Like many people, maybe most people, I am struggling with a poor attention span. There are so many distractions. And they are all bright and shiny and are literally designed to grab our eyeballs.
I was having a particularly bad day with this and decided it was time to try and run with the stream rather than against it. Can I use the atomised nature of time in a world run by tech to achieve the sort of long-term goals that I have always imagined can only be done with long bouts of concentration?
So here’s the plan. Let’s try splitting the day up into timed sessions. Well these sessions are running. I focus on one particular thing I want to get done. At the end of the session ideally I stopped straight away. But I have given myself a latitude to finish off a specific thing I’m working on while I’m doing it. The length of these sessions will vary with the time I have available, and my judgement of my level of concentration achievable at that point. They can go as low as five minutes. They could be several hours. But typically, I will go for 10 minutes for clearing stuff that needs to be done. And 25 minutes for more worthwhile work. The 25 minutes is the length of time recommended by the Pomodoro method, which has inspired this exercise. I find that is a good time for getting a lot of stuff done.
I started off this investigation by simply seeing if I could write something worth rereading later in 10 minutes. When this proved to be possible, I resolved to do exactly that every other day. And a little later still I decided that I would try to write a book length piece of writing. I don’t imagine this will be a book that will ever be published. But it might be something I would enjoy reading in the future. The main goal though is simply to produce something of that scale in a series of very short bursts spread out over all the other busyness of my life. The entire focus has been on producing the content. So the final result will be a very simple, if quite long, marked down text
“Obedience isn’t virtue if it overrides conscience. This quote nails the difference: dogma obeys orders; wisdom does what’s right. True morality isn’t about being told—it’s about knowing and choosing. Be guided by reason, not just rules.”
Important as goals, strategies and procedures are, there’s no doubt that The best way to get stuff done is to have plenty of energy. And the single factor which seems to affect that most, at least in my case, is getting a good night’s sleep.
This morning is acase in point. I start my active day every day with 10 minutes writing. That’s what I’m doing right now. But having had a good night, I am well ahead of myself getting this 10 minute habit done.
So what are the factors that govern whether or not I sleep well? It’s not easy to tease them out. But one absolute necessity is getting to bed early. I am terrible at this. My ideal is to be snuggled up to my pillow with a Trollope by 10 o’clock. I hardly ever manage this.
I get off to sleep much more quickly if I read a book then if I scroll my phone. I have known this for years. But by that time of night, I am weak. I can’t see anyway around this apart from trying to develop some more willpower.
The other thing that is under my control and seems to have an effect is how much I eat in the hours before bed. Big heavy meals and alcohol get me off to sleep initially, only to wake up in the middle of the night and stay awake sometimes for hours.
I will keep these under observation and see how I can improve things.
I’m very easily distracted by anything that looks interesting. Current affairs is a big thing, because by definition it’s information you don’t have yet. But I will just as happily follow-up a scientific concept I haven’t come across before, and obscure bit of history or even just something I remember and I want to check up if my memory is correct. “Oh look, a squirrel.”
To overcome this I’ve tried to make a rule that I will write up everything that I read. So for example, I was intrigued by a YouTube video last Friday evening. So I required myself to write an account of what I learnt. This certainly worked in as far as I didn’t get distracted by anything else over the weekend. But I did find that writing what should have been some quick notes itself turned into a distraction all of its own. I didn’t keep track of it, but it must have taken at least three hours.
I was actually quite pleased with the result, and I will put it on my blog. The exercise of turning thoughts into something that can be read, is quite a good one. Although I don’t think this blog will ever be of any value to me, or anyone else, The skill I practised in doing it is a useful one to have.
But I shouldn’t fool myself. There were still better ways I could’ve been using my time. Three hours of writing is better than three hours watching YouTube videos. But it’s not as good as three hours solid achievement.
The other thing I learnt was that writing is really a lot harder than reading. If I am going to do it, I should choose wisely what I’m going to do it about.
One of the marvels of the modern world is away you can get access to data and statistics in very close to real time. This is great news for decision-making and planning when you can get the information you need quickly and efficiently. But as always, there is a downside. I find data interesting, and I particularly like data which tells me how well I’m doing. For example, I check my pension fund status daily. This has no benefit whatever. It’s already fully paid up, and my checking it makes it no more valuable.
I do this with lots of things. The worst example is I frequently check the statistics on people who visit my blog. The number is always low. And all the time I’m checking I’m not creating the kind of content which might increase the number.
It is of course good to know information about how well you are doing. And metrics can be tremendously helpful in focusing your efforts in the right direction. But the aim should be to seek the information you need to achieve your goals. Don’t waste time on stuff where all you’re doing is patting yourself on the back, or wallowing in misery at the evidence of your failure to get where you want to be.
Having a curious mind, I am very prone to getting into a cycle where something attracts my attention. This leads on to something else interesting. With the internet available almost everywhere, I can literally do this for hours. It’s daily wired into my brain and it takes huge willpower to overcome it.
The thing is, this is a very helpful thing when I am working on something that I value. Going into the background on stuff and taking it back to first principles is one of the ways of doing great work. And I really enjoy it.
The only answer is to get onto a useful track first thing in the morning. Just get started. Once the ship is moving in the right direction momentum becomes your friend.
One of the strategies I use to get things done which are important but not urgent is to schedule a certain amount of time for them in my calendar and just do them without really thinking too much about it. For example I’ve been watching to create a database which enable my team to work much more efficiently and better together. It’s still a long way from being completed, and will require many hours of work before it starts to really pay off. But I’ve managed to put in about 60 hours already without really even noticing. There are many hours yet to come.
That’s late last night. I put in a 30 minute session. I noticed that I’m now very nearly at the stage I can start sharing it with my team. This means it’s got to the point where it will start paying back the time invested in it.
what I’m finding works really well with this approach is that it’s very low stress. The job pops up on my calendar. I put in a half an hour. At the end of that half hour, I put it all back into good order to pick up again . And then I forget about it. When a milestone like the one that was just been reached crops up it is a pleasant surprise. I think that it is also an efficient way of working. But the main benefit is the low stress approach.
I had some unavoidable disruption to my schedule last week which left me away from home. I thought it would be a good idea to try and catch up over the weekend. Rather than return straightaway, I checked into a hotel for a couple of nights to get away from routine distractions and really focus on some work for awhile.
And I think it did work in the sense of I got more done than I would have done had I not checked in. But the actual amount I got done was rather less than I’d hoped. So I’ve come away a bit disappointed.
But I’ve learnt some things. For a start, distractions are everywhere and you need energy to resist them. I should have had a good rest before setting off. The other thing that affects your energy levels is the amount of processed and sugary food you eat. I would have done better if I’d packed some raw vegetables and fruit. There are just way too many temptations available from The hospitality industry. (But I did really enjoy that bacon burger.)
It’s also important to remember that your perception of time is terrible. When you are highly focused, the time seems to flyby. So so you have the illusion of having got a great deal done in a short amount of time. When you’ve literally paid for the time you are using you are much more conscious of its passage. So when you spend half an hour looking up a relatively trivial fact you notice it in a way you wouldn’t othewise.
Overall, it was probably a net benefit getting away from my routine for a while. But it wasn’t a panacea. Being better organised would have yielded better results.
I’ve just spent a little over six minutes watching a YouTube video entitled something along the lines of how to stop consuming and start creating. Its thesis is pretty much that all the time you are watching stuff on YouTube, even if it is positive and educational, your brain is in a passive and receiving mode. So despite it feeling good that you are learning stuff it is still distracting you from getting stuff done. In fact it might be worse than an out right entertaining distraction because it feels good and gives you the illusion of progress.
The suggested antidote was to spend a regular amount of time every day reflecting on what you have learnt that day and relating it to how you could use it achieve your goals. It also suggested that if you have watched something educational you should instantly assess what it means for you personally and determine how you are going to put it into effect. And this should be done via writing a note or recording a voice memo or something similar.
My first thought was that I had already come up with these ideas myself. In fact, this article is my journal where I reflect on things. The video suggested 5 minutes daily and I have allocated 10 minutes every other day. I’d already got the idea of reviewing what I watch on YouTube. But I’d just hit on that as a way of avoiding long sessions in front of the screen. The idea that I should also make a point of assessing its particular value to me hadn’t occurred to me. But now I hear it, it does make a lot of sense.
I’ve managed to get back into the habit of reading books quite successfully simply By leaving my phone outside my bedroom when I go to bed. That way I have nothing else to distract me and I can get to turning the pages. I can usually only manage 10 to 15 minutes when I go to bed, but half an hour every morning means I make meaningful progress on whatever time I happen today, be interested in at the time. I haven’t had to exercise any willpower in the matter, apart from giving up my electronic box where all my friends live.
I’ve had a similar if less spectacular success with making sure I only have one task open in a window on my laptop when I’m at my desk I use a Mac which has a great feature that enables you to have multiple desktops that you can switch between by swiping your fingers across the touchpad. This makes it really easy to switch from one task to another and leave all the tabs intact for when you come back to it.
I don’t think I’m that different to most people, I certainly hope not, and that I’m very easy to distracted by what I see. But if I can’t say something, it’s much easier to ignore it. This isn’t always a good thing of course. But when it’s working for you, it works very well. I’m gonna make it a mini project today to see if there are any other ways I can streamline my life to keep distractions out of my field of view.
I’m a very curious person. By which I mean I am very interested in finding out new things and the answers to questions. I might also be a curious person in the sense of being a little unusual - but I’ll leave that for now. I think a lot of the things that I have done that I am pleased about are basically down to curiosity. So in a sense my successes are a side effect of my just being interested in things.
This feature has turned massively to my disadvantage in the age of automated distraction. I am sure we’ve all been knocked off course by intriguing titles in articles and videos.
So I need to think about ways to use curiosity to my advantage.
I think the most effective way I’ve found of overcoming distractions, and indeed procrastination, is to simply fire up either the Most Dangerous Writing App or Omniflow and just start writing. This has the great advantage also generating some writing which can be useful. But also fully absorbs my attention and focuses it on things I want to do rather than whatever titbit the YouTube algorithm or the latest social media happens to serve up.
For example at the moment I am reviewing planking. This is something I started doing on a whim having read the title of an article in the Guardian. I picked what I thought was a fairly modest target of doing it for 45 seconds a day. This proved to be really tough, but I perservered because I don’t like to give up on anything I start. I have now developed the habit into one that I have no trouble keeping to.
I have just checked on the benefits - which I hadn’t actually troubled to do. I discovered that I am doing the kind of routine that an enthusiastic sportsman might select. I probably need to dial back on it if anything. I also discover that one of the benefits, which is backed up by some research, is reducing blood pressure and improving your mood. I have been feeling better in those areas since I started planking. I hadn’t really made the connection - but maybe the two things are related?
While I don’t need to write this kind of thing down - it’s not as if it is of any interest to anyone else, not even my future self - focusing on it in the way that writing forces you to does seem to improve the quality of my thinking.
Our blood sugar levels have a big impact on our mood and our effectiveness. Data indicates that judges handout stiffer sentences just before lunch. I doubt that they are aware that they are heading out harsher sentences as a result of glucose levels rather than misdemeanours.
What I am sure about is that a large midday meal or snack makes it much harder to get anything done in the afternoon. In some cases it makes it impossible to even start. So I’ve been experimenting with different snack options. I recently hit on the idea of baked potatoes. These are carbohydrate rich, but I had a mind that may be they take longer to digest. And this would hopefully give a more even glucose level.
I’m only at the start of this investigation at the moment. What I’ve done so far is it two small potatoes don’t provide enough to keep me going. two large potatoes on the other hand actually slowed me down because I think the process of digesting them was in itself enough to deplete my energy levels. But they are very tasty. So I think I shall continue the experiment.
It’s beginning to come together, scientifically in my head now. I need the right number of calories. And I need the kind of calories that are digested and processed by my alementary canal in the way I want them to be.
In the unlikely event of anybody paying this little project of mine the slightest attention, they may have noticed that I’ve been posting articles to blue sky more often than the stated strategy of posting every other day would suggest. The reason for this is that I had to prolonged period of very low energy in the spring related to recovering from a viral infection. I’ve been steadily backfilling the missing ones ever since. Until that is, today. I have finally caught up.
The interesting thing is just how motivating maintaining a streak is. I noticed I was getting close to catching up about two weeks ago and I’ve been writing with a lot more enthusiasm since. there is something just so satisfying about setting a goal, and having tangible evidence of having achieved it.
I think there are some factors as to why this particular project was worked so well with this particular approach. For a start, even on the busiest day you can usually find 10 minutes. The actual work I need to do can all be done in my head without any research . And the whole process is now very streamlined and so I don’t have to psych myself up to overcome any barriers. I’ve also got quite a lot of ways of writing now. I can use a keyboard, the wand on my phone and simply speaking to dictate my thoughts as I walk along.
I am of course only a quarter of the way through my project, so I may hit some currently unforeseen obstacle. But I’m currently pretty confident I’m going to get there. It’s a good feeling.
You don’t really need to explain what a rabbit hole is. We all know the feeling where you watch a video, read a news story or notice something interesting which grabs your attention. Hours later you have done a pile of research, discovered areas of human knowledge you didn’t know existed and developed opinions on things you never knew about before. You’re deep down the rabbit hole and nowhere near any of your actual goals.
I try to avoid following the news or going anywhere now social media for as long as I can when I wake up. I know this is the best solution. But I’m weak.
My alternative strategy is to try and pick stuff that is either not inherently appealing, or has some value. So for example rather than following anything to do with history, science or politics I try and seek out stuff related to productivity or improving my skills. This is a far from a perfect solution because rabbit hole is still a rabbit hole. even if it’s slightly nicer rabbit hole. But sometimes I can turn around By forcing myself too write out a justification for why this piece of software or kind of exercise might be a value to me. This can sometimes convince me to give it up and do some proper work. At the very least, at least I’m practising writing which is a skill that always benefits from work on it.
A long time ago , maybe as long as the 70s, there was talk about a thing called the Mozart effect. The idea was that classical music was so beneficial for your brain that made you more intelligent. And in fact, it was so good for you that you should play symphonies and concertos to your unborn child lost they were just dating to give them a good start in life.
