Tag Archives: Human Potential

2nd Jan, 2012

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My 2012 Resolution: Awesome Mornings

To start out 2012, I threw out most of the routines I was working on and decided to focus on my mornings. A bad morning really has the potential to derail your entire day. I’ve seen that with myself and I see it often with people I talk to as part of Lift.

Eat Breakfast
Eat breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up. When I don’t do this I get less done in the morning and then often overeat at lunch, which puts me into a food coma in the afternoon. This is what I meant by derailing your entire day.

This isn’t going to sound very exciting, but I’ve been using a breakfast idea that I got out of the Four Hour Body: beans. Usually it’s just black beans and hot peppers. If I’ve had time to prepare the night before, I’ll throw in some broccoli. But I almost always just go with beans. It’s as fast to prepare as a bowl of cereal–speed seems to be the key to not skipping this meal. Plus the high protein meal doesn’t spike my blood sugar.

15 minutes of activity
My ideal exercise is to go to the pool and swim, but my pool has odd hours and there are lots of days where I can’t make this happen. The result is that I’m haphazard about exercise and more than anything I just want to (re)create an exercise habit.

So I’ve settled on starting my day with 15 minutes of exercise or similar activity. It could be running. It could be squats, pushups, and crunches. It could be yoga or stretching.

Fifteen minutes isn’t going to sound like a lot to Lance Armstrong, but for me, it’s enough to feel like I’ve accomplished something without being big enough that I’m at risk of skipping it.

This has a nice side effect, it puts my mind on something other than work so that when I do start working I’m fully alert and clear headed.

That last bit is actually big for a lot of people. One of the common ways that people get derailed is that they check their email as soon as they wake up. They immediately get caught up in the details of their email and often can’t work their way back to their top priorities.

Choose priority #1
What is the top thing that I want to accomplish in the day?

For the first day of 2012, it was to drive to Pennsylvania to visit my grandfather. We had a nice dinner and I went to bed feeling like I’d accomplished something (even though many other things went unfinished).

Compare that with starting your day in the weeds and then looking at a todo list that’s full of things that all seem urgent but which you’ll never manage to get to. That’s paralyzing.

Lots of productivity systems advice that you start by prioritizing your day (it’s habit #3 in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). I’ve boiled it down to something simpler, just prioritizing one goal, for two reasons.

First, I don’t have a strong prioritization habit yet, so shrinking the initial goal creates a tiny habit that’s easier to adopt. Once it’s adopted it can be expanded.

Second, it gives me a better shot at ending my day feeling good. It’s a victory rather than a very productive failure (which is what a lot of items checked off of a overly long todo list feels like). I find that I’m more productive when I’m happier, so I’m always looking for these tricks to reframe things in the positive.

Work Smarter

The morning is the time of day when you can actually set yourself up to work smarter. I’m pretty optimistic about the routines above. They set me up for good energy levels, help me be heads up about working on the right things throughout the day, and give me a chance to end the day feeling like I’ve accomplished something.

* Photo by Tim Phillips

23rd Nov, 2011

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Experiments in Human Potential

Man, it’s time for a Lift update, right?

We’ve been experimenting with different configurations of an app that will put anyone on the path to super-humandom. By experimenting, I mostly mean experimenting on ourselves.

So if you were hoping to read a lot about me and a little bit about the cutting edge of behavior design, you’re in luck.

What is Lift exactly?
I don’t like to go on record with specifics because they change so often. We’ve built a handful of variations, but the core has always been using positive reinforcement to make being awesome easier.

The first version was like Twitter (text area + activity stream) with points. In fact you could give yourself as many points as you wanted, “+1Million I got out of bed today.”

Last week’s version had a lot of checkboxes and no points. That’s basically the opposite of the first version.

The constant is that when Lift is successfully giving out rewards, we all feel super human. Lift takes willpower out of the equation for us.

The One Habit of Highly Successful People
The one habit of highly successful people is that they’re able to create good habits.

There was a great article in the NY Times recently about Decision Fatigue. Decisions are the opposite of habits. A habit is automatic. A decision takes willpower.

You have finite willpower. So an ambitious, disorganized person (like me) makes a lot of mistakes because they run into situations where they know what to do but don’t have the decision making energy to decide to do it.

