In Conscious Growth Club, we’re going through our usual quarterly planning process now. This is a five-step process that we go through four times each year as we set goals for each new quarter. It starts by reviewing the previous quarter and seeing how we did, relative to the goals we set three months prior.
One of my favorite parts of this process is reviewing the previous quarter and noting what actually got done. When I was younger, this type of review would often serve as a wake-up call regarding all the things I didn’t get done. These days it’s a nice way to remember the previous three months. In the past I focused more on achievements. Now I strive for better balance between achievements and experiences.
Instead of just listing accomplishments when I begin this review process, I like to list experiences too. This helps me recall me how I actually spent my time and what value I gained from it.
For instance, here are some items from my list for Q1 2020:
Went to Panama with TLC, emcee’d the first day of TLC (went very well), and saw the Panama Canal
Had to lock down and stay at home starting in March due to coronavirus
Bought a Nintendo Switch and finished Zelda: Link’s Awakening with Rachelle
Joined the Ignite Video Challenge and created and shared 17 videos for it
Watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard
Did my first YouTube live premiere (for the Stature launch video)
Continued guitar lessons and started learning “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode
Finished reading Albert Schweitzer’s bio (a long book and a long journey)
Bought a new Apple 32” Pro Display XDR monitor and stand (my nicest monitor ever)
These may not be considered accomplishments per se, but I like to record them to remind me of some things I experienced during the quarter. When I view these in the context of other goals accomplished, such as launching the new Stature course and publishing the first 60 lessons for it, it helps me get a more rounded picture of the quarter.
In the past I would over-focus on achievements, and if I didn’t have enough of those in a quarter, I felt like I’d slacked off and should push harder the next quarter. But now I like to consider achievements in balance with experiences.
Playing through the Zelda game with Rachelle was a fun and playful experience that we both enjoyed. Reading Albert Schweitzer’s bio was something I whittled away at in the evenings before bed, often occupying my thoughts as I went to sleep. Buying the new monitor was an interesting stretch purchase since it’s the priciest monitor I ever bought, and I visited it in the store a few times before finally taking it home. These are all experiences I was glad to have this quarter.
Creating a more thorough list also helps me recall some things I had to deal with during the quarter, which could explain why I did or didn’t achieve the goals I had set. Obviously the coronavirus situation changes the game plan for many of us.
When I see the Panama trip on the list, I remember the dozens of bug bites that Rachelle and I left with. Even two months later, we’re both still recovering from those bites. The bugs there are vicious towards vegans.
Every quarter I create a new list of achievements and experiences, and I’ve been doing this for years, so I can skim through these lists to remember the highlights of those periods.
In a way this is similar to time logging. But instead of logging my days, I’m logging my quarters on a more macro scale. This gives me an interesting viewport into where my time is going over the span of a quarter. On that scale I don’t really care where each hour or even each day went. But it’s good to get a bird’s eye view of how I lived during that three-month period of my life.
This is turn helps me make better decisions for what I’d like to accomplish and experience in future quarters. It especially reminds me to include some experiential pursuits just because I enjoy them – seeing shows or concerts, taking trips, and having fun with friends.
One lesson I’ve learned in particular is that I feel best about a quarter when it’s nicely balanced, meaning that I didn’t just work, work, work all the time. I actually feel sad for a quarter that looks like it was too much work, even if I accomplished a lot. I like seeing quarters that include lots of experiential richness, especially because they give me the gift of better memories afterwards. I especially like looking back on a quarter and thinking, I really packed a lot of fun into those three months.
The coronavirus situation seems to be making me even more appreciative of all the wonderful experiences that can be had again when this passes. I look forward to the time I can feel aligned with traveling or even just going out to run errands nearby.
Did you know that Eddie Murphy wasn’t the original choice the play the character of Axel Foley in the movie Beverly Hills Cop? That role was actually given to Sylvester Stallone, but he couldn’t get some of the comedic elements right, so Eddie Murphy was brought in to replace him.
And did you know that Clint Eastwood wasn’t going to be the original Dirty Harry? Frank Sinatra was set to play that role. Unfortunately Sinatra broke his wrist and couldn’t lift the gun, so the role went to Eastwood instead. Why couldn’t Sinatra just shoot with his other hand?
Who could forget Marty McFly from Back to the Future? That role wasn’t played by Michael J. Fox initially. The movie actually started filming with Eric Stoltz in the lead role, but he was cut after a few weeks due to not being perceived as funny enough.
Changing actors during production is costly, but it isn’t uncommon. Sometimes this happens very late into a production. British actress Samantha Morton completed her role for the movie Her, where she played the voice of the AI. But she was replaced by Scarlett Johansson during post production, meaning that the entire role was re-recorded.
Given all the money being spent by the movie industry, you might expect that they’d get these decisions right the first time and lock everything down. But the reality is that creating a film can be an evolutionary process where decisions are made and then reconsidered along the way.
Sometimes you just have to make your best guess and go forward with action. Even when you do your best to make good advance decisions, you can’t always tell how things will work out. Sometimes you’ll make costly mistakes that will be problematic to fix or redo later.
From the actor’s perspective, it sucks when you get cut, especially after putting a lot of work into a role. Stuart Townsend trained and rehearsed for two months to play Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, only to be replaced by Viggo Mortensen four days into filming. Peter Jackson concluded that Townsend looked too young for the role. Couldn’t Jackson have figured that out sooner? Maybe he could have made that choice sooner, but sometimes you don’t really know how a piece will fit till you see it in context.