Sadly, either it didn’t work or we missed out on the opportunity of creating a generation of classical music loving geniuses by failing to follow the advice.
But one aspect of that was that you could improve your work rate by listening to music while you worked. This in fact is very widely believed by a great many people. i’ve believed it myself for quite awhile. But I have to say the results in practice are mixed. Sometimes a musical background does seem to make things flow more smoothly. Other times I find myself listening to the music instead of doing the work.
I haven’t looked into the research behind this. But I did read something by Daniel Kanahan, who is probably an expert in this area, who said that he had believed it but when he tested it on himself, he found it didn’t work.
I’m quite open to the suggestion that I have been deluding myself. i’ve done so often enough in my life. But I still wasn’t quite sure if there wasn’t something to it. So I did some trials. I have a few tasks that have a pretty good idea of how long they take. My conclusion was that easy tasks can be done more quickly with music, and more difficult ones are harmed by it.
My working hypothesis is that I get bored very easily. If I’m working on a boring job, the minor distraction from the music is helpful because it makes it less boring. So I stick at it. But if I need my full attention for something, the music can be a major distraction. Particularly good music.
I am a quarter of the way to my goal of having written a book on overcoming distractions. It’s too soon to patch myself on the back. There’s still a lot of work ahead. But the approach I’m taking to do it so far is working pretty well. Every two days a task is added to my calendar. and I diligently spend 10 minutes working on the project. I find it very motivating to keep up this schedule.10 minutes is just the right bite size.
It’s not just the schedule though. The other thing I have got just about right is that I can comfortably produce a meaningful amount of work towards the goal in those 10 minutes. I’ve got the bite-size just right. (There might be an even better length of time to allocate this project. But I’m not taking the risk by changing anything now.)
I think this really is the key. I don’t make much progress every day. And the completion of this book is still very distantly in the future. But every time I start a session, I know I am keeping it to my plan and getting somewhere. It works. The trick is clearly to make sure you’ve got the right bite-size for a particular project.
It is difficult enough working out what your own priorities are. But there are other people we have to interact with their own priorities. They may not be especially good at working on those themselves. For example, I’ve woken up on a Monday morning with a full agenda for the week, including quite a lot of stuff, that matters quite a bit to me. Before I do anything I have a troublesome matter that is at the top of my inbox. It is there for reasons I don’t fully understand and would not be worth recording if I did. It isn’t something I’m going to be thinking about this time tomorrow. Let alone next week or the year after.
The challenge is that I believe the protagonist who is obliging me to disrupt my workflow is at the very least wrong. But he gives every indication that he is malicious. I am in a position to fight back if I choose to. In fact at the moment that’s very little that I could do that would give me more pleasure. But the reality is it is a trivial matter. I should get it out of the way as quick as possible with the minimum thought possible.
Wish me luck!
If I’m not going out anywhere, I always think that Saturday night is a good time to catch up on films and other long form entertainment. The trouble is even here I find that distraction can make an evening considerably sub optimal. I think I spend nearly half my Saturday night nights when I’m free Idly surfing YouTube for something interesting to watch.
It’s time this ended.
So last night, I decided well in advance what I was going to watch. I also decided that I was going to write a review of it.
This definitely had the desired effect. I had chosen to watch an opera. I hadn’t checked in advance how long it was. At three hours, it was a bit too much to swallow in one hit. But when I looked it turned out to have three acts. So that was lucky. I was able to settle on just the first act.
Knowing I was planning to write about it, I focused much more intently than I might otherwise have done. I got my review written. All in all, I’m very pleased with the night. and as a bonus, I have two further nights planned. I think the key was knowing in advance what I wanted to do.
A couple of family members are beginning to struggle with their hearing. I tend to speak rather quickly, and so I am having to practice speaking more slowly. This is also helpful when using speech to text. Clearer diction also helps. So to that end, I thought it might be useful to practice some tongue twisters to improve my tongue muscles a bit.
Not having really taken any notice of tongue twisters since I was a kid, I had forgotten how difficult they are. In fact, the first one I tried at first attempt seemed literally impossible.
After a bit of thought it occurred to me that there must be a speed at which I can accurately read out a tongue twister. As indeed there was. Simply slowing down was enough to improve my accuracy to 100%. I also felt a sense of calm in doing so.
I think this may be a rule that is generally applicable. Slow down to the speed at which you are genuinely comfortable and you stop making mistakes. And we all know that sorting out a mistake is the biggest enemy of calm going.
My plan to write one of these articles every other day, and that each of them should take 10 minutes requires that I be flexible about how I go about it. For example I don’t stick to a rigid timescale. I can miss some and backfill them later. And I don’t have to write them all in the same way.
I write some on my phone using a wand. These ones have to be shorter but I can do them more or less anywhere at any time. I also compose them using speech - which I think is the most efficient. Or I type them either straight into a text editor or using a program that forces me to keep typing on pain of losing my work.
I don’t think there is any virtue in sticking to a single process or time of day. The trick is to just keep at it consistently over time.
The 10 minute limit I give myself to write these articles stops me from checking it out. But I think I read that there was a study that demonstrated that calmness was correlated with higher productivity. But I don’t really need a study to prove it. I know very well from personal experience but high levels of stress and anxiety do not lead to high output. Calmness is a much better state of mind.
So the question is how to achieve more calmness more often. This is something that a lot of people have given a lot ofthought to. I tried some breathing exercises once. I didn’t notice any benefit. But looking back on it, I think I’ve got the framework from a source that would rather over sold it.
I have had much more success with simpler things. Avoiding having a cluttered desktop, both the real one and the screen based one, definitely aids in calmness. having good lists of all the things you’re working on so you don’t have to worry about forgetting any of them is good too. And reasonably frequent breaks work.
But there is no doubt in my mind that the thing that contributes most to calmness is simply avoiding other people. When I worked in a highly corporate environment, my strategy was to arrive early and get through as much work as possible before everybody else turned up. The days when the only productive work I got done was before everybody else arrived.
I don’t think I can go as far as the Buddhists who seem to regard avoiding relationships altogether as a positive thing. But there is no doubt that other people are often the biggest enemy of your calmness..
Mark Twain’s advice about making sure you eat a frog first thing every morning is very good advice, and advice that I have huge difficulty in following. His idea was that you should tackle the thing that most repels you first thing in the morning. That is when you have the most energy and when you have the most time to do it. It also means that you can spend the rest of the day knowing that you’ve got the toughest job off the list and you save yourself a day of worrying that you should be working on something else.
But while I can see the logic behind this with perfect clarity, I usually start the day with something that is either positively enjoyable, or at least is fairly interesting. I use my relatively high level of energy and creativity to come up with excuses for why I am not getting any frog swallowing done.
I am going to make a concerted effort on this. I have created a list of frogs in need of swallowing and have them prioritised. I did this with Google Keep, a tool I am very familiar with which has a good set of features but not enough to become distracting. The next thing is to create a recurring task every workday which pops up and delivers a link to the list. I must spend at least 10 minutes on this, or clear at least one item. And if I can clear the list I will designate myself as hero of the day for the day.
I think that classical musicians often start the day practicing their scales. At least that is my perception of how that kind of skill works. Of course playing a scale is a trivial thing for anyone on a piano, and I don’t imagine it takes that long to learn on a more difficult instrument like a violin. But there still seems to be some value in repeating it regularly. Even apparently simple things benefit from repitition.
I have noticed this with these articles that I am writing every other day. Whilst writing non-stop for 10 minutes isn’t difficult, getting a bit of writing that actually says something worth saying and drawing it to a conclusion isn’t quite as simple as it seems at first. It’s not playing a symphony, but it’s not nothing at all. And getting it done in the alloted time and in a form that doesn’t require future editing does need some concentration.
And now, about a quarter of the way into my goal of 80,000 words, I am noticing that I am finding the process easier. And at least in my own view I think the end results are getting better.
I guess that what is happening is that I am shifting from conscious effort, which is hard, to having the neurones in my brain all trained for a particular task. I think this new skill that I didn’t realise I was acquiring could prove to be useful.
I have just seen a news article describing a new genre called vertical dramas. This is mini-series comprising 1 minute episodes edited to work in the vertical format used on mobile phones. These are apparently made by skilled film makers who are able to get the most out of the visual constraints imposed by the technology. Apparently the script writers are less skilled and the format has already got a reputation for cheesiness.
I haven’t seen any of these yet, though I must admit that the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice sounds intriguing.
But it doesn’t seem to me that this is necessarily a bad thing. If people are highly distracted and have a short attention span, then that is a challenge which the makers can rise to. In fact, they might well be able to be highly creative in it. Short form isn’t fundamentally a problem. In fact often it is constraints that make things special. It could be argued that the novel form is overcoming the constraints of the print media where illustrations were necessarily scarce and colour almost unkown. So I am going to keep an open mind. After all, it’s not as if I am going to have waste a lot of time if I don’t like them.
My two biggest distractions are Bluesky and YouTube. So I tried using blocking software to limit my access to them and thus free up time to do other things. The theory was that I’d use them less and so give my attention to other and more worthy matters.
So how did it go? Well the first problem is sort of obvious. There isn’t any really effective way of blocking these distractions. In extremis you can simply disable the blocking software. But even without that it turned out that I could switch to my phone if I was on my laptop. The phone had some blocking software too, but that was really easy to switch off. It literally offered the option of turning it off.
And in any case, both Bluesky and YouTube do have their uses. YouTube in particular has some very educational content.
So in the end, after an ignomious 3 months of constantly undermining myself I gave up. But it wasn’t a complete waste of time. Having to make a conscious effort to use them did give me time to think through what I was doing with my time. And I have managed to build some positive habits for how I use my time. For example, writing instead of reading and watching - as I am doing right now - turns out to be a good way of keeping out of the rabbit hole. Making a positive choice to do something is better.
I suffered a tactical defeat in my war against distraction the other day and found myself watching YouTube shorts. They are pretty much cocaine to my attention span - what harm can one more minute do? But there was an interesting one that resonated. It was a guy who had worked with high performers, and he was explaining a concept that he had picked up from Steve Jobs.
The idea is that if you have a primary goal in life, then that is the signal and everything else is noise. So you should focus your efforts on the signal and try to minimise the noise. And engineers who work on communications are able to quantify this ratio.
In a sense this is something that is pretty obvious. We all know we should prioritise. Some of us even do so from time to time. But how many people work on the basis of assigning a percentage to how well we are doing on it. The YouTuber claimed that Steve Jobs had a signal to noise ratio of 80%. This was the second highest of anyone he had encountered. It apparently meant that when you worked with him you had to focus on what he regarded as the most important thing, whatever it was. It didn’t make him easy to work with. The highest ratio he’d experienced was Elon Musk.
As I say, an interesting framework.
There is a theory that the reason the Roman Empire grew so wide is that it was down to intense competition between the political actors in the upper classes. If you wanted to get on in the Senate you had to conquer some barbarians. If there were no barbarians to be had, you needed to impress with some spectacular infrastructure. Basically, you had to win a battle or build an aqueduct.
This meant that Rome was always well provided with soldiers and with stuff that made life more bearable. They decline of the empire began when the Emperor took over and closed down political conflict. This meant that there was no longer any incentive to keep up the structure the had built the empire in the first place.
Or maybe they just got complacent. Whatever.
I have just wasted a huge amount of time sorting out a problem that was basically down to not keeping up regular maintenance. My blog, which is quite important to my promotional activities, crashed yesterday. It’s been running for nearly 20 years . And for the first 17 of those years, I diligently took it back up every day. But you know it is. When nothing has gone wrong for a long time, it’s easy to forget that something can go wrong. An easily automated task I have neglected has caused me a huge headache. It’s not quite as bad as being overrun by barbarians. But I still wish I’d been more conscientious.
I was quite early into blogging. I started putting stuff online in 2004. And things really took off when I switched to WordPress in 2006. The raised profile this gave me in my industry enable me to start my business in 2013. I enjoyed it all so much that I started another blog for fun.
Since the world has moved on quite a bit and I realised that I need to either stop bothering altogether or to dramatically raise my game on my professional blog. So this weekend as a practice run I did some quite intensive work on improving my fun blog. so far so good. It seemed like a sensible approach.
The only trouble is that the revamp of my fun blog, whose readership is basically zero, took way longer than anticipated. In fact, I still got another half hour to finish it off completely.
So here’s a question. Should I have abandoned this task as soon as I realised it was going to overrun? That would have got me onto more productive activities more quickly. Or does it make sense to completely finish what I started and get it out of my head. I don’t think there is any way of knowing the right answer to that question.
What I do know is that I really wanted to get it finished and that was always going to overwhelm any logical reasoning I might have. I just don’t have the willpower to do anything differently. All I can do is try and strategise so I don’t end up in that situation.
The thing I most regret spending time on is scrolling through social media and YouTube videos. In an attempt to overcome this, and bearing in mind the well-known fact that it is easier to replace a habit with another habit than to simply try to pronounce it, I have been Working on creating content rather than consuming it in the time I would have previously devoted to mindlessly absorbing it.
The theory is that creating is much harder work and therefore I will find it easier to switch to doing something productive.
This has been very successful. I am now behind on my podcast listening, I don’t automatically watch every broadcast by my favourite YouTubers and it is months since I got into an extended conversation with a stranger about an issue of no consequence to either of us.
The problem I have now is that some of my mini projects started to distract myself from distraction have become distractions in their own right. for example, I was looking at some old blog posts that I’ve written but abandoned. Quickly rehabilitating them seemed like a nice quick and easy project. Well, it was nice and easy. But it was anything but quick. What I’d thought would be a quick bit of editing has now transformed into re-originating the artwork, rewarding some of the text quite extensively and most surprising of all considering what my original goal was installing a learning and more up-to-date editing system on my blog.
I’m still happier than I was before I started. Getting the less important stuff done is a lot better than getting no stuff done. But it turns out that mission creep is an ever present threat. I need to work on my priorities.
I can still remember the difficulties I had learning to write. We all have our own issues- mine was writing the letter s. To this day my signature includes an s that I go back to to add an extra stroke. We were taught to believe that writing was the key skill in which all others rested.
It was sort of true back then. But being ambitious I learned to type. This turned out well when computers came as along. I was an effective keyboard warrior from an early stage.