The first habit I picked up with Lift was flossing. Jon, my cofounder, started with inbox zero. I’m not going to argue that those habits alone are going to make us highly successful people.

What they did do was give us both the confidence that we could create any habit. Now, when we want to level up, we look at what habits will get us there.

“Lift! It’ll turn you vegan!”
We’re going to need a better marketing slogan.

I’m the least likely person to go vegan. Every significant party I’ve ever thrown has revolved around eating meat. I said goodbye to a job by throwing a sausage party for my coworkers and for my 30th birthday I smoked ribs (St. Louis Style) for all of my friends.

All I really want is to lose weight and be healthier. I started by trying out better eating habits.

My first habit was to eat slow carb meals (a la Tim Ferris’ 4-hour Body). I was pretty consistent for my main three meals but I didn’t lose any weight at all. (I’m still surprised by this given how bad I had been eating).

So I looked at my non-meal-time eating and realized that I still ate a ton of candy. So I gave up refined sugar. That still didn’t have an effect. Next, I looked at my sedentary lifestyle and added in a little exercise. Still no effect.

I kept changing my habits until I ended up vegan with a small amount of exercise. That works for me.

It’s not that I now have the magic formula for weight loss (eat better, exercise a little). There are thousands of magic formulas for that.

What I do have is the fundamental skill for weight loss: I can change.

Lift is the secret sauce for that skill. It gives me enough reinforcement to get started on any habit and enough information to adjust as I’m going.

One pushup per day
Our friend, BJ Fogg, who does behavior design research at Stanford gave us an idea that he calls “tiny habits.”

Generating habits are the primary challenge for reaching your goals. You don’t win a marathon by running really hard just the one time. And you don’t earn a promotion with just one powerpoint presentation. There are millions of steps along the way.

The idea of a tiny habit is to strip out everything that might be a barrier to creating a routine, including the difficulty of the routine. Make it as easy as possible. Make it laughably easy. After that, your natural instincts will take over to push yourself harder and smarter.

Tiny habits are minimal routines like “floss at least one tooth” or “put your running clothes on after waking up”. Those are good routines if they eventually grow to “floss daily” or “run in the morning.”

Can I do 100 pushups in one go? I’ve tried the official 100 pushups program several times, but I always break down in week 3. That week is so demoralizingly difficult that I give up.

SoI tried this, “do at least one pushup every day.” Usually I do 20 pushups. If I feel good, I try to go for a personal best. If I feel bad, I just do a couple.

The result isn’t perfect–my personal best isn’t going up as fast as I’d like. But I have a routine that’s lasted 79 days. That’s a habit. And I’m confident that I will, one day, be able to do 100 pushups.

Admittedly, pushups are a novelty goal for a desk jockey like me. But this same basic concept is the core productivity method for a lot of prolific writers.

Stephen King writes ten pages per day (they don’t have to be good pages). Some days his work ends by lunch, some days it ends at 5pm. What’s interesting about his goal, is that it never keeps him at his desk until midnight. He’s prolific, but it’s because of consistent effort, not heroic effort.

What’s next?
As of last Thursday, we do have a pretty strong idea of what we’re building. It’s mobile-friendly. It has a reward system. It has a way for you to see what’s working and to change to something better. It has support for the little details that throw you off track. If you’re interested, the best way to stay informed is to add your email address to the beta, lift.do.

* Image by pasukaru

3rd Nov, 2011

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Done, Done and Ready, Ready

707009219_a353d7fc62_o.jpg

Have you ever had an engineer tell you that they were done and then found out later that what they meant is that they had solved the problem in their head, not that they’d coded the solution, tested it, or deployed it?

Let me be 100% clear. When this (or less extreme examples) happen, the problem is not with the engineer, it’s with your question.

I’ve been this engineer and here’s what happens. I go deep into some problem space and push out everything else so that I have an empty head that I can apply completely to the problem. I stop thinking about my personal life, the blogosphere, and most definitely anything that I happened to have guessed about the project plan and the pressures that my manager is facing.

Then I’ll reach some milestone for a personal goal related to the problem, “Yes! I’m done sketching the solution.”

Right after that, right after I’ve just started a personal celebration for being done with some important-to-me milestone, some manager will ask if I’m done. “Yeah! Want to celebrate me?”

