The power of choosing the right verb in living the life you want

I’ve always appreciated Merlin Mann’s careful use of language. I think he was the first person I ever heard explain the difference between “busy” and “time constrained.” Another one of his favorites is the difference between “expensive” and “costly.” I admire precision in language. In this same vein (and following yesterday’s article) I’ve discovered my own pet peeve when it comes to one verb in particular — find.

“Yeah I’d love to meet! Let me find some time in my schedule and I’ll get back to you.”

“10 Ways to Find More Meaning in Your Work!”

The word find is pervasive. Everyone is constantly searching for and sometimes finding the time to do things. Finding the time to go to a meeting. Finding time to setup a call. Finding time to work on that report. Looking for and often failing to find a time to work on that important but not urgent project. Busy, busy, busy. Finding, finding, finding.

Find insinuates that what you’re looking for is hiding from you and it’s simply a matter of discovering its location. At the same time, there’s a tinge of uncertainty. Something that must be found may end up being too well hidden. The excuse of not doing it is baked right into the verb — the time simply couldn’t be found! You tried! Who has ever heard of blaming someone for looking but failing to find? It’s not your fault!

The other context in which I see find inappropriately thrown around is when it comes to having a sense of meaning at work. Lifehack/personal development bloggers love to give advice about finding meaning at work. In their eyes, tips and tricks are what’s standing between you and the last rock you need to turn over to find the professional/personal meaning that has been hiding from you. Somehow meaning is some kind of discrete entity that is waiting for you to come get it if you just look hard enough.

It’s bullshit.

I’m trying to ban the word find from my vocabulary. When I say find what I should probably be saying is make. To find is passive. Finding has an excuse built into it. Finding absolves you from needing to make choices. Finding goes hand-in-hand with being too busy. Finding isn’t hard work.

Making, on the other hand, is active. It connotes making a choice. It’s deciding that something is important and doing what you need to do to make space for it. It’s being in charge of how you spend your time and attention and taking the vigorous action to do what needs to be done. It’s often difficult.

It even feels different when people use it in conversation with you. Which of these feels better as the recipient? “I’d love to hop on a call — let me make some time and get back to you,” vs. “I’d love to hop on a call — let me find some time and get back to you.” It’s subtle but the former feels like someone who is prioritizing our time together and not looking to slot it into an otherwise open part of their schedule.

Ultimately, I think the difference between find and make is the difference between feeling like you’re being buffeted about by the demands on your time and attention and feeling like you’re in control of where you direct your time and attention.

Active creators of their own reality make. Harried responders find.

Things I learned when I stopped writing every day

Awhile back, I used to write and publish something on Medium every day. The idea was to ideate, draft, edit, and publish in about 30 minutes. It was enough time to formulate some thoughts beyond the most surface layer of a topic, but not so long that sitting down and doing it felt too arduous to actually do (usually). I’m lucky to be a pretty quick writer so it usually meant I could crank out a couple hundred words without breaking much of a mental sweat.

Eventually I decided to stop that practice because it felt like it was potentially keeping me from writing something more “worthwhile” or “substantial.” Most days my only writing would be that thirty minute article that was drafted, edited, and published in the same sitting. Part of me felt guilty for not using that time to work on articles that can’t be written in one session. That I wasn’t building the muscles necessary to grab ahold of a more difficult or obscure topic and run it to ground over several, or many, writing sessions.

I have several pages of notes and ideas for articles and writing projects that can’t be tackled in the span of a thirty minute writing session. I hoped that relaxing my daily writing schedule would provoke me toward making meaningful progress on these projects.

Nope.

The truth, is that I havne’t been working on any substantial piece of writing. The time that I freed up by not writing and publishing every day has gone everywhere except toward writing more substantial pieces.

I try to treat everything I do like an experiment but somehow this experience has felt more like a personal failing as an aspiring writer and intellectual. I’ve been embarrassed to not publish anything for this long. And the longer I went without writing the more important it became in my mind to write something worth the delay. Which only raised the stakes which only made me less likely to actually write. Hello, negative feedback loop.

But a slight shift in mindset helps me realized I’ve learned some things:

• Writing, like most things worth doing, benefits from momentum and momentum is more about frequency/consistency than quality. It’s impossible to write the best thing you’ve ever written every day, but even writing something so-so every day has residual effects that spill beyond the boundaries of that individual writing session. I stopped writing every day because I felt like I was “using up” time and words that could be better spent on tougher pieces of writing. Turns out when I stop doing that I tend to stop writing entirely.

• Writing is part of my identity and when I don’t do it I don’t feel like myself. I’m decidedly average at a lot of different things that are relevant to my professional life. Writing is one of the few things I can point to and say, “You are good at this.” So when I don’t do it I’m basically handicapping myself in my quest to make a positive impact in the world.

• Writing generates more ideas. Somebody who doesn’t write frequently might think that writing consumes ideas but my experience is the opposite. It’s a very rare writing session where I don’t add two or three topics to my “spark list.” Writing prepares my mind to have ideas and make connections. I start seeing creative ideas and concepts everywhere. When I’m writing and publishing everyday it’s like they know they have an avenue to being made real so they pop into existence easily and in high numbers.

• Much of my work requires wading through ambiguity and uncertainty. Working with clients on a day-to-day basis, often in highly emotional contexts, means that a lot of my work is amorphous and hard and its hard to feel a sense of progress. Writing is a process with a beginning, middle, and an end. It starts with nothing and results in something. When I’m not writing I don’t get to feel those I-made-something-feelings very often. Those feelings feel good. I need them.

I feel like I’ve written a version of this article before and I’m sure I’ll write another version of it at some point in the future. I don’t seem to be the type of person who can learn a lesson once and have it really locked into my psyche from then on. But that’s okay. I’m a slow learner.

These daily(ish) articles aren’t going to follow a specific format or theme any more than my mind and daily life seems to follow a specific format or theme. The barrier for inclusion will be low because I want to be able to successfully write about anything and make it interesting (as long as we’re comfortable with a very liberal definition of interesting).

Forgive me this self-indulgent foray back into being a writing person and I’ll do my best to prevent this little project from veering into such navel gazey territory in the future.

You gotta cut me some slack, though — it has been awhile.

Focusing on the how in the quest for great work

I think meaning exists at two very different scales. The more common and overarching “macro” meaning that lives at the organizational level and the equally important meaning that is derived on a moment-to-moment basis while doing almost anything the right way (let’s call it “micro” meaning for now).

Consultants and the organizations in which they consult spend a lot of time talking about the first one and a lot less talking about the second one. Macro meaning is generally pretty easy to identify and talk about. It’s about doing good in the world and creating a positive impact in your community. It’s the difference between a non-profit bringing clean drinking water to the people of the world and a company bottling clean water from Michigan while its residents continue to drink poison from their taps.

Most people want to feel like their work has meaning (even if there is a significant dose of cognitive dissonance that must be managed). When you spend as much time at work as most of us do, the idea that what we do doesn’t matter is a quick recipe for disengagement and apathy. Macro meaning tends to live at the organizational level and when we talk about it we are mostly talking about organizational purpose. It’s all about what the organization exists to do and whether we believe that is worthwhile.

I’m more interested in the other kind of meaning, though. The smaller one. The one that exists at an individual level and is built and re-built hundreds of times throughout the day. Moment-to-moment, activity-to-activity, thought-to-thought.

This kind of meaning is what’s built when the way in which you are working and interacting aligns with your values. It’s the decisions you make about how to tackle a piece of work or how to have a conversation with your boss or how to show up in a meeting. I’m having trouble defining this feeling with words, so instead I’ll share a couple examples from my own work life.

I know how dangerous distractions can be when trying to do something that requires concentration and focus. When I take action to limit distractions during an activity (like writing this article) I feel like I’m doing it right. It’s easier not to turn on Do Not Disturb or put my devices in Airplane Mode or not switch over to Twitter the second I get stuck with what I’m trying to write. But every time I setup my environment in a way that allows me to do what I need to do well and I avoid the temptations to break concentration I feel like what I’m doing is more meaningful. If it’s worth the extra effort to do well then it must be worth doing.

Another example from a typical day; when I show up to meetings on time, or ideally, a little bit early. Not every meeting is one that I look forward to (shocker, I know) and the temptation is to stroll into those just as it’s starting or even a little bit afterward. Every time that happens, though, I can feel the cracks forming in my meaning foundation. I think it taps into a feeling that I don’t have any volitional control over my time and attention so showing up a little bit late is the (lamest) act of subconscious rebellion. Showing up early, ready to go, and fully focused for a meeting isn’t always the easiest thing, but when I do it I feel like my work has more meaning and that I’m showing up the right way.

One last example. On any given day there is almost always a mix of actions I could take but the overall order of operations is completely up to me. Very few things must be finished today. Things could get moved to tomorrow, later in the week, and truthfully, could probably never get done and the world wouldn’t stop spinning. When I’m not feeling connected to my work and it’s not feeling meaningful in any way, the way I tackle those tasks is often dumb. I’ll look at everything I need to do and I’ll do the easiest thing first. Then I’ll do the next easiest thing. I essentially take everything I need to do and reverse sort on Difficulty. That wouldn’t be a huge deal if nothing new was being added to my list but because I work in a company (kind of two, actually — The Ready and my client) there are always new tasks (e.g. emails and Slack messages) that are entering my consciousness and getting kicked to the top of my reverse sorted Difficulty list. The next thing I know, I’ve spent 8 hours doing easy (and mostly unimportant) stuff while surfing along the top of my email inbox and Slack notifications. The clean inboxes at the end of the day come at the cost of having to actually do anything difficult or worthwhile or meaningful.

