Tag: efficiency (Page 2 of 3)

The popular Lean Startup method features rapid scientific experimentation and short product development cycles, which allows great flexibility in pivoting direction. In the same vein, efficiency requires a flexible outlook, which means that you must adopt a learning mindset. To practice efficiency, you must take the original efficiency tools presented to you, and apply and tweak them as necessary. Successful implementation of efficiency requires constant innovation and experimentation.

How does one foster this learning mindset? Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the aggregate of physical, mental, and emotional stability. There are a variety of ways to exercise and expand these three areas of health, such as lifting weights for physical fitness, striving to internalize knowledge, and practicing meditation. But know that without the proper balance of these three domains, it will be impossible to perform to your full potential.

However, the ultimate weapon for pursuing efficiency is focus. The road to efficiency will be fraught with obstacles and setbacks. It’s far too easy to encounter a rough patch, find out that your efficiency tools aren’t working as well as anticipated, and completely abandon all hope and spiral into productivity oblivion. Focus is critically important in the pursuit of efficiency (and everything else for that matter). It takes willpower to adhere to these principles, to avoid falling back into the cycle of procrastination and laziness (somewhat) inherent in human nature. It takes a motivating goal, a driving passion to sustain efficiency. You need to ask yourself: Why? Why am I pursuing efficiency? Once you have your answer, focus on it and let it serve as the driving fire behind your intentions.

“Why do we fall, Bruce? So we can pick ourselves back up again.” — Batman Begins

This module is dedicated to the art of inertia. A simplified definition of inertia is that it’s a property of matter in which an object continues in its existing state — be it rest or continuous motion. Basically, it’s hard to get started, and it’s easy to keep moving.

Utilize this principle in your life: start with the hardest task first, and the rest of your day will be a success. If you wake up and start the day by finishing that huge, intimidating project, you will reap the rewards of that labor; the rest of the day will seem easy by comparison, as you’ve already gathered the momentum (another physics analogy!) to crush all obstacles in your way. If you wake up and spend your entire morning watching random videos on YouTube, then you’ve already lost the war.

Three is a very powerful number that shows up everywhere. It seems that at one point in time, people can only focus on three main things at once, which is something that you should consider in your planning.

If you have ever listed down your goals for the next three months (fantastic exercise I’d recommend), I’d hazard a guess that most people have around five to ten aspirations in a three-month time frame. That’s absolutely fine, but if you try and accomplish more than three significant goals, you probably won’t accomplish all of them (if you do, kudos to you, but I’m betting that it won’t be sustainable). What you should do is pare down this list of goals until there are only three of the most pressing goals remaining, and attack these goals furiously.

The Rule of Three is the reason that I created Three Iron Laws of Efficiency, and not any more.

I promised that we’d return to Parkinson’s Law and here we are. Parkinsons’ Law is an integral building block of schedule blocking (pun intended, of course). Parkinson’s Law as you might recall, states that a project expands to fill the time allotted to it.

Schedule blocking combats this phenomenon. It means slicing your day into individual blocks of time, and assigning tasks to each individual block. I like to divide my blocks into one to two hour blocks, which allows ample time to immerse into a task. The power of blocking is at play here: by creating finite divisions of time, it sets a soft deadline by which I must be done with the task and adds an extra psychological motivator. The presence of the soft deadline also prevents time creep, when a short project stretches into an unproductive work marathon.

Without schedule blocking, you will have a difficult time realistically figuring out how much you can accomplish. The twelve hours of a working day might seem like a lot of time, but once you factor in the time you spend with other miscellaneous tasks peppered through your day, it’s much less time than you initially perceived. If you don’t keep track of all your commitments, it will likely overwhelm you and lead to poor performance.

I like to use the Cal Newport scheduling system, where you keep track of daily events on a calendar (I use Google Calendar) and then record all your tasks for the day onto a piece of plain paper, separating them into their own distinct time blocks. It’s super easy, efficient, and highly recommended.

Newton’s Second Law (of Efficiency) states that: Work accomplished = intensity x duration. This is pretty straightforward, I believe, but it’s definitely an underrated aspect of efficiency. The “duration” aspect of work accomplished is very defined and easy to understand — if we were to suppose that “work accomplished” was only a function of “duration,” it would mean that results are only dependent on the amount of time spent.

This is a sentiment reflected by the “Ten Thousand Hour Rule” popularized by Geoff Colvin in his book “Talent is Overrated” and Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers.” The “Ten Thousand Hour Rule” basically states that it requires a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. I agree with the overall message of this rule, in that achievement requires a large amount of time and commitment, but I think that it requires a critically important addendum, which leads to the “intensity” portion of the efficiency law.

“Intensity” encapsulates a bevy of different factors. You can increase intensity through a variety of ways — marshalling all your concentration into one task or perhaps training with better techniques. We often marvel at individuals who can accomplish huge amounts of work in minute partitions of time, whereas it might have taken us substantially more time. But it makes complete sense; if this person works for three hours at the highest level of intensity, then he accomplishes just as much as you do in ten hours with a lower intensity level. It’s simple and easily understandable, yet people still “multitask” and think they’re being more productive.

The takeaway is that you can accomplish more work by focusing on intensity rather than duration. The old adage holds true: “Work smarter, not harder.”