely in Things and is just waiting for me to sit down and do the work.

Finally, there is an iOS version of Things that syncs with what I have on my computer. This allows me to quickly capture Next Actions when I'm away from the computer. After a day away from my computer I'll usually have a handful of items sitting in my Inbox waiting for me because I used my phone to capture ideas during the day.

Tips and Tricks

One of my favorite features of Things is using the Scheduled feature to hide a project or task until a specific day. During my Weekly Review I'll often determine that certain projects aren't going to get worked on in the upcoming week. Instead of having them sit in my active list making me feel bad all week, I'll schedule them to re-appear next Sunday (during my next Weekly Review) at which time I can make a decision about whether I'll work on them in the coming week. I also like using this feature for activities or events that I might want to do but aren't sure about at the moment. For example, if there's a concert a couple months away that I want to reconsider going to once it gets closer, I'll have a Next Action that says "Look into going to XYZ concert," pop up a few weeks in advance. That way I don't have to think about it until I can actually do something about it.

One of the best uses of a task management system is to schedule infrequent recurring tasks. I don't put things I do every day, like brush my teeth, into Things but I do put things I do every month, every 3 months, every 6 months, and even every year into it. I have a reminder to conduct a Monthly Review on the first Sunday of every month, I have a reminder to revisit my goals and vision every year between Christmas and New Year's Eve. I have a reminder to "start thinking about Christmas shopping" in the middle of October. I can use the power of the program to help me make sure I'm moving my attention to where it needs to be at different times throughout the year.

If you use the Quick Entry with Selection keyboard shortcut within Gmail, Things will create a new Next Action with a link back to that specific email in the Notes field. Since I try to keep my email inbox as empty as possible, I'll frequently create a Next Action that is connected to a specific email. By using Quick Entry with Selection I can then have a Next Action that allows me to click back to the specific email I'm replying to. A huge time saver that also lets me keep my email inbox under control

Other Software

Part of what makes Things so useful to me is making sure I'm not asking it to do too much. Things is *only* a task manager for me. It keeps track of Projects and Next Actions. That's it. It's not a calendar (although I do attach due dates to Projects and Next Actions when it makes sense). For my calendar needs, I use Fantastical. It doesn't really matter what you use as long as you're crystal clear about the information that does and does not go into it.

Likewise, Things is not for holding any kind of reference material. For that, I use Evernote. Evernote is my "digital file cabinet" and very often I'll have a note attached to something in Things that says, "Relevant notes are in Evernote." By making sure I don't put calendar items or reference items where they don't belong I can make sure Things stays optimally useful to me.

Things is an incredibly important part of the way I work and my successful use of it allows me to be more productive and less-stressed than I otherwise would be. I'm not an evangelist for this piece of software or this company -- but I am an evangelist for people having *some* kind of way to keep track of their ongoing projects and tasks. Having a clear view of everything you've committed to not only makes you a better team member, coworker, employee, or family member but it allows you to keep implicit contracts with yourself. You'll know that you can trust yourself to do what you say you're going to do. You'll stop letting things (ha) slide through the cracks and the coolest result of it all is that really cool opportunities will start to find you. I firmly believe that without knowing the precise state of your working life most of us subconsciously keep opportunities from appearing. We know we're too busy to tackle anything else so why would you have your feelers out for something new and exciting. Using a program like Things has allowed me to have a crystal clear vision of what I've committed to which means I know what else I can safely take on and what I have to let pass me by. In the past, I wouldn't be scanning the horizon for cool opportunities because I was barely keeping track of what I already had going on. This is huge -- and not something I expected when I first started using this program.

I'm probably missing vast swaths of information that would be helpful to you. What questions can I answer for you about Things and task management more generally?

