Category: Productivity

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The Right People Keep You On Track

I was going to give this post a much more descriptive and specific title, but I think this one actually captures the essence of what I’m about to say more clearly and, perhaps, accurately.

First, I’ll explain my initial thought.

I’ve come to believe that using any substance or activity that floods you with dopamine, whether that be alcohol, cannabis, TikTok, Instagram, or anything else, leaves you depleted of the dopamine you would otherwise need to pursue activities and objectives.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about my times going up to lake cabins in the summer. I always go with hopes that I’ll have tons of energy and do every activity available to me like kayaking, swimming, tubing, whatever.

As I’ve outlined in other posts, I’ve noticed in recent years that the energy and enthusiasm I’ve had for those things has been dwindling. One thing that’s been consistent over time is that these types of activities tend to come with more overall drinking that normal. Perhaps not all at once, but having White Claws throughout the day is quite common.

However, to the point of this post: I feel like the right people will sort of force you to do things. Even if you don’t have the energy to suggest it and make it happen, as long as somebody does, they’ll often convince you to do it.

And so even at times when perhaps I had been drinking more than usual, I still did more activities because somebody else convinced me to do it.

But in the last several years, more often the people who would have done that for me were in the same boat (literally and figuratively). As a result, we kind of just… Don’t do anything.

And that’s a shame.

The solution is probably for at least one person, me for now, to be the one who’s not drinking or doing anything else and sort of lead everyone.

But that’s not the main point here.

Having the right people around who are going to motivate you and keep you on track with a schedule and moving towards some kind of goal is extremely beneficial.

In my examples, I’ve highlighted how this is the case for leisure activities when on vacation. But I suspect it applies to so much more.

They say that having a strong group of close friends is one of the greatest predictors of success in life.

One of the main reasons could be that when you are struggling (in any way), they’ll help you through it and keep you on track.

Maybe you’re having a tough time with something. Your friends may encourage you to take the steps needed to keep your life going and even get back on track.

If you’re totally alone, it would be much easier to simply give up and not do anything to improve.

So I guess the main conclusion here is to keep the right people around who are going to support you, motivate you, and keep you on track.

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I Seriously Need to Focus on just Blasting Through my To-Do List

I’ve wrote about this same thing before years ago when I really started establishing my to-do list as a cornerstone of my progress. While the to-do has served me incredibly well, I think I really need to take a step back and re-evaluate how I approach it.

The main issue is that I still treating as if I have set work hours, and that my to-do should take me exactly as long as my set work hours.

There are a few ways in which this is extremely harmful:

  • It causes me to drag things out longer than they need to be if I see that I should have plenty of time
  • It causes me to get distracted with other misc. activities for the same reason
  • I have a tendency to add new things to the to-do list if I’m ahead of schedule

One of the points of working the way that I do is that I’m focusing on output and results rather than time spent working.

The way I’ve been approaching my to-do list is completely counter-productive to that.

I need to think carefully about what I want to accomplish in the day, and then do that and only that.

And most importantly, I need to be laser-focused on finishing it. No distractions, no new tasks, nothing.

I need to just blast through it.

And if I finish super early?

Great! That’s the dream. I’ll have the whole day to do other stuff.

So I need to do that, because I’ve felt frustrated lately that I seem to not have any extra time, even on days when my to-do was supposed to be easy. I think this is exactly why.

So let’s do better.

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Watching Spanish Content Makes me Feel Better than Other Stuff

I’ve noticed that I feel a lot better watching content in Spanish vs. watching random, time-wasting content on YouTube.

Now, this may not really be all that deep. Watching Spanish content feels productive and challenging.

Watching YouTube… Is typically not.

But I think it’s worth noting that watching things in Spanish can also be extremely entertaining. There’s nothing stopping me from watching my favorite shows and content in Spanish.

So I think it’s really important to stick to watching things in Spanish and not get sucked into wasting time watching pointless videos on YouTube.

Not much more to my post today. I think the main lesson is just that I really need to focus, always, on productive activities. I can’t be wasting time on mindless entertainment.

