Use less words. Bring the point into focus. Respect the time of the user. Skip the tangents and digressions. You might feel like you’re losing valuable stuff, but it's all dead weight that will make you more free and the end user more engaged.
Do more with less.
I looked at my oldest daughter the other day and she’s changing. She’s starting to grow up a little bit and look more grown-up. The difference between a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old is pretty big.
I want to capture these years and these moments and seal them up to save them forever. I can’t do it, but maybe taking more pictures of my kids will help. I’m going to start trying to set aside time each week to take nice photos of my kids doing what they do. Not the staged and posed nonsense. Just them living and learning and being funny. I think I’ll be happy that I did when I’m older.
Don’t talk yourself out of it, find ways to talk yourself into it. Take 30-seconds and close your eyes and look at the potential success rather than the potential problems.
The focused life is the best life there is. It’s a life from which satisfaction is derived at a level 100x that of fleeting hedonism or chasing a momentary dopamine high.
It’s a life spent improving yourself and contributing value to the community around you.
To live a focused and productive life we must leave behind the distracted masses, the sports, the daily gossip, the news in general, and most of your social media.
We must ruthlessly constrain our time and be careful not to give it away to every “opportunity” that arises. It will feel selfish at the moment, but if you do it to optimize your productivity and you are delivering valuable contributions, it’s much less selfish than it may seem at first.
Set aside time and sacrifice the next hour to work without distraction, background noise, checking email, or phone calls.
Do that four times a day. Watch your life change and see how much happier you become and how much more free time you have to spend doing things you love with freedom and comfort knowing you are contributing and adding value to the people around you. It all begins with leaving behind the distracted masses.
If you can sum up your email in a simple yes or no question, do that!
I’ve talked about adding a “TLDR” to the beginning of emails or communications to respect the time of your reader and I’m here to say that making emails easy to reply to is also a form of respecting the reader and ensuring you get more responses and better responses.
Instead of saying: “Hey, I would love to get your opinion on “X topic,” thoughts?”
Instead say: “Hey, I am researching “X topic” and would love to get your opinion on it. Could I stop by your office at 4:45pm on Thursday for 10 minutes?”
The second question conveys more context about your project and gives the reader a chance to see if they are interested. You have also set up a date and time on their turf (convenient!), and you phrase it so they can literally reply “yes” and that is all the work they need to do to respond.
Just like that you’ve set up a meeting and shown a concern for the time and effort of others.
Make it easy to respond whenever you can. It’s usually more often than you or I realize.
Scarcity mindset is essential to adopt when you consider your own time and attention. Defend them and let nothing steal them. They are not abundant. They are limited. Defend them!
Abundance mindset is the idea that there is lots of money, work, and opportunity for all. This is probably true. But it is not true with respect to your time and focus.
Any “opportunity” that might steal any level of focus from the important tasks in your life should be viewed with caution and the default answer should be “no” when responding to most requests.
Chasing instant gratification provides instant, but low-value pleasure. This low-value pleasure becomes more addictive, but the more of it you crave and the more of it you get, the less satisfying it becomes.
As the chase for low-value pleasure consumes your life it leaves you with no satisfaction with any important work you do. All the important stuff (that doesn’t have the same instant gratification) is suddenly boring and you don’t want to do it.
Your life loses meaning and balance. You sink into a depressive state as you meander around searching for meaning and deep happiness.
If you cut the dopamine-intensive instant gratifications out of your life (drugs, alcohol, video games, porn, eating lots of sugar, social media attention-seeking, etc…) those boring things suddenly become much more rewarding. In fact, you’ll find satisfaction in simply doing those meaningful things that you once thought were too boring.
Less pleasure is more fun. It’s certainly happier.
Speech and silence are brothers to action or inaction. Yet they work quite a bit differently.
If you are talking about it, you are probably not doing it. If you are doing it, you are past talking about it.
You usually regret the things you say and the things you don’t do.
You almost never regret being silent or taking action.
When it comes to speech, not doing it is usually better. When it comes to action, not doing it is usually worse.
When considering speech or silence, I remember that I rarely regret the times I was quiet or spoke less. It was when I said too much that I messed up/
When I think about action or inaction, I remember that I rarely regret jumping in a going for it. When I pulled the punch or was too afraid to jump right in then I would miss the opportunity and feel regret afterward.
“I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.”
You might feel like you failed. But if you are still trying, you haven’t failed. A failure doesn’t try, but a man looking to learn keeps trying.
So, whatever you do, keep trying.
I’m taking a week off from writing my blog posts. I don’t need the time off, I’m just doing it because I’m cutting away most of the technology and social media in my life for the next seven days.
When I started writing these posts in late 2019, I did not honestly believe that I would stick with daily writing for more than a few days, maybe a month at most.
But, it’s become a habit. It’s become part of my morning routine. I just do it now.
Three years ago taking a week off would have been the death blow to this little daily writing habit, but today I am 100% confident that I’ll be right back to writing come Monday, May 23rd. Cultivating good habits is hard work and requires changes that sting, but the result is calm confidence that feels akin to the most soothing massage or calming beach vacation you can imagine.
It’s easy to look at something and find reasons that it will be good. It's a short walk to then adopt a new practice or buy a new tool.
Usually we find positive reasons to support things we’re inclined toward and we leap at the negatives with respect to things we are repulsed by.