The Process of Boring Work

"InsuranceAgents.com sells insurance. Again, it’s tough to find anyone with a “passion” for insurance. Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com says, “Insurance is not an exciting industry, but that doesn’t mean the work can’t be meaningful. We had to find ways to make the work more fun, make the environment more family like, and show people the positive impact of what they do.” -- Matt Linderman

There are a lot more jobs in this world that fall into the "Well, that sounds boring," category than the, "Woah. That's an awesome job," category. And this is why I think focusing on the process is so important. Even in the amazing jobs, there are going to be tasks that must be done and projects that must be completed that are straight up BORING. If you only feel satisfied with your job when you're doing objectively "cool" things you have put a ton of pressure on your job (and subsequently absolved yourself from a lot of responsibility -- convenient, eh?) to keep you entertained. The key to the craftsman mentality is finding joy in the process of doing the work. I think this is a key difference between those people who view their work as meaningful and those who are constantly dissatisfied with what they're doing. 

Mental State Continuity and Productivity

Our brains are awesome in many ways. It's pretty incredible that our lumps of grey matter hold the entirety of our consciousness as human beings. Pretty neat, for sure. However, as incredible as our brains are sometimes they need a little help. One form this takes is what I call striving for "mental state continuity."

Mental state continuity refers to the idea of keeping my brain working on one problem or type of problem for as long as possible, instead of bouncing around between lots of them. When you're working on a specific type of task you've pre-loaded a lot of concepts, knowledge, and information needed to complete that type of task. For example, when I'm reading and summarizing academic articles for my thesis I've "pre-loaded" what I know about how to read academic papers efficiently, social science methodology, whatever knowledge I have on the specific content area, and all of the thoughts and ideas I've recently had around the larger project that is my thesis. That's a lot of stuff. And it's a completely different set of information that I'd have ready to go if I were writing in my journal, watching a lecture, or paying my bills.

It takes mental effort to shift between these states. If I were switching back and forth between reading academic articles and paying bills I'd constantly be loading and re-loading the relevant mental states I'd need to do these tasks well. I'd be spending more time trying to remember what I was thinking about when I left a task to switch to the other one than I would actually doing what I need to do. This is why working with distractions is such a time waster. Distractions represent shifts in mental continuity that you have no control over. While it's certainly important to eliminate those as much as possible, I think most of us need more practice with not switching mental states so quickly.

Weekly Planning

There are certain things that you probably have to do every day to fulfill your job responsibilities. However, there's probably another whole class of activities that you have more control over when and how you do them. These activities are the ones you can use to organize your week to better allow you to have control over your mental state. For example, when possible try to work on fewer projects each day. Instead of bouncing around 4 or 5 try to hone in on 1 or 2. By giving yourself more time to dive deep into fewer projects you're more likely to come up with creative ideas and feel like you're making meaningful progress.

Tapping forward 9 projects in a week may take the same amount of energy and represent the same amount of progress as really booting forward 2 projects but the psychological satisfaction you'll receive from the latter usually makes it the better course of action to take. While I'm sure there are important individual differences as to whether this holds true for everyone, it's something you can easily test for yourself in the next week, too.

One of the best ways to ensure you're minimizing the amount of mental state switching you have to do is being deliberate in your weekly planning. Look at your upcoming week and figure out the main tasks for each day. You don't have to get down to the micromanagement level of planning each hour of the day, but it's helpful to know that Big Project A is going to be your main focus on Thursday so you can focus on Big Projects B and C on Tuesday and Wednesday. In order for this to work, however, you have to be diligent in recording any ideas, updates, and thoughts for Project A that come to mind earlier in the week so you can engage with them on Thursday (and not in the moment when they first appear).

The other consideration when planning your week is to think about how your mental state naturally shifts throughout the week and capitalizing on your natural tendencies. For example, I like to start my week off with a bang so I'm likely to tackle very important and large projects on Mondays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have class in the middle of the day so it's difficult to dive into large projects that require large swaths of focus time so I'll usually work on smaller projects or something directly related to those classes. I like to end the week with as many closed loops as possible so I'll try to take care of all my administrative tasks on Fridays. For all of this to work, though, I have to make sure I record any administrative tasks that come up on Monday (instead of doing them in the moment) so I can tackle them at the end of the week and not have to shift my mental state when I'm working on something important. Likewise for ideas that come to mind on Tuesday or Thursday for the project on Monday -- any ideas have to be recorded somewhere I'll trust when I get back to it later.

