In order to restore and maintain margin in your life, you’ll have to become comfortable with making trade-offs.
As I’ll talk more about tomorrow, there is a sad irony to many people’s lack of margin. You see, for many folks, their pursuit of meaningful work and a meaningful life is what has prompted them to sacrifice margin in the first place. And yet margin is the thing needed in order for us to live out our values.
To be blunt, without margin, you are suffocating your ability to walk out your values.
This goes for your finances, your emotional availability, your physical energy, your relational presence, and your creative intuition.
Without breathing room you — quite literally — cannot breath.
Therefore, you need margin to give space for your values.
Margin lets you adapt, be present, be happily available.
Which means that margin is not just good for YOU… it is also good for those around you.
To fight for margin is to fight for your values.
Have you ever felt at your limit? Perhaps emotionally you’re feeling on the edge. Or perhaps there is little to no breathing room with finances right now. Or physically, you’re just tired and feeling overwhelmed.
We all need breathing room in our lives. As my friend James Clear says, that margin of safety acts as a buffer against the unknown and the unseen.
Over on The Focus Course blog, we just published an article about how to include in Margin as part of your decision-making process. It includes some questions you can ask yourself when you are setting goals and planning out your week or you month. It also includes a few bullet points to help you identify if you are good on margin or if you’re lacking it.
It’s a fantastic article, and it was written by my production manager, Isaac Smith.
Check it out: How to Include Margin as Part of Your Decision-Making Process
A few months ago I bought one of the best drip coffee makers in the world.
Truly, as I was walking out of the store with box in hand, four — (4!) — different people stopped me to say how excited or how jealous they were that I was taking this coffee machine home.
Long-time readers of this site will know that I am giant coffee nerd. Probably the worst thing you can buy me is anything related to coffee. Chances are good that I’ve already seen it, researched it, bought it, used it, and have since moved on to something else.
Over the years my coffee shelf has been home to a V-60, French Press, Espro Press, AeroPress, Kalita Wave, Kone Brewing system, Moka pot, Siphon, and Clever dripper (to name a few).
After well over a solid decade of manual coffee making at home I finally aged out. I have moved to an automatic drip coffee maker. Gasp!
I bought the infamous Moccamaster. (It’s more than famous.)
So, after all those years of manual coffee brewing methods, why did I get a drip coffee maker? It all boils down to my time.
The time I have between when I get up and when my day starts is never enough. And I wanted to spend those precious minutes on activities other than pouring hot water over coffee grounds.
I wanted to get back just a little bit of my time in the mornings without sacrificing the quality of my coffee, of course.
It’s been at least four months now since I bought the Moccamaster, and I love it. It certainly wasn’t cheap. The model I bought probably cost more than nearly all of my manual coffee makers combined.
One thing that makes the Moccamaster special is that it’s built to last. I’ve heard from many people who have owned their Moccamaster for years and years and still love them.
As far as quality of coffee… I would say that the Moccamaster makes almost as delicious of coffee as I could make with one of my pour over methods. If the Kalita or V-60 can make a cup that is 9/10 delicious, the Moccamaster makes one that is 8/10.
While I think I could get the coffee quality to be a bit better — you’d be surprised to hear about ways you can still get nerdy and fussy with a Moccamaster — I have intentionally chosen not to go that route because it would be the opposite reason for why I bought the thing in the first place.
I just measure my beans and water and I’m happy with the results. In fact, I’m drinking a cup of my coffee as I type this very sentence. Yum.
The one thing I do not like about the Moccamaster is that the carafe and brew basket are not dishwasher safe. It’s not a huge deal, but it just means every few days I have to wash everything by hand. It still requires some bit of maintenance.
Actually, now that you mention it…
Sadly, there is no gadget or system or process that is completely absent of all work and maintenance.
To some degree or another, everything requires your time and attention; everything requires maintenance.
Alas, even my “automated” coffee maker still takes some work to keep clean and operational.
As someone who doesn’t always like to trust the process, it has been helpful for me to keep this truth in mind: everything requires maintenance.