Sometimes you’ll also get blindsided by what life throws at you. In the movie Aliens, the actor James Remar was originally set to play the role of Corporal Hicks, but he was arrested for drug possession, so James Cameron replaced him with Michael Biehn.
When you tackle an interesting creative or business project, problems come up along the way. It’s rare for such projects to breeze through predictably from start to finish. Sometimes you have to make difficult choices as you go.
And sometimes you’ll be the one getting cut because someone else has made that decision, or they fell into circumstances where they had little choice.
In film production such cuts and changes are ideally made to create a better movie. Of course there can be politics involved, but sometimes it’s just the right choice. It’s hard to envision a better Beverly Hills Cop than Eddie Murphy, but would you want to be the one to tell Sylvester Stallone that he wasn’t funny enough after you’ve already cast him in the role?
When you face a difficult decision to make, ask yourself what’s best for the story of your life. What’s your big picture? When you put that picture first, what decision wants to emerge? What’s the right thing to do, regardless of the implementation difficulty?
Sometimes the right decision for your story is that it’s time to cut someone from your cast. Sometimes you need to replace the script for your life. Sometimes you need to pursue different roles. And sometimes you just need to step back and trust everyone to do their jobs.
It’s easy to look at a crappy film and wonder how the studio could have released it like that. Couldn’t they tell it was going to be bad in advance? Couldn’t they see all the mistakes they were making along the way? In many cases the answer is yes, but it’s still difficult for someone to step up and make those calls. How do you cut an actor who’s been training hard for months for a role? How do you let go of a long-term career that isn’t working for you? Sometimes it’s easier just to let it go badly and hope that the next project is better.
Imagine looking at your life through the lens of being the movie director in charge of it. Do you like how the picture is progressing? Do you have the right people in the right roles to make it work? Do you need to make any cuts or changes to ensure that the film turns out well? And there any counterproductive forces at work that you need to address?
What keeps you going through all of these tough decisions? Ultimately it’s your vision for the film – or your vision for your life. You can let a variety of different forces push you one way and then another, or you can sit in the director’s chair and direct.
In Conscious Growth Club, we’ve been discussing the coronavirus situation since February 26, and our discussion thread called “Coronavirus preparation” is now up to 325 posts and still growing. Perhaps a half-dozen related threads have been started as well, as members are discussing topics like self-care in isolation, immunity boosting tips, and sharing updates on what’s happening in different countries. So we’ve had some visibility on it this sooner than most, which gave us a head start on mentally and emotionally preparing ourselves for it.
Contrast this with various local businesses that haven’t been as aware of what’s coming up and were thrown for a loop at the speed and surprise of changes coming at them.
Let me share some local Las Vegas businesses how have been adapting.
Casinos and Hotels
The casinos and hotels are shut down statewide. So the Vegas Strip is shuttered. This essentially turns off the flow of money coming into the city.
The larger operations seem to be paying their employees for the next 2 weeks up to 30 days, but the smaller ones are already laying people off. I read that about 206K casino employees are out of work now.
This is going to crash the cities economy, badly enough that I think it will take years to recover. When we reach the point that the bigger casinos have to start laying people off, it will take them a long time for them to rebuild afterwards. And it will take a while to rebuild tourism to the city.
These larger operations don’t have a lot of good adaptations right now other than laying everyone off. It’s not like they can convert their large spaces to other social uses. They’ve had to turn off just about every revenue stream: hotel stays, gambling, shows, restaurants, night clubs, spas, arcades, etc. The entire resorts are closed.
Some local places have remained open 24/7 for many years, so they literally had to hire a locksmith to come over and install locks. They’d never had cause to lock their front doors because they had never closed before.
Additionally Cirque du Soleil, which has many shows in Vegas, laid off 95% of its global workforce, basically letting go of all of its performers.
Presently the casinos seem to be begging the federal government for bailout money, along with many other businesses.
Some resorts actually have to pay rent because they don’t own the land they’re on. The Bellagio is in this situation, for instance. So what happens when rent is due, but there’s no money coming in?
Fitness Studio
My local fitness studio has adapted to this situation quickly. They converted their in-person classes to online streaming classes. They provided all active members with access to a private area of their website where we can watch streaming classes online. Each day they post a schedule of classes.
Today, for instance, there are 11 classes include various forms of yoga, pilates, bootcamp, and barre. There’s even an indoor cycling class, which I guess is suitable for people who have exercise bikes at home.
It looks like they may stream a class live the first time and also record it. Or maybe they just record them all – it’s hard to tell. But they’re streaming on a schedule with only one class available at a time, and you cannot pause a video in progress, so it simulates the feeling of live classes. It’s less flexible though because if they’re recording these anyway, they could just make all recordings available at all times.
They must be in a tough situation though. Rachelle and I have each done a few of the streaming classes. They’re well done, and I like that this option is available so I can continue what I started in February in some fashion. But it’s not as good as the in-person experience at the studio.
This studio is part of a growing chain across several states, so they can pool resources to create the online classes. The ones we watched looked like they’re being recorded in Vegas though. Some people were wearing Vegas shirts in one video, and another was done by an instructor we know from our local studio.