But we’re talking about completely different things and neither of us is being clear. The person asking is in the context of some conversation from a few days ago and I’m in the context of what I was just working on 30 seconds ago.

There’s a really easy solution to this common miscommunication that doesn’t involve any blame or hard behavior changes. Your team just needs a common definition for done and an unambiguous way of referencing it. Enter “Done, Done.”

Done, Done

Stop asking, “Are you done?” and start asking, “Are you Done, Done?”

I learned this phrase from Luke Hohmann at his agile product development firm, Enthiosys. I’m pretty sure it’s at least relatively common in Agile circles.

So, using Agile as an example, your team definition of a task or user story being Done, Done might mean the task has been coded, meets team-wide code standards, includes test coverage, and has been peer reviewed.

You should come up with your own definition with the help of your team. Explain the concept and then have them put things that might be in the definition onto a white board. Then go through and decide together what’s in and what’s out.

That’s your first pass although you’ll want to revisit this both because your first version won’t be perfect and because your product priorities change.

The development team’s API for product

Luke is the person who first made me realize that Agile artifacts are an API for the development team. Tasks, projects, or user stories get passed to a development team and Done, Done defines the format for what the developers return.

Think of what the product roadmap, velocity, and story points look like to the product manager. Suddenly they never have to (although they will anyway) ask developers when something is going to launch. They just have to look at your velocity and the number of story points that they want to include in their launch. If they don’t like the answer then they can drop stories and features.

The better this API gets, the more autonomy and fun both roles get to have.

Ready, Ready

Agile was a big step forward. But Lean is even a bigger step forward because it introduces the idea of validation.

Not everyone thinks this, but I do: having validation means the developer can make product decisions without having to go through the product manager.

Maybe this is the wrong tangent for this post. All I really want to say is that because we’re into validating our work a la things we gleaned from The Lean Startup book, we ended up needing a stronger definition for the beginning of a project.

Before we start coding we need to create some sort of hypothesis about the result we’re shooting for and then take some sort of baseline measure. Enter Ready, Ready.

Now before we start work we have a checklist to make sure we’re ready. And me, the super disciplined product manager, has to actually put some thought into what’s going to makes for a clean, measurable, coherent iteration.

The Checklist Manifesto

I saw The Checklist Manifesto guy, Atul Gawande, speak recently. He’s a doctor that found an amazing way to reduce deaths after surgery: make the surgery team follow a very basic checklist that includes things like discuss the upcoming surgery as a team, have everyone introduce themselves, wear gloves and masks.

Implementing the checklist can reduce complications and deaths by as much as half.

The two main problems with the checklist are that it’s easy and that it’s patronizing. Nobody makes any money by selling the checklist. And it doesn’t help cowboy surgeons feel more cowboy. But it works. Weigh that tradeoff for your next surgery: 50% reduction in your chance of death or boost your surgeon’s self-esteem.

Checklists work in other places too and that’s exactly what Ready, Ready and Done, Done are for developers and product managers.

We think we’re super disciplined, but we’re not. So reducing missed steps, errors, and sloppiness is part of the benefit.

The other part is that now we have a structure for coming to an agreement and adjusting for problems. It’s not really bureaucracy because the definition comes from within the team.

I always want to move faster and rather than rushing people to cut corners in their code (i.e. micromanaging the pace), we can control the basics of code quality in the Done, Done list*. Likewise, we’re experimenting with ways to learn more as we go, and a lot of that gets reflected in our Ready, Ready list.

Jon (my co-founder) and I are major cowboys who are oblivious to risk and live every second on the edge (not really), and checklists look controlling at first. But once you start using them you realize that those are details that you don’t need to keep in your head anymore. That leaves more space for actual thinking and creativity.

That’s all. Please leave a Comment, Comment.

* Scared? The main thing we pushed on was doing the simplest possible thing that works for the first cut, i.e. handle it with Rails defaults before building a more permanent Javascript (Backbone) solution. I’m sure we’ll reverse that when we’re more confident in the configuration of features that matter.

26th Oct, 2011

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Three Types of Entrepreneurs

My favorite book on training, The Cyclist’s Training Bible, starts with a self-evaluation that identifies your strengths and your limiters. That’s the first time I’d seen weaknesses rephrased in a pragmatic and actionable way.