So I tend to regard both writing and typing as inherently good things to be doing. But the reality is that talking and dictating are becoming much quicker ways of getting stuff done. I need to work on my vocal chords more than my fingers.
When things go wrong, I like to do at least some kind of investigation into what went wrong. So today we shipped some reports witherrors in them. The mistake was made as a result of using AI. But it wasn’t really an error by the AI itself. It was more that we’re not used to using it yet. So as with any new technique is a bit of a learning curve.
So I put some changes in place for next time. I also had to redo the job. All accompanied to the sound of profit margins flying out the window.
This really is to be expected when you do something new. The potential long-term savings from getting Silicon to process stuff instead of human brains is going to be massively beneficial.
The only trouble is that because the AI interface is and the way the models work keeps changing, you never really settle down to a standard way of working. So you never really finalise on an optimum operating procedure.
I didn’t see any way round this. The guys in Silicon Valley Are hellbent on rolling this technology out as fast as humanly possible. And humanly possible is becoming much faster with these tools. But maybe I need to become a bit more relaxed about mistakes and just roll with them.
I had a bad night’s sleep last night. It would be nice if my life was exciting enough for that to be the result of a major trauma or a vital moral crisis. It was actually the result of eating too many baked potatoes. It turns out I’m now at the stage in my life, where I can’t manage digestion and sleeping at the same time.
But I’m finding that the lack of energy and mental clarity that comes from not sleeping well has some quite profound impacts. For example, I had writing this article down as one of my things to do for the day. I quite like knocking them off first thing if I can. But it turned out this morning that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t think of anything to write about. Instead, I did a fairly mundane and easy job. But even with that, I found that it took longer than I would have expected. I don’t know if this will persist through the whole day. But it is very noticeable that I’m not at top performance levels.
But the interesting thing is that I have a feeling that if I didn’t have that ready explanation, I might be feeling very different differently about thanks. Would I be on the point of giving up writing this book because I had no inspiration? Would I be blaming my slow performance on some irrelevant factor like which software I was using for some shortcoming in the input I’ve got from my client?
In fact, I wonder how many of the problems I’ve had in my life were down to low energy levels for some reason or other. I didn’t notice at the time.
There are two kinds of people in life. Starters and finishers. I am a starter. And when I say a starter, boy do I mean a starter. I’ve started a great many projects in my life, many more love will ever get finished in a single lifetime. As a couple being a starter with being a sentimental old fool, my life is cluttered with a great many unfinished things.
The message is clear. Don’t start what you don’t have a clear plan and resource to finish. But I know I’m going to take notice no notice of that. what I do have the willpower to do, barely, is make sure I mothball projects efficiently to come back to later. This actually is quite valuable.
For example, I have long neglected my history books review blog. But I now want to start doing it again. I’ve given myself a target of a blog post a week. Getting into this habit has been a lot easier because I had about 20 half written posts stashed away. So I was able to get a decent schedule of them ready fairly quickly. This has given me the momentum to get off to a good start.
We’ve all had the experience of staring at a blank piece of paper knowing that filling it with something is absolutely crucial, but not being able to work out what to write. Writers block seems to be a variation of this. The harder you try the more difficult it becomes to get it done.
Often the best solution is to go for a walk or do something else. Let your mind think about it subconsciously. Do something else. Then when you come back to it, it’s suddenly seems clear and straightforward. This doesn’t just work with essay crisis style problems. Quite a lot of things that seem insurmountable Will become tractable if you just let them soak.
In fact, I think this is what’s really going on when you have a break with the intention of letting yourself have a rest. The theory, and it certainly sounds plausible, is that you need to give your brain a rest. Maybe you even need to give your body a rest. But I think the actual Gray matter itself is taking advantage of being let alone to work in its own way.
If I’m right, the best working day is one where you split up your tasks into the difficult and the easy and schedule a few extracurricular activities. It doesn’t look like hard work. But I think it’s more productive.
I have just completed a very thorough trial of using AI to write stuff. I decided to do a set of 7 blog posts covering different aspects of the life of William Cobbett. Why William Cobbett? It was just something I felt like doing. I don’t need a reason.
So how did it go?
I started by writing a spec for the AI to work to. This took a surprisingly long time to come up with. I could certainly have rattled a quick single blog post in the time it took. I didn’t record it, but it was about an hour. I think there was a bit of learning curve in it, and I would have had to have done much the same thinking if I’d been working on my own.
The results were initially impressive. All were well written at first glance. I started getting them in order directly in Wordpress. It was here that I noticed my first surprise. It had generated 8 rather than 7. I later realised that it had in fact experienced a technical glitch and one was incomplete and had then been regenerated.
As I was editing them all at the same time I didn’t notice this issue and ended up with two similar articles. This required a lot more work to sort out than it would have done if the problem hadn’t arisen.
Although the writing was superficially quite good, when I got into the details it was repetitive and had some inaccuracies. By the time I’d finished I spent about as much time as I would have done writing without the AI. I think the end result was a bit better than I would have managed on my own. But it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Overall I think it will prove to be a useful tool, particularly for researching stuff. But I don’t think it can actually implement a good idea unaided.
There is no doubt about it, there are way too many distractions available in the modern world. This morning I have so far listened to about 10 minutes of a podcast about proteins, followed the fascinating story of how the Verve lost the rights to their best known song, got a fevered update on US politics and how some recent election result changes everything, seen a comic in Romania have a go at an Israeli member of the audience and get an analysis of why the Russians are in trouble economically and are having to increase their level of conscription.
All this before I was even ready for a cup of tea.
I am not an entirely innocent victim of course. I do have a choice. And the choice I need to make is to avoid distraction. I need to adopt the attitude that an alcoholic does. I don’t have the willpower to dip in and out of distraction at will. I have to avoid it altogether. If I fall off the wagon it will be some time before I get back on, and that is time I can’t get back again.
It has been unusually hot for the last couple of days. The heat belt up in my office by the mid afternoon making it very difficult to work. I found myself almost involuntarily taking a snooze. It turned out to work rather well I regained consciousness in time for dinner, and then felt wide-awake through the evening and was able to more than catch up.
I wonder if this is a better work pattern even when the temperature returns to normal. I don’t think I’m particularly unusual in finding the period directly after lunch to be not especially productive. I try to schedule unavoidable but not especially demanding work for that time of the day. but maybe it would be better to suggest give up on it altogether. A mid afternoon snooze is a very pleasant experience. Forcing myself to do rewarding work whilst not in the mood is not.
This is a course not a tremendous radical idea in any countries around the world. countries where having a siesta is normal don’t seem to be doing too badly.
The biggest problem is, and I’m a bit shame faced about this, I don’t think my fellow workers customers and suppliers would appreciate not being able to get in touch with me for a big chunk of the normal working day. nonetheless, I think I’m going to give it a try.
Last night I sat down to clear a few emails that I found myself pussy in a solid two hours of focus and productive work concentrating mainly on my top priorities. I was in that state that is called “flow“ where working seems to be not so much effort free as Something that it would require effort to stop.
I have no idea why it happened. Maybe it was the fact that we are in the middle of a heat wave and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. Maybe my constant attention to writing this book has put my mind in a state that is receptive to being focused. Or maybe it was the two days previously when I tried half heartedly to get stuff done with very little result. Perhaps my subconscious had worked out a plan.
All three seem quite believable. But only one of them is repeatable. So that’s the one I will carry on doing.
At my school people who habitually left things to the last minute were referred to by the teachers as last minute merchants. From the fact that there was a name for it, it is possible to infer that the behaviour was widespread. From the fact that I remember it so clearly many years after it is possible to infer that this was a behaviour I was guilty of.
I still am.
And I’m still doing it right now. I have had to wake up early on a Monday morning to deliver something late that I promised last week.
Why do I do it? I don’t know. Some jobs seem to bring with them their own form of writer’s block. I’d love to solve this one. But it is very deeply ingrained.
i’m a very curious person. I’m highly motivated to find out how something works or what is going on. This has effect of making me extremely easily distracted. One of the strategies I’ve been investigating as a way of overcoming this is to deliberately work on stuff which is quite demanding. so rather than following my fancy on a trail of related blog posts and YouTube videos, accompanied with googling to find the fine details,, I’ve been working on writing and creating stuff myself. As that is a naturally tiring process which has a definable end point it stops me going down too many rabbit holes.
That’s a theory at any rate.
The problem is that it can become an even more compelling rabbit hole all of its own. This happened today. Instead of going into mouse potato mode I chose to write a blog post instead. The blog post got written alright. But having got into the mood I also spent quite a while working on other blog posts and generally getting a schedule of blog posts lined up for future release. All good stuff, in so far as it goes. But not What I really should’ve been working on.
So I had a better day than I might’ve done. But not as good as I could’ve done. I think I need to work on prioritisation a bit harder.
It is highly unlikely that anybody is taking my writing a book in 10 minutes sessions every other day seriously enough to notice. But I’ve been posting articles more frequently than that recently. It’s more like one a day, and some days I’ve been getting two out. This was originally because I was backfilling a big chunk of the calendar when I’ve been too ill to do anything this frivolous.
But I’m also finding that it is quite a nice daily exercise to get my mind working and focused. In fact, I’m reminding myself of Marcus Aurelius and his famous meditations. I say famous, there is no evidence that they were particularly famous in his own time or indeed at any time until quite recently. Marcus seems to have followed a common stoic practice of keeping a daily journal to keep track of his thoughts and to keep himself online with his philosophical goals. you must certainly never intended anyone else to read them.
I’m beginning to see what made him keep the practice up. There is something about the discipline of getting your thoughts down in writing that seems to make them stronger and easier to follow.
Writing has become very divorced from sitting down with a bit of paper and covering it with lines of symbols from a thin tube of coloured liquid. You can now do research with the spoken voice, and ask an artificial intelligence to draft your text.
This is all great for a lot of things. But sometimes it’s the hard work of thinking stuff through that is the point. So there is still a place for the pencil.
But one way of using tech is pretty much the opposite of utilising the computer to do your thinking. I use a program called Flowstate which forces you to type for a preset length of time. If you don’t keep up the keystrokes it deletes what you have written. There’s a very similar online tool called something like ‘The Most Dangerous Writing App’.
It takes a bit of getting used to. I definitely lost a lot of work when I first started. But if you want to focus it definitely has that effect. And you can often use what it produces with only light editing.
I have found a Shortcuts are tremendously useful ways of saving time. A few minutes or even a few seconds shaved off a job you do regularly soon mounts up but that isn’t even the biggest value. The sooner you can get from wondering about what you should be doing, through working out how you should be doing it and finally actually getting it started the better. I find that the mental blockage that needs to be overcome sometimes the biggest obstacle to getting something done.
I compose most of these articles using Google Keep. It’s a very flexible tool. Its the biggest drawback is that I use it so much it sometimes hard to find stuff I’m working on. So for things like this that I do regularly, I create a tag for the article that means I can find this specific file almost simultaneously. Things like my current priority list also has a tag. That particular tag is preceeded with A1. Tags are listed alphabetically, so that makes sure that most important tag is the one on the top of the list.
I have set up tags for categorising particular kinds of entry. I’m pretty sure that was completely a waste of my time. it’s a feature I never use.
I also use the Shortcuts on my browser as a way of rapidly getting to webpages I use frequently. The good thing about that is that those are lists that I use regularly. So they are automatically near enough kept up-to-date. All in all, I regard shortcuts as almost an essential tool.
I allow myself 10 minutes to write my GSDIANOZAS articles. I streamline the process as much as possible. That is as after all the point of the exercise. That’s reflected in using the acronym Getting Stuff Done In A Nexus Of Zero Attention Span. I regret the word Nexus now - but the Cult of Done principle of just getting it shipped applies.
But I just noticed that I was so spending up to a minute finding the file I use to compose them. I have just set up a shortcut. I have gained a productivity advantage.
When you are busy, and particularly when you are busy with urgent deadlines, it is very easy to overdo it. This results in you getting tired and unproductive. The reality is that you would be better off closing your laptop, packing up your papers and heading off for a walk or even going home for a snooze. This isn’t always a possibility. But you often don’t do it anyway, because one of the effects of being tired is reducing your bandwidth to actually work out what he should be doing. More importantly, whether or not you should be doing anything at all.
It’s a bit like the worst time to decide whether or not you need another drink is when you’ve just had several of them.
There aren’t many good strategies for coping with this current situation. And when you’re tired, thinking of strategies is one of the things you’re least likely to be able to do well.
But one that I find works for me is stopping trying to work on whatever it is you’re trying to achieve and instead do a list of all the things you need to get done. And the trick is to do this very aggressively. Break things down into the shortest sections you are able to. If necessary, have several lists covering different aspects of the job you’re trying to cope with. When you’ve done that, you can start knocking off a few of the easier ones.
It isn’t a panacea. Unfortunately, there is no real cure for having too much to do. It does feel a bit like adding an extra unnecessary stage in the process of getting things done. But it has got me out of more than one crisis.
I suffered a tactical defeat in my long war of attrition on distraction yesterday. As is often the way with unsuccessful military campaigns, it all started off so well and the plan was so good. But in the end, I found that I had clocked up a huge number of YouTube videos Which I hadn’t even finished rather than a solid day of achievement. I tried to make a tactical retreat to an early night, but ended up con continuing my YouTube binge until nearly midnight.
When you are trying to build a new habits, it’s rarely a good idea to take extreme measures. The best approach is to simply try and replace what you don’t want to do with what you do want to do steadily over time. But sometimes you just have to panic. I’m going to have a complete Van for the duration of this calendar day on any form of social media. YouTube is my current enemy but I need to avoid falling for its allies as well.
Now I have fallen into this military metaphor. I’m going to treat today as a battle. Off to draw up my marching orders.
Oscar Wilde described a cigarette as the perfect pleasure. What he meant was that you could carry on smoking cigarette after cigarette without losing the hit you get from it. Other pleasures always came with a distinct end point. You can only eat so much food. You can only drink so much alcohol. You can only have so much sex. But you can puff away for as long as you like.
I think there was probably something in Wilde’s character that made this particularly appealing to him. I dread to think how you would’ve got on with modern social media. Because these share exactly that quality with cigarettes. You can continue for hours, maybe even all day, reading or watching the all intense infinite output.