And it stands for more than just the things I own, such as my clothes, cars, lawn, and tax-receipt filing system. My physical self and even the productivity workflows I live within every day require attention to keep operational. (Ugh, right?)
Perhaps one area I see the most hangup in this is related to productivity systems.
Staying in control of your time and your attention is an activity that requires some time in an of itself.
Lots of folks bemoan this fact. They have, no doubt, tried many systems and none worked for them. They feel frustrated because they don’t want to waste time managing their to-do list.
Now, side note, there is a lot of legitimacy to these frustrations. I definitely understand how frustrating it is to spin your wheels with an overflowing to-do list. A lot of productivity systems out there are way more work than they’re worth.
However, if you care about how you spend your time and your attention — then you also ought to care about the keeping up with the system that keeps you on track. And I think most people do care, which is why it can feel frustrating at times.
For me, I set aside about half an hour on Sunday evenings in order to plan out my week. (I go into the nerdy details of this in the “Analog” section of my All the Things course.)
During my weekly planning time I will decide what it is that I will focus on and how I will primarily spend my time each day for the upcoming week.
This brief weekly planning session never feels convenient. I am rarely in the mood and I’d almost always rather do something else. But my task list and calendar must get the appropriate amount of my time and energy in order for them to be effective and helpful.
In the beginning, these inconvenient activities of maintenance often feel like speed bumps that are getting in the way and slowing things down. There is never a convenient and easy time to work out, or to eat well, or to plan my week or my day.
However, if you stick with it, then over time you will see how these activities of “inconvenient maintenance” are actually the foundational actions in our day in which we are choosing to live with intention.
The truth is, you won’t find anything that is free from all work and maintenance. This is as true for coffee makers as it is for productivity systems.
With that in mind, don’t try to find something that requires ZERO maintenance. Because it doesn’t exist. You’ll never find something that is devoid of all work and maintenance.
Rather, find a system that can work for you — one that you have the ability and the drive to to keep up with.
In yesterday’s post I mentioned how, starting today, I have deleted Twitter and Instagram off my iPhone for the month of February.
There is something else I’m doing this month as well.
But first, if you don’t mind, I’d like to share a story…
I remember one evening when I was young and my family was having dinner. And for some reason that night we got several phone calls during dinner. I remember my dad stomping into the kitchen where the phone was and finally just taking the receiver off the hook so that we wouldn’t get any more interruptions. (Raise your hand if you remember when phones were plugged in to the wall.)
Growing up, we had dinner as a family several nights a week. Even though I totally rolled my eyes at it, I now look back and can see just how special of a time that was where the four of us were able to connect. My dad silenced the phone that night because he didn’t want other people having the priority of attention during that time.
Now that I’m married with kids of my own, I am jealous for consistent and quality time. But instead of telemarketers calling us, it’s friends text messaging. Or my own compulsions to check my email and social media inboxes.
Right now our kids are at the age where dinner is more like a circus. It’s crazy. More food is on the floor than on the table. But because we do dinner together almost every night of the week, the consistency of it adds up over time.
And I don’t want to invite my cell phone to the most important family hours of my day.
That’s why, for the month of February (at least) during the evening hours between 5:00 until 7:30 pm, both my wife and I are putting our phones in Do Not Disturb and leaving them in another room.
These are the hours every day when my family is all together. After we all have dinner together, my wife and I wrangle our three boys toward bed, hoping they’re down by 7pm.
It’s already a very busy and crazy time just due to the nature of our kids: 3 boys, ages 2, 5, and 7. And I don’t want it to be normal for my boys to always see me using my iPhone. I also just want to be more intentionally present with them — not having a baseline level of noise in the back of my mind that is distracting me and pulling me to just check my iPhone.
We have been dancing around this Do Not Disturb time a little bit here and there over the past month, and but so, now we are going to go all in for the month of February.
And I’m inviting you to join us. Is there an hour or two during your day that you’re willing to shut down your phone and put it away?
This is also something I will be tracking in my Baron Fig for February as one of my daily habits: how many days do I leave my phone alone between the hours of 5:00 – 7:30pm while I’m with my family?