That is merely using emotion to dictate what is good or bad and pretending like we have good reasoning for it. Those reasons are there (while excluding any reasons to the contrary) because you already decided you liked/didn’t like the thing.
What if we considered what was good about the thing and then considered possible negatives as well? What would happen if we looked for ways that our favorite tools, services, social medias, personal routines, vices, and virtues affect us and made some adjustments?
Just because you see a great reason for something, doesn’t mean there aren’t three other reasons that are bad. Honest examination of the things we choose will lead us to a more fulfilling, happier, and more productive life.
TLDR is the internet acronym for “too long, didn’t read.”
I think every email should contain the essential piece of info in the first sentence. The reader should have everything they need in 10 seconds. Get to the point.
Then use the following few lines to smooth out that message and add kindness, context, and more info.
You’re busy, I’m busy, and we both stink at communicating in a friendly, yet succinct manner.
Spit out your message and smooth it out afterward. Approaching your emails, blog posts, instant messages, videos, social media content, etc… with a TLDR-first mindset will help make everything you do more user-friendly.
I’m still working on it, myself. Too often, these benign blog posts are often verbose beyond belief.
All of the infrastructures in the world means nothing without brilliant minds filling them. The innovation that injects life and excitement into the world doesn’t come from having the best gear or the biggest office. It comes from the daring, the risk-takers, the wild thinker, the oddballs, and the renegades.
Let not the outward trappings of the biggest corporations intimidate you. Without your mind and your ideas, they’ve got nothing but empty cathedrals. Train your brain and intestines to learn fast and take risks.
Stretch the limits of what you think is possible at least once a day. Crush yourself by setting aside fifteen minutes in which you will complete a 30-minute task.
You do this with an intensity of focus and a viciousness of work that you cannot sustain for a long period of time.
But by training your mind your intensity and speed of work will increase over the months and years.
Practice getting faster and focusing harder by setting hard deadlines that are very difficult to meet. Then voraciously attack the task.
The ability to deeply concentrate on something is a skill that you can practice and train to improve.
It is not something that magically appears when inspiration or motivation strikes.
The systems you build to govern your life, your morning routine, your structure of working hours, enforcing a strict “no-internet-distractions” policy with yourself during those working hours, etc… these systems beat inspiration.
They are repeatable, they are reliable, and they don’t wait for the angel of inspiration to stir up your waters of motivation.
Don’t rely on that fickle fool in your mind who tells you of motivation. "I just need some inspiration!" "Oh, how I could use motivation!" These are seductions of your lower beast.
Instead, build systems that force you to train your mind to focus and do deep work. It's hard. It takes time and effort. Get started as soon as you can.
Don’t be in-between. When we work, we should work extraordinarily hard and be extra focused. And then, when we stop working, we should stop working. No checking email, no making plans for new ventures on the restaurant napkin, no talking about work and stressful obligations, etc…
Our brains need the rest and, while sprinting and resting make us stronger, constantly running at a middle churning speed is stress that squeezes us like a grape. We end up imploding.
Figure out a routine at the end of your work hours and stick to that shutdown time. Give yourself the rest or await a burnout that consumes your ability to get things done.
It can be tricky, but we must make every effort to be either on or off.
Execution is so much more difficult than strategizing. And writing the to-do list is a breeze. But tomorrow, the work begins, and you're going to ask yourself why you made such grand plans.
When we make our plans, we have the ability to remove ourselves from the difficulty and pain of doing the work, so we have huge ambitions and we heap work onto our future selves.
We also believe that we will abruptly become superheroes and live in a world where time moves half as quickly.
Execution is hard. Focus on only a couple of very, very important things each day–no more than two or three at most! Shift your focus to your input, not the output.
Are you doing that very, very important work? Good. Keep going. The output will come from that. Focus on the hours you spend working or focus on anything that you actually do rather than getting stuck focused on massive deliverables that take much more time to complete.
Focus on writing 5x paragraphs a day, rather than your goal of writing a book this year. Focus on smoothing the concrete driveway with each trowel stroke you make, rather than how many driveways you want to build each week.
By doing more smooth trowel strokes, and by writing more paragraphs, you will deliver on your goal, and probably go much higher, too.
Achievable tasks focused on vitally important things is the way.
Stay away from the dopamine train early in the day. Distractions are bad enough, but morning distractions will derail an entire day.
Funny enough, early success and getting things done early in your day propels you forward into an amazing day.
Distractions early in the day making switching your brain into “work mode” nearly impossible. You’ll spend all day fighting the urge to not work.
Not ideal if you want to be productive.
Avoid distractions, but especially avoid them in the morning.
It is better to get a little bit done regularly than get a massive amount done only once in a while.
You will look back at a body of work over a year in which you did more than you ever dreamed of and felt less pressure than you thought possible. Your financial and mental stability will thank you for it later.
Interruption and distraction are the single most detrimental thing to productivity and creativity.
The finished artwork is hours, months, or years of work that is distilled into a single piece that you can consume in a moment.
For the artist to create requires empty blocks of time. Slabs of hours, uninterrupted and without distraction. A block of six hours is not the same as three blocks of two hours. What can be done in six uninterrupted, focused, free six hour block might be 25x blocks of two hours.
Smaller sporadic chunks of time are exponentially less valuable than the bigger chunks of time.
If you can reserve several large (90+ minutes) blocks of time in your day and block out the distractions your life and business will change drastically.
Slabs of time make the creative mind tick. In them you get lost and in them you discover the things that make you special.