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I Need to Adopt a Pragmatic Approach to Everything

This feels very obvious but I don’t think I’ve really been living it: I need to adopt a pragmatic approach to everything.

I’ve posted many times about my idealism in the past and how I tend to think I’m going to be able to just brute-force my way through problems and achieve a level of perfection that will solve all my problems.

And that obviously isn’t a good strategy.

The only viable strategy is pragmatism.

It’s fine to want to improve, work towards goals, and imagine a future where we are better in certain ways.

But in the present, we need to be completely honest and realistic about ourselves, our opportunities, and our weaknesses.

Because none of those things change over night. If I’m weak against something now, I’m likely to continue being weak against it in the future.

The path the leads to success will take into account all pieces of information and make decisions based on that. Because why wouldn’t it?

Idealism simply ignores some data and replaces it with what you wish things were like.

Pragmatism is iterative, too. You can try something based on what you know, and alter your approach based on how that went. As you learn more, you can improve what works.

So here’s a concrete example of this.

I’m currently not drinking at all. Productivity is way up and lots of other things are greatly improved.

This is highly pragmatic. It recognizes that there are downsides to drinking and that it has very real consequences, and also that it’s difficult to just drink a small amount.

The idealistic side of me has always said, “I can limit it to weekends and it won’t affect me in the week” or, “even if I’m low on energy I’ll just power through it and it won’t affect me”.

They are idealistic and unrealistic ideas.

Whether or not I’ll one day be able to find a happy middle ground remains to be seen, but the fact remains that I definitely AM more productive now, and it is highly pragmatic and effective to give up drinking in an effort to be more successful.

But I can think of some other things that this applies to as well. Here are some of the top of my head:

  • I’m not effective on low sleep, and it’s generally better to sleep late than to try to power through the tiredness
  • I’m not motivated to work or be productive at night
  • Looking to others for help in areas where I’m lacking is probably much more beneficial and rapid than trying to do everything myself

I need to simply give up my idealism and focus on being pragmatic in all areas.

Most importantly, this means acknowledging my own weaknesses and consistent failings and altering my approach accordingly.

My goal now is to just be more aware of times when I’m being too idealistic and take a step back to figure out what I should really be doing. And perhaps writing about it there!

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Some Recent Wins

I’ve mentioned before that not every post here has to be ground-breaking and deeply profound. Sometimes it can just be an update of how things are going!

Today I had some solid wins that show I’m moving in the right direction and that things are generally going well.

First, I had a qualified seller reach out to me from my website that is interested in selling the hosting portion of his operations. It looks like a great potential seller and we’re speaking tomorrow.

But the best part is that he found me online. All of my marketing efforts lately have gone towards attracting exactly this type of person, and it sounds like they are paying off.

In fact, just today I posted a new article that I’ve been working on related to this topic.

Perhaps because I posted that and just an hour or two later I heard from this new seller, it really felt like I earned it. Like I’ve been doing the right things and am being rewarded for them.

Because this is really my long-term strategy and it’s still a bit unproven, it’s really great to see it start to pay off. I hope to continue working hard on expanding my web presence in this area and, hopefully, attracting tons of sellers like this.

The other thing that happened today was that I approved a great candidate for renting my vacant room. Everything looked great for him, and I think he’ll be an excellent renter.

This obviously is less ground-breaking, but it’s fairly important for my goals (for now anyway) that I have both rooms rented, and it’s great to finally have someone after months of searching.

From a day-to-day financial point of view, it just makes my life a ton easier. I don’t have to take nearly as many distributions, and it ends up being much easier to invest more.

I also recently hit a new personal record with weight training, which has been going extremely well.

Sleep has been going well. I’ve been able to wake up without using snooze every morning for quite some time now. I may even be able to finally move on to another habit!

I finally set up my system for tracking initiatives, which is going well. It has helped me concentrate on things I’m trying to get done, and actually make progress in them. It’s what has helped me proceed with attracting new website hosts.

As discussed at length, I gave up drinking a while back as part of a year-long experiment. That’s been going great overall. Life is, perhaps, less exciting, but boy is it more productive (and easier in general).

I’ve been able to almost entirely eliminate social media and other time-wasters from my life. I’ve also kept up quite well with avoiding the daily news.