In all three of these examples the common theme is having control over my attention. When I make deliberate choices about how to spend my attention I generally feel like my work has more meaning. When I let my attention be buffeted by things outside my control it feels like nothing I do matters. That’s why having a conversation, responding to an email, and writing this article could all be opportunities to build a sense of meaning in my work, or they could all be opportunities to destroy a sense of meaning in my work. It’s not the what but the how that matters.

I think a surprising amount of the organizational dysfunctions we see in our consulting and you probably live on a day-to-day basis can be tracked back to that sense of moment-to-moment meaning that happens at an individual level. When you multiply that feeling, or lack of feeling, across hundreds or thousands of people in an organization you get some effects that are far more than the sum of their parts and why extremely minor shifts in how we all approach our work may be more of a solution than it first appears.

I have a lot more to say about this but let’s end it here for now.

What do you think? When do you feel like your work has the most meaning? When do you feel like what you’re doing doesn’t matter at all? What am I missing from my description?

The State of the Apps & Tools: 2018

A craftsman has a paradoxical relationship with his or her tools. On the one hand, tools are the primary conduit through which their skill and passion are made manifest in the world. From this perspective, tools are incredibly important and the careful consideration of them makes perfect sense. On the other hand, a true craftsman knows that their skill and ability isn’t contingent upon the quality of their tools. They know they can take supbar tools and still create beautiful work.

All of this is to say that I think about the tools and apps I use to do my work a lot. I use the former perspective when I’m trying to feel okay about trying my third email app in three months and the latter perspective when I need to berate myself to focus on what actually matters (i.e. my actual work).

To indulge my “tools are important!” side for a little bit I thought I’d write a summary of the key pieces of software and hardware I’m using as I go into 2018. It’s always interesting to see what stays the same from year-to-year and when I’m successful in introducing a new tool that actually sticks around for the long haul.

So, let’s get to it.

Hardware

MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB storage)

This computer is entering what is probably going to be it’s last year of service. In the fall I’ll start looking for a replacement as this one will have reached the three-year mark. All-in-all, I love this computer. I’ve had a few of the well documented keyboard problems earlier in the year but am currently riding a nine month wave of keyboard bliss (knock on wood). It’s getting a little long in the tooth when it comes to anything computationally challenging at all but I’m either becoming more patient in my old age or its pokeyness just feels normal now. When it’s time to upgrade I’ll have to decide whether I want to keep rocking the lightweight MacBook or go with something a little bit more powerful. I think it’ll partly depend what my reliance on iOS/iPad is at that time.

iPad Pro 12.9" (first generation, Wi-Fi & Cellular, 256 GB) with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard

I went through long swaths of 2017 using this as my primary computing device. If the Google suite of apps weren’t unecessarily neutered (why are the advanced sharing settings different on iOS?!) I’d be able to use it almost 100% of the time. Whenever I use my iPad exclusively for a long period of time I start to feel like I’m living in the future. However, every time I come back to using my MacBook I feel like I can work smoother and quicker. Basically, I shift back and forth between using my iPad and my MacBook as my primary device on a pretty regular basis. The Apple Pencil is great and some of the best client reactions I’ve gotten in awhile were in response to the hand drawn slides I pulled together and the real time drawing/note-taking done during a meeting while connected to a projector.

Unfortunately, this iPad is currently having some issues that prevent it from staying reliably connected to its Smart Keyboard. I’ve taken it to an Apple Store and swapped out the keyboard several times, all to no avail. So, if I want to keep running this iPad experiment I think I’m going to have to make a new purchase fairly soon. I’m thinking about downgrading to the smaller Pro size as 12.9“ has felt slightly unwieldly at times. I think the 10.9” might be perfect.

iPhone 7 Plus (256 GB)

In many ways, my phone is the cornerstone of my work and personal life. I really enjoy the Plus size and have been impressed with its overall resilience. I like to use my iPhones without a case (or more specifically, I consider Apple Care+ my case) and so far I’ve only needed to seek assistance with a cracked screen once over the nearly 2 years I’ve owned this phone. I think I’m going to skip this most recent generation of iPhones and take a hard look at what’s released this fall with an upgrade likely to happen around then.

Apple Watch (first generation)

I love my Apple Watch. I use it all the time, including while I sleep. It makes me a more active person and while it may feed my unhealthy connection to notifications, I do feel like it adds more value to my life than it does detract. I’m very anxious to update to one of the newer models (not sure if I’ll get the LTE version or not) since I’m still rocking one of the original slow ones. Considering how much I like this version I’m a little afraid of how much I might like one with better battery life and quicker response times.

Kindle Paperwhite

The minimalist in me likes to do all his reading in iBooks on my phone or iPad. The reader in me likes my Paperwhite. I’ve decided to lean back into my “use the best tool for the job” mentality and that means my Kindle has re-entered my life with a vengeance.

Software

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I have two primary “modes” that I seem to alternate between every couple weeks. One mode I already mentioned above — the “use the best tool for the job” mode. When I’m in this mentality it means I’m using primarily third party apps (often extensively customized to meet my preferences). I probably spend about 70% of my time in this mode.

My other mode is what I call “default” mode. When I’m in this mentality I’m all about keeping my needs as simple and minimal as possible. I’ll use the default apps and settings and try to minimize my reliance on third party apps or fancy workflows of any kind. I’ll often find myself switching to this mode when everything feels overwhelming and I feel the need to get back to basics. I probably spend about 30% of my time in this mode.

I used to berate myself for switching between modes because there’s always some switching costs in doing so. In some ways, it can become a distraction and a crutch (often it’s a sign that I’m avoiding real work) but I’ve decided to become a little bit kinder toward myself. I think having these two modes helps me stay fresh and aware of both a.) what my actual needs are and b.) new developments that might make my work better or easier to do. Therefore, in the section below I’m going to share both categories of apps when appropriate (Default Mode first, then Best Tool for the Job Mode second).

Web Browsing (Safari)

I use Safari everywhere because I’ve never been annoyed enough by it to seek out something else. I like the design and I like that it seems to sip battery power across all my devices as compared to Chrome. I keep Chrome around for emergencies but it never feels as good to use as Safari so I rarely let it come out to play. I’m thinking I may give it another whirl, especially when I’m in Best Tool for the Job Mode but for now I’m a Safari man across macOS and iOS.

Email (Apple Mail/Airmail)

Airmail has lots of great preferences that allow me to really craft an email experience that works with my productivity workflows and the way my brain works. I like being able to kick emails over to Things extremely easily — something Apple Mail doesn’t make as easy. I also appreciate that Airmail has versions for iPhone, iPad, and my MacBook that all look and work about the same.

Maps (Apple Maps/Google Maps)

I want to use Apple Maps more and more, but articles like this make it tough to not use Google Maps. I do think Apple Maps has gotten significantly better since iOS 11 (the turn-by-turn driving directions especially) but it’s hard to beat how much more information is easily reached via Google Maps.

Notes (Apple Notes/Bear)

Gosh, I love Bear. I’m not 100% sure why, either. I’m not a huge fan of tagging systems (I tend to prefer folders-based systems) and I don’t even really use Bear’s all that much but for whatever reason I happily pay for a yearly subscription to this app. I think it’s just really well designed and incredibly stable. As with all my key software, it has great versions for all my devices, too.

Music (Apple Music/Spotify)

Last year I spent most of my time in the Apple Music ecosystem before switching back to Spotify in the last few months of the year. I like the design of Apple Music better but I can’t deny that Spotify’s recommendations are much, much better. This year I’m going to try to stay as completely within Spotify as possible so my end-of-year report is actually accurate (what can I say, I’m a sucker for automatically generated year-in-review reports).

Twitter (Official Twitter app/Tweetbot)

Every time I get all excited to use default apps I’m always really excited and motivated until I get to Twitter. God I hate the algorithmic timeline that the default app pushes on you. It fundamentally changes how I view and use Twitter (for the worse). I can’t help but think that there will come a day when this is the only option I have for Twitter but until then you’ll find me using Tweetbot (and more or less being a timeline completionist) the vast majority of the time.

Calendars (Apple Calendar/Fantastical)

Nothing beats Fantastical when it comes to easily adding events with natural language. On the other hand, the default Calendar app has some nice integration with Siri (pulling information out of my email and other apps) and features like Travel Time that I find myself longing for when I use Fantastical for too long.

Task Management (Things)

There is no default app that replaces Things. I’ve tried using Reminders as a simple task management system but I always seem to come back to Things within a few days. Things drives nearly all of my productivity and it’s in the place of honor (far right position in the dock) on all my devices.

Shared Lists (Apple Reminders/AnyList)

Until recently I used Reminders for all shared lists but on the advice of The Sweet Setup I decided to give AnyList a try. So far, I like it quite a bit and it has taken over the shared list job in my life.

Longform Writing (Apple Notes/Byword)

I debated whether this was still a category worth having as Bear has seemed to cannibalize a lot of the writing that I used to do in Byword. However, considering I’m writing this article in Byword right now I figured it was worth keeping, for now. I like that I can publish to my Medium account directly from the app and I think that’s what has helped keep it around instead of just using Bear for all writing. When I’m in Default Mode, Apple Notes becomes the place where I do all writing, including longform.