Limiters

If you’re a scrawny cyclist who routinely leads up the mountains, you’re probably weak at sprinting. But that’s not worth worrying about because sprinting isn’t how you, the scrawny cyclist, win races.

However, if you find yourself breaking away on the uphill and then getting caught as you try to solo time trial to the finish–that’s a limiter. Even if you consider yourself a good time trialer, that’s still the skill that’s preventing you from winning races.

Entrepreneur Types

Starting a new company is a good time for self-reflection. Probably the most useful realization I had was that I was a specific type of entrepreneur and that type came with limiters that I could improve or work around.

I had the realization while advising at Kapor Capital. I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs there and hit a point with one where I was totally flumoxed.

She had built an amazing technology but was somehow attracted to the tiniest potential application for it. I think at an emotional level, she just wanted people to use the technology and that was clouding her better business judgment.

Half-way through convincing her that there were several ways to create much more impact with her technology, I realized that I get trapped by small market ideas for the exact same reason. I get excited the second I find a few customers. Then my sense of duty kicks in and I get wrapped up in serving their needs and requests.

Ever since that realization, I’ve called myself a Utilitarian entrepreneur, meaning my inclination is to focus on the value I’m providing to the exclusion of almost anything else. I’ve been trying to figure out the strengths of that predilection and the limitations that I should be working on or around.

Partly as a way of comparison and partly as a way to be a better advisor to other entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that there are two other common types, Technologists and Opportunists.

Technologists

Technologists are attracted to hard problems. Think of Google as a company founded by Technologists–the core idea was a breakthrough insight about search algorithms.

The best case scenario is that you find a clear and profitable application for your technology. Since you’re doing something hard, it’ll also be hard for people to copy you (make sure to tell your VCs about this built in defensibility).

One common pitfall is that you build something impressive that nobody wants. I don’t want to name names, but the examples that come to mind are in search and in databases. I just checked the TechCrunch deadpool and it seems much more common that people build something simple that either nobody wants or that has no way to make money. But there’s at least one example of technologists-gone-wild on the first page of deadpool companies.

The second common pitfall is that you miss obvious and more effective simple solutions because of your focus on over-engineering your dream technology.

A year ago, I heard from several computer-science-smart founders that filtering content was the next major internet challenge that needed to be solved and that advances in machine learning allowed this to be tackled algorithmically.

Fast forward one year. The best new application for filtering your overwhelming stream of information (at least in my opinion) is Stellar.io. Stellar has taken the non-technologist brain-dead solution–it shows you content that’s been liked or starred by people in your social graph. No math required.

Opportunists

Opportunists are like heat seeking missiles. This word has good and bad connotations–which seems right. Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are opportunists who were successful, but who don’t have great reputations.

However, I don’t think raw aggression is the defining characteristic. Rather it’s simply how quickly someone latches on to something that’s working and how quickly they drop something that’s failing. They’re attracted by the scale, magnitude, and potential impact of an idea.

I’ve worked with a very successful and very nice person in this category. It’s impressive to watch him move on to the next idea while I’m still wrapped up in trying to polish the existing idea for our five users.

The biggest gotcha is just to completely overlook the utility or feasibility of an idea because you’re so wrapped up in how awesome it’s going to be once it’s big.

The funny example I give, is a guy who called me up asking if CrowdVine could help him build a social network for everyone who owned a cell phone. That’s a lot of people! But why would the first ten users use it? He, a cell phone kiosk owner, had no answer for that.

The second biggest gotcha in this category is when the hype far outpaces the fundamentals. I have a couple of personal experiences here, but the most clear is Odeo.

In hindsight, the media hype for podcasting in 2005 was probably a reaction to how slow they’d been to recognize the value of blogging. It was easy to get swept up in the idea that we were riding the next big social media wave.

It took a lot of backtracking to realize that while podcasting was an occasionally useful form of social media, it wasn’t on par with blogging or social networking.

Utilitarians

Utilitarians are attracted by, you guessed it, utility–positive feedback from customers about how useful your application is.

From the outside, Joel Spolsky, looks like a Utilitarian. He’s got a nice, medium sized business, providing bug tracking software.

Size is one of the pitfalls (or not, depending on whether you think lifestyle-business is a perjorative). It’s definitely the pitfall I fell into with CrowdVine. I was plenty happy–happier than I’d ever been professionally–to be selling nice-to-have software to a small niche of cash-strapped businesses.

