Try this: tonight, before you go to bet, set out your clothes for tomorrow.
Why, Shawn!?
One reason we procrastinate is because we lack a system of execution.
If you make the first step of a task or project easier on yourself, then you have one step one already decided. It will make it simpler to continue following through.
(Pro tip: you can apply the night-time-outfit-trick to any other project or area of your life.)
I recently revisited this article about ideas, and a few things about it stuck out fresh to me:
And, in fact, these two go together. You need to consistently finishing what you start… If you’re a slave to every new idea then you’ll never have the focus to finish a single thing.
I was recently flipping through Greg McKeown’s book, Essentialism, and came across this quote that I had highlighted:
“If you believe being overly busy and overextended is evidence of productivity, then you probably believe that creating space to explore, think, and reflect should be kept to a minimum.”
It is dangerous to be overly urgent and busy. Because it will distract us from slowing down.
One definition of Focus is “Maximum Clarity”. But, in life, having maximum clarity doesn’t always mean having absolute, perfect clarity. Focus can be a graduating scale.
Sometimes, having maximum clarity right now, may still seem a bit vague… maybe you are only 80% confident and clear. But that’s the best you’ve got right now so you make the best decision you can at the time with the values, motivation, and information available to you right now.
Thus you must make a decision with the most amount of clarity you have right now. Knowing that, as you move forward, things will come more into view and you can make adjustments.
I try to make as few decisions each day as possible.
Here are some of the things I’ve “automated” about my day, and why it matters.
Years ago, I started with automating the trivial parts of my life:
I rarely make those same choices every day as if they were “new”. I’ve mostly become boring about the trivial stuff, so that I don’t have to think much about it every day.
Next, I removed as many of the non-trivial decisions from my day as possible as well.
I did this by creating routines for growth in my life. Things such as:
By creating routines for growth in each area of my life I don’t have to think about growth decisions every day. Instead, I simply have to show up and stick to my routine.
By “automating” parts of my day, it means two things…
See? Routines are sexy.
By automating parts of my daily life, I don’t think and decide about the same things over and over and over every day.
This lets me save my “decision energy” for the things that really NEED it. Such as being present for relationships, creating new things, and solving interesting problems.
It’s been more than 18 months since my company switched from Basecamp to Notion for managing our entire editorial calendar and all other projects as well.
There are a lot of great things and a lot of frustrating things about Notion. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the good and the frustrating.
In this excellent article from Paul Graham, he talks about the fact that a lot of work kinda sucks — that’s the nature of it a lot of time. And so you have to just dive on in and do it.
But, unfortunately, a lot of people and teams will shy away from the work that sucks — because, well, they don’t want to do it. Who does? But it’s often the unpleasant work that leads to big breakthroughs and successes.
And so, a Paul says, that’s not to say you should go out of your way to seek out unpleasant work, but neither should you shrink from it when it’s on the path to something great.
This reminds me also of something from Scott Belskey:
There is an inverse correlation between how much you value your time and how much “luck” you encounter (i.e. noticing opportunities around you and capitalizing on them).
New successes require lowering your expected ROI on your time.</blockquote >This is how inflated egos extinguish new possibility: the more important you think you are, then the less open you are to non-obvious opportunity and the more limited your chance of success in new vectors and relationships.
A reader recently asked me about procrastination, and I pointed them to this article about The 5-Minute Rule.
There are many activities in life that are worth doing but that aren’t always easy to get started. A few things that come to mind for me include:
When it’s time to do one of these activities, and I don’t feel like it, then I will commit to 5 minutes.
I’ll spend 5 minutes putting away the dishes; 5 minutes warming up; or 5 minutes writing whatever crappy prose comes to mind.
Then, after those first 5 minutes, if I’m still not into it I give myself permission to move on to something else. But most of the time, it only takes a few minutes for the momentum to kick in.
This was something like the 30th sabbatical week that my company has taken since 2017.
After years of these regular, week-long sabbatical breaks, I’ve discovered a few things that help me make the most of my time out of the office.
One of the best ways to get the most out of a sabbatical week is to know the difference between true rest and counterfeit rest.
True rest will leave you recharged with more energy. Thus, you want to find restful activities that give you energy rather than draining it. I love to say that if you work with your head, rest with your hands (such as cooking, woodworking, landscaping, etc.).
And so, here’s the thing: true rest usually takes a little bit of effort.
Things like reading a paperback novel, cooking a meal, going out for a walk, having a conversation with someone, listening to an audiobook with your significant other. Heck, even just sitting down, alone, and not having a phone or screen can take some effort.
And so, during my sabbatical breaks, I focus hard on getting a healthy dose of that restful and creative work.
My aim is usually to have one big project that I can get done during the week in addition to daily anchors such as exercise, getting out on a excursion, having a meal with someone, etc.
I also keep my same sleep schedule. It would be easy to toss discipline into the wind for that week and treat it like full-on vacation mode. But honestly, that leaves me feeling more exhausted and behind at the end.
Anyway, for me, this past Sabbatical that was just last week seemed to be themed around taking pictures and cooking food. I smoked about 40 lbs of beef brisket and I got out several times to make photos with my Leica Q.