Other Software I Use A Lot (Slack, Trello, MindNode, Day One, Reeder, Deliveries, Dark Sky, Instapaper, Apple Files, AutoSleep, Moment, Exist.io, Keynote, Google Docs, Insight Timer)

MindNode, Day One, Dark Sky and Instapaper have all been in active use for years. I’ve tried alternatives in most of those categories but always come back to these apps. I’ve gone pretty deep into the iCloud Drive world, hence the use of Files. In fact, I don’t even have Dropbox on any of my devices anymore.

A Word on Notifications and Other General Setttings

• Do Not Disturb: I have DND set to turn on from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM on all my devices. I would love, love, love Apple to introduce DND by app at some point in the future. For example, being able to set all my communication-centric notifications to start appearing around lunch time while allowing utility-centric or system-centric notifications to appear earlier.

• Notifications, in general: Like with my software preferences, I seem to have two modes when it comes to notifications on all my devices. When I’m deep under the influence of Deep Work and Flow and feeling like I need to focus intently, I’ll adopt a notification strategy where I basically eliminate all of them. At other times, I like keeping all my notifications on because it helps me feel connected to the rest of the world. With as much travel as I’ve been doing and with the fact that my family and my girlfriend all lived far, far away I tended to keep notifications on. However, even in this mode I will feel no compunction about manually flipping on Do Not Disturb when I need to sit down and really focus on something (like writing this article, for example).

• “Military time”/24 hour time: I use a 24 hour clock on all my devices because I think it’s simpler than the AM/PM system. There’s never any ambiguity and I appreciate the simplicity.

• Tap to click: I’m all about settings that allow me to make things happen with less effort. Therefore, my trackpad settings on my MacBook are set to tap to click. Unfortunately, I’ve seemed to have built impossible to remove muscle memory that always makes me do a “for real” click. I’m trying to re-learn!

• Highest sensitivity settings on trackpad and mouse: Keeping in line with my preferences for settings that allow me to do more with less movement, I have the sensitivity settings for my trackpad and mouse setup to be as responsive as possible. Apparently that isn’t super common because it’s the #1 thing people comment on if they use my computer at all.

• Camera privacy slider: In the past year I got skeeved out enough about the possibility of hackers doing nefarious things with cameras to buy a privacy cover for my MacBook. I got this one and it looks good and works well.

2018 Intentions

In general, I hope to do less fiddling with my setup this year. When I do feel the urge to switch modes, I want to do so mindfully and as swiftly as possible. I’ve done things like collect all the apps I like to use in each mode into a single folder so that when I decide to switch into that mode it’s easy to update my homescreen and get myself arranged (as opposed to hunting for each app each time I want to switch modes). Hardware-wise, it’s likely that every major component of my setup will get upgraded this year. That really won’t change much other than making it more enjoyable to use the software I’m already using. There is a small part of me that keeps getting tickled by the idea of getting an iMac for my home office but so far I’ve been doing a good job of tamping that thought down.

Curious about anything I didn’t go into enough detail about here? Leave a question below and I’ll collect them all into a Part 2!

My 2017 in Books

2017 was a strange year of reading for me. I re-read more books this year than I ever have before while also reading the fewest number of books and pages since 2014. At the same time, while this was still a “down” year for me, I still managed to get through 60 books — which taken at face value is a decent amount of reading to get through in 365 days.

I definitely went through stretches this year where I wasn’t reading consistently. When I’m on top of my reading game, I’m usually reading for anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes a day with intermittent audiobook listening throughout. I worked through the backlogs of a couple podcasts this year and that cut into my audiobook time (looking at you The Adventure Zone). I also had a hard time focusing on anything, especially books, when I was working through some post-concussion symptoms last spring. Luckily, I picked up the pace in the second half of the year and was able to get back to my usual pace.

I know it’s not all about the sheer number of books or pages read. However, I think it’s important for me to be reading as much as possible. Instead of slowing down and taking copious notes or really trying to digest every little part of the books I read I treat it more like a waterfall that I choose to stand under. I let it wash over me knowing some of it will stick and some of it won’t. When it comes to great ideas I think it’s more important to expose myself to as many as possible. It’s a numbers game — therefore, I read as much as possible.

The Best Thing I Read This Year

• Grant by Ron Chernow: Chernow is a master biographer. Every single one of his books I’ve read (Alexander Hamilton, Washington, Titan, and now Grant) has been excellent. I read this immediately after having read Walter Isaacson’s new book on Leonardo Da Vinci and it was fascinating to juxtapose these two authors. Chernow is such a better biographer. It’s not even close. Isaacson writes like a journalist and his biographies feel like long magazine articles. Chernow is a goddamn biographer and his books feel exhaustive and complete.

The Most Challenging Things I Read This Year

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: McCarthy holds the honor of writing the book that has emotionally affected me the most, The Road. I’ve never read anything that has been anywhere close to as successful at making me feel uncomfortable. Blood Meridian may be a close second, though. The violence and depravity described in this book gave me visceral reactions of revulsion. I’m pretty sure I’ve never muttered, “Jesus…” or “What the…” under my breath so many times for a single book. It was good as hell, though.

• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer: Incredibly long, utterly depressing in many ways, and showing its age in places (i.e. treatment of homosexuality). Oh, and there’s something about reading about the rise of Nazi Germany in today’s political climate that is very eerie.

The Most Fun Things I Read This Year

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows by JK Rowling: I’m only what, 10 years, late on this one? Better late than never, right?

• The Ghost Brigades & The Last Colony by John Scalzi: This series is like candy in book form.

• Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey: Same as above. Pretty fun sci-fi that doesn’t require me to think too hard. I think the TV show is pretty okay, too.

Most Likely to Re-Read

• Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Enlightenment by Robert Wright: My meditation practice continues to be a source of joy and frustration. When I read this book I was pretty far away from my ideal meditation routine and I’d love to read this book again when I’m deep into a regular practice. I think I will get a lot more out of it when I’m not reading it simply as an intellectual exercise.

Things I Re-Read This Year

The only new additions to this list are The Phoenix Project(which I actually read for the first and second time this year) and Team of Teams. Everything else I’ve read three or more times, at least. I think Essentialism and Deep Work will continue to be yearly reads.

• The Phoenix Projectby Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford

• Essentialismby Greg McKeown

• Team of Teamsby Stanley McChrystal

• The Way of Zenby Alan Watts

• Flowby Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

• Deep Workby Cal Newport

The Most Underwhelming Stuff I Read This Year

• Zen in the Art of Archeryby Eugen Herrigel: I don’t know if underwhelming is the right word, but in the afterword you find out the author was a Nazi. That soured me a bit on this otherwise interesting book.

• The Art of Learningby Josh Waitzkin: Tedious and shallow, in my opinion.

Looking to 2018

At the very least I’m committed to reading at least 52 books/18,000 pages this year. My stretch goal is to hit 70 books/24,000 pages. There are a few ongoing series that I’d like to finish out before starting anything truly epic. I also think I’m also going to stay away from doing a bunch of re-reading this year. Other than that, we’ll see where the year takes me. I generally don’t make long lists of highly detailed reading plans. I just throw books into my To Read list any time I stumble across anything interesting and when it’s time to start something new I just scroll through the list until something catches my eye. Do you have any suggestions for me? What are you going to read this year?

Is Technology Destroying My Intuition?

A Personal Experiment Recap and Reflection

Are my systems turning me into a robot?

There are two dueling forces within me that seem to be locked in a never-ending battle. On the one hand, I love simplicity and minimalism. I love using default settings and apps, simplifying my needs, and generally reducing the number of requirements I need to be productive and happy. On the other hand, I love using highly specific software that has features beyond the basics. For the tools I use everyday, I love finding the best and then customizing them to my exact specifications and I love using technology to create systems and processes that help me offload the need to remember to do thing. These opposing forces ebb and flow within me and you can usually tell my current status by just taking a peek at the software I’m using (and since I’m writing this in Bear instead of Notes my expansive/non-minimal aspect must be winning right now).

I recently found myself reflecting on all the systems and processes I had created to get myself to do the “right things” at the “right time.” As a huge proponent of the Getting Things Done (GTD) personal productivity approach, I’m very good at offloading my tasks into an external system. Every thought that starts with, “I should do…” is regularly captured in a piece of software and a decision is made about what to do about it on a very regular cadence.

Even beyond my robust GTD system, I enlist technology for several other jobs in my life. I use an automatically recurring checklist in the morning and in the evening to help me get through my morning and evening routines successfully. Every day at the same time 5–7 reminders pop up on my devices to encourage me to do things like, “Read for a bit,” “Journal,” and “Meditate.”

Finally, I’m also using technology to track several different categories of data about myself, both physical and mental. I track sleep and physical activity with my smart watch, subjective experience with Exist.io, computer usage with Moment and Rescue Time, and finances with Mint, just to name a few.

All of these external systems I created for myself are designed to help me focus my attention and effort where it is most needed. At least, that was the theory… but what if I’m actually harming myself instead?

What if my GTD system is making me capture and make decisions on the inessential at the expense of what I really needed to be doing? Would I be more likely to work on what really matters, the truly essential, if I didn’t have a system that tracked all my work and instead I had to make decisions based on my gut?

