The Hustle Is Dead to Me

For the longest time, I proudly considered myself part of “the hustle”. I always kept many oars in the water, and they were all paddling, seemingly at once. Time for reflection or rest was for wimps.

I grew up with that work ethic, and I never questioned it. Over the last several years, I have thought a lot more about how I spend my time and what are truly my priorities. As a result, I find myself spending a lot more time on the things most important to me and a lot less time on everything else. I am no longer a rowboat. I am a speed boat with comfy chairs.

It’s only recently, with this new insight, that I have come back to this idea of “the hustle.” With a little wisdom and understanding, I now realize that “the hustle” is dumb.

The rules, as taught to me, were wrong. It is not he-who-works-most wins. It is he-who-focuses-on-what-is-most-important who wins.

The Relationship Between Task Lists and Calendars

I’ve written about hyper-scheduling and using my calendar to keep myself in check when planning tasks. Those posts often get questions from readers about the exact relationship between my calendar and my task list. If you keep both a calendar and a task list, it can get confusing to figure out what goes where. Of course, you know the dentist appointment goes on the calendar, but if you are going to get the most out of that calendar, it should be used for much more.

Your task list should be the keeper of all tasks. It is the full inventory of things you plan to do. If, however, you’re like me, that inventory is pretty full. There is no way I’m going to wake up one day and complete every task on my list. Honestly, there are years worth of work in my OmniFocus database.

The purpose of the task list is to bring order to that chaos and give you a framework to hang current and future tasks and keep them in perspective. The goal is that when you plan your days and weeks, you can easily pull the wheat from chafe in that task list and know that out of all of those things, which are the ones that move the needle for you right now. Figuring out what is essential right now is the entire reason I’ve invested my time in mastering OmniFocus (and made the OmniFocus Field Guide). I want to get to the tasks that need my time with the smallest time investment on a daily basis.

It’s at that point that my calendar joins in the dance. Once I have picked my tasks for the day or week, I need to plan when I will accomplish them. To do this, I need to answer a few hard questions:

How long will this take?
Do I have that kind of time available?
Exactly when will I give it that time?

Let’s break that down further.

How long with this take?

As humans, we are generally terrible at estimating how long it takes to get something done. We usually vastly underestimate the amount of time required. If this is new to you, I recommend taking your initial time estimate and doubling it. Let’s say one of your on-deck tasks is a client proposal, and you immediately think “one hour”. Make it two. You can always scale back later, but if you are using calendar blocks and they are too short, you will fail at it. If it ends up taking one and a half hour to make that client proposal and you have a one hour block, you’ve already crashed. If instead, you had a two-hour block reserved, you can take a break for thirty minutes and play with the dog or work on something else. Bad time estimates are where most people have trouble when calendaring tasks.

You may find that you also have a set of essential but small tasks that also need to get done. I don’t block time for small tasks, but I will block time to handle a pile of small tasks. In my case, I often have a one-hour calendar block called “Legal Flags”. Those are small flagged client items in my OmniFocus database that I can lump together and get through quickly.

Do I have that kind of time available?

This process starts with a small list of tasks and you setting time estimates for them. Even with a short list of tasks, you may find you run out of time. There are only so many hours in a day. If you have realistic time estimates, you may find that you don’t have enough time for all of your selected tasks. That’s okay. It happens to me nearly every week. You then have to decide what gets done now and what has to wait for later. This process is the payoff of combining your tasks with your calendar. It allows you to be realistic about what can (and can not) get done in the time you have. It’s the difference between a realistic list of tasks for the week that you can feel good about finishing and an unrealistic list that may sap all of your energy by Wednesday as you realize you have no hope of getting it all done. I guaranty you will get more done with a realistic list than an unrealistic one.

Exactly when will I do it?

The final step is to put those task blocks on your calendar. They are just as crucial as dentist appointments and will help you keep on track throughout the week in getting those most important tasks done.

So in answer to the question of what goes on my task list and what goes on my calendar, I’d say while all of my tasks are in my task list, only a select few graduate to the calendar. I’d also avoid going through this process for tasks any further than a week out. Everything is continuously in motion, and it isn’t easy to know what will be the priority more than a few days from now.

Want to see what technology I use to pull this off? There’s a post for that.

Personal Retreat Technology

A few days ago, I published a video about my personal retreat experience. Since then, I’ve had many people ask me to explain further what technology I used. I’m about to explain what I did, but before I do so, there is a good argument that you shouldn’t take any technology on a personal retreat. It’s so easy to let the tech take over.

However, in my case I wanted to do a lot of typing and dictating, and tuning out infinity bucket apps has never been a problem for me so I brought along some Apple gear. If you want to bring technology and are worried you’ll be wasting time in social media instead of doing the hard work of a personal retreat, turn off your WiFi and cellular radios. I didn’t need to get that drastic, but if I’d caught myself lurking on Twitter, I absolutely would have done so. (I also did bring along pen and paper, just in case.)

