James Clear's Blog, page 15

Time Assets vs. Time Debts: A Different Way of Thinking About Productivity

Late in his career, Steve Jobs famously drove his car without a license plate.

There were all sorts of theories about why Jobs decided to drive without tags. Some people said he didn’t want to be tracked. Others believed he was trying to make a game of avoiding parking tickets. Jon Callas, a former computer security expert who worked for Apple, revealed a different reason.

According to Callas, Steve Jobs discovered a loophole in the California vehicle registration laws. Anyone with a new car had up to six months to get a proper license plate for their new vehicle. During the first six months, however, you could simply drive the vehicle without a license plate.

Once he realized this, Jobs arranged a special leasing agreement with his Mercedes dealer so that every six months he would drop off his current car and receive a new Mercedes SL55 AMG to replace it. This meant that he never drove a car older than six months and he never had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a license plate. [1]

After hearing the story, many people responded by saying something like, “I guess that’s what you do when you have a lot of money.” And, to be fair, it is true that this license plate strategy isn’t reasonable for most people on the planet. If you look deeper, however, you’ll notice that something else was happening: Steve Jobs was building a Time Asset.

Time Assets vs. Time Debts

Most productivity strategies focus on short-term efficiency: how to manage your to-do list effectively, how to get more done each morning, how to shorten your weekly meetings, and so on. These are all reasonable ideas.

We often fail to realize, however, that there are certain strategic choices that impact our time on a larger scale. These choices can be categorized as Time Assets or Time Debts, which are two concepts I learned from Patrick McKenzie. [2]

TIME ASSETS are actions or choices you make today that will save you time in the future.

Software is a classic example of a time asset. You can write a program one time today and it will run processes for you over and over again every day afterward. You pay an upfront investment of time and get a payoff each day afterward.

The car leasing system that Steve Jobs developed is another example of a time asset. It took him some time to find a loophole and arrange a repeatable leasing system, but his process rewarded him with additional time and less hassle every 6 months.

TIME DEBTS are actions or choices you make today that will cost you additional time in the future.

Email is a time debt that most people participate in each day. If you send an email now, you are committing to reading the reply or responding with an additional message later. Every email you send creates a small debt that you have to pay back at a later time.

This is not to say that all time debts are bad. Perhaps you enjoy serving on your school committee or volunteering with a local organization. However, when you make these commitments, you are also creating a time debt that you will have to pay at some point. Sometimes the debts we commit to are worth sacrificing for, many times they are not.

Time Assets in Real Life

I wrote down a short list of time assets and time debts for my business. Here are a few I came up with…

Assets

Speaking. I can create a speaking page on my website that answers common questions and qualifies the right kind of people. This could include a descriptive Frequently Asked Questions section or a better sign up form. The goal of the system is to set clear expectations and answer common questions that I usually have to answer via email.
Accounting. By setting clear rules for my bookkeeper and accountant, we can develop a system for automatically tagging certain expenses and transactions each month, which minimizes the need for me to manually approve repeated transactions.

Scheduling. Booking calendar appointments, calls, and interviews requires a lot of email. Using software like ScheduleOnce eliminates this problem and lets people choose from a pre-selected list of available times.

Debts

Email. The more email I answer, the more email I generate.
Comments. I like the comments on my site and I don’t plan on removing them. (I love hearing from you!) But every time I publish an article with a comments section, I’m creating a time debt that I have to pay back by approving and moderating comments.
Interviews. At first, I said yes to every interview that came my way. Today, I typically do 3 to 5 every week. Saying yes to every interview has become a time debt.
Low quality work. If you don’t edit your article now, you’ll have to fix the grammar later. If you write sloppy code now, you’ll have to debug it later. If you create a poor product in the beginning, you’ll have to service customers and process refunds later. Every low quality piece of work is a time debt that you have to pay back. To quote Jon Wooden, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

A System For Your Time

Systems are more important than goals, and Time Assets are a perfect example of why this is true. Each Time Asset that you create is a system that goes to work for you day in and day out.

If your schedule is filled with Time Debts, then it doesn’t matter how hard you work. Your choices will constantly put you in a productivity hole. However, if you strategically build Time Assets day after day, then you multiply your time exponentially.

Driving a car without a license plate might seem like an extreme way to save time, but it is also a level of strategic thinking that most people never embrace. This isn’t an approach that only works for Steve Jobs. It works for all of us.