Are my automatic morning and evening checklists offloading the responsibility to notice how my routine is making me feel in favor of just mindlessly checking items off a list? Do I really need a piece of technology to tell me to take the actions I know make up routines that are important to me?

Is my quantified self habit causing me to take certain actions not because of how they make me feel but because they move certain numbers up or down? Shouldn’t I be doing things because I like the way they make me feel and not because they make my graphs prettier at the end of the year?

In a nutshell, am I outsourcing my intuition by using processes and technology to take care of large aspects of my life?

Would I be a more sensitive, calm, and responsive person if I stopped relying on these systems and instead tried to get in touch with my own thoughts, feelings, and sensations? The more I dug into what an experiment to test this might look like the more nervous I got, which told me I was probably on the right path.

Ultimately, I decided to commit to 30 days where I removed as many of these sources of information, tracking, and outside support. I would revert back to a place where I didn’t have any kind of technology telling me what I should be doing or feeling with the hope that it would re-awaken what I was calling my intuition — my ability to notice how I’m feeling in the moment and make decisions or take action based on that information.

I won’t bore you with the day-by-day play-by-play, but some of the things I ended up doing included:

• Stopped tracking my sleep

• Stopped filling out my weekly personal metrics spreadsheet with things like steps, sleep duration, number of workouts, journal entries, and meditation duration.

• Stopped weighing myself daily

• Didn’t use an app to track workouts or meditation sessions

• Didn’t use automatically recurring checklists in the morning or evening

• Turned off as many notifications as possible

Importantly, there were a few things I didn’t do (although I definitely thought about it):

• I didn’t stop using Things or the GTD methodology for tracking my work

• I didn’t turn off Mint since it tracks my finances passively and I knew I didn’t want a big hole in my yearly data

Doing those two things felt too unsafe to try right now so I excluded them from the experiment.

The Results

The one thing that always bothered me about being a PhD student was this expectation that we were supposed to always know how our experiment would turn out. I’m not sure anybody ever explicitly said that, but the message was still there. By the time you had reviewed all the literature and prepared the methods and done pilots and worked through every possible contingency, running the experiment was just a matter of getting the data you needed to write up your findings (and if you disagree with that please point me to where all the “failed” experiments are being published… nobody moves forward in the academic world with failed experiments).

That was definitely not how I approached this experiment. It was truly an experiment in every sense of the word. I didn’t know what the results would be. On the one hand I was hoping that maybe this would unlock some kind of blissful, free, and responsive state of mind that would liberate me from all my systems and keep me much more rooted in the moment. That would have been an interesting and exciting result of this experiment. On the other hand, I had a sneaking suspicion that there was a reason I felt drawn to things like GTD and recurring checklists and quantified self. That removing these important aspects of how I make sense of the world would make me feel like I was adrift with nothing to latch onto.

The real results were somewhat more mixed.

I think I started to see some glimpses of my intuition coming back. I definitely became more aware of my body and my mind by creating more space. On the positive side, removing nearly all notifications was something that created a noticeable improvement in my state of mind. I felt like I could have longer thoughts that had the freedom to roam and grow. In a notification heavy world those thoughts would often be cut off before they could become something interesting.

By the end, though, I decided to revert to my previous systems and habits almost completely. I learned that these systems I’ve created for myself give my brain and energy positive direction. Without them, I would start ruminating or obsessing over things that would just end up making me feel bad.

I also learned that without my systems that prompt me to take positive action, to do the things I know I should be doing, I mostly end up not doing any of those things at all. I worked out very little over the course of this experiment. I meditated very little over the course of this experiment. I wrote very little over the course of this experiment. I know that I feel better when I do all three of these things regularly. For whatever reason, when I removed all external structure I didn’t keep doing these things that I know are positive for me.

Does this mean that I’ve been tricking myself and that I’d actually be happier if I stopped doing them? If I can’t do them without collecting data about them or being reminded by a technological system does that mean I shouldn’t be doing these activities? I wrestled with this for awhile because for a significant amount of time I thought this might be the case. Was I doing my habits for the wrong reasons?

Ultimately, I decided that it’s better to do the right things for the “wrong” reasons than it is to not do them at all.

I’m happier when I’m working out, meditating, and writing regularly and if there are tools, systems, or processes that help move me in that direction then I should embrace them with open arms. It was actually extremely eye-opening to realize that what really matters is simply doing these activities and that it doesn’t matter what it requires to get my ass on a cushion, my feet in a gym, or my fingers on a keyboard. The real battle begins when I close my eyes and start breathing, lifting those weights, or moving my fingers; I don’t need to make it harder than it has to be. If a recurring checklist makes it easier to meditate, great. If being able to track my workout data over time makes me more likely to go lift weights, awesome. If keeping track of how many times I write in my journal every week makes it more likely that I’ll sit down and write, excellent.

I admire the folks who don’t need systems to get themselves to do the things they know they need to do. What this experiment showed me, though, is that I’m not one of those people. And instead of feeling badly about that, I’m going to lean into this realization and continue building the external systems that help me be the best version of myself — completely guilt free.

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You Can’t Hide Mediocrity Behind Quantity

Recently I embarked on an experiment where I challenged myself to write and publish something everyday. I wrote quite a few articles during that time. Some were trite and navel-gazey but a few others tried to tackle more substantive ideas.

Like any good experiment, I definitely learned something.

Publishing everyday isn’t the skill I need to develop. Writing everyday is.

Trying to publish everyday was certainly challenging and it pushed me to sit down and spend more time in front of the keyboard than I probably would have otherwise. I got a little bit better at quickly identifying something to write about and cranking out something coherent. Being able to write clearly and cogently is definitely a useful skill, but it’s also one that is squarely in my comfort zone. It seems like I’ve always been able to write quicker and at greater length than most people (I remember all the dirty looks my friends gave me during in-class essay tests in high school).

Unfortunately, when it comes to writing, quickness is not a particularly distinguishing characteristic. I’m not trying to write breaking news or get something published under a tight deadline so the fact that I can crank out a couple hundred words without thinking twice isn’t super useful. What is useful, however, is writing something so impactful and insightful that people share it with their friends or are compelled to reach out to me or change how they think about a tricky subject — all characteristics that are unrelated to how quickly I created it.

This experiment in daily writing actually coincided with another event that really helped me understand my own approach to work. At The Ready we work in duos and we try to be very deliberate about retrospecting and learning from the work we do and how we do it. For the last 6 months I’ve been partnered with Spencer Pitman and a few weeks ago we had our last retrospective. If you know Spencer you know that everything he does oozes with quality. All you need to do is spend a couple minutes checking out his writing or his decks — the dude makes incredibly impressive stuff.

I know he never said these words but I remember walking away from our meeting with the stark realization, “I compensate with feeling creatively or professionally vulnerable with sheer quantity of output.” My combined affinity for perfecting my own personal productivity and my natural gift for being able to work quickly tend to create a strategy of overwhelming people with okay content.

Spencer takes the opposite approach. He doesn’t create a ton but everything he does make causes people to stop in their tracks and say, “Woah.”

I, on the other hand, seem to be operating with some version of this in my head:

“I don’t know if what I’m doing is any good, or if I’m even capable of doing something excellent, so instead I’m going to create more ‘pretty good’ stuff than you think is even possible for one person to create and you will probably be impressed.”

This approach to creative work is a way for me to hide from the uncomfortable reality that doing great work requires skills I’ve yet to master — patience, editing, and taste, to name a few. My experiment of writing and publishing everyday was helping me develop skills I already had while letting me ignore skills I find uncomfortable.

“I can’t edit this piece for clarity or impact! I told myself that I’d publish something everyday! I can’t tackle a trickier idea because I don’t have the time to really tackle it the right way!”

With this new understanding still settling into my brain I’ve decided to embark on a new experiment. I’m still aiming to write everyday but I will no longer expect to publish something everyday. I’m hesitant to put an official interval on my publishing efforts, but I’m shooting for publishing something roughly every week or so. I want to give myself time to step away from a first draft, revisit with fresh eyes, rewrite and edit as needed, and put something into the world that I can be proud of on its own and not just because I wrote it quickly. I want to take the time to write articles that take me more than one session to draft because they require more careful thinking and care.

I’ve been sitting on some ideas that need more than a rushed evening writing session to bring to fruition. Removing my arbitrary daily publishing deadline has given me the space, and the motivation, to try to tackle these. Therefore, you’ll definitely be seeing my writing less frequently. The world doesn’t need another mediocre Medium author peddling half-baked (or even three-quarter baked) ideas so I’m taking myself out of the kitchen — for now.

I’ll be back when I have some fully baked bread, and better metaphors, to share.

My One Year Anniversary of Becoming a PhD Drop Out

I re-read the book Essentialism for the third or fourth time during my recent vacation. It’s one of a handful I come back to on a nearly yearly basis to help recalibrate my thinking. Even though I know all the ideas within it backwards and forwards every time I read it I’m always left with a slightly new take or a burst of motivation to do the things I know I should be doing.

The timing was particularly auspicious because today is the one year anniversary of one of the biggest essentialist decisions I’ve ever made — withdrawing from my PhD program.

With the benefit of some distance between me and this decision I figured I’d share a couple thoughts that may be generalizable beyond my own specific situation:

Big decisions can be hiding in plain sight.