This must be a tough situation for them. If the online classes are only needed for a few weeks, hopefully it will help members keep their memberships going and not cancel. But if this situation goes on for months, I think more people will conclude that they should cancel their memberships. I think people will find it hard to justify paying as much for online video workouts as they do for the live in-studio experience.
One issue Rachelle and I both noted though is that on some of the videos they’re creating, they’re clearly not practicing good social distancing. They have an instructor and several students on yoga mats within arm’s length of each other sometimes. That’s a concern. I think a lot of people are having a hard time noting just how disciplined we need to be about social distancing.
Rachelle and I stopped going to classes at this studio about two weeks ago. We were sad to stop, but we saw this situation coming a while before it began to unfold locally. Initially after we stopped going, the studio tried to adapt with fewer classes and more sanitation procedures, but I knew it wasn’t going to matter.
That’s a pattern I’ve seen a lot locally. Businesses are trying to incrementally adapt, but often by the time they figure out their incremental adaptations and announce them to their customers or clients, the situation has already moved beyond that.
Music Store
Initially the local music store where I take guitar lessons tried to keep their stores open but with more limited hours. Fortunately our Nevada Governor shut that idea down by ordering (instead of merely requesting) all nonessential businesses to shut down.
I did my last lesson there more than two weeks ago and canceled all upcoming lessons indefinitely, having a glimpse of what was about to unfold. I told someone at the store that I expected the store would be closed by the end of the month. I don’t think he believed me at the time.
During the past week, the store sent out a couple of emails announcing reduced hours for their physical locations and added the ability to continue lessons online, saying that the guitar teachers would follow up with their students individually about this. Their plan was to still have the teachers stream the lessons from the stores.
I knew this wouldn’t last long. A few days later the store had to completely by Governor’s orders.
I’m not sure if they’re going to try adapting to this now by letting their music teachers team and stream lessons from home. That seems a bit risky for them because they take a cut of the lesson tuition. So it’s like cutting themselves out of the loop, although they could still handle booking and billing lessons.
I like the in-person lessons, but I don’t think I’d want to do them remotely if given the options. There are other ways I could take online lessons that are more flexible. And I’d miss the face-to-face aspect.
Farmers Market
Close to our house they’ve converted the usual weekend farmers market into a drive-through version, so people can get fresh produce without leaving their cars. There’s a short video of it at the link below if you want to see how it works.
This seems like an okay adaptation at first, especially since the helpers wear gloves when they handle the produce and money. But the video still shows some examples of people not applying good social distancing as they move around the area, so while this may be better than going to an overcrowded grocery store, it’s still showing risky behavior.
An even worse issue is that when a local food bank announces that they’re giving away food, like in a parking lot, people swarm the area to acquire the food. These giveaways may be well-intentioned, but there’s a serious lack of awareness or discipline about the criticality of social distancing, which makes it easier for the virus to spread.
If we keep seeing this pattern locally, it’s just going to make the situation worse.
Strip Club
Vegas has a lot of strip clubs, and this situation puts many of them out in the cold. One local club quickly tried to adapt by offering drive-by strip shows. The idea was that patrons would stay in their cars, pay $100, pull up to a window, and a stripper would perform for them from a distance for 10 minutes. No touching allowed of course.
This idea generating some local press, maybe for its creativity or simply for its desperation, but was dead on arrival. The club didn’t have a chance to implement it before the it was ordered fully closed by the Governor, along with all other nonessential businesses.
Earlier today I learned that a strip club in Portland came up with a different idea. Partly as a joke, the club’s owner suggested on social media that they should convert to a food delivery service and have the strippers deliver food to people. Some people started to seriously inquire about the idea, so the owner decided to do exactly that. Now they have strippers with drivers (who also serve as security for them) taking food orders and delivering food. They say they’ll even deliver food to the coast (about an hour’s drive from Portland) if people are willing to pay enough for it. The name of the new service: Boober Eats.
Since strippers typically work as independent contractors, they’re not eligible for unemployment benefits. So while it’s to be expected that they may try to create new income streams, reporters have noted that the place in Portland isn’t practicing social distancing.
One source noted that while the owner is providing masks, disposable gloves, and sanitizing wipes, there are major problems present with social distancing:
But social distancing seemed to be a struggle for the women themselves. The club has turned into the headquarters for Boober Eats, and on Friday, it remained full of dancers, delivery drivers and members of the media. Some of the dancers greeted each other with hugs and took selfies together.
So there’s a genuine risk that this could become a coronavirus delivery service.
Problems with These Adaptations
These adaptations, while understandable, creative, and perhaps even admirable in some situations, aren’t without issues, especially when it comes to social distancing.
I think we’ll likely run into more local businesses trying to make similar adaptations, and I caution everyone not to ignore social distancing since it remains so critical right now.
Some of these problems can be solved with better attention to detail. For instance, we don’t not need lots of students on a streaming yoga video to demonstrate the postures. One or two would be sufficient, separated by a generous distance. And the Farmers Market could assign one person to one or two tables, so their paths aren’t crossing each other and they stay in their own zones.
The USA has now surpassed 42K reported coronavirus cases. Three days ago (on March 20) we were at 16K cases, and on that day I predicted that we’d surpass 50K cases sometime on Tuesday (tomorrow). Unfortunately we’re right on schedule, even slightly ahead of schedule.
