Joshua Bryce Newman

Recently, I’ve been playing around with a new approach to time management from the very sharp British productivity guru Mark Forster. I’ve been more on top of things with his approach than I have with any before. But, even so, I’m dropping balls, can’t fit everything in.

This morning, I was talking with a smart angel investor about the difficulties of starting a company. In particular, the difficulty of prioritizing. It’s a bit like going to a restaurant: you can eat anything on the menu, but you can’t eat everything on the menu, at least without getting sick.

That’s led me to wonder about our collective obsession with efficiency, with productivity systems and organizational tips in general. Sure, they make us more effective, at least up to a point. But, eventually, no matter how smart our approach, we run into a hard limit – there’s just so much you can fit into a day.

Paring down to what fits is hard. It involves making choices, saying no. Which, perhaps, is why time management books climb the bestseller list. They seem like an escape from those tough decisions. If we could just be effective enough, we wouldn’t have to choose at all! We could somehow make it fit.

Of course, we can’t. We run up against those hard limits, time and again. Usually, we blame the time management approach, or we blame ourselves for not sticking to it rigidly enough. But, I suspect, the problem usually runs deeper. We have the whole menu on our daily to-do list, and we’re trying to eat through it all by marking individual bites as next actions, or sorting the plates into A’s, B’s and C’s.

Perhaps due to my hacker roots, for more than a decade I’ve organized my life in a collection of text files. But when it comes to actually executing, I’ve discovered I’m far more productive working off a printed-out version of my Today.txt to-do list than I am with the same list on-screen.

For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my Beautiful Mind mode).

For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.

About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.

A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.

I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched Dobbin Clothing. (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.

Kermit was right.

Somewhere over the past couple of years, Gmail solved spam. I’m not sure when it happened, precisely, but by now spam in my inbox is so rare that it actually catches me off guard. How did that get through?

Still, about six months back, I realized that nearly half of my email was what’s sometimes called ‘bacn’: those notices, newsletters, updates and alerts somewhere between spam and the ‘ham’ of real, human-sent emails. Shipping notices from Amazon, connection requests on LinkedIn, investor updates, retweets on Twitter, bills due to ConEd, Time Warner and AT&T, server status pings, all piling up at alarming speed. And though I wanted to at least glance at all those emails, few were crucial, few warranted immediate reading or response.

Still, because of their sheer volume, those bacn bits quickly gummed up the works, making it harder to spot and corral the messages that really did deserve quick attention.

So, using Gmail’s filter system, I fixed the problem:

I created a label called “!Robots” (with the ‘bang’ / exclamation point to alphabetize first).

Then, over the course of a month or so, as any email came in that wasn’t a personalized message from a real person, I’d click the little arrow at the top right of the message, choose “Filter messages like this”, then choose “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the Label: !Robots”.

Voila.

Now, once every day or two, I head to the !Robots folder, and crank through the hundred or so messages that have inevitably accumulated. Most require nothing more than a quick glance. Others – say, an expiring domain – need a minute or two of action. Still, I can usually get through the folder in well under ten minutes.

And then, the rest of the time, when I check my email – whether in Gmail, in Sparrow, or on my iPhone – all I get is the good stuff. No weeding necessary.

Turns out, taking out the bacn has been as much of an improvement as taking out the spam.

Dangerously close to real life.

I’ve been reading some kinesiology texts of late (yes, really), and stumbled across an interesting paper by Dr. Richard Schmidt [Motor Learning, 1988] about acquiring motor patterns through repetition.

Schmidt’s extensive research focused on the amount of practice necessary to learn a movement, to make it habit. A new pattern learned from scratch, he discovered, seemed to reliably take between 300 and 500 repetitions to become permanent. But new patterns learned to correct and replace an old, less efficient pattern instead consistently took between 3000 and 5000 repetitions – a literal order of magnitude difference.

I’ve thought about that recently as I’ve worked out, looking at the ways I move in basic exercises. But I’ve thought about it even more, looking at how I ‘move’ through the rest of my life.

Over the years of running companies, I’ve developed work habits, communications styles, and basic approaches to business. Most of those, on inspection, have served me very well. But a handful have not. And, indeed, I’ve increasingly noticed that I spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy undoing the problems cause by those handful of inefficient, bad patterns.

I’ve been focusing on correcting those patterns, replacing them with new, better, more efficient approaches. And, for the most part, I’ve been moving forward. But, of course, like with anything new, from time to time I misstep.

Before, I’d always believed the business self-help book saw that it takes 30 days to make a new behavior a habit. And, perhaps, in some cases, it does. But Schmidt’s research makes me think that time has nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s about volume of practice. And, in the case of re-learning something, it’s about a very, very large volume of practice.

Five thousand is an inordinate number of times to face a decision, and to make the right choice. In that context, those missteps seem inevitable. How can you do something new correctly five thousand times in a row?