I spent a lot of time tweaking my approach to how I was tackling my PhD in order to alleviate the extreme discomfort I was having in working a demanding full-time job and trying to finish a demanding PhD program. I tried working only in the morning before work. I tried working only in the evening after work. I tried working only on weekends. I tried taking myself on “PhD Retreats” where I could focus for days on end without distraction. I changed the apps I used to do my work. I did everything except sit down and face the big decision that needed to be faced, “Do I even want or need to still be in this PhD program?” Once I asked that question, my entire perspective on the matter changed in an instant.

It didn’t matter how much I played around the edges when what I really needed to do was get down to first principles.

It’s okay to not have a side project.

From the moment I graduated from undergrad in 2009 I’ve always had some kind of side hustle. When I was looking for a teaching job and then as a full-time teacher I always had my website, my hockey coaching, and eventually my personal development coaching practice. When I got into graduate school I was still writing multiple times a week for my website, expanded my coaching practice, organized a TEDx conference, and eventually started a consulting company. For the first year of my work with The Ready my PhD work was my side project. And now that I haven’t had a side project for the past year I must say… it’s actually kind of nice. Again with the essentialism, when you don’t have a side project you have fewer avenues for your time and attention and that can feel pretty great.

Most decisions are only hard once.

I actually think about this decision a lot less than I thought I would. Prior to deciding to withdraw, my PhD was an all-consuming force in my life. Then, when the idea of possibly dropping out first entered my mind, I had to live with this new all-consuming force eating away at me for several months. Part of me was extremely worried that I would somehow continue to be eaten by my PhD even after officially withdrawing. I figured I would be filled with regret or doubt about whether I made the right decision. Instead, a couple days afterward and it was like it never happened.

I’m not sure if the ease I found myself looking to the future and not dwelling on the past is something that I am lucky to have as an individual or if there is something innate that nearly all humans share about putting decisions behind us fairly quickly in order to free up our minds and our attention to face the new reality we’ve created for ourselves. I have a feeling it’s the latter.

Thirty minutes, every day. Trying to write and publish a thing that isn’t completely asinine. Leave feedback below or say hello on Twitter.

Eliminating Everything Does Not Spontaneous Genius Make

For the last two weeks I’ve been on vacation.

The first nine days of that vacation were spent in almost complete solitude. Other than one evening sitting around a campfire with my Airbnb hosts the only interaction I had with people during those nine days was whatever the bare minimum had to be to successfully complete a couple grocery shopping trips and a few evening restaurant meals. My goal was to put myself into as slow and silent an environment as possible and see what might happen when my brain had a chance to unclench and relax.

Part of me hoped that after two or maybe three days of psychically and emotionally detoxxing in my low-stimulus environment I would magically be inundated with great ideas. In my fantasy I would wake up early and sip my tea as I slowly walked around my rural property and thought the thoughts that would make me admired among my colleagues and beloved by my clients. I would sit in front of a fire (my fantasy didn’t really register that it was July) and write big thoughts by hand in an expensive notebook with an expensive pen. Either the beginnings of a novel or a non-fiction tome that would rock the discipline of organization design to its core.

As I said, this definitely ended up being a fantasy.

Reality was quite different. I still got up early but even though I was successful in quieting my mind and shifting out of my normal routine I didn’t find myself drawn to my open notebook for hours every day (regardless of how strategically I left it open and ready to go).

The first twinges of despair started to wind their way into my mind after the fifth or sixth day where my notebook remained mostly bare. And then, in a split second, for some unknown reason, I saw the situation differently and more compassionately.

It turns out that eliminating nearly everything out of my life that could’ve feasibly been a distraction (work commitments, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, news of all kinds… hell, basically all people) isn’t the secret to having great ideas. Eliminating everything does not allow for the spontaneous generation of incredible ideas. I actually take an extreme amount of solace in this. Not that won’t continue to experiment with solitude and focus and sheparding my attention — but that I don’t require these conditions to have ideas.

Maybe this is my brain trying to protect itself from walking down the path of feeling like my vacation was wasted because I didn’t have some kind of eureka moment? Or maybe there’s something positive to be said for knowing that the hard work of being creative takes more than taking a humongous eraser to my normal routine? Or maybe the nearly week and a half of solitude has helped plant some seeds for better writing and thinking in the near future?

Everyday I try to write and publish something about my life in 30 minutes or less. Leave comments below or follow me on Twitter.

The Gap Between Crushing It And Being Crushed

Motivation is a fickle thing.

Last week I was riding a wave of success in writing every day while also successfully completing most of my other daily commitments (meditating for fifteen minutes and reading for around an hour). As you may have noticed, though, I’ve gone a few days now without publishing anything. What’s striking about this, at least for me, is how the difference between how I was feeling in the midst of my steady routine and how I’m feeling now is so small. It’s not like I was riding a manic high and now I’m pulling myself through a deep depression. It’s not that at all.

I think that’s why I’m left sitting here without necessarily a super clear point of view about this. On the one hand, the fact that the difference between me functioning at my highest capacity and me being just okay is not particularly great, is reassuring. Meaning, it shouldn’t be too hard to tap back into that more elevated state of mind because it’s not that far from where I am right now. On the other hand, the fact that all it takes is an extremely minor slip in focus or motivation or discipline for me to be at a place where I’m not doing the things I know I need to do is pretty disconcerting. It means I need to be ever more vigilant to make sure that minor slip doesn’t happen. Or, if it does, identifying it immediately and then taking corrective action (which is what this article that I’m currently writing at 10:30 PM even though I want to go to sleep actually is).

I guess that’s the point of developing habits and routines, right? If something is truly a habit then you don’t have to sit down and write an article about how the balance point between executing your intentions perfectly and consistently failing at those intentions is so small. I’ll never feel the urge to write an article about how my tooth brushing habit has started to slide or that I keep forgetting to do my Friday pizza routine. That’s what makes them habits and routines. They have been successfully offloaded from my conscious mind and are now just things that happen.

Anyway, the fact that I was able to write anything this week while finishing up a major 6 month project and preparing for a vacation is a step in the right direction. I’ve been surprised by the reaction these silly little articles have elicited from folks in the responses here on Medium and on Twitter. I’ve really appreciated chatting with people about some of the ideas I’ve written about over the past week and a half. Let’s keep doing that.

Finally, I’m headed out the door for a two week vacation that’s going to be fairly off the grid. I’ll still be writing daily but those efforts won’t be finding their way to Medium (at least, not right away). A large part of this vacation (10 days of which will be completely by myself) is to try to really focus in on these daily habits I’ve been trying to inculcate which is probably why this topic is on my mind.

Keep the lights on while I’m gone — see you in a couple weeks!

I try to write articles every day (or as close to every day as I can manage) in 30 minutes or less. This was today’s. Thanks for reading.

#mundanelife: An exercise in boring

For the last couple of months I’ve been using my Instagram account to document the most mundane aspects of my life. Such riveting photos as a sink full of dirty dishes, an empty fast food container, and a bag of garbage sitting by my front door waiting to be taken to the dumpster. Truly boring stuff.

I don’t remember the exact moment of inspiration for the project but I do know the basic feeling I was reacting to when I decided to take my first exquisitely boring photograph. The slow accumulation of my friends’ exotic vacations, 5-star meals, and truly “I am having the time of my life” social events — all captured in high-fidelity (promptly pushed through a filter to make them look low-fidelity…) — eventually broke me. What used to be amazing had become mundane.

I’ve always loved learning about the boring details behind how people live and work. I love books like Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals and I used to even run a website where I collected quotes from historical figures talking about their own working processes (it was called Getting History Done and it was awesome — but now defunct). I love the mundane.

Beyond my own kind of weird obsession with things most people don’t even think about, I think my love for the mundane was further ignited when I read Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In it, he talks about the conditions for optimal experience and the idea that the quality of our lives is dictated by the overall quality of our attention across each moment. While he first investigated the flow experience in people participating in leisure activities like climbing, it isn’t a state of mind reserved for the obviously fun aspects of our lives. In fact, there’s no reason that we can’t learn to find flow in everything we do, including the incredibly mundane.

I love this idea. I think it’s incredibly powerful. The idea that regardless of what is happening in your environment you can still control the way you interact with it and the way you make sense of it. It’s inoculation against boredom! It’s a superpower that lets you be highly engaged with the world regardless of what you’re doing.

I think my little Instagram project is a tiny exercise in finding flow in the mundane. It helps me look at situations that otherwise would be so unremarkable as to not even enter my attention and engage with them in a semi-artistic way. Plus, it gives a more honest sense of what my life is really like. I think we could all use a dose of mundane honesty in our social media feeds and maybe recalibrate our sense of what it means to live a full and meaningful life.

If you want to follow along I’d love to have you join me on Instagram.

Every day I write something quickly (30 minutes or less) and share it with the world before I think about it too much. Share feedback below or on Twitter.

Let Me Help You Not Suck At Email So Much

An artist’s rendering of email.

I’m constantly aghast at people’s email habits. Not because I think “inbox zero” (barf) is some kind of badge of honor or because I think the key to success is responding to every email within mere seconds of it hitting your inbox. I’m aghast at people’s email habits because apparently they are making people miserable. It’s one of the most common things I hear from clients and while I can’t necessarily help you solve your organization’s toxic communication problem with this hot take I think I might be able to help you get your head on a little straighter when it comes to what you do control — your habits.