Daily Planning

Finally, one last scheduling consideration to keep in mind when thinking about mental state continuity is at the individual day level. When do you feel at your best in terms of doing creative work? In the morning? Just after lunch? Late at night? Do your best to match the energy level required for a project or a task to the level of energy you currently have. Doing a low-energy task when you're at full-energy is a waste of your potential. For that reason I do almost all of my writing in the morning and schedule all my meetings in the afternoon. Meetings don't require me to be as creative and productive as writing so it makes the most sense to schedule them when I'm already feeling a little tired. Friday afternoons are the most tired, so that's when I'll handle responding to non-urgent emails, filing papers, and other administrative mindlessness.

If you have some level of autonomy over your work day and how your work week is scheduled it makes sense to think about how you can keep your mental state in as continuous a state as possible. True creative work comes from digging below the surface level connections and observations that anybody can see. The only way to do that is to work on a project or a problem long enough, and with enough concentration, to break through that layer of superficiality and dig into the richness of the content below. It's not necessarily easy to do it but with practice and a little bit more consideration when planning your weeks and days I think you'll find the effort worth it.

Photo by frankdouwes

Your Life Is Not a Children's Movie

"These (literally) childish plot devices are eerily similar to the popular conversations surrounding career planning. The passion culture tells us that the key to an extraordinary life is to look deep, be true to your inner passion, and courageously ignore the naysayers as you pursue your dream." -- Cal Newport

Animated children's movies are becoming more formulaic and perpetrating the cult of self-esteem. Whether you're a rat that wants to cook or a panda that wants to be a kung-fu master the key seems to be simply believing in yourself. While this is perhaps harmless (although that's debatable) in a children's movie, Cal makes the point that much of today's career advice sounds a lot like Disney movies. From a popular career guide:

"You see, I believe you already have everything you need inside of you. You are good enough the way you are. You’ve simply learned ideas that keep you from living up to your full potential.”

Yikes. 

Cal points out that this is not deep wisdom. Finding your passion and overcoming naysayers does not a successful career make. Real life is much messier, complicated, and frankly boring, than most career advice would have you believe. 

Find something that at least holds your interest for a little bit. Become completely engaged in it and develop your skills to the point where you actually have expertise. Continue exploring the process and refining the skills of your chosen profession and you're likely to see passion emerge. It's not something to be found and there aren't naysayers holding you back from the life you're "meant" to live. 

You are not a crop duster that wants to become a world class racer or a snail that wants to go fast. You are a person who has control over where you put your attention and energy. That's a super power most children's movies have yet to explore.

How to Leverage Success Intelligently

It feels awesome to accomplish something audacious. After weeks, months, or even years of hard work and it all finally comes together into a successful product or event you are probably riding a seriously intense wave of adrenaline and excitement. Assuming it went well, you'll probably feel like you're on top of the world, the bee's knees, or the cat's pajamas. I applaud you, I congratulate you, and I want to shake your hand.

What I don't want you to do, however, is start making plans for your next project.

Maybe it feels like a waste to not utilize this surge of motivation and excitement. What better time to plan than when you're already feeling great about yourself and your abilities? And to that I answer, "Almost any other time."

Making decisions about your future when you're on an emotional high is a good way to set yourself up for unattainable expectations and burnout. It also sets you up to neglect other areas of your life that probably need attention after the period of intense focus and dedication your current accomplishment required. Instead of launching right into the planning process of something new, I encourage you to do one, or more, of the following:

1. Reflect: Before blindly blundering into a new project give yourself some time to reflect. Let a little bit of time lapse so you can look back at the entire process with a somewhat more objective view. What went well? What challenges were faced and how were they handled? What would you do differently next time? Give yourself time to sit and observe these reflections so you can incorporate them into future projects and endeavors. Everything you do, successful or otherwise, provides data that can be used to improve the way you go about future work.