Yesterday we hosted our very first Live workshop for The Focus Course!
We had 32 people here in Kansas City and I led them all through the Focus Course. It was so much fun! And I am so tired!
I’ll be writing quite a bit more about the event in the weeks to come, but I wanted to share a few initial thoughts from my perspective.
For starters, the whole event went just about perfectly! (Thank you Isaac and Joanna!!)
This was our first live event of this scale and polish. It was the content of the Focus Course combined with a live presentation of my whole ethos behind Delight is in the Details. A lot of group training events like this are rich in content but poor in delightful little details. I wanted to do things a bit differently, and seeing it all come together it was clearly worth the effort.
And speaking of the content…
It was so incredible for me to work in person with people and witness as the dots connected and light bulbs went off for them as we all went through The Focus Course. It was amazing to watch people “get it”… From getting their life vision figured out, to finally understanding how habits and scheduling can help them live a better life. Or getting a breakthrough in goal setting, or understating the value of margin. All throughout the day people were getting these little moments of revelation, and it was an honor to be a part of that process and to see it happen in person.
This morning I woke up, and I wrote this in my journal:
“If it is true that health in one area of your life brings about greater health in the other areas… and if it is true that when we align our values with our calendar we can reach our greatest potential with the most joy in the process… and if it is true that we have a finite amount of mental energy within any given day and we need help to keep our life on track…. if those things are true, then therein lies the power of a focused life. Because a focused life enables those things.”
This event was life changing. Can’t wait for the next one!
Greg McKeown, from his book, Essentialism:
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. Yet these very activities are the antidote to the nonessential busyness that infects so many of us. Rather than trivial diversions, they are critical to distinguishing what is actually a trivial diversion from what is truly essential.
You’re probably very aware of just how challenging it is to try and keep up with multiple areas of your life all at the same time. Between your relationships, health, finances, work, hobbies, and personal time … how do you get it all done?
The truth is you can’t. Or at least, you can’t get it all done at the same time.
I love how David Allen says that you can do anything you want but you can’t do everything you want. And that is an extremely liberating mindset.
It is all too easy to feel regret over not having gotten everything done during a certain timeframe. (Such as at the end of a calendar year.)
But depending on what it is you’re feeling regret over, perhaps you should turn that regret into celebration instead.
Now, if someone had taken a significant amount of their time and squandered it on something that didn’t even matter to them, then, well, yes, I would regret that as well. That is a regret in having neglected to do something awesome by do something lesser-than instead.
But perhaps you’ve had to compromise something good so that you could do something great. Perhaps you didn’t get your book idea written last year because your free time was spent focusing on your family or your health…
You probably had several great things you wanted to do, but had to pick just a few of them. If so, then consider thinking of it from a place of celebration.
Instead of feeling regret over what you didn’t do, celebrate what you did do.
When you think of “leading by example” what does that mean to you?
Does it mean doing more, being more, and giving more than those around you? Being the first to show up and the last to leave? Never asking someone to do more than you’re doing yourself?
There is, undoubtedly, a noble work-ethic tied to this approach to leadership. Plus, it is instantly quantifiable — if you get into a kerfuffle with those you’re leading you can just point to your time card and prove to them that you care more because you’re working more.
But something I’ve been thinking on for the past several months is this:
Are there other ways to lead by example?
At what point do you stop doing more, being more, and giving more?
At what point do you draw the line to say that you’re doing enough, being enough, and giving enough?
Consider this….
As a leader: What do you need in order to be around for the long run?
What are the things that ONLY YOU can do?
I believe leading by example should mean prioritizing your life without apology. It should mean you’re courageous enough to choose to do what you know to be right instead of doing what the peer pressure and/or company culture is.
Lead by example of how to work SMARTER, not harder.
What’s difficult about this type of “servant leadership” is that it’s less quantifiable. It’s not so easy for people to see you leading by example of your healthy balance between family, health, and office hours. (All they see is that you’re not working on the weekends and you clock out at a normal hour.)
But this type of leadership style plays to the long game. It takes time time to see the rewards of the choices you are making now to keep your work life from swallowing your personal life.