And, just as important, in that context, it’s clearly only worth setting out for change when you’re ready to buckle down for a long-haul commitment, when you’re ready to start even knowing that you aren’t aren’t ‘done’, you aren’t finished thinking about your actions, until you’ve got things right again and again and again, three thousand to five thousand times.

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

• Chuck Close [Here, Via]

Recently, I stumbled back across a blog for students, called Study Hacks, that’s written by my friend Cal Newport. After getting sucked deep into the archives, I can definitively say it’s not only a great and well written site, but also one that’s genuinely and broadly useful for even those of us well out of college and into the ‘real world’. Go give it a read.

In particular, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about his Law of Action Planning: that no rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete.

As Cal observes, (and as I have in the past) productivity largely boils down to two problems: capturing and organizing the stuff you have to do, than actually doing that stuff.

But, Cal goes on, while a simple system can solve that first ‘capture/organize’ problem for years and years with little change, it’s the second ‘do’ problem that constantly needs new solutions to keep up with the realities and demands of our lives.

Previously, I’d taken that as either a flaw inherent in a given system (like, say, David Allen’s Getting Things Done), or in myself. Now, I’m starting to see it’s perhaps just the way human brains are wired to work.

Admittedly, that doesn’t really change anything in terms of my actual productivity output. But it does, at very least, allow me to skip from one form of time management to another without all the mental angst. Don’t worry, I can tell myself; it’s a feature, not a bug.

There’s a great story about a guy who attends a Tony Robbins seminar, and complains to Robbins that, despite trying everything, he can’t lose weight.

“You’ve tried everything?” asks Robbins.

“Everything,” the guy replies.

“What were the last hundred things you tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” the guy admits, “I haven’t actually tried a hundred things.”

“Then what were the last twenty-five things you did?” asks Robbins.

“I haven’t tried twenty-five things, really, either,” the guy responds.

“So how many things have you actually tried?” asks Robbins.

“Well,” says the guy, sheepishly, “maybe five or six.”

Perhaps it’s an artifact of America’s Protestant work-ethic roots: when we fail, our first response is to try the same thing again, just harder, and with more resolve.

Problem is, that rarely works. If the strategy didn’t work the past five times, the sixth isn’t likely to work either, no matter how much energy, commitment, and enthusiasm you throw behind it.

Just observe the number of people making the same New Year’s resolutions year after year. If you’ve been vowing to lose weight each of the past five January’s, odds are good, by the next one you’ll still be a fat fuck.

As the old saying goes, if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Or, in Einstein’s more eloquent words, “the thinking which created today’s problems is insufficient to solve them.”

So as you embark on this new year’s old resolutions, do some new thinking. Brainstorm about what you’re going to do differently, smarter. How you’re going to change your strategy. Because trying the same thing again – this time, with feeling! – just isn’t going to work at all.

Even with the best of daily blogging intentions, even on a long holiday weekend, it appears I couldn’t keep my re-start streak going for three straight days.

But, at least, it appears I’m not alone. In one of his earlier books, productivity guru Mark Forster relates this exercise:

All you have to do is pick one task which you are going to do the next day without fail, and then do it. If you succeed at that task, then you pick another different task for the following day and make it just a little bit more difficult.

And so you continue one day at a time, picking one task which you will do each day – each day a little bit more difficult. Once you are confident that you can carry out any task no matter how difficult without fail, you then repeat the process with two tasks.

It doesn’t matter whether the tasks are meaningful or completely nonsensical. The idea is to do them for no other reason than because you have decided to do them.”

As easy as it gets. Yet, as Forster points out in his later Do It Tomorrow, that simple game “has in fact proved too difficult for just about everyone who has tried it.”

Clearly, I wouldn’t fare particularly well on Forster’s exercise either. But I do increasingly believe that mastering it, achieving that sort of conscious self-control, is at the heart of productivity, and most other life successes.

So, perhaps, that simple exercise is worth working on. Perhaps it’s less about will, and more about skill. Perhaps practice makes perfect, and self-control can actually be learned.

Or maybe not. Either way, I think it might be worth the effort to find out.

There’s a piece of Talmud read each year at the Passover seder, Mishna Pirkei Avot 2:21, in which Rabbi Tarfon explains:

“It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task. Yet, you are not free to desist from it.”

Which, in my mind, is the crux of so much of life – from the very small (why we procrastinate) to the exceedingly large (why we stand by apathetically while genocides rage in places like the Sudan).

As we can’t imagine finishing, we don’t even begin. Yet, as I often say in regards to entrepeneurship, there are only two steps – start, and keep going – and you lose most people at the first step.

So, whether you’re Jewish or not, take heed of Tarfon’s wisdom, and take advantage of this time of year to reflect where it might apply to your own life: you don’t have to finish, but you do have to start.