Материалы с блога Скота Янга
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/
Work Less to Get More Done
For several years now I’ve used a productivity trick called weekly/daily goals. I’ve written about it many times before, but the gist is simple:
You keep two to-do lists, one for the day and one for the week.
As the week goes by, move items from your weekly to daily list.
When working, only focus on the daily list. When it’s done, you’re finished for the day.
The power of this method is that it forces you to not work on certain things. You avoid the infinite to-do list syndrome of constantly procrastinating because it feels too hard to get started.
Despite its simplicity, I get a lot of emails with a common implementation problem. A typical email exchange goes like this:
“Hey Scott, I really like the weekly/daily goals, but I have a problem. No matter how hard I try, I can never get everything done on my daily list! I can only get about half of it done before I give up. What should I do to finish my daily goals?”
To me the answer is obvious—if you aren’t ever finishing your daily goals, it probably means you’re putting too much on your plate. Set fewer goals and actually finish them. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, almost nobody takes my advice! They claim that they have to get that work done, so they can’t possibly set a smaller to-do list. Instead, of setting smaller goals, they continue creating to-do lists they can’t possibly finish.
You Work Less Than You Think (or Why These Emails Drive Me Crazy)
The template rebuttal to my “work less” argument is insane. If they can’t possibly set a smaller to-do list, but only end up accomplishing half of it, then it doesn’t really matter how big the list is. Nobody cares how much work you intended to accomplish, only how much you actually finished.
This tendency to grossly overestimate your ability to get work done in the short-term is a common one. Even productivity authors aren’t immune. Cal Newport posted his dismay at his meager total of hours devoted to his most important research tasks.
I’m not immune to this either. I think a difference between people like Cal and myself and most isn’t that we have a magical ability to get more done, but that we actually take the time to measure our input. I’ve done enough timelogs to know how much time I waste.
The average person, who has never meticulously tracked work for several days, more often reacts to failing at a particular to-do list, not by scaling down their ambitions, but, ironically, by adding more work to next day’s list.
Why You Should Plan to Work Less
Goals only work if they motivate achievable action. Zig Ziglar used to say goals should be out of reach, not out of sight. If you’re not succeeding your daily goals lists at least half the time, you’re not stretching yourself, you’re just wasting time.
In the spirit of this, I offer two propositions:
We should endeavor to know, honestly, how much time we spend working and how much we actually accomplish. Doing a timelog is easier than ever now that there are services which track it for you.
Once we know how we actually spend our working time, we should try to incrementally improve it and not pretend that we’ll be superheroes tomorrow.
If you do a timelog and discover you’re only working 4 hours a day (which is very common) the appropriate reaction isn’t to immediately convince yourself you’ll start working 8 hours, but to make incremental shifts. Try 5 or 6 hours and log yourself again in a couple weeks to see if you’ve made improvements.
Why Take Small Steps?
When your self-image, especially the idealized self-image that plans your work out, doesn’t match who you actually are, you become less efficient. I can say, after having done a mix of both for years, that the days I set a small, but achievable list are my most productive.
Unfortunately if you’re under the impression you’re capable of working 8 hours straight, but your timelog reveals you’re only working 2, then planning becomes meaningless.
Of course, we also remember the one day we set a large to-do list and actually did finish it. This is misleading because you can always accomplish more by temporarily kicking yourself into overdrive. But this drains you, so it’s rarely sustainable for more than a week or two. The goal should be to raise your baseline level of productivity.
How to Implement this Advice and Start Getting More Done
First, do a timelog. I’ve always used pencil and paper, but if you’re more tech-savvy than myself, there’s plenty of apps for recording your time spent. Doing a timelog is a pain in the ass, but it’s essential if you want to know what’s a reasonable benchmark for how you should spend your time.
An alternative to a timelog is to record the tasks you actually accomplish on any given day. This is a less reliable metric because task-completion is more variable than time spent, but if you do it for a longer period of time, you can get a good idea of how much you can accomplish on a typical day.
Second, set your productivity standard to be only somewhat above your current average. If you’re getting done 4 hours, try 5 or 6. If you’re completing 8 tasks, try 10 or 12.
Third, keep this standard for a full month, before going back and seeing if your productivity improved during the time period. A month is a good amount of time because anything less tends to get distorted because of the motivation burst when setting a goal.
Finally, if you’re still not meeting your goals, ratchet it up another 25-50%. By doing this incrementally you can eventually reach higher levels of productivity. Eventually this tapers off and it gets harder and harder to work more without sacrificing energy or efficiency, but a lot of the early gains come from simply reorganizing your time and wasting it less, not by working longer.