It’s easier to lead by the example of doing more because everyone can see you doing more. It’s not so easy to lead by example of doing “less” or “different” because those things are more internal, personal, and far less quantifiable.
What’s great about this alternative of leading by example is this…
It dignifies those around you.
Yep.
When you choose to live a healthy life, to have boundaries, and to “work smarter” rather than “harder” then the byproduct is that your co-workers and your team feel trusted.
When you treat yourself with respect, you will also treat those around you the same — as the smart, valuable, and self-motivated adults that they are.
For the past 6 years, every January, my wife and I take an evening or two and we map out our upcoming year.
We each get a few pieces of paper and use them to list the year’s important events, milestones, plus any goals we have or other things we want to do. Then we go through that list and decide when those things are going to happen and what we’re going to do to help make them a reality.
It’s a very approachable way to get a birds eye view of the upcoming year.
It helps us define what matters most to us for the year and what obstacles we may encounter. And year after year, this time of planning has proven to be a highlight. It has a positive impact on our year, and it’s also a lot of fun since the process facilitates some great conversation.
For this upcoming January, I’d love for you to be able to go through your own process if you like. (And you don’t have to be married — this is something that works for anyone and everyone.)
I have put together something simple and new. It’s called Plan Your Year.
Plan Your Year is a small workbook that walks you through the exact same process Anna and I go through each January.
The workbook is just $19 and is something you can do in a single evening. Check it out.
May you get out of bed on January 1 and get to bed on December 31, and in-between do what you want to do.
Over on The Focus Course blog, my friend and one of our Focus Course alumni, Mo Bunnell, wrote this article on the conundrum we face when we have more ideas than time.
As I look back, distinguishing between my successes and failures is really simple: nearly all of my successes in life have been when I’ve focused on very few things, obsessed over them, and pushed them until they are ready to ship, good enough for my standards. Nearly all of my failures? Starting too many things, saying Yes to too much, or beginning more things than I can finish to my standards. Trying to do too much leads to fragmentation, dysfunction. And despite what you read, there’s no fun in dysfunction.
More and more, my success seems correlated to what I say Yes to and what I say No to.
Mo’s article originally appeared in one of his Founder’s Friday newsletters. And as soon as I read it I felt super encouraged, because it came at just the right time.
Just a few months ago Isaac (my production manager) and I were getting ready to start on a big new project. But things felt rushed… as if we were behind before we even began.
Isaac suggested we move our project deadline back by 30 days to give ourselves additional margin. But I wasn’t sure. And for several days I was stressing out over this conundrum of how much we needed to do but how I didn’t want to miss our deadline.
Reading Mo’s article reminded me of my own advice. More often than not, it’s better to sweat the details and ship something that is up to standards than it is to rush something out the door.
And so we did choose to move our project deadline back by 30 days, and it was clearly the right decision.
When Mo talks about the power of focus, he’s talking about the results you’re capable of when you give yourself the time and the margin you need in order to obsess over a project and really make it something special.
Today’s podcast episode wraps up our focus on Margin. And I’ve saved the best for last.
Over the past several weeks we’ve covered so much ground: what margin is; why it’s important; how to get margin in our schedule, in our finances, in our creative energy, and so much more.
For today’s podcast, I wanted to talk with someone I deeply respect: Havilah Cunnington.
Havilah and her husband, Ben, are two of Anna’s and my dearest friends. We’ve known them for over a decade (Ben and I used to be roommates).
The four of us often connect to talk about life, kids, family, entrepreneurship, building an audience, and more.
Havilah is the founder of Truth to Table, an online Bible study platform. Fun fact: I totally stole inspiration from Havilah’s training videos when designing the “look” of my Focus Course videos.
On the show, we talk about how to do your best creative work when you’re also raising kids, how to build an audience, how to keep a healthy work and personal life, and more.
Speaking of, if you enjoy this podcast with Havilay, you should check out my free class: The Elements of Focus. It’s a 10-day video class where we’ll talk about making time, finding clarity, and gaining traction in your business or side project.