I have a feeling that if wild was here with us today, we would never have heard of him.
The same rule does not apply to creating stuff. And that must include the content of social media platforms that everybody goes to to read. There is a very distinct limit to how long you can carry on producing stuff. It varies of course with the subject matter and your energy levels. But writing something about even the most engaging of topics is not something that you find difficult to abandon.
I’ve been returning this to my advantage recently. I’ve been losing many battles in my long war with distraction. But I have found one way to turn around from a hyperlink rabbit hole full of stuff I am at that moment intensity interested in is to write an essay about the subject. I hold out the hope that one day this will generate a valuable and incisive piece of writing. Maybe. But it certainly puts me into the frame of mind where I am able to stop.
One of the reasons social media is so distracting is the way it keeps you engaged by constantly seeking your opinion. YouTubers rarely finish a video without asking you what you think and suggesting you make a comment. There are also polls, like buttons, questions to find out your personality, intelligence, when you were born etc.
It all works consciously to keep your attention on the platform. And it works pretty well. And one more post or one more video is so tempting. What harm can a few more minutes do?
I am going to try and overcome this by using the same tactic back as far as I can. But instead of scrolling I am going to write. This means rather than watching a video I will write a blog post. Rather than spending time reading the news I’ll spend time writing a response to the news.
Let’s see if I can make creating stuff more compelling than consuming content.
I’ve had a big job on this week which involved dealing with an auditor from accreditation company. To be entirely honest, there are some things I didn’t do as well as I could’ve done. To carry on being honest, I covered them up rather well. I was greatly help in this by the auditor finding a lot of completely unjustified problems. He was a young guy. I think he was looking to make an impression. He was probably a bit insecure as well – which I didn’t help.
So not for the most reprehensible of behaviours on my part. But a bit below the standard I like to work at. However, I very foolishly allowed myself to cope but I dwelling on the mistakes the auditor made.
I had some stuff to do to follow up. But found myself spending a lot of time thinking of ways I could have a go with the auditor. And when I say a lot of time, I mean a lot of time. I composed several emails in my head. I thought of some approaches I could use to get him into trouble with his employers. At worst of all I spent time going through the details of the standard he was working to to rub in his errors.
I’ve now come to my senses I will simply do the minimum I need to get the issue solved. I can then forget about it altogether and concentrate on more profitable and enjoyable parts of my life.
I don’t think I’m alone in being sucked into arguments. they are a great way to have a miserable life, concentrate on an important things and increase your stress levels. So what can I do about it?
The first thing is just to be aware of it. Spot the rabbit hole before you go into it. good advice, but easier said than done.
If you can’t stop yourself entering the hole here are some ways of making it less damaging once you do. Make a list of all the stuff you need to do on the problem. And include all the cunning plans you have for scoring points and inflicting harm on your probably unsuspecting opponent. And then put all the revenge stuff to the end of the list. With luck, you will run out of time before you get to them. And thirdly, do your best to treat you as a learning opportunity rather than a flexing your muscles opportunity.
I fell short this time. I’ll do better next.
There was a time when my tickle file was an absolute mainstay of my daily organisation. I have to be honest. For a lot of that time it didn’t work very well. I found it difficult to keep up the habit of using it. In the end I resorted to self bribery. I bought a bar of chocolate. I allowed myself one square of it every day. I was soon reliably opening the tickle file as my first act on reaching my desk.
But as the world has become more and more electronic, I’ve less and less need for it. Nowadays, it is more often empty than not. But it still has chocolate. So I’d like to see if there are other uses I can put it to.
The biggest issue with the file was always that it is designed for and works very well for single sheets of paper or relatively small objects. I’m tempted to start a handwritten project. That would be good from the point of view of keeping my handwriting up to standard. But it does feel a lot like quitting work for the sake of work. And that’s definitely not what I want to be doing.
There is one thing that I might want to go back to paper on. For the last few years I’ve been solving my birthday cards for friends and family problem by subscribing to a rather fun birthday card service. But perhaps I should take more care over my closest friends and relations. I think this is a good idea, but I don’t have that many friends and relations. It’s not going to justify the existence of the tickle file on its own.
Maybe I should just bow down to the advance technology and accept it. But I’ll finish the chocolate first.
A great way of losing time and expending energy to do so is to make mistakes. If you rush your job and get it wrong and you have to do it again, any idea of efficiency goes straight out the window.
That’s an extreme case of course. But we’ll make clumsy slips from time to time. And these can turn out to be important when they end up in the finished product. But going back to check your work before releasing it always seems like really hard work. There’s a nice job apparently completed all you have to do is tick it off and you can get onto something exciting and new.
As someone who is chronically clumsy and unusually impatient, this is always been and I suspect always will be a big problem for me personally. But as a manager, I’ve noticed it’s a very common problem with people in general.
The most successful strategy I have found is to schedule checking several days or several weeks after completion. This is a disadvantage of adding to the time it takes to ship whatever it is I’m doing. But it does overcome over familiarity with the job which tends to make you see what you expect to see rather than what you actually see.
The least successful strategy is asking somebody else to check it for you. They rarely have as much insight into your work as you do. And of course, the time they’re spending checking your work means they can’t do their own work. I wouldn’t rule this out altogether though. I find the motivation to not let the checker find something helps me.
But the most helpful strategy I have come across is the advice from the cult of done. This asserts that there is no editing stage. If you’re doing something, what you produce is the final version. Particularly on a piece of writing, the idea that once I’ve left paragraph I will never come back to it does make me pay more attention. And it is most of the time the reality. You don’t often come back and revise stuff you’ve done no matter what your intentions were at the time.
I’ve been doing an unconscious experiment of my life. Most of the time I follow the news assiduously. I’ll get interesting in particular stories and follow them closely. Back in the days when the only source of opinion with the newspapers, I’d read the opinion columns. But when nothing was going on, that was interesting me very much I would go weeks sometimes months on end without checking out the headlines at all. Looking back on it, I can say with certainty that my level of interest in World events turned out to have no impact on them at all. So one thing is clear. I’m not duty bound to follow the news because of the impact that might have on anyone else.
But does it do me any good? Most of the time I think it’s just entertainment. It’s interesting to know what the powerful are up to. It might also have been some use in helping me make decisions. But looking back on it, I don’t think any of this was particularly great. I would’ve been just as well informed for my own purposes by reading books.
I’m writing this on what feels like a big news day. But I’ve just done the mental exercise of thinking back to previous similar events. Many things which seemed highly significant at the time have turned out to be much less so in hindsight. It’s good to know what other people are talking about. But then, I dare say those other people are very happy to bring you up-to-date if you don’t know what’s going on.
Of course it’s rather hard to avoid the news nowadays. So I don’t think becoming a hermit is feasible. But I’m going to make a conscious effort to make sure I devote the minimum attention to current affairs that I can.
I follow the 5:2 intermittent fasting program. So two days a week, Friday and Monday, I restrict my calorie intake to 600. It’s a very modest intervention and it has moderate results. But I have noticed that the day after I tend to be a bit more alert and I’m better at tackling tougher jobs. I’ve also got a long-standing observation, which I imagine other people have noticed, that the day after an alcohol and all carbohydrate binge Tends to be fairly slow moving.
So, I wonder if fasting in a more dramatic fashion might have an even stronger result. Maybe even a result that is worth the sacrifice. Yesterday I tried this out. So rather than 600 cal I just had one apple and one banana all day.
I’m writing this the morning after. Observation so far – I’ve got a good night sleep. I woke up at 6 am which I always regard as the optimal time to wake up. However, I haven’t noticed much in the way of increased alertness yet. I will keep the experiment going by not eating at all until the evening. Let’s see how it goes.
They think that attracted my attention most over the last couple of days is how important my energy levels are to achieving anything. On Tuesday I had a really solid days work getting a lot done. The following day many hours ended up disappearing while I just couldn’t get started .
The thing about high energy level days isn’t just that you get more done. You enjoy life more as well. So it is probably well worthwhile considering what factors affect my energy level. I think there are three main ones.
Most important is getting a good nights sleep. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had it right. Sleep it is a gentle thing, beloved from Pole to Pole. getting into bed early with a good book and dozing off is a huge pleasure in itself. And it also sets you up for a great following day. I wonder why I do it so frequently?
What I eat affects me greatly. As does when I eat. A few years ago I gave up eating breakfast. This has had a huge positive effect. I can now get stuff like writing this article done within minutes of being out of bed. I’ve also noticed that the late afternoon crash that I have and typically attributed to my bio rhythms is much bigger the more at lunchtime. What I eat matters as well. Basically the more carbohydrate and the more process that carbohydrate the sleepier I get.
I really need to manage this aspect of my life better.
And finally regular exercise and keeping my overall weight down helps. And again, I’ve wonder why I don’t pay these things more attention on a day-to-day basis.
So there’s lots to think about there. my real passion in life is experimenting. I can see some good experiments coming up.
I had a remarkably good day in terms of how much I got done yesterday. It was quite exciting, and after putting in a pretty solid day I also found myself ready to do a bit more in the evening and ending up working from half nine to nearly midnight. Then to my surprise I woke up at five this morning, and got off to a flying start this morning.
It couldn’t last, and didn’t. I had a bit of a crash about 11am and achieved very little for the rest of the day.
It turns out that no matter how organised and motivated I am I can’t keep up a Stakhanovite rate of work day and day out. I think the better approach is to get a good night’s sleep rather than burn the midnight oil. The trick isn’t about long hours it is about achieving more in fewer hours. I don’t think the brain is like muscle and metaphors drawn from sport can be misleading. But even so, it isn’t possible to just keep thinking and working with your head than it is to keep jogging for hours on end.
Stop work early and get a good night’s sleep.
My daily toxicology revision as I run through ChatGPT was interrupted this morning. For some reason ChatGPT wasn’t able to answer my questions. It wasn’t that big disruption to my life to be honest. But it was a good reminder that we will become very dependent on electrons running around in the silicon. It’s made me realise that in the event of a prolonged power cut almost all of my business activities wouldhave to cease. this isn’t a tremendously comfortable feeling.
I was wondering the same question yesterday funnily enough. I have for many years run the most basic low tech bit of organising technology. I just call it a tickle file. It may have some other more fancy names. Basically, it is a drawer in a filing cabinet. It contains (I think) 47 folders. 31 of them have a day of the month on them. 12 of them have months of the year. Every day I remove the contents of today’s folder. I then either work on them, throw them away, or reschedule them by putting them into a later folder.
Over the years the tickle file has become less and less full. Typically nowadays there is nothing in it at all. I keep it going because the handful of things in it that can never be replaced electronically I still needed. For example, I have a photocopy of the front and back of all my credit cards. This is to enable me to rapidly contact all of the companies unwise enough to extend me credit in the event of one or multiple cards getting lost. The other reason I keep it going is that long ago I was having trouble keeping up the habit of using this file. My solution was to put a bar of chocolate in it and reward myself by having a piece of that chocolate bar when I did the daily turnaround on it. If I give up the file, I’ll have to give up the chocolate.
But it does feel like there are things I could be doing on paper which it would be better to to keep on paper and up-to-date. I’ll give it some thought.
When self-employed is very easy for your work life and your home life to get more mixed up that is good for you. That’s certainly been my experience. Over the years I built up some habits that aren’t proving very helpful. For example, are used to start the day by catching up with all the news.
When I say used to, I mean up until yesterday. But today I resolved that I was going to spend all the time at my desk working. And I was going to start early. I also thought I would try wearing my tie as a sign to myself that I am working and not doing anything else. Plans really survive their contact with reality. I took my tie with me, but forgot to put it on until mid morning. Another part of my plan was to have a very short lunch break. That didn’t work either.
but I did manage to focus on work to a much greater extent than I have been doing for many years. This worked really well. By mid afternoon I was ploughing through my backlog faster than I’ve done in a long time. It was actually a very good feeling. It was also a good feeling taking my tie off, and therefore give myself permission to relax for the evening.
I’m looking forward to rolling up my sleeves getting my tie on and starting again tomorrow morning. I didn’t achieve all of my objectives, but I’m keen to have another go. I think a lot of success comes down to simply putting yourself in the right frame of mind, but whatever means that works for you.
There’s an idea associated with Jerry Seinfeld that it is very motivating to keep track of your progress on something. Hey, according to the story at any rate, writes new comedy material every day and when he is fulfilled his session he puts a red cross on his calendar. He finds that the desire to keep a continuous run of red crosses makes him very keen to carry on in the habit. And the more red crosses he has the more he wants to avoid breaking the run.
This certainly is a very strong motivator. It’s used in lots of contexts. I think the most impressive one is in the language app Duolingo. Not only do you keep track of how continuous your progress has been, you also have a cartoon owl who pops up to comment on how well or badly you are doing.
The downside to it is that when you do break a run, you’re now motivated to give up all together. That’s what I found any rate. To overcome this, I allow myself to go back and fill in gaps. The deal with myself is if I committed to something I will get it done. But I won’t necessarily commit to doing it every day. In fact, I’m working to this system right now. My target is to write an article like this every other day. But for one reason or another I missed out half of February and most of March. I’m now diligently going through and writing an article to correspondence to all missing entries in my calendar. It’s not quite as satisfying as getting things done to clockwork on a schedule. But it’s not far off.
I’ve had a bit of an uptick in work coming in to my business. This is good news of course. But there is the matter of getting the work done. I don’t think there’s much doubt that I’m going to need to invest in more staff and/or improved technology to cope with this. And what I say and/or all it will almost certainly be and.
But I do have the short-term problem of a rather long to-do list, which will soon be trying the patience of my existing and new clients. So in the short run, I think it is time to look at ways of increasing how much I can get done personally per hour. This is probably overdue. I’ve looked a lot into planning and organising over the last couple of years. But I think if you let yourself, you tend to default to bad habits when it comes to the minute to minute time usage. and ultimately I want to work less hours so getting more out of the hours I actually spend will be very worthwhile.