If you’re serious about getting more done, here’s a summary:
Do a timelog for a few days, or a detailed record-keeping of your daily goals over a few weeks.
Set a goal to increase your work accomplished by 25%.
Come back in a month and measure yourself, if you’ve improved, you can try again or simply aim to maintain your productivity levels.
Hopefully this approach can stop the nonsense of planning for a 10-hour day when you’re only actually completing 3 hours. Getting things done doesn’t require working more, but working smarter. How can you work smarter, if you don’t even know how you’re working right now?
Fake Wisdom
When I first started writing, I used to get “false agreement”. This is when a comment claims to agree with everything you’re saying, but reveals that they actually believe the opposite in the substance of their message.
I used to blame this on reader illiteracy, but it was likely my failing as a writer. But now I feel there’s another factor at work, that some writing people will simply accept as being profound, regardless of any of its implications.
Self-help gets a lot of flak for being overflowing in this style of fake aphorisms, but this kind of thinking is prevalent everywhere. I discovered that if you word the message the right way, people will feel like they agree with you, even when they don’t.
Feel-Good vs Think-Good
If you’ve been reading here for some time, you’ve probably noticed a lot more disagreement in the comments than my earlier writing. But I consider this a success because it means I’m articulating my ideas in a way that people can actually consider them, instead of providing token acceptance.
Not all writing needs to be intellectual, as much as I prefer “think-good” to feel-good pieces, writing is more than just communicating ideas, just as music is more than just the literal content of lyrics.
That being said, I think a sign of a well-articulated idea is that you can imagine its opposite. My last post was about aggressive learning, which had some detractors as I outlined specifically what it implied and what it didn’t. I wrote a similar post which had fewer detractors because few people could clearly imagine an opposing concept.
Being Able to Imagine the Opposite
If I’m reading just to feel good, or to promote a particular attitude, perhaps deep reflection isn’t necessary. But, if I’m trying to implement something specific in my life, I try to ask myself what the opposite of a particular idea would be. If I can’t imagine it, that likely means the original idea is malformed.
Because popular writing tends to be evaluated on how compelling it is, being a “good” writer doesn’t mean you need to be very precise. In fact, I’d argue that many successful authors lack this quality, writing ideas where it is very difficult to clearly imagine any alternative hypotheses.
Since precision isn’t always highly valued, that puts the onus on the reader to try to make the idea more precise. Asking yourself what would be a contradictory theory is a good exercise in thinking about whether the idea is useful at all.
Good Ideas Have Objections
You could argue, since I have far more detracting comments in my later articles than my earlier ones, that my earlier articles were closer to the mark. An explanation is that I’ve come to believe increasingly ridiculous ideas in my old age.
But I think the sign of a good idea is that you can imagine an alternative. If you can’t, then either the opposite of the idea is so carefully hidden that you’re not truly evaluating the idea, or it simply doesn’t exist.
I had a discussion with someone about the Law of Attraction, in which I protested my disbelief. I argued that attitude clearly matters, and controlling attention certainly can alter your perception, but that this hardly justifies a complete rethinking of physics to believe so.
The person countered that he didn’t believe all of that, but still thought that LoA was generally true. My criticism is that if you can’t articulate a setting where the opposite of a piece of advice is even plausibly true, it can’t be very useful advice. So if LoA only means “having a positive attitude”, then it’s hardly the revolution it claims to be.
What’s the Opposite?
If an idea is going to change your life, it should give obvious implications. I like Cal Newport’s blog because his philosophy isn’t just that success follows from mastery, but that, as a consequence, “finding your passion” matters a lot less. Benny Lewis says speaking matters to learning languages, not-so-much for solo practice. Holistic learning implies memorization isn’t really important.
If the tradeoff of an idea, the counter-theory it suggests, is incredibly weak, then the idea is probably fake wisdom. It sounds nice, but since it implies so little, it probably isn’t very useful. Maybe good for an inspirational read, but probably not best to be a keystone of a new philosophy.
I’m not perfect in this regard either. My archives are full of early posts which fill a lot of space but imply little. But I strive to be better as a writer, even if that means provoking more (healthy) dissent.
Shifts in attitude can change your life, but so do changes in philosophy. And while a shift in mood is temporary, a shift in ideology can have long-lasting ramifications. That’s why good ideas matter, and why it’s worth hunting them down—even if you disagree with them.