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While some people (myself included) advocate the idea of showing up every day and putting out regular content, Havilah has found success in going “dark” for a season in-between her online teaching events. She takes a season of time (a few months) to muse, write, and create her next product. Then, she comes back strong with something big and new.
The challenge of balancing a busy traveling schedule with building a personal brand: When you’re on the road all the time, it’s hard to build your own brand. It’s difficult to build momentum with your own audience when you are putting most of your energy into serving someone else’s platform. This isn’t to say that serving other platforms is bad, but it you can’t always do both.
One of the ways you learn how to balance work and life is through trial and error. You have to listen to the season of life your in right now and go all in with the one or two things that are most important.
Parenting little kids is just a season of life. Aim to parent from a place of authenticity rather than social expectations.
You’ve got to have a few core values and boundaries that keep your life healthy.
Advice to overwhelmed moms and dads who want to build something: Stay inspired.
Do this by: (1) having a coach, mentor, podcast, book, album, or whatever that you can turn to in order to find and build motivation when times are challenging; and (2) look to those who are ahead of you and gain strength and motivation from the work they are doing.
Havilah’s Online Bible Study Courses: Radical Growth, I Do Hard Things, The Good Stuff, and Eat, Pray, Hustle.
Havilah’s podcast series on Core Values: Pajama Days, Sleep, Learning to Grow Now, and Staying in Your Lane.
In today’s episode of Shawn Today I have the honor of talking with Cal Newport.
Cal Newport is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. His book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, was one of the most impactful books I read in 2015. And his brand new book, Deep Work, is equally fantastic.
The hypothesis behind Deep Work is this:
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
In our conversation, Cal and I talk about time management, how to develop a lifestyle where you are consistently able to spend time in your day on the things that matter most, how it’s a skill to be able to do deep work and focus and how to develop that skill, and more.
This podcast continues in the series on Margin that I’ve been writing about for the past month. Check out this page for the central repository with I’m keeping updated with links to each article and podcast.
* * *
There are so many components to doing your best creative work, but the very foundational one is the creative work itself. If you’re not showing up every day and practicing, then you’ll never reach your potential — you’ll never do your absolute best.
Deep Work, Deliberate/Intentional Practice, The Craftsman Mindset, Finding Flow — all of these are synonyms for showing up every day.
But they go beyond just showing up. Showing up and working hard isn’t enough. You need to make sure that the time you spend in deep work is productive time.
In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal writes that people will hit a performance plateau beyond which they fail to get any better. And his newest book, Deep Work is all about how to push through that plateau. Deep Work is about what to do when you do show up, and how to turn all of it into a part of your lifestyle.
In short, to do your best creative work, you need to hone the skill of being able to focus.
And that is exactly what we talk about on this podcast.
To have an effective deep work session, you need to: (1) schedule the time; (2) have an expected outcome that you are aiming to accomplish during that time; (3) realize that you’re working the “focus muscle” and that it takes practice and time.
Deep work is not a natural activity. When it comes to doing important work and improving our skills, our mind and instincts can’t be trusted.
Schedule every minute of your day. This takes the guesswork out of where you should be focusing on, and all you have left to do is show up and do what you’ve planned to do.
If you work with your head, then rest with your hands. For the knowledge worker, a good down-time hobby could be woodworking, gardening, yard work, etc.
Reduce the amount of “novel stimuli” that you let in to your day-to-day life. When you have a strong baseline level of noise in all the little moments of your life, it makes it more difficult to focus on the task at hand when you’re doing deep work. Because you’re training your brain that boredom is bad.
By reducing the baseline level of noise, it helps us to focus for extended periods of time. It also helps your mind to rest as it should during your down time.
There are four styles of deep work:
We can change that mindset and change our paradigm about what it means to be effective. First we have to challenge the culture that values “crushing it” — that says only those who are super busy are the ones who are super hungry. Realize that you can work effectively, and you can be focused without overworking yourself. There is a division between being out-of-control busy and being a hard worker.
If you want to do more deep work, but you’re not sure where to start, do this: (1) look at your calendar and block out 5 hours on your schedule over the next two weeks; (2) put your phone away when you get home so that you don’t get distracted; (3) find a balanced ratio of shallow work and deep work.
