Read This If You Do One Thing At A Time
Those of you who have been readers for the past couple years know my feelings about "multi-tasking."
There is plenty of evidence that doing multiple things at once means you don't do any of them well. That's fine if the tasks are small and the consequences of failure are low-risk.
You might not need to hit 6-Sigma level industry standards if you're just folding pizza boxes or sealing envelopes.
For everything else, though, it's usually worth it to just focus on one thing at a time.
But that's not good enough!
I want to do all the things!
I want to be productive while I sleep!
Me too.
So, how do we do multiple things at once, without actually doing multiple things at once?
Okay, brace yourselves for this super boring, unsexy, nerd answer:
Do stuff that compounds or does double-duty for you.
Yep.
Building tools and systems are one way to achieve this.
They allow us to apply the same effort and get way better leverage.
The bicycle is a perfect example. A bicycle might take days or weeks to make--or it might take a chunk of cash to buy--but once you've got one, you can move literally 3 - 10 times faster than pedestrians.
Same effort. Way better output.
Make your work do double-duty.
The next level is thinking about how you can then turn that same energy you're putting into the bicycle into something else that's useful to you, like exercise, or eliminating your carbon emissions.
Now you're not only going faster, but you're increasing your heart rate and burning carbohydrates, not hydrocarbons! Cool!
- If you're a marketer, this might mean taking that YouTube interview you did and turning it into a podcast or quick checklist for your audience.
- If you're a teacher, this might mean using your garden to teach biology, chemistry, and cooking skills in the same lesson.
- If you're a software engineer, this might mean using code you've already built and either refactoring it to use less CPU or just updating some parameters to make it solve a new problem.
Multi-tasking is out.
Single-tasking on work that does double-duty is in!
If you keep chasing more work I promise that's what you'll get.
But if you look for more ways to put the wind at your back you'll get more done and you'll still have time left over.
Prefer to work on things that provide multiple benefits.
2 Minute Action:
Check-in with your partner, co-founder, teammate, or your own personal to-do list.
Look at all the work you're doing and call out some areas of focus (marketing, operations, finance).
Create a Venn diagram, triangle, or whatever you need to create to visualize the overlap between those areas of focus.
You might not magically come up with ideas immediately and that's okay, but put a post-it note or reminder of this diagram somewhere you'll see it.
I've found that when the question keeps knocking on my door, I start to see answers in my day-to-day that I might not have seen before.
Read This If You Want To Make Your Life Easier
Okay, sure. This is sort of a click-baity headline, but I couldn't resist.
Yesterday was a challenging day for me.
I started out exhausted. I slept in until almost 8 AM, which is not something I do.
I then volunteered my time for nearly the whole day. And I was pretty uncomfortable doing it.
I was talking to people who did not want to talk to me back. Everyone I talked to the entire day was someone who I'd never met before. I also was doing work I'd never done before, which meant that I had to learn new tricks and be proficient quickly.
Being good at stuff comes with time. A new challenge helps you develop.
But then what?
Once you're good at that new thing, you've finished developing. You're no longer challenged. Being challenged further seems really hard--and it is.
But that's the point.
Growing and developing means you're constantly in a state of being uncomfortable.
So, forget the idea of being comfortable.
If you're in shape, you're constantly in a state of some kind of soreness.
It's not that you're not recovering, you're just rotating through which muscle group or body parts are recovering and which ones are active.
So, here's the punchline:
If you want to make your life easy, don't.
If you have an easy life, it might be a sign that you aren't developing!
2 Minute Action:
Let's take 2 minutes to challenge ourselves today.
Make a phone call to a family member or colleague that you've been avoiding.
Ask your supervisor for a new kind of work, today.
Sign up for that "how to be a DJ" course you've been putting off.
The more you get out of your comfort zone, the more confident you'll be.
The pain won't go away, that's the point, but you'll be building a habit of going into the unknown and feeling confident going there.
Read This If You Think You Should Read This
So, you may have noticed that I started writing my subject lines a little differently.
For the past few years, it's been clickbaity headline after clickbaity headline.
You know what I'm talking about.
Headlines like:
"One Bulletproof Way To Change Your Life," and "The 5 Little Known Things That Will Make You 150% More Productive," and "Do This Surprisingly Simple Daily Habit To Improve Your Mindset."
I wrote them every day for a year and I still wonder if that helped me gain attention or pushed away readers who would like what I actually had to say.
Either way, I've been focusing on a more simple approach.
I'm not sure it's helping me gain more readers yet, but I do know that it neither adds nor takes away anything from the rest of the content I'm writing.
So, why?
Because I feel better about it.
Yep. That's the big realization.
I feel more straightforward and more honest--and that's been the promise the whole time, right?
I promised simple, to-the-point, no fancy-pants, quickly digestible, mission-critical, delicious, family-friendly, actionable, knowledge-nuggets?
These headlines feel even more stripped down. So, that's what I'm doing.
So, I'll be looking at open rates and read through rates to see what kind of actual, measurable impact this small, seemingly insignificant change has made, but as of right now, it feels like the right thing to do.
How does that relate to you?
Of course, I want to hear your feedback about this, but more importantly, I want to model a behavior for you.
Takeaways:
Change is good if it's good.
If the change you made achieves a desirable result (not necessarily the specific result you initially desired), then it's probably good. Make sure you are on the lookout for unintended consequences, too.
Simpler is usually harder but better.
I write a 7th-grade reading level. Why? The average reading level in America is a 7th-grade reading level. It also helps those above that average get to the point faster and comprehend more. No, I'm not dumbing it down. I'm meeting people where they are.
Measure what matters.
My message won't matter if it doesn't get clicked, opened, and read. My message also won't matter if it falls into the wrong ears. Discerning open rates and audience is the front portion of my battle. Understanding the impact is harder to measure, but also worthwhile. Likes, hearts, and thumbs-ups can be useful in understanding audience attention, but it will only serve your vanity if you don't follow them to the behaviors of the people you are trying to impact. This is also why I include a quick, actionable note in each post.
2 Minute Action
What's something you've been doing for a while but haven't seen much change in? It's probably something important but not urgent, like "fitness" or "writing that novel."
What are your current excuses/reasons for not doing it?
Go ahead, jot them down.
I'll give you a hint, here. No one has the time, money, or the team to make it happen--so you can't let those slow you down.
If you were diagnosed with some terrible disease, you would stop other things and focus on healing. Why? Because it's a priority. Suddenly, things became important AND urgent.
If you're like me, you want to do all the things.
You want to have a huge impact in 20 different disciplines, catch up with your friends and family, be an informed citizen, speak 7 or 8 languages, and play 13 different instruments.
Since you can't do everything, it's going to be up to you to decide what to prioritize. It's going to be up to you to decide what is important AND urgent.
As Derek Sivers says: "hell yes!" or "no!"
Changing/modifying a routine, simplifying/improving an existing routine, and measuring the results are some of the ways to get there.
You can start on one of those things, today.
And I know you can start in 2 minutes or less.
All I did was start writing different headlines.
Daily 1% improvement accumulates into a 100% improvement every 70 days.