Let’s do the basics first. I need to get started on the most important work first thing. I am very bad at focusing on the most important job. I need to bring that forward to being the first thing I do. I already have a list of the most urgent things that I need to get out of the way. Let’s put an alarm setting on it. I normally start work at about 9 am. so let’s go for 8:30 am. I’ll make that a hard point in the day. I’ve normally out having a walk at that time. So I will only get my walk tomorrow if I get up in time to start work at my desk at 8:30.
The other thing that I spend a lot of time on his taking breaks between tasks. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your brain does need a rest. And it’s also a nice reward. But I think I’ve gone a bit far in the direction of keeping my brain relaxed rather than actually using it.
The other thing I must do is see how much I can use AI to replace real work. I’ll need to be careful of this. I’m a terrible tinkerer. I can easily spend huge amounts of time fiddling around and finding the features that are interesting.
So that’s a plan. Let’s see how it goes.
Can you exercise your brain like any other muscle to improve its performance? It doesn’t sound like a completely unbelievable suggestion. It is definitely the case, which we have all experienced, that you can train your brain to do particular tasks. And that training wears off over time. When I worked in a laboratory back in the days when pocket calculators were not common my mental arithmetic was very good. It started declining as soon as I got hold of a calculator.
But the question is does exercising your brain on one task transfer to improving your performance on others? The analogy with muscles would suggest that it does. Somebody who does regular weight training would be able to cut down a tree more quickly than someone who never goes near a gym. Does the analogy actually work though? When you build muscle, you literally increase the size and efficiency of a bit of your body. Using your brain is more about creating connections and patterns. It is entirely possible that any practice you carry out to reinforce a particular set of patterns simply uses up capacity that would be better use for more practical purposes.
This is the stage in a problem where a train Scientist will stop speculating and look at the available data. There is not much evidence that brain training improves performance in unrelated tasks. There is some. But not much. There is some support for the idea from the fact that Mental exercises do seem to help with the mitigation of dementia in old age. But stopping things from going wrong is very different to positively making them better.
The brain exercise which seems to have the best supporting data when I did a very quick and not very thorough search seemed to be dual n-back. I thought I would give it a go. It turns out to be an excruciatingly difficult mind game. The principal behind it is forcing your brain to do two mildly difficult things at the same time. This turns out to be quite close to torture.
I have to say that the effort involved in playing this game does feel like it ought to be doing some good. It was certainly tiring, which is the same thing you get from physical exercise.
Trying it out didn’t help in my judging whether or not it was of any value. but he did help me come to a decision. it was a unpleasant experience. It was not an enjoyable fun game. So as the rewards of dubious but the effort is real, I’ve decided I won’t pursue this idea.
But it does show me that there is one mental exercise which is helpful in improving performance in the real world. by forcing myself to write up this exercise, I came to what I think is the right decision much more quickly and I would’ve done without focusing my thought. So while I won’t be playing any more mind games, I will carry on writing about things that matter.
The single thing I spent most of time on is my email inbox. I’ve made some progress to reducing this over the years. I make extensive use of the schedule button so I can deal with emails when it suits me rather than when they arrive. I also shunt emails Onto Trello if they look like they will take a lot of attention. And ones that can be quickly resolved I try to resolve quickly.
I’m not doing too badly on all this. But given the number of hours involved , it is worth doing anything which scrapes even a small percentage of the time I spend in my inbox.
One of my other strategies is having templates for replies to common queries. This is certainly a time saver, but it is quite clunky. It seems like something that an AI tool might be helpful for. To this end, I’ve just tried a program called Superhuman. It’s too early to say whether it’s any good or not. But I think this is one of those situations where getting in and trying things out is a good approach. Ideally, I would like to be able to press the button and get a range of potential replies Drafted which I can rapidly pick from and edit as necessary. All the stages should be controllable by voice commands for quick key strokes. Ideally, I would like to keep my time in my inbox down to 5 minutes an hour of working.
Let’s see how it goes.
Many years ago when I was a student there was a clear differentiation between the people who left things to the last minute and the people who got stuff that needed doing out of the way as quickly as possible. I tended towards the essay crisis approach, and often had to pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline. (An all-nighter for people who’ve never done one isn’t as heroic as it sounds. It would typically start at around 12:30am and would involve a toast break at about 6:00am before the final dash in the last hour before the deadline where a reasonable rate of work is finally reached.)
But these things are really work patterns rather than personality features. I would do both, and I think that is true of most people.
It is tempting to treat being an inky swot who gets everything done well ahead of time as the ‘right’ way to do things and leaving things to the last minute almost literally is bad practice if not a sign of a bad character.
But in a way both are bad. Getting something out of the way as quickly as possible means you are minimising your contact with the task. This might be okay some of the time, but often you are doing something where there is much to learn from it. This is sort of obvious if you are cramming for an exam. You could speed read the textbook either on the first day of term, or just before the exam.
If, like me, you are in the habit of consuming social media and/or Youtube videos as a way of filling time between tasks and you’d like to do less of it, there are a number of strategies available. Willpower is one. Good luck with that. Time blocking software is another. This isn’t entirely useless, but the tempation to treat the limit as an allowance is always there. Also, working out creative ways around them is a pretty effective bit of time wasting in itself.
But I saw one suggestion that is beginning to work well for me. This is to replace mouse potato time with creativity. So instead of watching a video you do a drawing, or write some code or do some writing. For example you could set yourself the challenge of spending 10 minutes writing an article to go in a book you are writing. In fact that’s just what I am doing right now. Of course exercising your creativity does take a bit more effort to get started. But if you keep it up for long enough you could end up with an actual book.
Keeping it going is exactly what I am doing right now. It seems to be working.
While it is undoubtedly true that if you really want to make progress on something important and meaningful that stretches your current abilities, you really need a solid three hour soak concentrating on that one thing, if you are working in an atmosphere rich in distractions much shorter blocks of time are way more suitable. The famous pomodoro technique advocates 25 minutes. My experience is that this is a very good length of time for making worthwhile progress. And running a session of multiple pomodoros all devoted to different projects can make some serious inroads. Alternating pomodoros between a highly desired long term goal and more urgent tasks can be a great way to balance current and future goals.
But the reality most of us face is that we spend days in a hail of distractions, some unavoidable, some avoidable but tempting. I have found that 10 minute sessions are both effective and actually motivating. You can get way more done in 10 minutes than you imagine. I keep track of these 10 minute sessions and looking back over the day and seeing it fill up with small patches of progress gives me a feeling I am getting somewhere no matter how chaotic the day is proving.
The fundamental challenge of this book is whether it is possible to do meaningful work in between distractions. The main distraction I had in mind was the kind of media that the internet is serving up. That is a potent distraction because there is a Darwinian selection process at work whereby the most appealing content tends to get viewed more, gets more revenue and so it gets spread more widely.
But there are other distractions available off-line, the biggest of which is work. I am in the middle of a big job that involves working with other people for most of the day. It is very difficult to carve out time from this sort of setup. But I am giving it a go right now. It is the lunch break so I have license to do as I please. Following the latest news on my phone is my first thought. But I have set the timer for 10 minutes and will instead try to write instead.
One of the things about breaking bad habits is that it is important to have an alternative to the habit to fill the otherwise blank space. It is easier to give up smoking if you take up boiled sweets to replace the ciggies. I am enjoying the tactile feel of writing on my keyboard. I think I will try to develop a 10 minutes writing every lunchbreak habit. Apart from this one, I won’t include this in my writing a book while avoiding distractions project. It will be more appealing if it is a completely new project.
So my goal is to create a novel length book detailing my daily struggle with distractions in 10 minute sessions every other day. For the purposes of this exercise I’m treating novel length as 80,000 words. I’ve just checked and so far I have clocked up 12,700 words over 56 articles.
So 171 more articles at a rate of 1 every two days should take just a little less than a year from the time I am writing this.
This is interesting because writing an actual novel is something that I’ve already dismissed as too big a project to undertake. There’s also the facts that it requires a lot more talent than I possess and the prospects of making any money from it are exceedingly remote. And of course there’s a lot more to writing a novel than just putting in the hours of typing. But the fact that the actual drafting can conceivably be done in a couple of years with all the other committments of a normal life is quite intriguing.
I’ve woken up early this morning as I am having a break in a rather nice hotel on the south coast of England. I’d hoped to see the sunrise - which happens before 5 at this time of year - but the sky was too cloudy. I settled on reading the paper instead. I’m a bit of an early riser very generally. I have been since I did a paper round as a teenager. I susbsequently discovered from reading William Cobbett that this is a virtuous thing to be. That was good news as I didn’t have much else to fell virtuous about.
More recently, since becoming self employed the time I get out of bed has varied a lot more. But I still tend to feel some guilt if I’m still between the sheets at 9, even though with modern technology it is quite possible to be extremely productive while remaining completely horizontal.
So is there really any virtue in early rising? Logically there isn’t. The parameter that ought to matter is how long you remain conscious. People’s body clocks vary, but I think most people start with more energy and gradually lose it as the day proceeds. But I still feel that getting at things earlier rather than later is better. Somehow the hours before 11 seem more valuable than those after it. But having tried both late and early starts I don’t think the difference is all that great. In the unlikely event of anyone asking my advice on the matter, I’d say get up early if you can. But it isn’t worth setting an alarm clock. Undisturbed sleep is probably more valuable.
One of the things I am rubbish at is knowing when to stop. This is true both of my day to day activities and conversations, but also of projects. I have no problem starting projects. The problem is defining the end point clearly so I know when I am done and can get on to the next one.
A good example of that is this project of writing a book in 10 minute bursts while distracted by other things. I’ve created the habit of working on it daily, and I’m already finding ways of honing it to do it more effectively. But there will come a point where it no longer makes sense to keep it going. I haven’t given it as much thought as I should, but I think I vaguely planned to stop when I run out of ideas. Initially I thouhgt that this was something that would happen fairly quickly.
But it turns out that the more I do it the more ideas I have. I have a finite sized brain and so there must at some point arrive a time when I run out of ideas for bite-sized reflections on how to get stuff done. But my experience so far has been that the more I do the more ideas I have. In fact before my fingers hit the keyboard I am having to choose what I want to write about.
I still think that if a day arrives when I have nothing to say, then that is the day I stop working on it. I already have some ideas on how I’ll word that final post. But in the meantime I think I have to come up with another way of ending the project. I think I will stop when I’ve reached the normal length of a normal novel. I think the figure is 80,000 words - but I’ll check that. I’ll also look back on what I’ve done so far and calculate how long that will take to achieve and revise it. accordingly. But I will be happier knowing that for once I have a project with a clear end point.
My idea to write a book about coping with distractions whilst actually coping with distractions is turning out to be quite successful. The book exists. And it is gradually growing. I’ve slightly eased up on my original criteria of spending 10 minutes creating every other day. I allow myself a bit more than 10 minutes if I write whilst having my morning walk.
The question is why a long-standing recidivist like myself can keep up a regular pattern like this?
I think one of the biggest things is that there’s a very low barrier of entry to putting in one of my 10 minute sessions. I just pull up a text editor, and start writing against the clock. I can then have my new bit of content added to the book in less than a minute at the end of the session. And it is then done.
This isn’t just efficient. It’s also motivating.
So can I use this discovery in other areas of my life? The key points about making it easy to get started and having a clear and point in mind aren’t as easy to apply to other things I do. What I need to do is split tasks down into stages that take in the region of 10 minutes. If I can make things systematic, I think I can make much more progress.
Like a lot of people I have a CPD record as part of my job. I’ve only been doing it for about 10 years and I only started taking it seriously for the last 3. I’m old enough to think of systematically recording your continuous professional development as something that’s a bit of a new thing. But I imagine that younger people regard it as just one of those things.
The benefits of having a record of your achievements for someone trying to build their career are fairly obvious. But I am quite well established and don’t really need it for that reason. I’ve embraced it because I find it a really good framework for deciding what kind of thing I should be working on and which opportunities to take up. It’s easy to miss the importance of keeping your skills honed, and looking at your CPD record is a good way of keeping track of how you are doing.
I recommend it.
At some point in my life, I was working in an office where a new telephone system was installed. This had the innovation that it gave you the length of your phone call just after you put the phone down. Shortly after I started using it I made a 10 minute call to a colleague to sort something out. At least I expected it to take 10 minutes. After making it I thought to take 10 minutes. But the phone told me otherwise. It had actually taken 25 minutes. Both my prognosis for the length of the call, and the actual length of the call were significantly wrong. In fact I was out by 250%. Without the phone telling me I would’ve had no idea how wrong I was.
I don’t think I’m particularly unusual in this respect. Any manager who has had to look at their teams timesheets will know that their estimates of how long tasks take bares only the most minimal relationship with how long they actually take.
Our perception of the passage of time does not relate at all closely to how the clock measures it. This is something we all know at some level. But somehow it’s not something we take much account of. So it is really not at all surprising that none of us make much of a fist of managing our time.
I’ve read a lot but the thing I read that changed me most was a book about beer. I think it was called Beer and Skittles. It just mentioned in passing that the goal of a pub conversation is to find things to agree about. I’ve applied this strategy inside and outside pubs ever since.
I think that being agreeable is one of the things that makes life better both for yourself and the people you interact with. This isn’t a universally accepted truth. I remember hearing Jordan Peterson saying in an interview that there was a published paper that says that being disagreeable is predictive of being successful. My reaction was I wonder if the author had to wait ten years to get it published because all the journal editors hated him.
But peer reviewed empirical research notwithstanding, my experience is that agreeability is in fact a good predictor of financial success. Certainly the most successful of my friends from a financial point of view is also the most agreeable.
I was educated during the 60s and 70s when it was a maximum that rote learning was bad and genuine understanding was good. It seemed quite a believable thing at the time. And all these decades later I still think it’s basically true. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever questioned it. But I came across a video on YouTube the other day which trace this notion all the way back to Seneca in ancient Rome. I thought of it as a very modern debate. But it turns out to be something people have been aware of for a very long time. In fact, probably since education started as a thing.
But I wonder if the argument is really that one-sided. I’ve been doing some rote learning over the last six months. I wanted to know more about toxicology. So every morning I have set up ChatGPT to ask me two questions about it from a textbook. This really is classic rote learning. I’m memorising facts about chemicals and their effects on the body’s biochemistry. but I’m finding that it is deepening my understanding of chemistry, biochemistry and biology. I am spotting links between structures and effects that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about.