So, in true “lifehack” form, here is a prime numbered list of things you can do to TAKE BACK CONTROL OF YOUR INBOX or BECOME AN EMAIL NINJA or maybe, more modestly, stop dreading your email so much:

First scan of the inbox is for murder.

I love checking my email because the first thing I do every time I open my inbox is look for an email to murder. I guess the technical term is “unsubscribe from” — but I prefer committing email murder. It’s really simple. Every time you open your email your number one job is to find every email that can be unsubscribed from. Likely culprits include super shitty marketing emails for companies you don’t care about, updates from social networks (let’s be honest, you’re going to go check Facebook in a second anyway… you don’t need that notification in your email), newsletters that used to be good but aren’t anymore… you catch my drift. Become a serial email murderer and you will thank me in a couple weeks when those shitty emails stop showing their faces so often.

Stop treating your inbox like a task list.

For the love of God your email inbox is not your task list. You realize that basically anybody can email you, right? Anybody in THE ENTIRE WORLD can tap together a barely coherent string of sentences, send it to you, and then you treat the place where that thing lands as the list that tells you what you need to do? Like, for work? No! No! Your email is a place where potential things to do land and you being the smart and industrious professional you are will evaluate them in due time and decide whether they should be graced with your careful attention. But to do that you need to pull stuff out of your inbox and put it somewhere else. Like, almost literally anywhere else. In a pinch I guess you can use a separate folder in your email program to hold the emails you need to do something with but real next level shit is when you can pull out the actual tasks, in your own words, and put them on a list somewhere. I like Things because I started using it 10 years ago and I fear change. Use whatever you want. Just not your inbox.

Burn your filing system to the ground.

When I was a small child one of my favorite things to do was organize my hockey cards. I had thousands of them and I wouldn’t blink twice at spending a weekend organizing them alphabetically, or by set number, or even sometimes by an obscure stat (who wouldn’t want their cards organized by penalty minutes?). It was tedious and pointless — much like filing emails into folders. Seriously, when is the last time you actually needed to find an email in a folder? What? Never? Maybe spending an extra couple seconds filing every email you receive into its respective folder for YEARS isn’t the best use of your time? (And if you answered that question by saying, “Earlier today,” well — good for you. You get to ignore this piece of advice). Search in email is pretty amazing now. All you need to do is remember at most two pieces of information and you can find any email ever sent you. It’s the best. And the best part is that you don’t need to spend your afternoon organizing your hockey cards… I mean filing your email.

Christ on a bicycle, turn off your notifications!

Remember how I said that anyone in the world can write you an email? It’s bad enough that shit has to show up in your inbox. It’s 100 times worse if that piece of digital drivel triggers a notification that distracts you from something you were doing. No more notifications. For real. Turn them off. Even if you work somewhere where you’re basically expected to live in your inbox. Try checking your email every 15 minutes in those cases. Set an alarm if you want to, I don’t care! Just don’t let random ass notifications drive where you put your attention. You realize that email notifications are basically a perfect random reward schedule, right? This is what casinos use to get you to keep pumping your money into slots or what scientists use to get pigeons to keep pecking at a button until they are so obsessed its all they do. You are not a pigeon (I hope).

I guess I lied earlier when I said I had a prime number of hot tips for you. That’s just how I like to roll. Maybe use the time I just saved you by not giving you a 5th tip by not going to check your email.

Every day I write something. Sometimes I swear in those things. Sorry. You can yell at me on Twitter if you want.

The Weekly Review and Self-Management of Attention

This photo has been professionally simulated to appear like my Weekly Review station. Don’t try this at home.

I don’t remember who said this (maybe a Peter Drucker quote that I first heard via Merlin Mann?) but it has always struck me as more profound than we give it credit for (and this is undoubtedly paraphrased from whatever the actual quote happens to be): “The first job of any knowledge worker is figuring out what their job is today.”

How do you know what your job is on any given day? Sure, you have a job title. When you were hired you probably responded to a job application that had some kind of job description attached to it. There’s a list of bullet points that I guess is some kind of description of what you’re supposed to do — right?

If you’re a knowledge worker, particularly one with any kind of agency over how you spend your time at work, you know that the makeup of your job shifts constantly. What you were hired to do X years ago is just a shadow of what you do now. Your neat and tidy job title is laughably inaccurate given how you’re expected to spend your time and attention now.

The problem that I’ve seen in my coaching and consulting career so far is that very few people actually take the time to figure out what flavor of their job they need to inhabit at any specific time. They try to bring the same frame of mind and habits to everything they do. They have a very undifferentiated take on what it means to show up and be a knowledge worker every day.

All of this is just preamble for the main point I wanted to make today: do a Weekly Review.

The canonical Weekly Review comes out of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and methodology. As part of GTD, the Weekly Review is the time you set aside at the end of a week to go through your system and make sure it’s updated and ready to go for the week coming up. I’ve been practicing and tweaking GTD for my own needs for about 10 years but one thing that has always stayed constant is the Weekly Review. I’ve built out a very robust checklist that I fire up every Sunday evening and systematically work through with a mug of tea and either a podcast or some soft music to keep me company. My template is here (but it is so customized to my needs it’s probably not useful other than as an example for what yours could look like).

I’ve been thinking about work, particularly knowledge work in complex environments, more and more from an attention management perspective lately. Our attention and the way we develop, protect, and allocate it is foundational to understanding the future of work.

A Weekly Review helps me survey the entire landscape of where my attention is currently going (without my knowledge or choice), where it is currently going (with my knowledge or choice), and where it could or should be going but isn’t. This dedicated time allows me to pull apart these strands and make some decisions instead of just leaving them all gummed up into some kind of untenable ball of vague confusion. It combines steps of letting my attention spread wide (collecting all my open loops and thinking about the future) and brings my attention back into a narrow focus (making specific decisions about projects and next actions).

To bring it back to the opening quote, a Weekly Review is an awesome tool to help you figure out what kind of jobs you’re likely to have this week. It helps you feel confident about what’s coming up so you can bring the right mentality to everything that’s thrown at you this week. In a world where expectations are high and the pace is unrelenting we need every little bit of help we can get.

At least, I know I do.

I write an article in 30 minutes every day. This is the article I wrote today. Did you like it? Did you hate it? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments below.

Knowledge Work as Craft Work

Expert craftspeople have intimate relationships with their tools. In many cases they have created their own tools specifically for their own specific use case and personal preferences. The tools become an extension of their own bodies as they do their work. Paradoxically, masters are both obsessed with their tools and the slight preferences they represent (try talking to a high level hockey player about his preferred stick type/length/taping pattern, etc.) and they don’t let their tools get in the way of doing their work (that same hockey player can use any stick in a pinch).

I think one of the main things that knowledge workers struggle with is a lack of relationship with their tools. In a world where our work products are often ephemeral and digital there’s a gap for many where the the crafter/tool relationship should be. We may not have a specific hammer or wrench that we feel a close connection to because it helps us do our work more easily (and maybe we have some positive memories associated with it) but we do have computers, tablets, phones, apps, and web services that make up our knowledge worker toolkit. They aren’t physical objects but I think they play the exact same role in our world.

Meaning at work is a complex and broad topic. I wouldn’t begin to suggest that the best or only way to feel a greater sense of meaning in your work is to start paying more attention to your tools. That seems a little disingenuous and possibly insulting to anyone who feels stuck in an organizational system that is inherently dehumanizing. However, it’s hard to argue with the fact that many people who identify as being some kind of craftperson often report a high sense of meaning in the work they do. To that end, is it possible for the knowledge worker to have the same quality of mind, that same relationship between their effort and their results, that many craftspeople seem to have?

I think so. And it starts with sweating your tools. It starts with having an opinion about the software and the services and the tools you use to make your dent in the world.

That might mean exploring alternatives to the apps you dread using but feel like you have to. Have you ever tried a different email app? A different calendar app? Have you ever looked at the preferences options of your most used software and seen if there’s anything you want to tweak? Do you hate the keyboard of your laptop? Ever tried using an external keyboard that feels better to type on? There’s an endless array of tweaks, modifications, and choices to be made related to every aspect of our tools. Granted, I don’t want anybody to fall down the unproductive rabbit hole of endless tool tweaking — but I have a feeling most people are much closer to the end of the continuum where they’ve never even thought about their tools (as opposed to me, hanging out dangerously close to the “obsessive tweaker” end of the continuum).

Just because we spend most of our time in the world of bits and bytes doesn’t mean that we can’t cultivate a relationship, as weird as that may sound, with the tools that help us make our living.

I share an idea in 30 minutes or less every day. Have a thought or a comment? Leave one below or reach out on Twitter.

I Just Followed You Again And I Promise I’m Not Crazy

If you’re a friend of mine you may think I’m a little crazy. If you get notifications when someone follows you on social media, particularly Twitter or Instagram, you may wonder if I’ve lost my marbles. Every couple of months you may notice that I’ve once again re-followed you for the second or fourth or tenth time (it depends how long we’ve known each other).

I’m not trying to get your attention or elicit a re-follow or send any message of any kind. What’s actually going on is that you just passed the relatively extreme filter I use when it comes to my social media lists.

Well, when I put it that way it makes it sound like I have some kind of sophisticated system or algorithm I run to create the most impactful, useful, and interesting social media feeds. That would be pretty far from the truth. What actually happens is that I generally start with a pretty small group of core people I enjoy or I think post interesting things that I like to follow (folks like yourself, obviously). However, over time I keep adding more and more folks to my lists. I follow a little bit more indiscriminately. I get an itchy follow finger, basically.