That business satisfied my short-term need to make users happy, but not my long term desire to have a large impact. Because happy users make me so happy, it was hard to realize that CrowdVine was our first product, not our last.

There’s another good product comparison here. Sharepoint, a social network (slash collaboration) product from Microsoft, has every feature that could possibly push someone to buy it. But generally, and I’m basing this on unrelated phone calls where someone spontaneously brought up how much they hate that app, those features are not optimized for usability.

A utilitarian would never do that. The app just won’t make sense to them unless they know that it’s being used and used well. Yammer is the utilitarian counter to Sharepoint. It’s a rapidly growing intranet social network that is useful enough that individual employees deploy it themselves and then spread it to the rest of their organization.

Countering Your Limitations

One Utilitarian entrepreneur that I was working with did back of the envelope business models (a 30 minute exercise in using Excel) and one of the models came out as two orders of magnitude bigger than the others. That’s what she’s working on now.

For me, I went to another successful entrepreneur with all of my side projects and asked for advice. He was completely right about what I should work on–but it was a decision that was hard for me to do because I was so enthralled by other side projects that I was convinced would be useful–but which were also obviously small potatoes.

The advice, “launch early and often,” seems perfect for Opportunists. It flushes out problems with feasibility. Technologists should get out of the building. If you build it, will they buy it? Utilitarians seem to do those two things naturally–what they need is a prioritization filter.

If you feel like you fit into those categories, you probably just need to do one or two similar things in order to counter your limiters. If you don’t fit these categories, I bet there’s still a class of mistakes that you make over and over. That’s your limiter.

* Photo by Leo Reynolds

9th Aug, 2010

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Lessons on deliberate practice from Jerry Rice

Jerry Rice is the greatest wide receiver of all time and a well-known workout fanatic. That makes him a good subject for talking about deliberate practice. He’s also my favorite football player, so consider this my semi-topical homage in honor of his induction into the Football Hall of Fame.

The standard Jerry Rice story is that he wasn’t the fastest wide receiver in the league, but he was the hardest working and most disciplined. He finished his career with every major record by a wide margin. His career stats aren’t just a little bit better than the other all-time wide receivers, they’re better by a third. He caught 197 touchdowns, the next best receiver caught 148.

I have two favorite stories that I think demonstrate important ideas and outcomes from deliberate practice.

How do you spend your time?
I once saw a television special on the top ten Monday Night Football performances of all time. Jerry was on the list twice, naturally, including posting a MNF record 289 yards and three touchdowns on Minnesota in 1995. He also had a third, uncredited, performance on the list.

In 1989, his teammate, John Taylor, had 286 receiving yards (a record at the time), including two 90+ yard touch down catches. In every single John Taylor highlight, Jerry Rice would come out of nowhere to land key blocks. They’re amazing blocks, both for effort and technique. Watch these two highlights from the game and keep your eyes on #80. The John Taylor game would not have made the list without Jerry Rice.

One of the major themes from the people who study performance and deliberate practice is that how people spend their time is more important than how much time they spend or how hard they work. For example the swim study that I often reference found that different levels of swimmers were differentiated mainly by how they spent their practice time, not by how much time they spent practicing.

Jerry Rice had to be on the field doing something. He could have just thrown one block or taken the opportunity to catch his breath. Presumably, in pre-season all of the wide receivers had engaged in blocking practice. Every wide receiver in the league had similar opportunities. Jerry Rice maximized those opportunities. I think of that as a combination of time management and focus. (BTW, his teammate, John Taylor, was also known as an excellent blocker and that quid pro quo played a part in winning games and in boosting Jerry’s stats).

Think about your own work today. Did you use every minute productively? I sure didn’t. Since starting this post, I’ve checked TechCrunch and HackerNews several times and watched a YouTube video of some cheesy song about the town I live in. So rather than thinking about working sixty hours this week, try thinking about how to make each minute count.

Preparation mismatches are common
In 1997, Jerry Rice set the single season touchdown reception record with 22 touchdowns. Here’s the amazing thing, because of a player’s strike, he played only twelve games instead of sixteen. At the pace he was on, he would have scored 29 touchdowns over the course of a full season.