Like a lot of things, there’s usually more nuance than we realise. I’m not converted to the benefits of rote learning. I’ve just come round to thinking it might have its uses after all.
This is the subject people have written whole books on. But the fact is that a lot of what you achieve is down to your habits. I don’t know how unusual I am in this, but typically I’m most interested in things that are new and different. so if I decide I’m gonna write a book in 10 minute Burst initially it’s interesting and new and I have no trouble giving it my attention.
I’m now at the stage where I’ve been doing it for awhile and it’s no longer has the novelty value to grab my attention. But equally, I don’t do it By force of habit either. So this is the grinding bit when it either takes as a habit or starts to fade out of my daily activities.
So I have a couple of strategies for ensuring this habit takes. For a start, I’ve set up an automated reminder for every two days. Previous ones fit in my calendar and remain there until I take them off. This means I can backfill any that I miss. The psychology is that I want to continuous record of achievement. The other thing is I am tying this to my daily walk. I will check progress at the beginning of my walk. So every day there is something tangible that reminds me to work on it.
Let’s see how it goes.
I sometimes find it hard to get to sleep in the evening. I stay awake until one or later. Sometimes I work inefficiently on a particular project but more usually I aimlessly listen to odd bits of music or watch random videos. YouTube shorts are my drug of choice.
The result of this is I get a short night’s sleep that affects the next day badly.
I put it down to lack of willpower. And that’s no doubt part of it. But I have just spotted that it correlates with drinking low sugar coke drinks earlier in the day. And I mean much earlier. I’ve done the positive experiment and had the predicted bad night. I’ll leave off caffeine for av week and see what happens.
My biggest problem is starting jobs that I never finish. And I also hate killing off things I’m working on. So not surprisingly I have a massive number of unfinished jobs. But I wonder, is finishing a job a skill you can learn? So for example Can I finish this little article? I’m writing and get it posted to the book I’m writing and completely finished within 10 minutes?
So I’m literally trying to do that now. I’ve set a 10 minute timer on my wrist watch. And I’m writing, or rather dictating into my phone, as I walk around the field.
The thing with 10 minutes is it doesn’t sound like a lot of time. But really it is. If you arrived at the train station and found you had 10 minutes to wait for the train, you would certainly want to find something to do with that time. And there are certainly things you can usually do in 10 minutes. And this includes quite serious things. For example, I read the whole of Madame Bovary in French in 10 minutes sessions some years ago. The job I had at the time entitled me to two 10 minute breaks. So that’s what I use them for.
It took a total of 65 hours to complete the book. When I started it, my French was distinctly shaky. When I finished it, it was much better. Now I’m quite sure that if I were to spend 65 hours solidly studying French, working out the grammar and diligently memorising vocabulary as I went along I could no doubt have got much better at speaking French for the same amount of time. But in a normal life, when do you ever get 65 hours spare time?
So I think 10 minutes breaks are much under appreciated resource. I’m going to see how much more use I can make of them in the future.
I am a big user of cloud computing. One of the consequences of this is that I have a lot of jobs that have URLs. If I’m writing a report in Google Docs, I can get onto that report with the URL for that report.
I’ve taken advantage of this feature to have lists of URL‘s in text files. I can then pick up ne from the list at random. I find this helps with motivation. When I don’t know what job to start picking a random one reduces the resistance I have to anything. It also means I don’t have to prioritise things. If it’s on the list, I will get round to it. Prioritising is one of those things that absorbs a lot of brain power. Anything that minimises that effort is a good thing..
This is all proving successful but I want to take it further. I want to have one single list which has various categories. I can then have one job list That tells me one time just how much I have committed myself by
Next job, work out a plan by which I can achieve all this.
Completion generates momentum. Each finished project builds confidence and energy for the next one. The habit of finishing things creates a positive cycle of productivity and creativity. Done isn’t just an end state—it’s the fuel that powers future achievements.
This principle isn’t so much a guide for action or an analysis of the way things are. It is much more simply a description of the outcome of following the other 12 principles. If you get things done, you’re going to get more things done.
These principles collectively create a mindset that values action, embraces imperfection, and celebrates the process of creation and completion over endless refinement or theoretical perfection.
I have found them to be extremely helpful IN guiding my decision-making when trying to get things done. They’re also quite motivating. i’m going to carry on thinking about them and finding ways of implementing them until I’ve thoroughly internalised them.
So last night, whilst doing my ironing, I watched a YouTube video about how to use Claude more effectively. It was a very good video. It inspired me to have a go at using some of the ideas it had presented.
So I set myself the project of writing a quick blog post about how stoicism can be a helpful philosophy in the modern world. So far so good. Using some of Claud‘s more advanced features resulted in it suggesting that my idea could be spread over several blog posts. In fact, I ended up with seven.
Once I decided to go with this, it became obvious that this should be a weekly series spreading over seven weeks. All good stuff. I tried to do it as much as possible of this work on my phone. But that didn’t prove to be very practical. So ended up finishing it off on my laptop. All in all I spent about four hours on this. Not all hours are equal. Two of those were earlier this morning when I’m at my most productive.
So did I do well or badly? I certainly think the improvement in my skill at using AI interfaces will prove useful in the future. I’m also quite pleased with the series I created. I don’t think it was as good as it would’ve been had I written all from scratch. But it took less than half the time a more polished and personal version would’ve done. And of course I wouldn’t have had the idea in the first place left my own devices.
When it comes to time, you can only use it once. I’m currently running a larger backlog than usual, even by my rather low standards. And to bring the point home when I got back to my work inbox after finishing my modest contribution to the world of stoicism, I found that I had lost out on a job that would’ve been a perfect opportunity to develop the same skills I’ve just done on something with no monetary value.
So my conclusion is that I did well that could’ve done better with more discipline. If I done the work job first, for which Only an adequate level of quality was sufficient, I would’ve had more money. I could also have done a better job of the stoicism blogs. Live and learn.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to tear something down and start fresh. This principle acknowledges that demolition can be as creative and necessary as construction. Clearing away what doesn’t work makes room for what might.
This one really resonates with me. There is nothing I enjoy more than the feeling of having got rid of something holding me back and starting afresh. My personality is very much that of a starter rather than a finisher. So a fresh start is something I find very motivating.
The mysterious thing is why I do it so infrequently. I threw away some clothes earlier this week and feel much better for it. And yet I had given them houseroom for several years. I suppose deep down I was worried about the expense of buying new ones to replace them. But the reality is that moving on give you the kind of energy you need. Filling space with stuff you don’t love doesn’t.
I’m back to the 5 minutes writing, 5 minutes editing and publishing model for this article. I am quite happy that I’ve worked out how to write an article while going for a walk. But I need to keep up the original vision of getting a book sized bit of writing done in the odd moments between jobs, distractions and periods of indecision.
My two main focuses of my thought at the moment are getting better control of my emotions and working out the optimum way to use AI tools. On the former I think I’ll tackle it by reading and making notes. I’ll start with the classical stoics and then move on to more recent stuff. With AI it is down to increasing the amount of experimentation I do with it. My gut feeling is that it can be used for working out strategies more effectively than I can do myself. But I haven’t even worked out how to start on that yet.
I’m not sure I understand this one.
I suppose the idea is that sharing ideas publicly creates a form of accountability and completion. Even if the idea isn’t fully realised, putting it into the world gives it life and creates possibilities for collaboration or inspiration. Public sharing creates a tangible record of thought.
This might work for some people, but it doesn’t do much for me. Or at least it doesn’t in the way it is phrased. It is true that social pressure can be a strong motivator. But I find that this really only works for outcomes not intentions. I’m not impressed by someone saying they are going to get a great job. It takes the job offer itself. And nobody listens to your plan of how you are going to get a great job. And I don’t think online social pressure is as great as real life.
So I’m going to park this one. I may come back to it later.
Failure and mistakes are valid forms of completion, not reasons to avoid starting. They provide crucial feedback and learning opportunities. By counting failures as “done,” you reframe them as valuable outcomes rather than things to be avoided at all costs.
I think I might go even further. In a sense everything is ultimately a failure. Something that works is still going to be replaced by something better down the line. Kipling had it right. Triumph and disaster are both imposters.
I think I’m most concerned about right now is controlling my emotions. I find myself wasting a lot of time getting annoyed by things and people. This is bad in two ways. I don’t enjoy the process itself. And I’ve got much better things to do with the time. So I thought I would write something about it as a way of clarifying my thoughts.
My way of working on this kind of thing recently has been to frame what I want to work on as a question. It’s an easy to pop it into an AI program and get a rough draft. I can then edit it into a final shape that I find satisfying. Up until now, I’ve never got anything from the AI that is usable as is.
So I do that this morning using Claude 4. When I read the response, I was surprised to find that there really wasn’t anything to add or subtract from it. I judged it to be a perfectly good bit of writing that I would be happy to have done myself. I’m really not sure what I think about this. Here’s the prompt I used.
“What is some succinct advice for managing ones emotions? I find I devote too much thought to people and things that annoy me. I’d rather focus my brain on positive things and achieving my goals.”
And here is the response.
Here are some practical strategies for redirecting your mental energy:
**Catch and redirect quickly.** When you notice yourself dwelling on something irritating, immediately ask "Is this worth my mental real estate right now?" Then consciously shift to something constructive - a project you're working on, a problem you want to solve, or something you're looking forward to.
**Use the 2-minute rule.** If something bothers you, give yourself exactly 2 minutes to feel annoyed, then move on. Setting a timer can help make this concrete.
**Channel irritation into action.** When possible, convert that mental energy into doing something productive. Feeling frustrated about a work situation? Use that energy to tackle a different task or make progress on a goal.
**Create positive anchors.** Keep a mental list of 3-5 things that genuinely excite or motivate you. When you catch yourself ruminating, deliberately think about one of these instead.
**Practice the "so what" test.** Ask yourself: "Will this matter in a week? A month? A year?" Most daily annoyances fail this test, making it easier to let them go.
**Physical reset.** Sometimes a quick walk, deep breathing, or even changing your physical position can break the mental loop and create space for refocusing.
The goal isn't to never feel annoyed - that's human. It's building the habit of noticing when you're stuck in unproductive thought patterns and having reliable ways to shift your attention back to what actually matters to you.
The key to productivity is squeezing as much as possible out of an hour. The opposite is putting in more hours. I had a particularly bad day yesterday trying to put this into practice. Main reason being I had a dispute with a client that was on my mind. As a business dispute is a fairly minor one which has a low monetary value. However, for reasons that will make no sense to anybody else it has a strong emotional resonance for me. I have a fragile ego.
So I found myself using my brain to run over cycles of why what he has done so bad and all the different scenarios I could respond to him with. In other words a complete distraction. At least scrolling BlueSky is enjoyable.
So the question is how do I stop my emotions getting the better of me - at least during working hours? I think I need to look into anger management.
The emperor Vespasian boasted that he could be working within 30 seconds of waking up in the morning. I have to admire that as a habit. I am usually distracted by the radio, more recently by podcasts, and the now electronically delivered news. And once I’ve checked out global and national crises, I have then got the horrors of my current email inbox and bank balance. So in my case I can be distracted and have my day ruined within 30 seconds.
The thing is though, the first couple of hours of the day are for me - and I suspect for a lot of people - the time when I am most energetic and able to be most productive. So I really ought to be using those hours to tackle the things that will bring me most long term benefit. It’s six in the morning. Let’s see how I get on between now and nine.
It was always my intention to work in the most minimal way possible. When I started this project, I was using Google Docs combined with Omniflow. I gave myself five minutes on Omniflow to come up with a text. I then opened the Google document and pasted it in With a bit of light editing. I was then able to use the publish to web option on Google Docs. The final stage was to embed the most recent section of the Google doc into a blue sky post.
It was a pretty slick operation. And I was able to create a post in a total of 10 minutes. Without any posting or other complications I could be being ignored by the Internet was instantaneously.
A couple weeks ago on a whim I decided to try using GitHub instead. I was willing to sacrifice some slickness to do this. It just seemed a cool thing to do. In fact, my workflow is barely different to using Google. I can still use Omni flow if I wish. I tend to use Google Keep though. Now instead of editing a Google doc I pass into a markdown document enables me to cut and paste the URL directly into Bluesky.
This is forced me to learn markdown. In doing so, I have discovered that it is quicker to write in markdown and convert it for a lot of documents. Formatting buttons are perfectly good of course. But keeping your fingers on the keyboard close to the letters is slightly faster. I would never have learned this any other way.
The GitHub interface is scary and hard to navigate around when you’re not used to it. But once you get the hang of it, it’s faster and more responsive than the Google alternative. So all in all my new approach is an improvement. It’s not a vast improvement to be honest. But there is something rather satisfying about working in very close to plain text.
Sometimes just giving something a try without thinking it through first just works out.
Theory without practice has limited value. This principle values practical experience over pure theory - the wisdom gained from actual doing over hypothetical knowing. Getting your hands “dirty” with real work gives you insights that can’t be gained any other way.
This principle is worded rather provocatively. But it is certainly true. Outside the worlds of theoretical physics and abstract philosophy - having a handle on something by doing it is invariably going to give you a better understanding. Constant practice is the way to improve that understanding. I am hoping that the quality of these short articles improves as I do them every other day and I get a feel for how they work. One thing I’ve already learned is that keeping the sentences short improves them.
Keeping the overall length short is good too. So I’ll stop now.
Perfection is not only unattainable but often uninteresting. Flaws and quirks give work character and humanity. By rejecting perfectionism, you not only complete more work but often create more interesting, authentic results that connect with others.
Do flaws in great works of art detract from them? There’s no question in my mind that they don’t. So why do I spend so much time getting emails just right? This is clearly a waste oftime. But it goes a bit deeper than just being good time management. When you are focused on something you are seeing it through a distorted lens. My email is not just overpolished. Nobody is going to look back fondly on a well worded email. There is every chance that I could be doing something much more rewarding with my time than writing it.
Good enough is the perfect goal.