And then one day I wake up full of self-loathing for how little creative output I’ve had or how deep into a procrastination hole I’ve fallen and I look around for the quickest fix that will give me some immediate psychological relief. Given my minimalist tendencies and proclivity for extreme behavior in that direction, that often means wiping all my social media accounts clean. Back to zero. All gone.

And that feels good for a couple days or a couple weeks.

But then I realize that my lack of creative output or deep procrastination had very little to do with my social media accounts and I feel the void that they were filling in my life (social connection with real people, a steady stream of interesting and relevant content, the occasional easy, breezy entertainment, etc.) and I decide to start using them again. And then I start re-following folks.

And that’s how we get to where I feel the need to write an article about why I just re-followed you for the ninth time.

I try to write everyday. This is part of that. Have a thought? Tweet me, yo.

In Which I Have To Critique One Of My Intellectual Heroes: Or, Why Cal Newport Is Wrong

I’m a huge fan of Cal Newport’s writing. I read Deep Work the day it came out from cover to cover in less than a day. I read it four times in total in 2016. I’ve read So Good They Can’t Ignore You twice and have given it as gifts to multiple younger brothers and friends. I think his take on the deliberate cultivation of attention management skills is generally on point and a voice of reason in a very noisy world. I’m a huge fan of the digital minimalism idea he espouses and I think I would be a much more creative and productive individual if I could internalize more of his ideas.

However, I think I’m starting to see the limits of Cal’s experience as an academic in his writing about how work is done in the corporate world.

In his latest article, “An Early 20th Century Lesson on the Difference Between Convenience and Value” he shares a story about how the Pullman Company improved productivity by making it more difficult to communicate and coordinate across the organization. The ultimate “turns out” (“Everything you thought about a thing is actually wrong!”) story in a world that’s rife with email and Slack and instant messages, right?

It’s dangerous to take this story too literally or extrapolate it too far.

Much of the work I do at The Ready is helping organizations understand that they aren’t in the early 20th century anymore. The world in which the Pullman Company operated in the early 1900s is so radically different from today and extrapolating elements of their organizational operating system into our own organizations (organizations that probably aren’t manufacturing luxury train cars) should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Communication doesn’t need to be fluid in an organization where the economic forces aren’t as radical or rapidly changing as they are today (e.g. no Internet, less globally intertwined supply chains, less globalization, slower pace of business overall, etc.). The challenges organizations face today are often caused by broken communication. Departments that ought to be working together in tight cross-functional teams instead exist in functional silos that never talk to each other. Complex questions and conversations that many could value from are locked into individual’s inboxes — potentially useful information locked away in email purgatory.

In complex organizations its impossible to always know who specifically needs to know what piece of information so instead we push our clients to “default to open” and “work in public” and move their informational ecosystem to one where people can pull information as needed instead of being bombarded with an information avalanche. For all its faults, Slack and other tools like it can help enable these shifts in working that weren’t needed in the early 20th century but are allowing the firms of the 21st century to cope and thrive in a thoroughly VUCA world.

We should all continue taking Cal’s attention management advice on the individual level but we should also be wary about taking over simplistic views about what it means to work together in the 21st century. There’s a certain romance and elegance to looking at how things used to be done and applying those lessons to how we work today. And in some cases, there are valid ideas we should reinstate. But it’s important to remember that the business world of today looks very different from the business world of 100 years ago.

In many cases, the organizations who are upgrading their organizational operating systems are the ones navigating this uncertain and complex world better than those who are locked in the past.

Every day I try to come up with something insightful to say, write it, and publish it in less than 30 minutes. This was today’s effort. Have feedback? Leave a comment below or get at me on Twitter.

Is Your Organization Amazon-Proof?

If there’s one thing organizations need to take away from the recent Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, it’s that everything can change in an industry in an instant. Last year’s strategic plan and budget can suddenly seem like relics of the past when something fundamentally shifts in a market and competitive landscape. All organizations need operating systems optimized for the kind of uncertain world where an online retailer/internet infrastructure provider/media company can buy one of the largest players in groceries. To live in a world where the unexpected becomes commonplace, organizations need operating systems where responsiveness, fluidity, and innovation are baked into just “how we do things around here.”

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the reality for most.

How many orgs can absorb a shockwave like Amazon moving firmly into their market and feel confident that they have the processes, people, and policies that will allow them to do what needs to be done to adjust accordingly? Not many. Too many organizations are reliant on a single charismatic leader or a cabal of executives that are somehow supposed to guide the organization through tumult they never even saw coming and are left as surprised as everyone else. Does that fill you with confidence?

Great organizations have flexibility and resilience and responsiveness baked into every fiber of their being. Their hiring processes optimize for people with the right mindset. Their resource allocation processes remain flexible (i.e. not locked into annual cycles). They build teams that come together around solving real problems regardless of organizational hierarchy or politics. They push trust and autonomy to the edges of the organization so that decisions can be made quickly and those who are closest to the customers have the greatest ability to do what’s needed to be done to make or keep those customers happy.

It’s a fundamental shift from how most organizations think about themselves and how they show up in the world.

It’ll be interesting to watch as the volatility inevitably continues to increase. More Amazon/Whole Foods-scale acquisitions, more unpredictable sociopolitical events, and more, “What the hell is happening?” moments will start to separate the orgs who get it from the ones who don’t. The orgs who try to retrench and consolidate power will find themselves brittle and at risk. The orgs who embrace the unpredictable nature of the world and build the capabilities into their system, even if that looks messy or inefficient or unorganized — those are the orgs that will own the future.

I love that my job is helping organizations get ready for that future.

I try to write something (moderately insightful) every day in 30 minutes or less. Have a comment or question? Catch me on Twitter.

Making a Weekly Personal Metrics Spreadsheet

The times where I collected the most data about my life were not necessarily the times where I felt like I was making the most interesting insights about my life. Said another way, more data doesn’t always mean more better conclusions. Ahem. Something like that.

For the past year or so I’ve adhered to a pretty simple weekly habit that has made my efforts to quantify aspects of my life so much more useful. I call it my Weekly Personal Metrics spreadsheet.

The problem it’s trying to solve is — in a world of lots of data easily collected, how do you even remember what you’re tracking, let alone actually remember to go look at it and see if you can glean any insights? In a perfect world all of the interesting data I want to collect would be done so passively and a smart app or operating system would crunch it and feed me interesting tidbits (yes, I know Exist.io and Addapp exist but I have found them…. wanting).

The simple trick is to sit down once a week and collect all my various data points and manually add them to a simple spreadsheet. Then, I can look at them and compare them against the previous week (which is what I do most often and where the red/green cell colors come from). If I was more industrious I could make all sorts of visualizations to show how I’m doing on the various metrics I’m tracking (that might be an end of year project actually).

This simple little addition to my weekly routine has actually been pretty great. It helps me notice when I’m letting things spin out of control (I’m looking at you Sleep and Weight) and make changes before things get totally out of hand. It lets me really lean into as many passive sources of data collection as possible because instead of just letting them slip away into the ether I know I’m going to extract everything once a week.

I’ll go into more depth about why I track what I track in a future article. For now, you’ll just have to be happy with the nuts and bolts of setting up a Weekly Personal Metrics spreadsheet.

Making your own is as simple as figuring out a.) what’s important enough (or easy enough) to track? b.) when will you update it? That’s about it. Find important things that are easy to track (sleep is a good starting point if you have an Apple Watch and weight is kind of a no-brainer if you have a scale) and once a week pull the data into a spreadsheet. Do that every week for a long time and you’ll start to see the patterns emerge.

This is part of my semi-regular* series where I conceive of an article idea, write it, edit it, and publish it in 30 minutes or less. Have a thought? Leave a comment or follow me on Twitter.

*Where semi-regular means I sometimes go weeks without writing.

A Minimalist’s WWDC Desires

I’m a pretty unabashed Apple fan. I use almost exclusively Apple products in my personal and professional tech life and for the most part they have served me well. However, seeing as we’re just a day away from WWDC I figured I’d capture some quick thoughts about what I hope to see them do.

In general, I’m very much a minimalist which means I try to be very thoughtful about which tools I use — and how. I don’t really care about brand new pieces of hardware or amazing new apps. I own and copiously use a 12" iPad Pro and Pencil, iPhone 7 Plus, and MacBook in my personal and professional (management consultant) life. And yes, my definition of minimalism includes owning three different and very expensive pieces of technology. Then again, my phone’s home screen also looks like this:

Before I dive into the specifics, here are some things I’m always looking for from the tech tools I own and use regularly:

1. Like I just said, great stock apps. I always default to using the stock apps until they can no longer get the job done.

2. Storing data in the cloud as much as possible. I want as little of my data as possible to be tied to specific devices.

3. Great syncing. I’m almost equally likely to work from my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook. I want to be able to pick up any of them and know everything is synced and ready to go.

4. Reliability. I want to think about whether or not my tools are going to “work” as much as possible.

5. Use all the information you have about me to be as useful as possible. This means using context to be helpful in surprising ways.

6. Thin, light, and well made.

7. As simple as possible.

And now, on to some of my hopes for this year’s WWDC.