If you are going to use technology, there are three phases to my version of a personal retreat:

Identifying and writing out your roles.
Asking tough questions about each role.
Planning for action in relation to each role.

For steps one and two, you could do this with any tool for managing words. A text editor would be fine. Apple Notes or even TextEdit could get the job done. The next level would be an app that supports headings and organization, like Drafts, Ulysses, or even BBEdit. As I explained in the video, the process is very non-linear. You’ll find yourself bouncing around among roles and questions a lot. For that reason, another excellent tool for this process would be an outliner or mind mapping app with both the ability to add plenty of text and folding branches. My two favorite apps for this process would be OmniOutliner or MindNode.

For this past retreat, I spent the first two days using Roam Research. I’ve been experimentally using Roam for a few months. It’s a powerful tool that combines the ability to turn anything into an outline with the ability to link any outline block in your Roam document (“graph” in Roam parlance) to any other outline block in your Roam graph with no friction. Roam is an excellent tool for this process … except for its immaturity. While Roam is a bit of a mind-bender and makes connecting thoughts very easy, it is still very new, and there are a bunch of parts to Roam that are not ready for prime time. My biggest concern is the lack of security. As I started to pour my heart into the retreat document, I became concerned about lack fo security in Roam, a web app, and ended up towards the end blocking and copying into OmniOutliner, which lacks Roam’s cool backlinks but has better security. (We’re going to be digging in on these research tools on an upcoming episode of Mac Power Users, and I’ve got a lot more on my mind when it comes to Roam and its competitors.)

For part three, turning my retreat ideas into action, I relied heavily on OmniFocus and Drafts. A lot of the process toward the end was writing plans out for myself and my collaborators. All of those started as blank text files in Drafts and grew into much more as I worked through the process.

I also set up a series of new repeating tasks and projects in OmniFocus to help keep myself accountable for some of my planned changes. Using a set of custom perspectives and review frequencies, OmniFocus can help keep me honest.

Looking back, my personal retreat technology wasn’t particularly novel or demanding. You need a place to write words down. You need a place to turn words into future actions. To go much beyond would probably just be a distraction on a retreat.

Mistakes Book

Mistakes: The Foundation of Your Small Business.JPG

Dave Hamilton and Shannon Jean have been making The Small Business Show, a podcast about … well … small businesses, for five years now. It’s a great show, and I’ve even guested on it.

Recently Dave and Shannon released a book called We Love Mistakes that details so many potholes small business people often fall in. If you run a small business, or better yet, are thinking about starting a small business, this is required reading.

Course Corrections

When looking at yourself and how you get through your day, it’s easy to get hung up on big things, but so often the big things don’t happen overnight. They take time, planning, and money. And that is assuming you have any control over the big things.

In contrast, little course corrections can happen every day. They are easy to implement, and they take little effort to put into action. Best of all, small course corrections, even just a 1-degree turn, make a big difference over time.

Whenever I feel stuck and unable to move the icebergs in my life, I try to step back and start making little course corrections, so the iceberg is no longer a problem.

Maker, Manager, Consumer

I’ve been thinking lately about my journaling workflows. I’m increasingly using digital tools for daily journaling and questioning a lot of assumptions. One of those is about the purpose of journaling my day. Am I doing it to figure out what I was doing at 2:00 p.m. on a given day, or something else? The more I think about it, for me, the answer is something else.

Now I’m looking at my days not in terms of what I was doing at a specific time, but instead what I was doing with my time. I’m usually wearing one of three hats: maker, manager, or consumer.

The Maker

Whenever I’m adding something, I’m making. I interpret this broadly. Making Field Guides, writing blog posts, doing client work, and making music are examples of things I make. While a lot of the things I make are shared with the world, others aren’t. Whether it’s for others or for me, I’m still making.

The Manager

For Maker Sparky to produce, Manager Sparky needs to wrangle everything else. This is both an essential support role and an easy trap to fall into.

The Consumer

When I’m not making or managing, I’m consuming. This ranges from watching Star Wars to reading scholarly articles. It’s all-consuming. This isn’t bad. It’s one of the best ways I come up with ideas for Maker Sparky.

My purpose in journaling is tracking how I’m spending my time in these roles. I don’t view any of them as inherently good or bad. The magic is in the balance. While making is most important to me, both managing and consuming enable making. I want to spend more time making than consuming. I need to spend time managing, but not go down the management/productivity rabbit hole so far that I don’t make anything.

So with this in mind, I’ve been focusing my journaling lately not so much on what I had for lunch, but what I make, manage, and consume. Using tags, I can then see it on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis. If I look at my week and realize I spent most of my time sharpening pencils and sorting tasks (manager) and not enough time producing content (maker), I know I need to make changes. You can get similar information by tracking your time, but I think there is something more concrete looking at a list of things you’ve made, managed, and consumed over a period of time.