I’ve finally started watching Spanish language television instead of just YouTube videos, and honestly I think the benefits are immediate and tremendous. I now feel frustrated that I hadn’t been doing it all this time.

I’ve been reading more than ever, and exclusively in Spanish. I’m blasting through the end of Harry Potter and it’s exciting to see how much easier it gets over time. I’m looking forward to moving on to other books.

I’ve also been keeping up with my other studies and vocabulary, and have basically not missed a day in quite some time.

Not everything has gone perfectly, and it’s also easy for me to feel like I’m doing a bad job at things.

Honestly, after writing this blog post, my biggest take away from writing this post is that I need to do these more often. I would have said that I’m struggling quite a bit before writing it. But I’m really not.

I probably haven’t put enough effort into meeting new people here in Buenos Aires, and so I’ve been a bit of a hermit, which feels like a waste of being here. But then again, I’ve been pretty productive and things have been going well.

I just need to keep up what I’m doing, because it’s actually working well.

 

 

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Thoughts About a Potential Improvement System

I just happened to read my post about how a weight training system helped me quite a bit and then mused that I should have something similar for improvements in my business and personally. Then I read the following post which had more ideas about what I could put together.

And those were both way back in 2020 and I haven’t done anything yet.

Well, while I was reading I had some ideas. What if I put together some sort of end-of-day (or maybe start-of-day?) ranking system that lists all of my current initiatives and then I rate myself on how I’m doing on them.

Perhaps weekly, I could remove things that are no longer important initiatives.

And that’s it, that would be the system.

Why would this work?

First, it would keep things very simple. I don’t like the idea of a clumsy, complicated system that’s a lot of work to manage.

But what would make it effective would be the following:

  1. It would keep all important initiatives top-of-mind
  2. It would help me track how they are going over time
  3. It would motivate me to actually make progress so that I can put good numbers down

The last one is probably the most important. This has worked with my daily survey I fill out personally, because every time I put down bad numbers I feel guilty or ashamed, and every time I put down good numbers I feel accomplished.

It motivates me to get those good numbers.

So what would I put on this list?

It would be things like new habits I’m trying to develop, long-term efforts like trying to find and purchase other website hosting companies or setting up my fine art photography website, and possibly short-term projects as well.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the perfect time to respond to this daily questionnaire would be when I’m putting together my to-do list for the day. This happens almost every single day, usually late in the morning.

I think I would phrase the question like, “How do you think you performed  yesterday with regard to the following projects:” and then it would list each of them on a 1-10 scale.

If I didn’t do any work at all on a project, that’s a 1. If I did minimal, maybe higher.

Or for a habit, if I failed at it completely, that’s a 1. I suppose if I did it but it wasn’t great, that’s a… 5 or 6. If it was fully engrained and went perfectly, that’s a 10.

I think this could actually work quite nicely. I just need to decide how I want to do it. I use Google forms for my other questionnaire but I don’t love it. It could get a little weird over time as I’m adding and removing initiatives, too.

But, I think it’s worth a shot at least to start. I’ll make a note to start it up in a couple weeks when I’m back from Mendoza and we’ll see how it goes.

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Avoiding Closed Loops

Maybe “Closed Loops” isn’t the best phrase, but I figured I’d talk about something that has constant daily relevance for me.

This is maybe sort of a boring productivity concept, but it’s still pretty relevant and important.

I need to make sure to never have any “closed loops”, where a task in a process ends and has no systemic method to proceeding to the next step other than relying on me to simply “remember”.

So for example, a place where this happens often is with text messages. I don’t like to receive many text messages in my work but it does happen.

The problem is, I often see these texts while I’m out and can’t do anything about them. If I read it, it’s marked as read forever and there’s nothing ensuring I will address it later.

So what’s an easy solution? The one I employ in this example is to email myself a reminder. Email is one of the strongest parts of my system and any email I receive will be addressed, virtually every time.

In this case, it becomes an open loop that will continue along to the next step without any likely point of failure.

Working with website projects, I need to always make sure to chart out the next step and actually set reminders.