Time Debts need to be paid. Be careful how you choose them. Time Assets pay you over and over again. Spend more time creating them.

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Sources

“Mystery solved: Why Steve Jobs’ car never had a license plate” by Aayush Arya. October 27, 2011.
The idea for Time Assets and Time Debts originally came from Patrick McKenzie, a programmer and friend of mine. You can read his great productivity post on the concept here.

10 Lessons Learned from Squatting 400 Pounds

Last week, I set a new personal record by squatting 405 pounds (184 kilograms).

If you’re interested, here is a short video of the lift…

I have plenty of friends who can squat more weight—and a few who regularly squat over 500 pounds—but this was my first time passing the 400-pound mark so I’d like to share a few lessons I learned along the way.

10 Lessons Learned

1. Live in the arena instead of judging from the crowd. Every Monday and Thursday, I publish a new article on JamesClear.com with my ideas on habits, performance, and improvement. I enjoy writing and I try to make each article a great one. That said, anyone can share an opinion. It is easy to sit in the crowd and offer suggestions (or point fingers). It is much harder to step into the arena and do the work. This is one of the reasons why I lift: I don’t merely want to share ideas, I want to live them out.

2. Don’t miss workouts. Here’s the recipe for squatting 400 pounds:

Squat two or three times per week.
Increase by about 5 pounds every week or two.
Don’t miss a workout for two years.

I would wager to say that nearly any man could squat 400 pounds if they followed that simple program. That said, the exact numbers aren’t the point. The point is that it doesn’t matter what program you do, how smart you think you are, or what genes you were or weren’t born with. Unless you fall in love with boredom and do the work consistently, everything else is irrelevant.

3. When in doubt, go slower. The name of the game is to not miss workouts and make small improvements and that means one simple thing: don’t get hurt. For the last 18 months, I have been training on a basic 5×5 program, but in recent weeks I switched to the more intense Smolov squat program. During the fifth week of Smolov, most people add 10 pounds from the previous week. I decided to only increase by 5 pounds. It was still an improvement, but a slightly smaller, safer, and more sustainable one. The best program in the world is useless if you’re injured.

4. You are a reflection of your daily average. Your results in nearly any area of life are often a reflection of what you do on an average day. Increase your average speed and you’ll increase your results. Previously, I was averaging about 25 reps per squat workout (typically 5 sets of 5 reps). During the past two months, my squat volume increased to about 35 reps per workout (and often with heavier weights). Guess what? My average went up and my maximum strength went with it.

5. Self-care is crucial. Stress is cumulative and recovery is not negotiable. I knew the intensity of my workouts would increase with the Smolov squat program and so I made sure to learn how to get better sleep. There were multiple days when I slept for 10 hours. I also did something I almost never do: I stretched my legs and used a foam roller nearly every day. Despite the intensity of the program, my increased focus on recovery balanced things out. There were even a few days when my legs felt fresh.

6. Push yourself past the point of comparison. There is something magical about physical struggle that can remove mental fear. It can be easy to walk into a gym and fear what others around you are thinking.

“Does that guy think I’m weak?”
“Do I look stupid?”
“Am I doing this right?”
“Are other people comparing themselves to me?”

If you push yourself far enough, these questions fade away. When the weight gets big enough, it commands all of your attention. You don’t care what the girl across the room thinks. You don’t care if people watch you or ignore you. You don’t care if it’s raining outside or if your shorts and shoes don’t match or if the guy in the checkout line this morning was rude to you. The only thing you care about in that moment is surviving. I think there is something powerful about that. If you can learn to ignore what the world thinks for a few seconds when you’re holding onto the bar, maybe you can learn to do it in other areas of life. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

7. Focus on volume before intensity. I have been lifting weights for over a decade, but many of those years were spent training for other sports. It really wasn’t until the last 18 months that I dedicated time to focusing solely on weightlifting and particularly on squatting. I started slow and with easy weight. Then, I built a foundation of strength over the next year by focusing on doing a lot of repetitions. Not only did I avoid testing my one rep max, I didn’t do less than a set of five for almost a year. Only after handling a lot of volume did I decide to dial up the intensity. The Smolov squat program has a reputation for being particularly intense, but because I prepared with so much volume, I was ready to handle the intensity. This method requires patience, but it works.

8. Measure something. We spend most of our days living in a gray area. Are you a better person today than you were yesterday? Are you a better parent? A better leader? A better friend? It can be hard to tell on most days. This is why I believe that we should test ourselves and measure our progress.