My other predictions were that we’d reaching 100,000 USA cases on March 27 and that we’d reach 1,000,000 cases on April 3rd. Of course it’s possible that we may not do enough testing to achieve those predictions on the reporting side, but the virus is still showing abundant momentum to get there whether or not testing can keep up with it. Many experts suggestion that the true cases are likely to be at least 10x higher than the reported cases, so we could be looking at 10M+ true cases (or more) sometime next week. That can and will overwhelm many hospitals.
I’ve also noticed that this virus is moving socially closer. Last week I learned that a friend of a friend of a friend died from it. Then last night a friend’s niece passed away from it. More people that I connect with on social media have been reporting their own confirmed or likely infections.
Now imagine all of this being 25X higher sometime next week. And then it will flow right into 50X and then 100X without stopping.
If the adaptations seem reasonable, they aren’t. If they seem ridiculously strict, they may be just barely adequate.
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Consider how many times you may ask yourself questions like these during a typical week:
What should I do now?
What should I eat?
What should I wear?
Do I feel like exercising today?
What should I watch now?
Should I go out or stay in?
Even if you don’t ask that question consciously, your subconscious mind still has to address it.
Or do you ever have thoughts like these come up?
I should go shopping soon.
I really ought to do laundry.
I should catch up on emails.
I need to remember to pay my bills this week.
When am I going to find time to _____?
Are you really facing unique and different options each time you ponder these questions and thoughts? Or are you actually making very similar decisions each time?
Your work and your typical days probably involve a lot of patterns. You can leverage the predictability and stability of your known patterns to make many decisions less often. And you can also replace some chaotic decisions with patterns to systematize your daily and weekly flow even more.
A common objection here is that if your life becomes too predictable, it will become boring because you’ll be removing so much of the surprise aspect. And that is a valid objection in general, but it’s easier to get past it by asking this question:
If you didn’t have to spend much mental energy repeatedly making daily decisions like what to eat, what to wear, or what type of activity to do each hour of your week, what else could you do with the extra decision-making capacity?
Mental energy is a limited resource. If you spend this resource making lots of small decisions, you’ll have less of this resource available for making bigger and more interesting decisions.
Have you heard of the concept of decision fatigue? When you must make many decisions throughout your day, your decision-making circuits eventually become fatigued. When decision fatigue builds up, you may notice that at the end of the day, it can feel challenging just to decide what to watch on Netflix. That shouldn’t be such a difficult decision, but it can feel like a form of real work when your mind is mush from making so many other decisions throughout the day.
Decision fatigue can be cumulative over many days as well, so after several days of making lots of little decisions, you may feel inclined to have a “veg out” day where you barely have to decide anything. This isn’t such a bad idea, as it allows your decision-making circuits to rest and repair.
When you pile up decision fatigue, your self-discipline goes down as well. As fatigue increases, you’re more likely to make poor choices. One part of your mind may wish to make wise and intelligent, health-affirming choices, but the part that does the actual deciding just wants to rest and has basically checked out from the process. When you experience this state, it feels like your self-discipline has gone offline for a while, which is pretty close to what’s actually happening.
The way to alleviate decision fatigue is to make fewer decisions. Use this resource wisely. Instead of squandering its capabilities on recurring decisions, try to make each type of decision less frequently.
Systematize your days and weeks
As a direct application of the above, a good way to make fewer decisions is by structuring your days and weeks in advance. Map out what types of activities you want to fit into each week, and decide once what general purpose type of week works for you.
You can always adapt your general plan to incorporate unique changes for each week. And even if your weeks look very different from each other, you can still pre-decide how you’ll spend various blocks of time.
You can do this mapping with any decent calendar software. I recommend using the weekly view, so you can see the overview of your whole week.
Alternatively you can use a spreadsheet, setting it up much like you would with a calendar.
You could do this mapping very loosely by breaking your days into several blocks, such as: early morning, late morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and evening. The decide what type of activity you’ll assign to each block of time. With this approach you’d have 5 blocks per day, so that gives you 35 blocks to allocate for each week.
Alternatively you could structure your day in more granular segments like by hours. Using 30-minute blocks currently works well for me. Of course some activities may require multiple blocks.
The types of activities you might use to populate your recurring weekly calendar could include:
Hygiene (shower, shave, dress, brush teeth, etc)
Exercise, meditation, and other health-related activities
Creative work (writing, designing, etc)
Project work (marketing, launches, etc)
General business or admin work
Communication (emails, phone calls, video chats)
Personal development (journaling, reading, courses, etc)
Social time (date nights, time with friends, meetups, etc)
Sleep
Free time
Note the last item on this list. I think it’s wise to have some pre-scheduled free time that you can use at your discretion. You’ll be able to make better use of this time if you aren’t so overloaded with micro-decisions all throughout your day. Then it’s actually nice to look forward to some free time where you have the option to choose your activities. This free time will feel ever freer when you’ve adequately pre-decided when to handle all your must-dos and should-dos, and you can use your free time to enjoy some of your nice-to-dos.
When you get used to flowing with a weekly structure, it tends to feel freeing and less stressful. When you’ve intelligently pre-decided how to fit in the important stuff each week, you can relax and trust that you’ll get to everything that matters over the course of the week.
Even attempting to create a weekly structure can show you when you’re overloaded, and you need to scale back some commitments. When I first started using this approach, I caught myself designing 12-hour workdays to squeeze in everything I thought was important, and I soon realized that wasn’t very sustainable for me. So I re-thought what’s really important, and I scaled that back. I also learned to work with different quarterly priorities, so I can create a different type of balance across the quarter and across the whole year, which frees me from feeling that I need to address every type of activity each week.