Shallow work and deep work are both necessary. The former is doing the things that need to be done for the sake of today. The latter is doing the things that need to be done for the sake of the future. Put another way: Shallow work keeps you from getting fired; deep work gets you promoted.
I highly recommend you check out Cal’s blog, and his two books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work.
As mentioned earlier, this podcast episode is part of a series on Margin that I’ve been writing about for the past month. Check out this page for the central repository with I’m keeping updated with links to each article and podcast.
Lastly, next week I’m kicking off the next session my free class, The Elements of Focus. You can learn more and sign up for the class right here.
Download here. (01:15:32)
In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport states that as our information economy grows, there is an ever-increasing advantage for knowledge workers who are able to focus.
His Deep Work Hypothesis is this:
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then amen it the core of their working life, will thrive.
In this article, as we hit on the importance of margin for our mental and creative energy, I want to frame it in the context of deep work.
If you want to do your best creative work, you’ve got to show up every day. But showing up is just half of it.
Once you’ve carved out the time you need to work, when you do sit down to focus, do you know what it is that you’re going to work on? And are you able to spend an hour or more of your time working without interruption?
For me, I have a minimum of two hours a day that I spend on what Newport would call deep work. In fact, it’s the very first thing I do in the morning: I write.
I set a note out for myself the day before that tells me what my writing topic will be. This way, when it comes time for me to do the work, all I need to do is open my text editor and begin writing. I don’t have to spend my time thinking about what to write about, I simply write.
Writing is not easy. It’s never been easy, and I suspect it never will be. I’ve been writing as my full-time vocation for half-a-decade now, and sitting down to write is as challenging, and cognitively demanding as ever.
Now, don’t take this as me complaining about my job. I love writing. I love the sound of my clicky keyboard. I love having a hot cup of coffee and a couple of hours to share a story or an idea. But no matter what, writing is hard work.
Challenging, demanding work is not mutually exclusive from work that is satisfying. In fact, the two usually go hand in hand.
And thus, I have a two very important reasons to show up every day and write:
Secondly, writing is my job. Literally everything about my business stems from writing. If I’m not writing, then the very underpinnings of my work and business will slowly unravel.
As I mentioned above, one very important step in my writing routine is The Note.
The other is having margin for my mental and creative energy.
Margin is, simply put, breathing room.
Does your mind have breathing room? Do you have have a strong distaste for distractions? Are you comfortable with boredom?
Now, of course you dislike distractions. I know that you know that I know that when you’re trying to do something, the last thing you want is to be interrupted. But, when the rubber meets the road, do you honestly, truly, really, really dislike distractions?
It’s one thing to be annoyed at the external distractions of unwanted phone calls and passive aggressive taps on the shoulder by bored coworkers.
It’s another thing altogether to let yourself CMD+Tab over to your email app every 10 minutes.
That tug you feel when you’re at the far edge of your attention span…? That distraction from within that shows up when you sit down to do work that matters…? What are you doing about that?
I totally know how it goes. You’re sitting down to work on a project, but after 10 or 20 minutes you hit a roadblock. What then? Do you instinctively reach for your phone to check Facebook? Do you switch over to the Twitter app or check your email inbox real quick? Or do you stay focused?
When you are trying to focus on deep work, don’t give up after 15 minutes. Stick with it for an hour.
When Matt Gemmell is writing and he hits a mental block, he reaches for a ball to toss while thinking. Marco Arment wrote a computer script that quits out of Tweetbot and Email in case he accidentally leaves them open. John Gruber tends to spend his time reading through all his RSS feeds in one pass, then focuses on writing; he also has an Apple Script that takes all the read-but-not-yet-replied-to emails in his inbox and archives them at the end of the day.
These are brilliant behaviors and tactics. Because they state that, in order to do our best creative work, we need depth and focus. Depth is a result of uninterrupted focus on a single task. And uninterrupted focus is a result of, well, not being interrupted — not being distracted.