When I speak with a new potential client, I need to leave a note in my to-do to then prepare and send a proposal.

If they accept the proposal, I need to add notes in my to-do to send out invoices and get the project rolling when appropriate.

Essentially, unless every step in a project or task is 100% complete, I always need to write something down to complete the next step.

And I’ve been working on this for years.

I’ve gotten to the point where, anytime I’m in danger of creating a closed loop, it’s like something is screaming in the back of my mind to fix it.

Every so often I ignore it.

Not too long ago, I put some leftovers into my backpack. I knew that I didn’t need to do anything with the backpack when I got home other than put the food anyway, and so I knew I should probably establish some way to ensure I wouldn’t forget it.

But I did. I got home, and forgot about it until the next day and had to throw the food out.

Another common thing that has happened is that I don’t see calendar notifications for calls for the day. Normally I just happen to see them but it’s not a great system.

Sometimes, I’ll see the notification that it’s 30 minutes out, but then totally forget when the time comes.

Normally that would be solved by the little Windows popups, but on my home PC I disabled those entirely because they were an incredibly irritating distraction that was mostly for idiotic and pointless things.

If I could make it JUST tell me when I have calendar events, I’d do that. I also recall that they weren’t super reliable so that’s part of it, too.

I’ve developed two solutions for this specific problem:

  1. When I get the 30 minute notification (or whenever I see that I have something later in the day), I set a timer on my phone to go off a few minutes before. That way I can never forget.
  2. I’ll often add an additional calendar entry in the morning to simply warn me of an upcoming event. Since I always look at my phone in the morning, I’ll always see it.

I could present many more examples but I think these illustrate the point.

It’s just one little snapshot into my productivity optimization. It’s not a massive part of it but it’s still quite important.

I don’t have much of a point on this one other than that I need to continue improving this and ensuring that nothing ever gets left.

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I Want to Feel Obsessive Over Things Again

I recall that not too long ago, with almost every new thing I would become obsessed. I would learn a little bit about a topic and I would feel incredibly motivated to spend an incredible amount of time learning about it and practicing it.

I haven’t felt that way in a while.

I suspect that what I was feeling was a surge of effective dopamine and related neurotransmitters that made me excited and hyper-focused on the topic or activity at hand.

If that’s true, then the question is: why don’t I have that anymore?

One of my friends describes his affinity for video games as an “addiction”. When he starts playing, everything else disappears and he just has to keep going. He is extremely motivated and focused on the game.

I don’t want quite that level perhaps, but in general it is sort of what I want. I want things to utterly captivate me. I want to feel, even if fleetingly, like nothing else matters and truly dive into something like I used to.

I’ve learned a lot about dopamine and other neurotransmitters lately and specifically about things like dopamine fasts and other general ways in which you can make them more effective.

I’m already doing most of the things that are suggested like not drinking, avoiding most social media, and generally avoiding addictive-type things that give you lots of dopamine and leave you resistant to it when you need it.

It’s possible that over time, I’m going to feel everything come back and I’ll feel exactly how I did before.

If not, I think I need to put some more thought into what else I can do to help it along.

I’ve considered also that it’s possible my other regular activities are using up the dopamine in a healthy way and there just isn’t any left for other things.

For example, I workout regularly, I study a variety of things daily, and obviously I work everyday and have many habits related to that. Is it possible that these things are using it all up?

I don’t think that’s the case, but it is possible!

I think I just need to keep an eye on it and see how it goes.

If, at some point down the road, I feel like I am back to where I was, I could consider testing bringing some of my old things back and seeing if it has any effect on it. It would be interesting to see what the primary causes were.

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Intelligence Has Way Less to do with Success Than Other Factors

I wrote a post with basically the same title and premise back in January 2019 and, funny enough, I just read it as part of my regular review of old posts.

Today I’m going to present a bit of a different perspective, though it’s the same at heart.

I don’t want to give away enough details to identify this person, but I recently was thinking about how hard it is to work with someone in my life. And I put some thought into why that is.