My project to write this book in 10 minute bursts between other distractions has, as projects often do, drifted a bit. I used it to try out how effectively I can write stuff on my phone during my daily walk. This has proved to be quite successful and I have found I can get a reasonable section written, edited and uploaded by the time I get back. But my walk takes 25 minutes rather than 10 minutes. This is quite a good discovery and I am going to use it more. But it does mean I can no longer claim to be writing only in 10 minute bursts.
But I am very prone to mission creep, and this is quite a good development. I am now using the speech option a lot more during the day and it is saving me a lot of time. I don’t think that sitting down and typing will ever cease to be a thing - and this post is done this way. But it’s a good example of how actually doing something pushes you to improve.
A quick note – up until this point I’ve been appending new items to the bottom of the document. That’s proving to be more work the longer the document gets. From now on, I’m going to add new stuff at the top.
Toxicology has been something that I’ve been sort of involved with since I was a teenager. Back then I was a radical youth campaigning to get the lead out of petrol. Like most enthusiastic partisans I learnt all the details and to this day and surprisingly well informed about heavy metals. I went onto do a degree in environmental science and of spent most of the rest of my life in product development where toxicology was relevant consideration.
It’s a handy subject therefore for my professional life. It is also something that comes up in every day life quite a lot. There’s usually some kind of health scare around some chemical or other. So while back I decided to revise an upgrade my knowledge of the subject. I purchased a audio book version of a textbook which came with multiple choice quizzes at the end of every chapter. I listen to this through twice whilst driving. This proved to be quite a good exercise.
But could I do even better?
I wondered if I could persuade ChatGPT to ask me the questions from the end of the chapters randomly to see what level my comprehension was. This proved to be fairly straightforward. The audiobook came with a full PDF transcript. After a few misunderstandings, the AI got the idea and I started working through the 200 or so questions set in the text. The trick is that was getting it to understand that I didn’t want the same question again if I had got it right several times.
Needless to say, the path to perfect learning did not prove to be smooth. The AI completely scrambled the set up one day for no obvious reason. I got it going again and added a score system. To my surprise of its own back ChatGPT chose to start generating its own questions rather than using the one supplied. This is much better because I no longer have an idea of what questions are coming.
With a bit of experimenting, I’ve come up with what seems to be the Optimum strategy for using this that suits my particular needs. Google task serves up a link to the AI question thread every workday morning. I answer two questions. I look at what percentage I’ve got right. At the moment I’m around 50%, but getting steadily better. I will continue the process until I reach 75%. It takes less than 10 minutes a day. I usually do the session not long after I wake up. If I miss any days, I allow myself to do extra questions to fill in the gaps. I don’t allow myself to do more than six per day.
This set up works well for me. I’m learning toxicology that wouldn’t normally cross my path by chance. This is both satisfying in itself and potentially useful. It’s not interfering with anything else I do. I may read a bit less of something else. But nothing I would miss. Equally importantly, from my point of view, is that the time I spent it is limited. I’m very prone to mission creep. If I see something interesting during a project I’m quite capable of devoting huge amounts of time and resources to satisfy my curiosity without getting the project done, but with this arrangement, I do no more than answer two questions a day.
One of the reasons social media is so powerful, on me at any rate, is that at some level I actually care what all these people I don’t know from Adam think about me. It is a completely crazy thing of course, especially given that a reasonably large number of them are either insentient bots or professional trolls paid to influence me on behalf of entities I would probably not approve of. But somehow I behave as if they matter.
So can I use this to encourage me. If I make committments to people online who may not exist and certainly don’t care whether or not I do, will that encourage me to keep to those commitments?
I’ll try by announcing on Bluesky and Twitter that I am writing a book an how to cope with distractions. In all likelihood nobody will read that tweet nor expect me to follow up my on promise. But maybe it will work to keep me on the job regardless.
The goal of this 5-minute burst strategy is to use blocks of time that I would otherwise waste for productive activities, and to overcome a long, deeply ingrained problem. I am very prone to putting important activities on lists and then either forgetting about them or spending a lot of time managing and prioritising them. This results in a lot of things I am ‘working on’ that in fact never get worked on.
So the strategy is to have a card for absolutely every activity/project/process and to continually cycle through them. I have to have some kind of priority list for the stuff that is critical, and I have already created that. The priority list needs to be kept to 10 or fewer jobs that have to be done. I am currently on 22 but I think it is better to work down to the right number by clearing them off the list rather than moving them again.
I am into day three of using 5 minute bursts as my primary activity for getting things done, and so far it is working well. I have at least a dozen jobs on the go, and I am making progress on all of them. I am still spending more time on trivia than I would like but I am beginning to actually enjoy the 5 minute bursts in the same way that I do reading a tweet or watching a YouTube video. I don’t think the dopamine hit is as high, but it is there. There is clearly a skill to working this way that I am still to acquire, but it I am already noticing an improvement. It is surprisingly close to the feeling I get on the occassions I have managed to successfully get into the flow state. Successfully biting off a bit of a task feels good.
Using Apple Shortcuts has been something of a revelation for automating stuff to make it easier. Okay, it’s a nightmare platform to work with. But when it is working it is great for removing the barriers to getting started.
Setting up a set of short bursts that automatically increment to other ones is proving to be a compelling way of keeping myself engaged with what I am doing and getting stuff done.
I will work on this to improve it further, but it is already giving me a stronger feeling of being in control of my workload. The most powerful bit seems to be using the random feature. I think it is a bit like how I much prefer random music playlists so I get an element of surprise that keeps me interested. It also means I can sneak in interesting jobs.
But the biggest thing is that I just like keeping to the schedule and finishing off the routine the programme sets for me. It is a more powerful motivator than making money or even pleasing people. I am a strange person.
“It’s a job that’s never started, that is hardest to finish.”
That is a saying that is very true. But my particular take on it is that I have a whole range of activities that prevent me from getting going. The first one is checking the news. I have a permanent desire to know what the latest thing going on is - even though almost everything that goes on needs almost no input from me.
I also check my bank balance regularly. It doesn’t earn me any money. And I have drinks and snacks way more often than is biologically necessary.
I put energy into seeking out these distractions.
I have huge swathes of time available if I can cut down on that.
If you have a good character you take full responsibility for your actions and the consequences of those actions. You don’t blame luck, circumstances or other people. But this attitude isn’t just a ‘good thing’. It is also the most practical way of dealing with your life. You can rarely do much about the material circumstances you find yourself in. And it is pretty rare that you can change other people’s behaviour. Trying to do so may well make them worse.
But you can control what you do, including how you react to things. And most of what we have to deal with is the result of our own actions, which we can change. For example, my current problem is that I have allowed myself to become overwhelmed with work. This is largely down to two characteristics I have. I love starting new things. And I love doing those things to a really high standard. The result is a huge number of half completed projects. If I am going to get out of my overwhelm - I need to change what I do.
The famous Pomodoro technique proposes 25 minutes as the ideal length of a work session - followed by a five-minute break. I have to say that this is pretty much the ideal length of time to work on something and make some reasonable progress. It is a good default value. But there are times when a much longer soak is needed. I’d say there’s another sweet spot at 3 hours for when you really want or need to focus intently.
But there is also a drawback to the 25 minute block. For a start, it’s easy when you’ve done one session to feel you’ve finished. It can make the pain of getting started again more of a problem. And also, there is a limit to how many 25 minute sessions you can fit it. I find that much shorter sessions, down to as low as 5 minutes, can sometimes work much better if you have a lot of ground to cover. Today’s experiment is going to be starting off with short sessions and gradually increasing their length over the course of the day.
I watched a YouTube video called “Amusing Ourselves To Death” this morning. It was quite a slog at 15 minutes in length. But I persevered because the subject is important. Instant gratification websites like YouTube and the social media ones are continuing the process started with television of eroding our ability to focus.
This is something that has been bothering me for a long time. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. But constant repetition is a requirement for getting something ingrained.
As a result I have decided that whatever else I do, I am no longer going to take my phone into my bedroom at night. Reading is the easiest and most practical way of increasing focus. I want to at least get an hour or so of reading in every night before I get to sleep. I’ll keep track of how many books I complete as a metric to see if I am improving.
I am a big fan of the pomodoro method and use it a lot. It was originally proposed as a method for studying, but I use it to cope with my perennial problem of having too many different projects on the go at a time. My strategy is typically to assign sequential pomodoro sessions to different projects so that I make at least some progress on all the main projects I am working on. The suggested length of pomodoro sessions is 25 minutes. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with this and I’d say that most of the time for most things, that is the optimum. But longer sessions can be good for big projects, and shorter ones are better when I don’t have the focus to get started. I’ve gone down to as short as 5 minutes and still made good progress - or at least made some progress when it would have been easy to make no progress. Doing multiple short pomodoros also has the great advantage of avoiding tasks going ‘stale’ so that when you get back to them you’ve forgotten what you should be doing.
I have set up a system that I find helpful. Using Apple’ script language Shortcuts I have created a routine that selects a random URL from a list and opens it. I add trello cards, emails and documents I am working to to the list. I can then set it up to run these tasks for a period of time I define and for a specific number of the items on the list to be run.
I call it a procrastination buster, because the idea is that whenever I am reluctant to start anything big I can spend a bit of time nibbling away at my most important jobs.
Although the original motivation was to overcome my reluctance to get started, I am finding it is having some extra benefits that means I am using it more than I had originally intended. For a start I get a good feeling from having made even a tiny amount of progress on something I have been putting off. And secondly, it keeps things I am working on in mind so that when I do find the time and motivation to tackle them I have a good idea of what needs to be done.
8 Minute Random Bursts
It sounds crazy, but I have found setting up my computer to select tasks from a list and then spend 8 minutes on each task works extremely well. It doesn’t sound like it should. But it does.
Taking
So today is Saturday and due to circumstances beyond my control I find myself with a pile of things that I really need to get done this weekend. So I went to my office with the intention of a solid three hours focus on getting things done.
Poor Performance
That’s not what happened. In fact I spent all day from 10:30 to 5:00pm and still got nowhere near my goal - just 1hr 40 minutes of actual work. I was distracted by Bluesky, YouTube, the latest events in the US. I did do some thinking and get some stuff clear in my mind. But even so if I had focused I would have got it all done by lunchtime. Why do I do this?
I’ve just posted this on Bluesky -
“I’m going to stop using social media before lunchtime. Even when it’s wholesome I have better things to do with my attention.”
I am just too easily distracted by social media. I know I’m not the only one - because of all the people I meet on social media. The thing that triggered this was reading about a thing called the 5am Club, which I came across by chance on social media. I didn’t read the details but I didn’t have to. Focusing on what you want to achieve not on what gives you a dopamine hit is what is important.
My experiment to see if I can slyly write a book in between all my other tasks in 10 minute blocks isn’t working out very well. I haven’t made any progress on it for months. It is the softest task on my list and consequently gets dropped nearly every day. (To be scrupulously fair, I have been suffering with several bouts of a nasty bug for the first few months of this year.)
It turns out that keeping to a strict schedule isn’t all that easy and doesn’t in fact create any new time for new projects. However I have been findining it easier to break big tasks down into smaller chunks as I have been practicing it more. And having lists of tasks that I pick from randomly helps in avoiding procrastination. These two things are helping me get more done in the sense of not leaving so many projects neglected to the point of me not knowing what I am doing with them.
I have just spent several hours getting about half an hour’s work done. I do this every so often. The situation is I have a fair bit of time spare and no particular deadline, but a lot I want to get done. Sundays and bank holidays are good examples. But I somehow never manage to get started, even though I have a really good level of motivation. Why is it so hard to get going? I don’t know. I think I might try a variation on the trick that often works of breaking things down to really small bits of jobs that only take a few minutes. This isn’t a great way to be productive but it is a good way of busting procrastination. So I’ll try doing some literally 2 minute sessions. This might work because 2 minutes is nothing and I’ll know I am not really comitting myself to anything in particular. Let’s see how it goes.
The Cult of Done is a document I think more people should know. Its history is not particularly interesting and if my online world is representitive it doesn’t come up very often.
It is based on the idea that things you make have 3 phases: ignorance, learning and completion.
So you start not knowing what you are doing. Then you work at it and find out as best you can. Then you finish.
The bit it leaves out is tweaking and editing. You do something and reach a finishing point. You can call it a draft if you want, but it is effectively now a thing. If you don’t like it, don’t carry on working on it. Either use it as it is, or throw it away and do another.
I really like this approach. I find it difficult to use because I am a perfectionist. But I shouldn’t be. All those emails I spent 30 minutes polishing to read really well have brought me very little benefit. I should have set a timer and settled for what I had. And so on for most of my other activities.
I’ve decided to switch this project from Google Docs to GitHub. The initial impetus for this was simply that using a GitHub repository (actual thing) as a repository (metaphor) was mentioned in the Cult of Done video that I listened to. It sounded like a cool thing to do. But more seriously there is a lot to be said for keeping key information at least backed up away from the big tech giants given that it turns out that the United States may not be as trustworthy as previous experience has led us to believe. It will be interesting to see how much functionality I lose by switching tools.
There are three states of being: Not knowing, action, and completion. This principle recognizes that we all start from a place of uncertainty. Rather than staying stuck in that uncertainty, the path forward is to take action and move toward completion. Don’t get trapped in endless research or planning - recognize these three distinct states and keep moving through them.
This is the first principle of the Cult of Done. On the whole, I don’t think that being overly taxanomic about activities is a good thing. Being actually active is a good thing. But this broad classification is helpful, largely because it labels that initial feeling when starting out on a project where there are lots of procrastination options available. It is always fun to do research. It is less arduous to compile a list of actions than to actually carry them out. But both researching and planning are necessary activities. When you are getting going on a project it is helpful to start by working out what you don’t know and deciding how you are going to go about finding out.
I’ve broken the golden rule today and spent more than a 5 minute burst on this project. I did this pretty much on a whim. I don’t know if Github is going to prove to be a good move for this book. So far it has been a big consumer of time. It is a very geeky interface. This doesn’t intimidate me, but it does mean there are lots of rabbit holes I can go down. There are terriers less attracted to rabbit holes than me. So today I have been trying to replicate the way Google Docs enables you to let others see your work via a link. Google Docs does this fairly well. GitHub does it, but so far it has proved a lot more involved. Okay, I can accept that. I should accept that. But I suspect that there is an easier way than the one I have found. Am I going to spend potentially productive time searching for it? I think I probably am. Is this a good thing to do? I don’t know.