Better Siri

I would love a world where I could talk to my devices and trust they will do what I want them to do. Unfortunately, we are nowhere near that reality, yet. Siri needs to get more reliable and smarter about parsing my intention. The less “Siri syntax” I have to learn and the more I can talk like a normal human being, the better. Being able to successfully use my phone to do something other than starting or stopping a podcast without having to pull it out of my pocket would be great. #simplicity #reliability

Apple VPN

Somebody on some podcast I listen to suggested this as something that would be really interesting for Apple to offer and I’m on board. I’d pay a couple bucks a month for an Apple VPN (especially given our current political climate). I’ve used a standalone VPN off and on for the last couple years but having something built into the OS (both iOS and macOS) would really simplify things. #simplicity #reliability

Rumored “Siri Speaker”

I don’t have a huge desire for a new piece of hardware to manage, especially since I’ve been having more success using “Hey Siri” on my watch and phone recently (although, not enough success given wish list item #1). However, if Apple focused on making the speaker really good I might be interested if it could feasibly replace one or both of my SONOS speakers. I’ll trade my two SONOS speakers for a really high quality “Siri Speaker” (especially since they both sit on my desk and I live in a studio apartment — meaning I don’t need the separate rooms functionality). What would make this an instabuy for me is if it also contains wireless router functionality, thus replacing my Airport Express, too. #simplicity

Native Sleep Tracking with iPhone + Apple Watch

I’ve used AutoSleep and Sleep++ in the past but I’d love for Apple to just take this over and do it really, really well. AutoSleep is a design nightmare and Sleep++ is fine but has to be turned on manually. I’d really like to see what Apple could do with a native solution. #simplicity #stockapps

Natural Language Processing in Calendar.app

The default calendar app can handle basically everything I need but every time I move away from Fantastical 2 I miss how easy it is to create new events. I don’t want to spin dials or click through options. Let me just type (or say!) a sentence like a person and make my event from that. #simplicity #stockapps

Make Keychain a Legit Standalone Password Manager

I’ve become more interested in the past few weeks in seeing whether Keychain can truly replace 1Password. I’m not sure that it can at the moment… but it’s not too far away from being able to do so. Would love to see Apple lean into this. #simplicity #stockapps

Auto-Start Workouts on Watch

I always forget to start a running workout on my watch when I go for a run. But it knows my footfall cadence, heartrate, (and if I had a newer watch, my GPS location). Meaning, if you can tell I’m running just start a running workout! Or shoot me a push notification that says, “Yo, it looks like you’re running. Are you running?” I’ll bet it could figure out whether I’m swimming or cycling or anything else, too. Be smart about helping me capture these workouts! #simplicity #context

More Granular Notification Settings

I don’t let many notifications come through, but I would love to have control of my Do Not Disturb preferences on an app-by-app basis. Meaning, I’d love to have all my work related apps (a group that I could designate) not be allowed to send me any notifications after 6:00 PM but let my entertainment or messaging based apps keep notifying me until 10:00 PM or so. Even better granularity would be if my phone would shoot me notifications (or not) based on information from my calendar or location in the world, too. #simplicity #context

More Actions From Notifications

Again, I don’t have many notifications hitting my phone/watch… but the ones that do come through I’d love to be able to do more with. Give me more actions so that when I happen to get a notification that I can do something with I can take care of it instantly. #simplicity #context

Better Podcasts App

Every time I try to use the default podcasts app for any length of time I almost always end up reinstalling Overcast. I’m trying to figure out why since ideally a podcast app isn’t something you have to actively engage with very much. I think I just don’t like, or aren’t used to, how it’s laid out. I don’t need to be able to find new podcasts easily so I think the fact that Search, Featured, and Top Charts take up 3/5 of the menu bar real estate really throws it off. #stockapps

TV App

I appreciate the effort of centralizing my video watching experience into one app but if everything isn’t in there then it’s not really solving any problems. Make whatever deals you need to make to get everything in there… or just don’t do it. #stockapps

More Cross Platform Consistency

I don’t think macOS needs to become an iOS clone. I get that the two systems serve different purposes. But there is some really low hanging fruit that should be unified across them. Stuff like setting a timer with Siri on my MacBook. Why can’t I do that? Why is music, TV, movies, and apps all unified under iTunes on my Mac but broken into separate apps on my iOS devices. Let’s clean this up. #simplicity #reliability

iPad Hardware

I’m intrigued by the rumored new 10” iPad form factor that would exist between the original size and the honking 12” size. I think the 12” is slightly too big for me most of the time. I also think that future iPads should get some kind of super unobtrusive kickstand on the back so I can use it without a cover/case. Keep pushing thinness, too. #simplicity #thinandlight

MacBook

I like the new butterfly switch keyboards… except for the fact that I’ve had to get a stuck key fixed three times. Keep the low key travel but make it more reliable. Also, no need to make this any thinner. Keep it the same size but cram some more batteries in there. More battery life is more important than lighter or thinner at this point. #reliability

AirPods

I think AirPods in black would be delightful. I would also like them to be a touch more consistent when I tap to invoke Siri. #reliability

Apple Pencil

Make it so this bastard doesn’t roll away from me without me having to put a stupid third party clip on it. Put an on/off switch on it so the battery doesn’t die as much. And I’d be okay with making it a tiny bit thicker. #simplicity

What about you? What would make your computing life simpler and more enjoyable this year?

A Subtle Mental Shift Is Kind of Rocking My World Right Now

I’m a man who love(d) a good goal.

Goals are supposed to provide clarity and potentially motivation (if it’s a particularly well-crafted goal) on a quest of personal development. I know all about how good goals are supposed to be set and I can break down an audacious goal into bite-sized chunks with the best of them. Unfortunately, this torrid love affair with goals has remained largely unrequited. Goals just don’t love me as much as I love them.

My eyes have been wandering and I think I may have found my next personal development amour and this time it feels a little bit different…

A Practice-Based Approach to Personal Development

A practice is more than just a goal. It’s a mindset and lens on life that permeates everything you do and think. You don’t ever achieve a final end state in a practice. There’s no final goal, ultimate boss, or checkbox to tick when you’ve finished. It’s a commitment to taking constant yet small action that helps you develop skill. It’s a way of life. It’s just how you think and act.

My goals were always designed around aspirations like “being in good shape” or accomplishing some sort of impressive extracurricular activity like “write a book” or “start a company.” They were my best shot at articulating the end state that I thought would bring me happiness and/or meaning. I’ve finally realized, though, that trying to set goals kind of flies in the face of a lot of what I believe about the difficulty and impracticality of predicting the future in a complex world. Who am I to know what specifically might be the best thing for me to pursue?

Therefore, I’ve been experimenting with having a small handful of “practices” that I’m always thinking about and trying to challenge and push myself in at all times. They aren’t goals and they are very broad. They come out of the self-knowledge I’ve gained over the past 30 years about when, where, and how I feel like I’m at my best. As of this writing, they are:

• Mindfulness

• Strength

• Cooking

• Journaling/Writing

• Minimalism/Essentialism

• Deep Work

My hypothesis is that developing skills in these areas (which obviously aren’t mutually exclusive) will serve me much more than any set of discrete goals ever could. Each of these practices can be developed with deliberate effort and consist of actual skills that can be practiced and refined.

I’m still working on the supporting mechanisms that will help me bring these to life, but so far I’ve landed on a couple that have worked well.

1. Weekly Freewriting & Reflection

First, I’ve set aside some time every weekend to just do some free writing about how the previous week went in each of my practices. What did I do to become more skilled in this area? What didn’t I do? What should I consider doing next week? Taking some time to just reflect and set some basic intentions helps me stay on the proper track.

2. Tracking Meaningful Metrics

Another thing I’m still in the process of doing is figuring out which metrics actually help me see development in each practice. The obvious one is simply the number of sessions in which I deliberately engage in the practice (number of strength workouts, number of meals cooked at home or new recipes tried, number of meditation sessions, etc.) but I think there may be a few others that are worth tracking. I already have a pretty robust weekly metrics habit where I regularly track a few numbers that matter to me so this is simply a matter of updating those metrics to make sure they directly support my practices.

3. Capturing Potential Next Actions (in a Low Key Way)

Finally, I created a folder for each practice within OmniFocus where I capture discrete next actions I could partake in to help me further develop my practices. These ideas often fall out of the freewriting exercise I shared above. I often start the freewriting exercise by quickly reviewing and checking off the actions I know I took in the previous week. For example, right now in my Cooking Practice I have the actions, “sharpen my knife,” “find a recipe to cook this week,” and “read another section in The Food Lab.” In my Strength Practice I have “bail on a squat” (so I can get over my fear of failing a rep and learn how to do it in a safe way) and “finish reading chapter 3 of Starting Strength.” I treat these next actions lightly and none of them have a due date. They’re just placeholders to help me figure out what to do when I decide I want to do a session in any of my Practices.

I’ve only been doing this for a couple weeks but the difference in my mindset has been incredible. Thinking about the ways I want to be better as never ending practices instead of finite goals has somehow completely shifted what it means to get better at something. My actions are no longer a means to an end but an end within themselves. Maybe it’s possible to make that mental shape without all the rigamarole I described above but for whatever reason this is really working for me.

Expect more on this topic as I continue tweaking the basic approach and getting deeper into the practices themselves.

This article is part of my daily challenge to write and publish something in about 30 minutes. Please excuse the length — if I had more time I would’ve written something shorter. I like feedback in the comments below or Twitter (@samspurlin).