This person isn’t dumb and isn’t unfriendly, but they are incredibly ineffective in a lot of ways. The primary reasons seem to be:

  • Lack of accountability
  • Lack of a system to organize tasks that need to be done
  • Inability to think critically and develop novel solutions
  • A sense that things outside their normal scope of care are either unimportant or outside of their control
  • General lack of initiative
  • Total lack of follow-through

These are all things that most people struggle with at some point or another. And none of them really have anything to do with intelligence (though it can help a bit).

But in the case of this person, I would say that these are the reasons they are difficult to work with and also are likely causes for any failures or lack of success they’ve had elsewhere, as well.

It could be totally different for everyone, but these are the main things I’ve seen with this person.

Everyone starts out with tons of weaknesses. Some affect them more than others. Intelligence might help solve some of those problems or improve those weaknesses, but by itself, it won’t accomplish anything.

I’m thinking now that the single most-important traits (or group of traits) is probably the ability to accurately reflect on one’s own weaknesses and to effectively improve or compensate for them.

Essentially, it’s the ability to accurately answer the question, “what’s holding me back?”

And then, of course, to figure out a way to overcome whatever the answer is.

More broadly, this could really be described as having a “growth mindset,” though I generally think of a growth mindset as being entirely internal, whereas external factors could also be holding you back and you still need to be able to overcome them.

A related trait that may be just as important is the ability to effectively identify and take advantage of the right opportunities. Sometimes there may not be anything holding you back, but you still need to be able to figure out which opportunities to pursue, and how to stick with them and pursue them effectively.

That last part is where I feel I’m weakest right now and where I really need to push forward. I’ve identified some excellent opportunities and feel I have everything in place to go after them.

I just need to do it.

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Ignoring Things to Give Them Time to Resolve vs. Being Proactive

I’ve heard two approaches to dealing with all of the tasks work and life through at you. Both seem to be championed by modern thinkers and yet they are diametrically opposed.

Supposedly Napoleon would wait a week or two before opening any letter he received. The idea was that most problems would resolve themselves, and there’s no sense wasting time on something that doesn’t actually need your help.

It makes sense when you think about it, and in my experience is absolutely true.

It’s easy to assume it’s just a terrible idea and that Napoleon happened to succeed in spite of this poor strategy. You’d think that in war, particularly, having rapid knowledge and acting on it would be a game changer. And my understanding is that it was once it was possible.

And yet, there’s some logic to it.

It is completely contrary to what I’d consider to be a considerably more popular idea among efficiency experts and self-help gurus. The idea that you need to proactively manage everything so that you avoid ever having to put out fires.

This is certainly more of the approach I’ve attempted to adopt in my life, and it does seem to be effective at making things calm and predictable and also allowing me to be as productive as possible.

It’s one of the primary components of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and basically every clone of that book ever released. Supposedly most people are just flying by the seat of their pants and simply react to avoidable emergencies as they come along.

So what do I make of this?

I want to believe there is some kind of middle ground between the two concepts. However I think the reality may be a bit more nuanced.

I’m not sure you have to be one or the other.

Something tells me that it’s more an issue of figuring out the things that are in your control, important, and also your responsibility.

Napoleon choosing to remain ignorant of problems within his empire sort of feels like procrastination. He could have simply read the letters right away and determined that he could ignore them. Or had one of his people simply respond and say that it’s their responsibility to solve it.

Or perhaps, had he delegated and established roles and responsibilities better from the start, he would have never even received the letter to begin with because the issue would have been dealt with locally.

I think there is a very small amount of middle ground for some things, however. For example, my recent post suggesting that responding to emails within a day is just fine, and that responding in an hour is totally unnecessary.

I receive emails several times a week with people having issues with their devices or their website that they quickly resolve on their own and let me know they don’t need me.

I think there’s room for that.

But for the most part, if I’m focusing on things that are important, in my control, and my responsibility, I shouldn’t be wasting too much time on other tasks regardless.

I suspect that people who employ the Napoleon strategy really only benefit from it because they end up only putting time towards the really important things, and end up ignoring most of the distractions.

That feels like more of a side-effect than the actual intention.

I have plenty of posts discussing more about that.

So overall, I’d say I can safely ignore the Napoleon approach and focus on being proactive.