Remember that the structure is meant to empower you, not handcuff you. You can always consciously break from it when you choose to. It’s there for you to slide back into it as your default approach when you’d rather get into the flow of doing and spend less time deciding.
One of the most empowering benefits of following some kind of pre-decided weekly flow is that you have more mental processing power for thinking bigger. You can take on those kinds of projects that you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for. It feels really good to be finally completing some of those major projects that I’ve had on my creative bucket list for years, such as publishing a major deep dive course on Subjective Reality, or leading people through a transformational deep dive course on character sculpting.
Even blogging this series was an exercise in reducing mental effort since I pre-decided the theme for a week’s worth of blog posts, so that was one less decision to make each day for a while.
This concludes our series on reducing mental effort. I hope you enjoyed it!
One often overlooked way to reduce mental effort is simply to do less. Pull back from obligations. Decline invitations. Withdraw from projects till your plate is less full.
Working with a very full plate can be stimulating, but it’s best as a short-term condition. In the long run, it’s great to have excess capacity, especially for developing fresh creative ideas, investing in some long-term projects that will never be urgent, and rejuvenating yourself.
When everything on your plate becomes a have-to, especially when there’s constant urgency involved, you never get around to those important but never urgent items that could make a real difference in your life. Yet those are the projects that often grant the greatest feelings of satisfaction.
Remember the high cost of saying yes. You can only fit so much into your life, so make each yes as high-value as you can. A good standard here is to ask whether a yes is closer to a “hell yes” or a “mostly yes.” If you fill your plate with the latter, you may not have the capacity to accept or even to recognize when a true “hell yes” comes along.
Consider that one really good “hell yes” opportunity can produce greater results than lots of “mostly yes” obligations combined. Saving some capacity for the occasional “hell yes” could save you a lot more mental effort in the long run.
Make planning time sacred
Doing even a modest amount of planning for your weeks and days can save you a lot of effort later. Whatever you invest in planning, you’ll usually make up for many times over in saved execution time.
When we get overly busy, planning is often one of the first activities we cut because planning doesn’t immediately appear to more workflow forward. However, to reduce mental effort, it’s important to do the opposite. When the time crunch is coming up, carving time out for some sensible planning can make a big difference.
Sometimes when I feel exceedingly busy, I pause for a few minutes to sketch out a simple plan for how to achieve what I’d like to achieve. Often this involves deciding which aspects are truly important and need to be done soon versus those aspects that could wait or be cut.
A tip I learned from Brian Tracy is to occasionally pause and ask two questions:
What am I trying to do?
How am I trying to do it?
If all you do is ask and answer those two questions, you have the basics of a simple planning approach.
Ideally it’s wise to make planning a long-term habit. Many people map out their days the night before, which is a good start.
As Stephen Covey noted in the book First Things First, weekly rhythms are usually the best for routine planning because a week is a long enough time frame to address most (or all) of your important roles. You can’t necessarily give much attention to every important role in a single day though.
Do your best to treat planning time as sacred, even when you’re tempted to skip it or cut it. You may carve out an hour or two on a weekend to plan your week as many people do. I often like to begin the week with a planning session on Monday morning because that’s a time when I’m freshest mentally and emotionally, after I’ve taken some restoration time over the weekend and let go of the previous week.
Decide first; then do
A simple but powerful habit for smooth workflow is to separate deciding from doing.
Work in two phases. First, take some time to decide what you need to do and how you’re going to do it. Write down your action steps in order, and make them pretty granular. Don’t worry about doing any of the steps yet. Just figure out what they are, and write them down in order.
I use a daily work journal for this, which is just a basic spiral notebook. Each day, often multiple times per day, I make short lists of the action steps for whatever I need to do next. This usually takes a few minutes.
Sometimes I may list only enough steps to carry through the next 30 minutes. Other times I may list a few hours worth of steps. And sometimes I may list enough action steps to last 2-3 days.
You may wonder if it’s enough to have a typed to-do list on one of your devices. I think that’s fine, but I still recommend writing down the action steps with pen and paper as part of your daily flow, even if you’re just copying them directly from a screen. I’ve experimented with this a lot, and for some reason I find that handwriting the action steps and crossing them off as I do them is way more satisfying than checking off or deleting items on a screen-based list. I also find that writing the steps makes me feel more committed to doing them. The handwritten list feels more personal and makes me feel like I own it. A screen-based list feels a bit more distant. A handwritten list on a screen (like with an Apple Pencil) still doesn’t quite feel as good as simple pen and paper. I suggest you do your own experimenting here to discover what gives you the best feelings of commitment, progress, and flow.
Once you have your steps listed, you can focus on doing. There’s no need to occupy part of your brain with figuring out what needs to be done once you’ve already made those decisions. You can just do one step at a time, checking each one off as you complete it.
You may even gain a small sense of accomplishment just from creating the to-do list – a boost which can help you flow into the action phase with a little more motivation.
Mixing deciding and doing tends to be less efficient than separating these phases. The mind goes into different modes of thinking for each phase, so it can devote all its best resources to one type of thought.
What if you run into a snag in your doing phase, and you realize that your original action sequence won’t work? If you no longer have good cause to trust your existing list, go ahead and switch back to decision mode. You may be able to modify the remainder of your current list, or you may feel that it’s best to drop the old list and create a fresh one.