One other thing, on April 12 I began posting daily videos to Instagram. You can’t schedule these videos ahead of time, I was on Instagram posting them every day, which definitely led to me spending much more time on social media than I normally would.
My Screen Time Report for last week shows an average of more than 90 minutes / day on Instagram. Ouch. Even though a lot of that was time spent in the app to create my daily videos, it’s still a lot of time on social.
Anyway, if you’re curious what an average Sabbatical week looks like for me, it’s not too far off from how I spent last week’s break. Here’s a rundown:
Smoked a 12-pound brisket, just for fun. I woke up early on Monday morning to get the brisket on the smoker. Then spent most of the day tending to the food and prepping the sides. And, because we live in Kansas City, of course I separated the point and chopped it to make burnt ends. It was fantastic.
My youngest son was home from school on Tuesday, so he and I got to work together to build new storage shelves in the guest room closet downstairs.
It was a beautiful day for a drive in the CJ-7. I took my sister out to lunch. Made some photos with the Leica Q. And, later in the evening, I lit up the backyard fire pit for dude’s night with a good friend.
Finished building the closet shelves.
Made dinner: Korean rice wraps with bulgogi beef and bulgogi tofu. Not gonna lie, the tofu was on point.
Smoked more brisket! Not one, but two (!) briskets for a fundraiser at our church that was happening Sunday. I made them the day before because they needed to be dropped off on Sunday morning and I did not want to be up and down all night tending to the brisket and hoping it would be ready in time on Sunday morning.
I personally did’t get to try the brisket (I delivered it wrapped and uncut), but I heard it turned out great. And, of course, I also made burnt ends and I did taste test those and they turned out just as incredible as the same-day ends I made on Monday.
Anna and I have made it a focus in life to go on a date every week. Sometimes we go out, and sometimes our date nights are at home because we want to stay home or maybe we just can’t find a sitter. Sometimes we sit on the back deck or walk around the neighborhood.
It has been an unusually busy month at home for us, and this past Sunday we were actually we able to get out of the house and go on a date. We went to sushi dinner, got ice cream, and enjoyed some beautiful weather walking around downtown area snapping some photos with my Leica Q.
. . . .
As you can see, my week above was a somewhat “normal” week. The only really different thing is that I didn’t go into my office to do any work.
But I still kept to my same basic daily schedule: I go to bed and wake up at the same time as I do on weeks when I am working. I kept my exercise routine and did my normal rowing and lifting workouts. Ultimately, for an average sabbatical week, the biggest change for me is that the 6-8 hours / day that I normally would be working, I instead will spend that time on personal projects — cooking, woodworking, making photos, and extra family time.
These regular sabbaticals give me the space and the time to pull back from work. I also love how the sabbatical creates a clear and consistent stopping point for our focused work cycles, that help us to avoid biting off more than we can chew and to get more work done in less time.
There are 8 Laws of Focus and one of them is the Law of Tradeoffs.
As David Allen said, you can do anything but you cannot do everything. In order to give your perpetual devotion to any one thing it will require the perpetual neglect of many other things. Focus, therefore, requires tradeoffs.
You can only focus on so many things at a time. And you can only focus for so many hours during the day. Instead of ignoring the limitation on your energy, embrace it and find ways to routinize and automate the non-trivial areas of your life so that even when you are not giving them your full attention and devotion, they are not being fully neglected.
Speaking of meta work… if you take a few minutes to create an implementation intention for your task, then you are 3x more likely to do that task (as opposed to simply writing the task down).
What’s an implementation intention? It’s simply deciding when and where you will do something.
There are 4 necessary steps to doing work that matters:
Only one of those steps is actually doing the work. The other 3 are what we call “meta work”.
Meta work is the work that happens before and after the work itself. If you are cooking dinner, meta work is doing your meal planning and going grocery shopping and then cleaning up after dinner. If you are writing an article, meta work is scheduling your writing time and topic.
There are so many times when we feel like meta work is a waste of our time. Planning, meetings, reviews, etc… why bother!? Let me get to work!
To be sure, we never want the meta work to get in the way. But neither can we skip it. When you look at the meta work in context of the bigger picture, you can instantly see that it is necessary. You cannot skip any of the steps or else you will short-circuit the whole process. But, of course, neither should you spend too much time on the meta steps.
Here’s one from the archives that I recently re-surfaced. As I was reading through this listicle, it’s amazing how smart and timeless a lot of this advice is. I would say that the first two items in the list still stand as true as ever, if not even more so now.
Something fun happened earlier this week: Monday was the 11-year anniversary of when I quit my job and began blogging for a living!
On Monday, I walked into the office and proudly exclaimed that this business goes to 11! I’ve been waiting a decade to tell that joke, yet all I got were blank stares from my team. (They were, of course, promptly fired.)
For any of you long-time readers, you may remember how I used to support my work through a $3 / month subscription to get access to the private “Shawn Today” podcast. Wow. Those were the days…
Over the past 11 years, so much has changed! It’s no longer just me, sitting down at my desk to write and publish for my blog. There is a team of us now, and I absolutely love getting to work with them!
We celebrated on Monday with a dozen Crumbl Cookies (if you know, you know) as we spent the day ideating, brainstorming, and organizing a lot of new initiatives around our 4-Focus Method and the next big update to Focus Academy and beyond.