One of the things I would love to be able to do is work on my phone more. This will enable me to go for a walk while also getting stuff done.
However, I haven’t found the speech to text option works very well on most of the software I routinely use. It is positively dreadful on the iPhone version of Google Docs for example. But somehow I had a hunch that it might work better on the GitHub app. GitHub is for geeky people after all. So I’m giving it a go right now.
Having had good results with GitHub, I tried speech to text on a few other applications on my phone. It looks like the improvement quality is down to the overall technology rather than any secret sauce from GitHub itself. This is a course better news. So I think I can now look forward to being able to compose documents whilst getting some exercise. This does actually have more than one benefit. Not only am I keeping fit, I’m also far less distracted when I’m away from my Desk and where I can focus on thinking about one thing at a time.
Quite apart from anything else, it is a very satisfying feeling to be getting two things done at the same time. This is something that is rarely possible.
Nothing is ever truly perfect or final. When you view your work as a draft, you remove the pressure of perfection. This mindset frees you to actually produce something rather than being paralyzed by the fear of imperfection. The goal is progress, not perfection.
Excessive perfectionism is something that has definitely held me back over the years. The most routine example is spending half an hour getting the wording of an email just right - often making it harder for the recipient to read it. But the worst form is the paralysis induced by some bit of work where I don’t know quite how it should be done
Don’t create something and then spending a lot of time editing. Integrate your improvements as you go. This principle challenges the idea that creation and refinement are separate processes. Instead, create, improve, and move on, treating each new iteration as a fresh creation rather than an edited version of the previous one.
This principle is one that at first sight seems to be a bit questionable. Sure, sometimes getting something right as you go along makes sense. But there will be cases where getting a rough draft done first, and then getting it right afterwards might be a good tactic. But the trouble is, editing and correcting stuff is actually quite hard work when you come back to something. Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. This is equally true of your brain. Your current thoughts, ideas and habits will never occur again. It is very unlikely you will ever be in as good a position to edit something as you will be just after you wrote it. If it turns out not to be suitable, forget the sunk cost fallacy and just write it again.
I’m convinced of the truth of this, but it is going to take some work to break my long ingrained habit of putting off the hard bit of committing to getting something really finished.
This is very much a personal question. I’ve signed up to a couple of the AI options and I’ve been trying them out on various tasks. I’ve had the most success with compiling monographs for reports that I have to do quite often.
These used to take me anywhere between Three minutes and an hour. With the assistance of a large language model they take a pretty uniform 10 minutes as they were way more three minute ones than one hour ones overall length of time I spend on them has gone up. The quality of the results has gone up as well.
But the reason I carry on using this new assistance is that they now take less brain power. This means I can do them when I would otherwise have been too tired. It also means the resistance to starting working on them has broken down. So basically they have changed the nature of the task. It hasn’t knocked any time off the clock. But it has made the final product better.
The other thing about it is that I think it will make it easier for people to compete with me on this particular service.
So overall, it’s hard to say whether it is a good thing or a bad thing for this particular piece of my life. My feeling is that it’s a bit like That famous analogy that new technology is very much like handing out boxes at a football match. While the boxes are being handed out the people with the boxes can stand higher and get a better view. But when everybody has a box, they’re all much the same as they were before. But now you need a box.
Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” argues that the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming increasingly rare and valuable in our distraction-filled world. Newport defines deep work as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit,” which create new value and improve skills.
When I read the book, it certainly struck some chords with me. It chimed with my experience but but it also poses some pretty serious practical difficulties if you want to try it out.
As a busy technical manager, it felt very much as if my job description and management structure had been designed by a group of people who had intensively brainstormed Ways of making it impossible to concentrate on anything much for any length of time. Since going into consultancy, it’s become even worse.
The book outlines strategies for cultivating this skill, including scheduling dedicated deep work blocks, embracing boredom to train focus, quitting social media, setting rigid boundaries between work and leisure, and creating rituals around your deep work sessions. Newport contends that by prioritizing deep work over “shallow work” (non-cognitively demanding tasks often performed while distracted), professionals can dramatically increase both the quality and quantity of their work output while finding more meaning in their professional lives.
This is all good stuff, but how do you actually put it into practice when almost everybody you meet is melting your attention, your inbox is full of unavoidable demands on your time and the people who do have time to concentrate on developing new information technology keep coming up with stuff you are unable to ignore.
As luck would have it, tomorrow I have a relatively distraction free day ahead. I also have a big project to work on. I will treat it as an experiment in deepening the way I work. I’ll keep notes as I go along. If I come up with anything insightful, I will share it on here.
I’m a fan of stoicism and also of the Cult of Done. They aren’t the same. The stoic accepts their ignorance as the way things are. They might choose to do something about it, but it’s not something to be ashamed of or to hide. It’s simply the way it is. For now. Just be honest about it. The Cult of Done’s 4th principle treats It quite differently. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t, and do it.
Confidence often precedes competence. By acting as if you know what you’re doing, you push past the paralysis of self-doubt. This “fake it till you make it” approach acknowledges that action itself builds the knowledge and skills you need. Trust yourself and start moving.
Dishonesty is a bad thing. When it is deployed to enhance your own wealth and power at the expense of others it is a very bad thing. But I think adopting a frame of mind that gives you more confidence and so allows you to overcome your own and other’s misgivings is okay. Just remember it’s a hack. Don’t fool others. And definitely don’t believe your own bullshit.
There are quite a few resources online which address the problem of how to overcome procrastination. I generally find them interesting. I read them with great attention. In fact, I find them a great source of procrastination. This isn’t really a reflection on the articles themselves which are often very good. But for me, the question isn’t really how do I overcome procrastination. I already know the answer to that. I cannot overcome procrastination.
What I need is to identify the causes procrastination, and do what I can to prevent those causes. I am not remotely tough on procrastination. Perhaps I could be tough on the causes of procrastination?
So, I had a classic bout of procrastination this morning. Much like a rare conjunction of the planets, I had a rare conjunction of pressing tasks. I’d promised somebody in Australia something by the end of the day. My biggest customer wanted me to get something done urgently. And another big job was waiting to be done by my team who just needed some input from me.
Most of what I needed to do was a bit vague or ambiguous or both. I coped with the situation the way I normally cope with such situations. I found something more interesting to do instead. Unusually, I managed to shake myself out of it. Instead, I drafted a list of all the things I need to do. I then revisited each item on the list and as far as possible broke it down into all the various tasks I needed to carry out and questions to which I needed an answer. I was expecting to also have some decisions that needed making. It took me by surprise when I actually looked into detail.My mini crisis had less work involved than I initially imagined.
It was however still a long list and it was clear I could not get all that done in time to please everybody. It was at this point that I felt the need to empty some bins. This is my normal pattern of backsliding in the face of urgent and important stuff the accomplishment of which would allow me to sleep easily.
But weirdly, my subconscious brain helped me out for once. While I was dithering around doing about the lowest value task available to me somehow unbidden an effective plan for tackling the list formed. When I got back to my desk which was now equipped with a very satisfying the empty bin, I started working on my list with great efficiency. I didn’t get everything done, but I did get messages out to the people who are waiting with a realistic estimate of when they would hear from me. And I know exactly what I will be doing first thing on Monday morning.
Drawing up the list certainly did provide me with a list of things to do, which is always helpful. But my feeling is that it was the compilation of the list itself and the thought process I had to go through to come up with it that made the difference. And I think that emptying the bin was an important part of the process. Without that I may not have been able to process the information. I hadn’t been able to conquer procrastination. But I had managed to, more by luck and judgement to be honest, remove the reason I was procrastinating.
I think I will try using this approach again.
If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
Ideas have energy and momentum. If you don’t capitalise on the initial enthusiasm, that energy dissipates. This principle enforces urgency - either act quickly on your ideas or let them go. This prevents an endless backlog of “someday” projects that drain your mental energy.
Procrastination is a big problem for a lot of people and is certainly so for me. Banishing it is a lot easier said than done. I don’t think just putting an arbitrary shelf life on ideas is the answer. But it can be part of the answer.
I am really guilty of accumulating projects which I am making little or no progress on. They do drain my energy. Dropping them would be heart wrenching. Some have been my companions for many years.
I am not ready to dump a load of stuff. But I will start asking the question when I am working on something - is this really the best use of my time and is it ever going to get finished.
One of the things I have noticed over the years about myself, and also about people I’ve managed is that everybody loves doing jobs that are fairly easy but a bit boring. everybody hates doing jobs that are both important and difficult. The important but difficult job that most people and certainly I hate the most is thinking about goals and priorities.
An important clarification to that is that talking about goals and priorities vaguely is quite easy and fun. Breaking that down into what is the most important thing you should be doing right now is really really hard. I’ve been aware of this for quite a while, and have tended to think that the problem is one of concentration and aptitude. If only I can force myself to focus on this issue more,things will get better. And I will become a better person.
But maybe the answer isn’t to try and become somebody different to who I am. Perhaps it will be better to try and turn the difficult job of analysing what I want to do and turning it into a detailed action plan into an easier job.
So for example, one of the things I find easy to do is take an early morning walk. The goal of this activity is to make sure I start the day with at least some exercise. But now it’s possible to combine this activity with writing. Maybe I can add a daily goal setting session (I’m writing this on my phone whilst standing in a stream right now. Technology has finally reached the stage where I can both walk think and write simultaneously.)
I will see how it goes. Habits like this always difficult to form initially. And a big part is breaking the project down into each individual tasks that are small enough to be managed in the time available.
In that spirit, I will start by creating a list of my goals, and link that list to the documents that are relevant to it. In theory goal should not change very often. But I think I need to look at the list at least weekly. So step one is to create a weekly reminder. In fact I won’t make it weekly I will make it every eight days. This is a kind of job that Google Keep is very good for. let’s see how I get on.
Yesterday, I spent around four hours in travelling time to attend a trade fair in London. It took about four hours to walk the show. I saw a few interesting things, chatted with a few old friends and gave my card out to some people who could conceivably be sources of business in the future .
On the face of it, it really wasn’t a great use of my time. I cannot point to a single tangible benefit of having been there. But it was a long day and I came back very tired. It’s very hard to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. Anything that took that much effort surely must have some kind of reward.
I have to say that although emotionally I feel like it was your day well spent the reality is in the online world a solid eight hours of creating searchable content would have been a much better way of promoting my business. I can’t help being human. I’d much rather come up with a justification for my misjudgment. But the reality is the world has changed.
This was already brought home to me when I offered a person my business card expecting to get there in return. They got out their phone and offered me a QR code instead. I’d actually go to the trouble of Updating my card and getting some printed specifically for the show. I handed out nine I think. On reflection, I don’t think there’s much a chance of a single one of them ever being looked at by the recipient again.
I’m sure Trade fairs themselves continue to be an important part of the business world. There are some things for which only a face-to-face contact will suffice. And let’s be honest, for a lot of sales people a trip to an exotic city on expenses is a perk of the job . But for me personally I have to come to terms with the fact that most of the time I can have something much better to do. And more generally, sometimes I do things purely because I’ve always done them not because they do me any good.
Completion isn’t an end in itself but a gateway to new beginnings. The true value of finishing something is the freedom it gives you to start something new. This principle is the most important one from my point of view.
Creating things is what humans do. It’s sort of all we do really. This principle doesn’t give any clues as to how it should be implemented. But it does tell you what frame of mind you should be in. Just spend as much time as you can creating and even if you don’t get very far you are setting yourself up for your next session.
I think nearly everybody suffers from procrastination at some point or another. Some of us suffer it chronically. But there is another feeling which is I think related. It’s when you want to do something on a project or even just do something. But you can’t think of what to do. I’m in just that state now
I’ve had what For most people will be a reasonably good days worked today. By my standards, it’s a stunningly successful day. I’m not only got started, I carried on and even completed some stuff. And I’m now going for a walk in the evening feeling there must be something I can do that will be of some benefit. But I can’t think of anything.
So in the absence of a serious task, I’ll address the problem of how you decide what to do when you don’t know what to do. I’ll try thinking of all the things that I’ve been putting off while I’ve been busy. But not just any things. I will apply the filter that they must be important but they mustn’t be urgent. I don’t want to spend any time on the unimportant and the non-urgent. I already give that category way more attention than it deserves.
I’m a big fan of the rule of three. Somehow, as many people have noticed, things just seem right when there were three of them. Two’s company, three’s a trikolon.
So let’s think of three broad categories of things I could be working on. I suppose he obvious ones are health, wealth, and learning.
That automatically helps. My health is in good shape. I don’t feel the need to fill in any lacunae in my knowledge right now. So let’s focus on wealth.
And when I focus on wealth I instantly start thinking about what I need to do to improve my business. Is there anything I can do to grow it? Once I frame the request in those terms a very obvious candidate pops up to the surface. A couple of years ago During a busy spell I stopped working on my newsletter for my clients. The main reason was at that point I had more work than I could cope with. So now would be a great time to start creating content for it.
One last thing – what should I call this mood of not knowing what to do that has just overcome? Loose end doesn’t really match. Negative procrastination doesn’t really work either. I think I’ll go for task turpour.
Detachment from outcomes is liberating. Not everything you create needs to be preserved or shared. The process often matters more than the product. This principle encourages you to value the experience and learning gained from creation, even if the final product isn’t kept.
This really is hard-core advice. Making something to just throw it away, well that’s really taking the principle that doing is the most important part of the process to its final and logical conclusion.
It feels wrong at first. But maybe it isn’t. Humans really define themselves by doing stuff. When we hear about a factory closing down, as sympathies are with the workers who no longer have work to do. We don’t generally worry about the availability of what it was they were making. And there are relatively few creators where we wish they had created more stuff. I could’ve done with a few more Beatles LPs. But I certainly don’t need any more Rolling Stones ones. At time of writing more Rolling Stones LPs is possible. maybe they will surprise us, but I suspect they’ve already done all they had to do.
So given that I’m unlikely to ever get anywhere near that kind of level I should probably accept that nothing I do will ever have enough intrinsic value to be worth keeping for a very long and certainly not for my whole life. Ditching it to do something new is probably the best thing.
© Colin Sanders 2025