We’ll continue with Part 7 of this series tomorrow.
During a normal workday, it’s easy to begin new tasks without fully finishing previous tasks. Sometimes we do this for the sake of variety, but this can be a very inefficient approach.
Each time you switch contexts, your mind has to release the previous context and load in a new context. Think of a context as all of the key ideas that link with the task at hand.
It often takes 15-30 minutes to load in a new context well enough to feel like you’re in the flow of good productivity. Before you’ve loaded the relevant context, a new task tends to feel a bit alien or complicated, so you can’t work as fast. It’s like learning the contents of someone else’s kitchen when you’re staying in a new AirBnB. It takes a while to figure out where everything is. Once you’ve fully loaded in the new context though, you can work a lot faster.
For this reason it’s wise to fully finish one type of task or project – or at least drive it as far as you can – before switching contexts.
You have to balance this with your fatigue levels though because working in the same context for too many hours in a row may eventually lead to diminishing returns due to tiredness.
So while it would likely be inefficient to work on 8 different types of projects in a day due to excessive context switching, it may also be suboptimal to only work on one project all day long due to fatigue (unless that project has some decent variety, like creating a bunch of different web pages for a website). Working on 2-3 different projects may be closer to ideal. Then you’re only switching contexts a few times, and you’re switching before the fatigue of doing one type of work becomes a limiting factor.
I suggest experimenting to see how much context switching during a day is best for you. I usually work very productively with about 2-3 contexts per day, usually not more than 4. And sometimes I can be very productive working in just a single context, but then fatigue does tend to be higher at the end of the day – it feels like I’ve burnt out some circuits by overloading them a bit.
Even when you feel fatigued or burnt out doing one type of work, you may find that you still feel pretty fresh when switching to a different type of task afterwards.
Drive small projects to full completion
This suggestion is related to the above as well as to the section on solving problems fully from yesterday’s post.
To minimize context switching further, it’s often wise to drive a small project all the way across the finish line when you have its context fully loaded.
In other words, once you’ve made the effort to load the context for a project, don’t unload that context till you’re 100% done with it.
A bathroom break is fine, but try to avoid a longer break such as for a meal (unless it’s just a quick 5-minute snack).
When writing blog posts, for instance, I usually try to go from idea to publication of a new article without taking lengthy breaks in the middle. I develop the idea and do the writing, editing, and publishing in a single stretch of continuous work time, even if it’s a pretty long article. If it’s 4000+ words, I may have to break it up into multiple sessions, but I always try to at least finish a context-dependent chunk in a single stretch. For a long piece, I’ll still try to write the whole piece in one session, and then after a meal break, I may do the editing pass and then publish it. I hardly ever work on a single article across multiple days.
So the idea here is to avoid having to load the same context more than once. Whenever you take a longer break from a task or project, especially if it’s overnight or over a weekend, you have to do extra work to reload the context to get back into a productive flow. So if you can possibly drive a project to full completion with a single loading of the context for it, do your best to make that happen. It can save you a lot of mental energy – and time.
We’ll continue with Part 6 of this series tomorrow.
Incompletes and stress go hand-in-hand. When we’re stressed, we often want to race to the end of a project or task and call it done when it’s really 90% or 95% of the way to done. But even 99% done isn’t actually done.
Some projects – like Disneyland – are never fully done because they’re ongoing and always evolving. But other projects like writing and publishing an ebook can be fully completed. And of course there’s a gray area in the middle with some projects having a reasonably well-defined completion state along with long-term maintenance activities.
To the best of your abilities, try to clearly define the completion state for your projects. What is the very last action step, the completion of which marks the true finish line? When do you really get to call it over and done? When do you get to celebrate? When does your mind have permission to let go of thinking about it?
If you get a project to 99% completion, your mind can’t fully let it go. Some of your mental RAM is still churning over that remaining 1%, and this can continue to be an ongoing distraction.
If you possibly can, drive the rest of the project fully across the finish line, so you can really check it off as fully done. Otherwise if it’s distracting you emotionally, use the method from yesterday’s post to pre-process the distracting thoughts and feelings when they start nagging at you. Better yet is to process this task into a system, so you can continue tracking it outside of your mind.
When incompletes pile up, the background feeling of stress and anxiety can increase as well. Even if you don’t feel it much, you may notice that your mind isn’t as clear and sharp as it is when you’re at your best. Some of your mental energy is being wasted on refreshing all of these incompletes.
Now and then it can be wise to make a list of your incompletes and take a few weeks (or months) to drive as many of them as you can across the finish line.
Even when older items don’t seem urgent, they can still nag at you repeatedly. The best way to bring that nagging to an end is to fully finish them, all the way to 100% done.
When you bring a task or project all the way across the finish line, it’s very satisfying. You can feel this sense of relief in your mind when you’re able to finally let go of the project. Extra energy is freed up – energy that can now flow towards something else.
Pause the inflow
Sometimes we have too much inflow relative to our outflow, and we need to pause the inflow to process the backlog. If the size of your backlog is getting to you, and you’re becoming overly stressed and distracted, it may be wise to reduce your inflow.
Now and then I go into a mode where I say “no more yeses” for a while. I turn down most invitations, and I do my best not to accept or open new projects. I focus on clearing older items off my plate and closing open loops till I’ve freed up more capacity. This eventually leads to the point where I feel ready to start taking on something new, and then I go into a phase of saying yes more often.