Implementing this isn’t difficult. You could create a text file and start making a list. You can do the same thing with a pad of paper and a pencil, or, if you’re using a digital journal like Day One, add tags for #maker, #manager, and #consumer. The real benefit of this comes in planning and review. If you’re going to track yourself as a maker, manager, and consumer, you should have some expectations and a feedback mechanism for living up to them.

Waking Up and Sleeping

I was recently reading Benjamin Hardy’s article about waking up early. He makes many good points, but I can’t help think he is missing a huge caveat. While waking up early can help you, not getting enough sleep will wreck you.

Not getting enough sleep messes with your body in so many ways. Memory issues, trouble concentrating, mood changes, weight gain, and balance issues are just the start of the list. Not getting enough sleep also lowers your libido. We’re talking less sex, people! Seriously, a doctor friend once explained it to me simply: “Not getting enough sleep is like operating the human body while intoxicated.”

I’m all for playing with your schedule. If you need to get up at 3:00 a.m. to be the best you, then absolutely do it. But if you think you can do that without getting enough sleep, you’re kidding yourself.

Time Saved. Time Lost.

I have been thinking about how the coronavirus pandemic has changed my life. There are lots of big and small ways. Have you thought about how the pandemic has changed time for you?

There were things you used to spend your time on, but where are you now saving time? That long commute is on hiatus. The drop-in visitors to your office to “shoot the breeze” is much less likely. If you think about it, there are lots of ways you may be saving time now that you weren’t before.

On the flip side, what are the new time sucks in your life? These days “Zoom Meeting” is becoming just as dirty of a phrase as “Powerpoint Presentation” was before all this madness started.

Everyone has their own accounting of time gained and time lost over the past several months, but if you’re not aware of your own, you should be. A half-hour commute to work equates to five found hours per week, 20 hours per month, 240 hours over a year. That’s six weeks in your pocket. You could do a lot with that time. The question is whether you will recognize you have it and what you will do with it.

How Much News Is Too Much News?

I have always prided myself on being someone who does not need to delete apps. You know, someone who deletes Twitter or Instagram every few months so they can avoid getting lost in that and instead focus on creating something. I am lucky enough that I can put limits on those things—or at least I thought I could. It turns out that the news can be my undoing.

The year 2020 has been a doozy. Getting lost in the news is a lot easier this year than in years past, and I am spending too much time on it. Keeping informed is good. Reading different versions of the same story repeatedly is nothing more than a fancy bit of procrastination. When I was growing up, the news was contained for us. It came on in the evening and lasted about 30 minutes. With 24-hour news channels and so many websites, now the news can get crammed down your throat like Homer Simpson’s donuts. This is bad for several reasons:

It takes a lot of time. I need to make a living and support my family. Excessive time with the news gets in the way of that.
It closes my mind. With the way modern algorithms work, once I read one story, the computers decide what kind of news I like and try to feed me more of that. The longer I go, the more biased and extreme the feed gets.
It wipes me out. This year. This year. Do I need to explain how reading too much news drains me of the will and energy to do anything productive?

So, I am taking steps. I am rerunning my timers, this time with the idea of putting a 30-minute box around the news every day. Once I hit 30 minutes, I am done. Rather than get lost in the news, I would rather use that time for something else. Maybe I can spend a bit of it trying to make things better.

Time Tracking with Timeular

Lately, I’ve been trying a new time tracking gizmo, a Timeular device. It’s a polygon-shaped piece of plastic and electronics that connects to my iPhone. I can assign a different task to each side, and when I switch modes, say going from screencasting to legal clients, I just flip the gizmo to put the briefcase icon (legal) sunny side up, and the iPhone app starts tracking time toward the new task.

It’s simple, easy to set up, and an excellent way to track time, particularly, if you find yourself doing a lot of work away from your computer, where a software solution (like Timing) can track time for you. Indeed, I find it a nice compliment to Timing and use the Timeular primarily to track moving the needle time.

I’m only a week in, but I haven’t thrown it out the window yet. The Timeular gizmo works great and is entirely accurate, provided I remember to spin it to the next task before switching gears. Of course, it is in that human-based step that things usually fall off the rails. I haven’t turned it into a habit yet, but I can see the benefit of this device and its simplicity. For me, the trick is keeping it in sight. I need to move it between my two desks and always have it just within sight at least, until a habit kicks in.

Regardless, I think I like the Timeular device, and I want to keep at it to see how much it can help me keep track of that ever-elusive moving the needle time. I bought mine on sale from Timeular directly. Mine is the basic package with no monthly subscription. They have a summer sale going on right now so if you’re interested …