I’ve often debated the relative level of difficulty for this record. On the one hand, the season was significantly shorter–that obviously makes setting the record harder. On the other hand, the closest he ever came to this record in a full season was 17 touchdowns. So, there must have been another factor to put him on a touch down pace that was 70% higher than his next best season.

I think that factor was the strike. Most of the league went on a four week hiatus. Jerry came back ready to play at one level, the rest of the league came back at a much lower level. Even the highest level of professionals have very inconsistent levels of preparation.

I’ve seen many preparation mismatches happen at work. Many (frustrated) workers think it’s enough to be right. But ideas get more traction if they come packaged with preparation. The right idea with tight articulation, supporting evidence, and patient support will win out in most rational discussions. However, the right idea haphazardly presented will almost always lose out to a lesser idea presented well.

If a person goes into every meeting prepared to represent their point of view, then their point of view is going to win out more often (the number of times it would win on merit plus the number of times it was the only coherent option). I’ve been on the receiving end of many bad decisions that originated in this dynamic. The fix was just to go into every discussion with over the top preparation. Generally, it’s almost always possible to out-prepare someone.

If you make over the top preparation your standard, then you’re going to find many situations where you win by default.

Jerry Rice photo from Flickr Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/devstopfix/2689677355/

20th Jul, 2010

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Two Tips for Deliberate Practice

Roughly, deliberate practice is a means to improve yourself by intelligently breaking your target into components that can be practiced and upping the level of difficulty of each practice session to be just outside your comfort zone. Deliberate practice is often associated with the idea that even genius-level talents (Mozart, Tiger Woods) got there through practice, not talent. However, you can ignore the talent debate and just concentrate on the idea that if your talent level is X, deliberate practice is how you get to 10X.

There are two things that I think need more emphasis when people talk about deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is more than 10,000 hours
Or maybe it’s less than 10,000 hours. Almost everyone I’ve used the phrase “deliberate practice” with has come back saying, “oh, that’s that 10,000 hour thing.” They’re referring to part of the research saying that after 10,000 hours of practice a person will have reached their improvement limit. This is the least useful thing to know about deliberate practice research. It’s the fine print warning that says if you keep a deliberate practice regime up for ten years it’s going to stop being effective. Big deal.

The ten thousand hour framing obscures two things, that deliberate practice can be applied to much smaller things (not just when your goal is to be world class) and when you want to make a smaller commitment. What happens after 1 hour of deliberate practice? Every hour spent practicing is time when you’re improving. There’s not 10,000 hours of work followed by a leap. It’s 10,000 hours followed by 10,000 gradations in improvement. The first research paper that I read on this topic is an study of competitive swimmers at all levels, The Mundanity of Excellence. Even at the youngest levels, they found that the fastest swimmers practiced better.

So, you’re an office worker who sends tons of email? Take one hour, read this article on writing effective emails, and then rewrite your last ten emails according to those guidelines. Forever after you’ll be a better emailer.

The key word is deliberate
A lot of people practice. They put in hours of work hoping to get better. Generally a high volume of practice does lead to improvement. But that’s not the key insight of deliberate practice. In the swimming example above they found that there were many similarities between the faster and slower swimmers, including how much time they spent swimming. The difference is that the slower swimmer would spend practice thinking about the hot tub and the faster swimmers would spend practice working on some minutiae, like how slight variations in the cupping of their hand effected the efficiency of their swimming stroke.

I generally find that it’s easier to work more than it is to work smarter. Why is that? It would obviously be much more efficient if my preference were reversed. For example, my number one productivity boost comes from keeping an obsessively updated todo list throughout the day. My natural inclination toward the todo list is to compete with myself to see how many items I can check off. The biggest problem with my todo list is that I’ll put everything on it and I don’t spend much time prioritizing. So at the end of the day my todo list reflects more activity than accomplishment.

In the language of deliberate practice, the “skill” I’m trying to improve is productivity. The naive approach is just to work harder. The deliberate approach is to break my productivity target down into smaller pieces and train up the areas where I am lacking. When it comes to productivity, I’m not afraid of hard work or long hours. Those are positives (I think). My weaknesses [1] are that I don’t like making plans (I distrust them), I often don’t follow my own plans, I procrastinate whenever the next step is not something I’m interested in (I almost lost an entire week to a screencast that still hasn’t happened). One of my old weaknesses was losing track of what I was working on and getting sidetracked. I solved that weakness by adopting a todo list. I bet if I spent more time “practicing” productivity I’d come up with an even more nuanced view of my strengths and weaknesses.