I know it’s a good sign when I start feeling enthusiastic about new directions, new invitations, and new creative projects. When I start to dread new items being added to my plate, I know I need to tighten up a bit. If I start feeling a little bored with the routine, I know it’s time to invite some fresh inflow.
We can adjust the inflow that comes into our lives by being more resistant to decrease the inflow or more welcoming to increase the inflow. Of course this may be more effective in some areas of life than others. Sometimes the inflow just happens, and we have to deal with it. But other times we can pull back a little to free up more capacity.
When taking on a big project or dealing with a significant lifestyle change, it’s wise to adjust expectations regarding your capacity, so you don’t overextend yourself. When I’m creating a major new course (like I’m doing now with the Stature course, which is up to 47 published lessons so far), that takes a lot of focus every week. It’s predictable that during such times, I’ll have reduced capacity for other projects. Consequently, I’m more selective in my commitments when there’s a big project front and center. I know from experience just how easy it is to become overcommitted, so I like to be extra cautious about that.
Many new parents learn that having a baby can greatly reduce their capacity to invest as much in other areas of life. There’s a feeling of pulling inward towards the family during the first several months, and this effect may continue for many years albeit to a lesser extent. It’s easy to underestimate just how much a new baby can take over your life, so it’s wise to free up extra capacity and not take on major new projects when the baby is expected. Overcommitting yourself could easily lead to great stress and even more fatigue.
I know it can be difficult to pause the inflow sometimes, especially if you’re an ambitious person, and you like to keep driving major projects forward. It can be hard to slow down sometimes, knowing that some parts of life aren’t going to advance much.
Another issue is when you feel like you’re behind relative to where you’d like to be in life, and you experience a life event like a major illness or a new baby that reduces your capacity even more. This can lead to feeling frustrated or impatient, wanting to push even harder to advance.
But if you can learn to surrender during these times, it can be very beneficial. Often these are times of incubation. When your mind gets a chance to slow down and rest more, you can set yourself up nicely for times of great flow and enthusiasm afterwards.
There’s a certain wisdom to life, and it will often slow us down when what we’re doing isn’t all that effective anyway. If you’re running on a treadmill, and life keeps drawing you away from it, you could see this as an invitation to question whether you want to stick with the treadmill going forward.
I’ve notice the pattern that work that feels aligned still feels aligned when I need to slow down. In fact, sometimes it feels even more aligned when I slow down.
I hope you’re still enjoying this little series on reducing mental effort. I’m enjoying writing it. 🙂
What do you do when you’re distracted by emotions or other circular thoughts, and you can’t be very productive?
Some people say to just push through and do your work anyway. I’ve tried this and found that it hasn’t worked well for me. I can work a bit, but if my mind keeps dwelling on something else, I’m certainly not working at full engagement. But nor do I like taking a full day just to deal with emotional processing.
So here’s a good solution: Devote a modest amount of time to pre-process whatever is distracting you. You may not have time to resolve it fully, but you can process those thoughts and feelings well enough to prevent them from distracting you throughout your day.
Grab three pieces of blank paper and a pen, and simply write out your thoughts and feelings as they come to you. Keep going until all three pages are full. Listen to whatever your mind wants to say, and flow it onto the page.
This normally takes me about 45 minutes, so roughly 15 minutes per page. It’s fine to pause and think now and then, but try not to pause too long. Just keep emptying the contents of your mind onto the page till all three pages are full.
You don’t have to solve anything. Again, you’re just emptying the contents of your mind onto the page. Let the parts of your mind that have been distracting you have their full say.
Be absolutely candid. Swear onto the page if you’d like. Be as honest as you can about what you’re thinking and feeling. Assume that no one will ever read what you’re writing. This is for you and you alone.
When you’re done writing three full pages, you can read them over if you like. If you see any actionable ideas, you can capture them on a separate page and later process them into your system that we mentioned in Part 2 of this series.
Afterwards I recommend that you destroy those three page, such as by shredding them. If you establish the habit of always destroying the pages afterwards, it will encourage you to be even more candid each time, which makes the exercise more effective the more you practice it. If you censor yourself as you write, it will be less effective.
The main benefit of this exercise is that it moves cluttered thoughts and feelings into the logical part of your brain. In order to write down these thoughts, you have to linearize them. You have to think about them differently than if you simply allow them to bobble around in your mind. Writing them down helps to move the energy out of the mental circuits that are causing circular thinking. It helps your mind let go and restore a sense of peace.
For really severe cases of circular thoughts and feelings, you may need to do this exercise for a few days in a row. Usually two or three days is plenty to create a serious reduction in the amount of distraction you experience.
When I do this simple exercise, I usually find that it’s well worth the time. If I think I might need to do it, it’s wise to do it. Afterwards I feel calm and peaceful.
You might be wondering if you can just do this on a computer or other device because it will be faster. It will indeed be faster, but my experience is that it’s also much less effective. Handwriting engages more of the brain than typing because you have to form the individual letters rather than just pushing buttons. Somehow this makes the mental processing work much better. It would say that writing is roughly three times as effective as typing, so I’d only recommend typing if you’re really short on time and you barely feel distracted.
Taking 45 minutes to make several hours a lot more productive seems like a fair tradeoff. And if you’d otherwise be worrying about something for days, then the payoff is even higher.