2. Refocus: In the weeks and days leading up to a major accomplishment you often have to narrow your focus. When the first TEDx conference I organized was getting very close to happening I had to put a lot of other normal concerns on the back burner in order to give it my full attention. I delayed hanging out with friends that I'd normally see more often. I called my family less. I put forth the minimum amount of effort to get by in my classes. The end result was that the conference was a great success and everything went well but I had to make some sacrifices in the process. It was important for me to relax afterward and identify the conscious and subconscious decisions I had made in the weeks leading up to it regarding my other commitments. I had to reach out to friends, to family, and re-dedicate myself to my academic work. In a word, I had to refocus and regain some balance to my life.

3. Recharge: Accomplishing major projects and milestones can be exhausting. While that exhaustion is often masked by the adrenaline and euphoria of accomplishment, eventually you'll come down from that high and the true state of your mental and physical health will hit you. That's why it's important to embrace rejuvenation immediately after a major success instead of immediately launching into a new endeavor.

This basic concept should be applied to both ends of the emotional spectrum. Just as it's a bad idea to make major decisions when you're emotionally high, making decisions when you're feeling abnormally low is also a recipe for disaster. That's not to say there's anything wrong with feeling particularly positive or particularly negative -- it's a fact of being human that you will vascillate between emotional states over time. However, because these are transient states they don't necessarily provide the surest foundation for important decisions. Making a decision when you're emotionally high is likely to result in unrealistic expectations while making a major decision when you're emotionally low is likely to result in overly pessimistic and negative expectations.

Embrace your success but don't let it set you up for failure. Embrace your sadness but don't let it hold you back. Find your center and use it to make realistic, optimistic, and attainable goals for your future.

Photo by jimmiehomeschoolmom

Death Spirals and Success

This is both awesome and sad. It's also a metaphor for what happens when you try to copy others' success step for step. There are an infinite number of paths to success (and the first step for any of them is figuring out what success even means to you -- and not what society says it should be). Don't get tricked into trying to do what the person in front of you is doing. You may be following their footsteps perfectly but at just a slightly higher perspective you'd realize you're doing nothing but walking in circles. 

Stoicism and Personal Development

A recent article on Motivated Mastery made me think about Stoicism and its relation to meaningful living. I don't remember where I originally started learning about Stoicism but I know I was immediately interested by its focus on identifying what you have control over and not wasting time or energy on what you don't have control over. To a certain extent, that's why I was interested in and wrote about minimalism for so long. When you start challenging yourself to live with less and only work on meaningful projects and act in ways that align with your values you begin to realize there are only certain things over which you have control. Most importantly, what you always have control over is how you reach to any kind of information or stimulus. 

One of my side projects is the website Getting History Done. Over there I share some of my favorite quotes from autobiographies and biographies. There's a whole section from my favorite Stoic philosopher, Epictetus.

"Every habit and faculty is maintained and increased by the corresponding actions: the habit of walking by walking, the habit of running by running. If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write. But when you shall not have read for thirty days in succession, but have done something else, you will know the consequence. In the same way, if you shall have lain down ten days, get up and attempt to make a long walk, and you will see how your legs are weakened. Generally then if you would make anything a habit, do it; if you would not make it a habit, do not do it, but accustom yourself to do something else in place of it."

Pretty simple. Pretty clear, eh?

Stephen King and Starting "Right"

Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years' Writing Opening Sentences

With a title like that you'd think that means Mr. King sits in front of a blank screen all day agonizing over the way to start his next book. Instead, that title should've said "Why Stephen King Spends 'Months and Even Years'Rewriting Opening Sentences." Somebody as prolific as Stephen King doesn't agonize over just the right way to start. He cranks out revision after revision until he has crafted that first sentence into something that perfectly encapsulates what he's trying to accomplish.

In addition to reminding me that just because something is "the beginning" doesn't mean you have to do it first, the linked article also made me think about how important it is to start things "right." 

The way I start my day impacts everything I do. That's why I get up early and try to work on something important right away.

The way I start my week impacts everything I do. That's why I try to make sure Mondays are highly productive and filled with meaningful work and save "administrative BS" for later in the week.