Seven weeks ago, I tried to squat 405 pounds and failed. Last week, I succeeded. I can tell you without hesitation that I am better today than I was seven weeks ago. No debate. No ego. No fluff. Black and white proof. Perhaps more importantly, I know who I am and who I am not.

When you measure your results, you cannot hide from yourself. You cannot lie to yourself. You cannot pretend to be something else. Best of all, there is no reason to fear failure because no matter what the outcome, you understand yourself better. What are you measuring in your life?

9. Short-term results are only useful when considered through a long-term context. History is filled with examples of people who have sacrificed their values, morals, friends, and families to achieve short-term results of some kind. If you’re obsessed with a particular goal, then it can be surprisingly easy to find yourself making exceptions and just-this-once choices you may regret later. If, however, you view your short-term choices within the context of your long-term values, then it becomes much easier to celebrate in the moment without losing sight of what really matters.

I was proud and happy when I squatted 405 pounds. I celebrated the feat. But I also know that the process is more important than the goal. I’m going to enjoy this one, but I’ll be back in the gym on Monday.

10. 500, I’m coming for you.

Martha Graham on the Hidden Danger of Comparing Yourself to Others

Agnes de Mille had just achieved the greatest success of her career, but right now the only thing she felt was confusion.

She was a dancer and a choreographer. Early in her career, de Mille had created the choreography for a ballet called Three Virgins and a Devil. She thought it was good work, but nobody made much of it.

A few years later, de Mille choreographed a ballet named Rodeo. Again, she thought her work was solid, but it resulted in little commercial fame.

Agnes de Mille in her outfit for Rodeo. (Photograph by Maurice Seymour. Courtesy of Ronald Seymour/Maurice Seymour Archive.)

Then, in 1943, de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, a musical show from Rodgers and Hammerstein that enjoyed nearly instant success. In the coming years, Oklahoma! would run for an incredible 2,212 performances, both around the nation and abroad. In 1955, the film version won an Academy Award.

But the success of Oklahoma! confused her. She thought that her work on Oklahoma! was only average compared to some of her other creations. She later said, “After the opening of Oklahoma!, I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha.”

Martha was Martha Graham, perhaps the most influential dance choreographer of the 20th century. (Although not as well-known by the general public, Graham has been compared to other creative geniuses like Picasso or Frank Lloyd Wright.)

During their conversation, de Mille told Martha Graham about her frustration. “I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.” [1]

Graham responded by saying,

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”

The Uselessness of Judging Yourself

For nearly two years, I have been publishing articles every Monday and Thursday on JamesClear.com. Some days the words come easier than others, and there have been plenty of times when I have felt a smaller version of what Agnes de Mille felt.

“I thought this was a good article. Why don’t people seem to enjoy it?” Or, I’ll feel like I mailed it in on a piece only to see it become the most popular post of the month. Regardless of the outcome, I’ve realized one thing: we are often terrible judges of our own work.

Martha Graham’s advice takes this concept a step further by explaining that not only are you a bad judge of your own work, it is not your job to judge your own work. It is not your place to compare it to others. It is not your responsibility to figure out how valuable it is or how useful it can be. It is not your job to tell yourself, “No.”

Instead, your responsibility is to create. Your job is share what you have to offer from where you are right now. To quote Pema Chodron, the Buddhist teacher, your job is to “come as you are.” (And then find your inner Sisu and keep coming.)

There are people in nearly every field of work who make each day a work of art by the way they do their craft. In other words, nearly everyone is an artist in one way or another. And every artist will judge their work. The key is to not let your self-judgment keep you from doing your thing. Professionals produce, even when it isn’t easy.

Keep Your Eyes on Your Own Paper

In grade school, I remember my teacher passing out an assignment and telling each student to “keep your eyes on your own paper.”

Perhaps she was simply trying to teach 8-year-olds to not cheat, but hidden within that phrase is also a deeper indication of what really matters. It doesn’t make a difference what the person next to you writes down for his answer. This is your race to run. It’s your assignment to complete. It’s your answer to create. How your paper compares to someone else’s is not the point. The point is to fill the paper with your work.

The same can be said of your work today. No matter what you spend your days doing, every morning you wake up and have a blank piece of paper to work with. You get to put your name at the top and fill it with your work.