To do your best creative work, you have to do more than hedge off the distractions from outside (buzzing phones and office interruptions). You also have to cut off the distractions from within.
You do that by creating margin for your thoughts and margin for your creative energy.
When was the last time you had a few minutes of free time and you chose not to spend it checking email, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? This morning, when you woke up, did you reach for your phone and spend some time perusing the news and your social network timelines before getting out of bed?
Here is, by far and away, one of the best ways you can keep margin for your thoughts and margin for your creative energy:
Now, we all know that there’s nothing morally or instinctively wrong with checking your social media timeline before getting out of bed. And neither is there anything wrong with keeping your computer’s email app open all day and switching over to it every few minutes.
But what these moments of “just checking” do is teach our brains that boredom is bad. They put a ceiling on our creative energy.
You won’t reach the height of what you’re creatively capable of if you can’t go 60 minutes without checking your email or scrolling your Facebook timeline.
Choosing to allow yourself to be bored when standing in line at the grocery store is also a choice to set yourself up to do your absolute best creative work.
Having a set time for deep work is liberating. The days when I know I’ll have have several hours of uninterrupted time are the days I most look forward to.
Not only do I look forward to the task and process themselves, but I also love the work that is produced after a season of deep work and measured progress.
Again, to quote Cal Newport:
To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing — a task that requires depth.
Your best creative work happens when you’re in the zone. When, in the words of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you’ve found flow.
Getting in the zone, finding flow, making progress on your best creative work, growing in skills as a creative, all of this requires intentional practice. It requires depth.
The good news is two-fold:
Deep work and diligence are skills. You can learn them, you can practice them, and you can get better at them. In fact, you can incorporate them into your everyday life!
Just like with regaining margin for your finances you need: (1) a short-term, drastic change in behavior to get some quick momentum; and (2) a long-term commitment to doing things differently.
I suggest that you start with a week-long information diet. And then, try to implement one new “alternative” action to those moments when you’re bored and want to reach for your phone.
Try this: take one week — or, if you’re feeling timid, start with 24 hours — and spend it disconnected from news and media.
Try going a whole week with no television, no news, and no social media. Perhaps a whole weekend with no email. Or even a whole day with no digital devices at all.
It sounds wild, right? This is some serious living-on-the-edge stuff. And the positive impact will be great.
In Chapter 6 of The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris quotes Herbert Simon. Simon says (emphasis added):
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
You need margin for your thoughts and margin for your creative energy is so that we can have a reserve of energy and attention that you can spend focusing on doing work that matters.
During your information fast, here’s another tip from Ferris:
Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” It’s not enough to use information for “something” — it needs to be immediate and important. If “no” on either count, don’t consume it. Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.
Little moments of mental down time can do wonders for our long-term ability to create, problem solve, and do great work. So, what are some alternatives when we’ve got a moment of down time?
For the times I do want to use my iPhone when I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, I’ve come up with a few alternatives instead of just checking Twitter or email. These are alternatives to The Just Checks:
Launch Day One and log how you’ve spent your time so far for the day. Doing this for a few weeks can also be super helpful for getting a perspective of where your time and energy are being spent.
Write down 3 new ideas. These could be articles you want to write, business ideas, places you want to visit or photograph, topics you want to research, date ideas for you and your spouse, gift ideas for a friend, etc. These ideas never have to to be acted on — the point isn’t to generate a to-do list, but rather to exercise your mind. Ideation and creativity are muscles, and the more we exercise them the stronger they get.
Send a text message to a friend or family member to tell them how awesome they are.
Don’t get out your phone at all.
These alternatives are meant to be healthy. They have a positive long-term effect and satisfy that need to do something during a moment of down time.
The whole point of having these alternatives is so that we don’t merely default into the passive consumption of content (ugh).
Take advantage of those down time moments, and allow your mind to rest for a bit. Or engage your mind by doing something active and positive that you can use the next time you’ve got an hour or two scheduled for your deep work.
What I love about having this bias against passive information consumption is that it helps cultivate a bias toward action.
Thus, instead of putting our energy into managing and watching the incoming — the inbox — we put our energy into creating, doing, and making.
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