The way I start a major project impacts how I'll feel about the project for its entire duration. That's why I almost always start with a massive brainstorming and planning session where I can get all my ideas in front of me and I can create a framework for completing it.

The way I start my weekend impacts how well I'm able to rejuvenate. That's why I try to close as many "open loops" as I can on Friday afternoon.

Where could you benefit from thinking about the way you start a little more carefully?

The Quest to Make Afternoons Not Suck

I'm one of those annoying morning people. I generally wake up at 6:30 without hitting the snooze and by 9:00 I've usually knocked out some high level creative work. I can generally work at a pretty productive clip until lunch time -- and then everything changes. 

In the afternoon I feel like a waste of space. 

It's hard to say how much I'm objectively sucking in the afternoon as opposed to comparing it to my somewhat abnormal normal hours. Either way, I want to try to even out my work day so I'm not constantly experiencing the two extremes -- either I'm tearing it up in the morning or I'm a zombie in the afternoon. To that end, I've instituted a few changes to my daily routine and have a few more waiting in reserve. I'm going to try these out over the next couple of months and then I'll report back with what is, and isn't, working.

1. Increased afternoon structure: One idea I have to make my afternoons better is to give myself more structure than I usually have in the morning. If I HAVE to be somewhere at a certain time then I obviously can't just sit around and feel unproductive. All of my classes this semester start no earlier than 1 PM. I also try to schedule client calls and meetings for the afternoon. When other people are relying on me I'm not going to just blow something off because I don't "feel like it."

2. Pushing lunch a little bit later: This is a simple way to make the morning, my prime time, a little bit longer. If I'm in the groove with whatever I'm working on in the morning I can try to keep it going a little bit longer by pushing lunch to a little bit later in the day. Unfortunately, on days I have class I can't do that too well because I have class at 1 and I can't go a three-hour grad-level class without having lunch.

3. Matching tasks with energy levels: This is a huge part of one of my favorite productivity books, The Power of Full Engagement. Some of the work I have to do requires me to be thinking clearly, creatively, and with a high level of energy. Writing of all kind and intensive research with lots of note taking falls into this category. A little bit less intense is preparing for coaching calls, doing general personal development research, and most brainstorming. Finally, some of the tasks I have to do can be done with just a minimum of focus and mental energy. Filing, updating my task management software, triaging email, and most simple correspondence are all able to be done in this state. Knowing the demands of my various tasks means I can then match them up with my optimal energy. Doing my "zombie tasks" when I'm feeling fresh and awesome is a complete waste of my psychological abilities. Likewise, trying to write a detailed article late in the afternoon when I'm exhausted is also a complete waste of time.

4. Each day has its own personality: The morning contains my highest value hours. The afternoon the lowest. You could say each part of the day has its own personality. Likewise, I think each day of the work week also has its own personality. For example, my Mondays are usually highly productive because I'm trying to start the week off on the right foot. I also do most of my emailing on Monday and that often means I'm brainstorming and moving forward many different projects. Wednesdays are usually my lowest productive day because I've pushed myself very hard on Monday and Tuesday. Fridays are usually pretty productive, but I'm also usually quite tired. Therefore, I try to save as many small/easy tasks, administrative duties, and errands for Fridays so I can free up more time earlier in the week for the more challenging things I have to do. It's the same concept as the #3 expanded to a daily, instead of hourly, perspective. Early in the week is best for my difficult and creative work and the end of the week is better for clearing my mental deck of various jetsam.

5. Afternoon workouts: I usually workout in the morning but I'm considering moving my daily workout to the afternoon. My afternoon fatigue is usually more of a mental situation, not physical. Therefore, I think working out shouldn't be too much of a problem. A possible added bonus is that I usually feel more energized after a workout so I may be able to kill two birds with one stone (getting in a workout and making my afternoon mental state better). This is going to be tough because I love my morning workouts where I'm the only person in the weight room. I'm willing to at least try it for a couple weeks to see how it goes, though.

By systematically trying these different solutions I'm hoping I can make my everyday experience a little bit more pleasant. Where could you use this same approach to some problem in your life? 

Photo by Horace