Many problems can arise during your day that knock you off balance. If you can effectively set them aside, then great – do that. But if you’re still feeling distracted a few hours later, and you notice that your productivity is suffering for it, it may be worth the time to pause, pre-process those distracting thoughts and feelings, and then return to your original work. This method is especially helpful when you don’t have time to fully resolve a new issue that comes up, and you need to stick to your original priorities with good focus.
We’ll continue with Part 4 of this series tomorrow.
Distracting thoughts are a major source of wasted mental energy, so in this part we’ll cover a few ways to reduce internal distractions.
Empty your head
One reason we dwell on certain thoughts is that we’re trying to remember certain to-dos, ideas, and items that require deeper consideration. Refreshing these items in our minds sucks up extra neural energy and doesn’t necessarily move much towards completion.
If your brain is using its working memory to continually bring up distracting thoughts, you can often free up extra processing power by allowing your brain to forgot. This helps you feel less mentally and emotionally fatigued as well.
A simple practice for when your mind feels cluttered and distracted is to do a brain dump. Write down every distracting thought you can think of, either on paper or one of your devices. Get the info out of your head, and externalize it somewhere.
Write down incomplete projects and unfinished items. Write down ideas that keep popping into your mind. Write down any worries or concerns. Write down anything you’ve been trying not to forget. Whatever your brain has been nagging you about, dump it onto paper or a screen.
Really squeeze your brain to get this info out, even if you have to do a few sessions over a few days.
This practice allows your brain to relax more, knowing that it can reference those details somewhere else instead of having to refresh the info internally. Even if your brain dump list is in random order and looks chaotic, it’s still a big step forward. Your brain can let go of having to refresh the info as often, which means less neural energy wasted and more neural energy available for you to use productively.
You may find this experience a bit overwhelming at first, especially if you see that you’ve been stuffing way too much into your working memory. When it all drains onto the page or the screen, you may see that it’s a lot, perhaps more than you can realistically deal with. But you may also discover that your mind feels more peaceful and relaxed afterwards. It’s more restful for the mind when it knows that it doesn’t have to keep refreshing all of this info internally.
Organize your tasks and projects
Another step is to process and prioritize some of that info you’ve just dumped from your brain. Turn those to-dos into tasks and projects, and organize them into a list or a system, so you can track them more intelligently.
There are many tools to choose from that can help you do this. I recommend testing several of them before you choose.
My current favorite tool for keeping track of tasks and projects is Nozbe. Nozbe comes with a free 30-day trial if you want to check it out. I’ve been using it since June 2019 and appreciate the clean, straightforward interface. It’s easy to learn and fast to use, especially for individuals and small teams. I especially like that I can create reusable templates with it. It’s good at hiding complexity, so the screen layout feels restful to me.
Here’s a screen shot of my current Nozbe templates. Each template is a basically a saved to-do list that I can reuse to spawn a new project whenever I want.
Since I have some of trips coming up this year, I could use the “Plan & book next trip” template to add a few projects with these names: Plan Portland trip, Plan Northern Ireland trip, Plan Milwaukee/Chicago trip, and Plan Costa Rica trip. Each project will be pre-filled with the to-do items from the template. And then I can individually customize each project with trip-specific actions.
Using project templates frees up mental energy because I don’t have to remember common action steps for the types of projects I do repeatedly. A new course launch, for instance, has hundreds of action steps, and it’s more restful for my brain if I capture all of those steps into a system. Then I can focus on doing the action steps in the proper order when I’m in the midst of the launch, trusting that the whole plan is solid and that I haven’t forgotten anything important. My brain doesn’t have to waste energy trying not to forget something. All of the details are captured in the system.
I’ve also used Asana for about a year (mid-2018 to mid-2019), but I didn’t like their web-based interface as much, and to be honest, Asana simply annoyed me into looking for a competing option. I started with their free version and soon upgraded to their premium version. I liked the premium version, which provided everything I could want and more. But after a while, their interface started pestering me to upgrade again to a business account, which had features that were overkill and unnecessary for the size of my team. I found this distracting and counter-productive, so when someone told me about Nozbe, I gave it a try, liked it better (especially the distraction-free interface), and quickly switched.
I probably would have stuck with Asana for years if they’d been satisfied to simply let me enjoy the benefits of the premium version instead of pushing for more. I absolutely don’t want a productivity app injecting extra distractions into their interface. That just seems like a ridiculous design choice. What sense does it make to use a productivity tool that increases mental load with extra annoyances?
Your choice of tools is your choice. The best system for you is the one you’ll actually use. Take the time to find something you like, and don’t just go with what’s popular or trendy. I often find that the most popular tools that I hear people buzzing about aren’t a good fit for me – I’m often disappointed when I actually test them. In general I tend to find that the popularity of a tool tends to have more to do with its marketing than with its actual utility. So don’t beat yourself up if you’ve fallen into the trap of acquiring tools that you don’t actually use. Keep looking to find the ones you will use.
A good system should be quick and efficient to use. It should feel peaceful and relaxing. If you feel stressed when using it or if you feel you must push and discipline yourself to use it regularly, dump it. If simple pen and paper would feel better to you, go with that. Don’t overburden your mind with even more complexity when you’re trying to simplify and reduce mental clutter.
I hope you’re enjoying this series so far. We’ll continue with Part 3 tomorrow.