So, how would I train my own productivity? Each of those weaknesses needs a training plan. I’ve never seen anyone break down “productivity” in the way a coach would break down a training schedule. Should I say next Thursday I’ll re-prioritize three of my old todo lists, take a coffee break, then prioritize three more lists (written 2 x 3 x prioritize todo list; 2:00 rest)? That would be taking a small subset of my productivity goal and training it.

I generally like to try to include my deliberate practice as an organic part of the rest of my work. That means I like to practice while I’m working instead of creating artificial exercises like the todo list one above. I’m not advocating this as the most hardcore way to approach work, but it’s as hardcore as I’ve managed so far. The way I broke down training productivity was just to create a meta list that gives me points for things like: making a plan, working to a plan, and not surfing random websites. I’d be interested in a more disciplined approach though–does anyone have any training ideas?


[1] The book The Cyclists Training Bible has cyclists identify limiters, factors that are holding them back from achieving their goals. Then the cyclist puts together a training program that specifically addresses these limiters. The difference between weaknesses and limiters may seem subtle, but I think limiters are a much more functional way of looking at your weaknesses. I’m a terrible singer, but that hasn’t held me back from anything meaningful. I’m also terrible at visual design and that often slows down my work. Gee, which one should I work on? Thinking about limiters also lets you work on things that you’re good at but which happen to be extra important to your goals. For example, as a programmer I’m a reasonably good communicator but I’ve still managed to collect a huge list of regrettable programming outcomes that could have been solved by earlier, more articulate communication. So communication is always one of the skills that I’m working on.

7th May, 2008

7 comments

Deliberate Practice

Sarah and I just got back from a talk at Haas about “deliberate practice” as it relates to excellence. The idea is that how good (or expert) you become at a skill has a lot more to do with how you go about doing your work than it has to do with merely performing the skill a large number of times or over a long length of time. An expert will break down the skills that are required to be expert and focus on improving those skills either during practice (sports) or during the course of day-to-day activities (business).

Most people who perform a job over a number of years will become experienced non-experts, not experts.

It’s easy to look at this in terms of sports. During practice, Tiger Woods doesn’t merely spend time hitting balls on the range. He practices specific shots and fine tunes his mechanics with each swing. One of my running teammates used to spend most of her easy runs thinking about her running form. I spent my easy runs day dreaming. She won more medals (and ended up running for Cal).

This all reminds me of an old study of what differentiated classes of swimmers, The Mundanity of Excellence (it seems to be readable through Google book search). The researchers found that swimmers who moved up in class did it almost entirely by how they went about performing their practice. It was the quality of their work, not the quantity of their work that mattered. Moving up in class could be as simple as changing the way you cupped your hand during your swim stroke, as long as you were willing to practice that improved stroke during every lap of every practice.

This was a business school talk though, and we ended up wanting more examples of how you would apply the concepts of deliberate practice in a business setting. So I started thinking about ways that I would or should focus on the quality of my work rather than the quantity of my work. It’s hard.

Public speaking is an easy one. People are so afraid of it that there’s an entire community to help people practice (Toastmasters). But where do you go to practice email? You have to do it on the fly.

When I write an email I consciously try to apply the rule that the action item for the receiving party should appear in the first two sentences. My emails are more effective as a result. They didn’t get more effective merely because I’ve spent years writing them or because I’ve experienced the receipt of well written emails. They got better because I made a conscious decision to apply a better practice with each email.

Every time I write code I start a mini-todo list where I can shelve ideas or concerns that popup. The list also means that if I get interrupted I have context that helps me get back into the flow faster. This is the major practice that let me be a productive developer while dealing with the interruptions that come with being a manager or running a business.

Sales is a huge one. Let’s just say that if I promise you a response and you get it, that’s because I started using Highrise to manage all my contacts. I’m not working harder to keep up with my email, I’m just working smarter.

The nice thing about having better practices for the mundanity of work is that it frees me from a lot of mental baggage so I can actually reflect a bit about what’s going on in life/business. There’s no sense making the engine more efficient if I’m using it to drive off a cliff (or some such crazy metaphor).