If what you write on your paper doesn’t meet someone else’s expectations … it is no concern of yours. The way someone else perceives what you do is a result of their own experiences (which you can’t control), their own tastes and preferences (which you can’t predict), and their own expectations (which you don’t set). If your choices don’t match their expectations that is their concern, not yours.

Your concern is to do the work, not to judge it. Your concern is to fall in love with the process, not to grade the outcome. Keep your eyes on your own paper.

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Sources

Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham by Agnes De Mille. pg. 264.

Thanks to Paul Jun for telling me about the story of Agnes de Mille.

How Experts Practice Better Than the Rest

My dad and I were standing in the front yard. Maybe that’s why I remember it. We typically practiced baseball in the backyard, but for some reason we were out front that day. I was around 9 years old and learning how to pitch. My dad was walking me through the basic mechanics.

On this particular day, we were working on the backswing of my arm. The ball came out of the pocket of my glove, my elbow went up, and my arm began to swing back behind me in preparation to throw.

“Elbow up.” That was the cue. “Elbow up. Elbow up. Elbow up.”

We spent that whole session focused on one little movement of 12 inches or so when my hands parted and the backswing started. We probably repeated it hundreds of times that day. Sometimes with full throws, but mostly with drills and little practice patterns.

“Elbow up.”

We kept working on this for a few days and then, at some point, we stopped talking about getting my elbow up and moved on to the next phase of the pitching motion. It wasn’t until weeks later, when I realized we hadn’t said “Elbow up” in awhile, that I noticed that I was getting into the right position automatically.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was one of my first exposures to the concept of deliberate practice.

What Do Experts Do For 10,000 Hours?

Malcolm Gladwell published his blockbuster book, Outliers, in 2008 and the most talked about idea from the text was the 10,000 Hour Rule. Gladwell, citing research by K. Anders Ericsson, explained that the key to becoming world-class in any field was to practice a specific task for at least 10,000 hours.

As you might expect, people quickly latched onto the number 10,000 and forgot the details of the argument.

Obviously, there is no magic in the 10,000th hour, but it is true that you need to put in a lot of work to become world-class in any task. However, the important question is this, “What should that work look like? If you want to become great at your craft, what exactly should you do with your 10,000 hours?”

You can’t simply put in your time and log 10,000 hours. You have to practice deliberately on a specific skill.

But what does that mean? What, exactly, does deliberate practice look like?

What is Deliberate Practice?

During a 2012 talk, programmer and author Kathy Sierra explained deliberate practice with a very simple and elegant answer. [1]

Deliberate practice is when you work on a skill that requires 1 to 3 practice sessions to master. If it takes longer than that, then you are working on something that is too complex.

Once you master this tiny behavior, you can move on to practicing the next small task that will take 1 to 3 sessions to master. Repeat this process for 10,000 hours. That is deliberate practice.

This is the first practical definition of deliberate practice that I have come across. It’s the first time I have seen the 10,000 Hour Rule broken down into something tangible that you can use at your next practice session or the next time you show up to work. And it also ties in quite nicely with the idea of getting 1 percent better each day. Each practice session should be focused on mastering a tiny skill that makes you slightly better at your craft.

The Idea in Practice

This basic method of deliberate practice applies to nearly any behavior, but let’s use weightlifting as an example.

This is what deliberate practice might look like if you are trying to learn the clean and jerk…

During the first session, you learn how to grip the bar properly and the fundamentals of the hook grip. There might be an additional session where you learn how to properly apply chalk to your hands before a lift.
Once you learn how to grip the bar, the next session is focused on teaching you the basic movement with a broom stick in your hand. At this point, you are simply learning the primary phases of the lift.
After a few sessions with the broom, you learn how to set the starting position of your feet. You experiment with different variations and get feedback over and over again on your foot position.
Next, you learn how to get into the set position to begin the lift. Perhaps you spend a few sessions focusing on different aspects of this set position. For example, you might spend one day working on keeping your shoulders back and your scapula down as you prepare to lift off the floor. Or, you could spend another session learning how to take the slack out of the bar before beginning the lift.

After that, you move on to actually lifting the bar off the floor (known as the “first pull”).
And so on…

Notice that during each practice session focused on one individual skill. Your energy and effort were directed toward something small enough that you could master it (or at least master the basics of it) within 1 to 3 sessions.

Also notice, however, that each skill built upon the one before it. The knowledge that you built in early sessions, like learning how to grip the bar or how to set your feet properly, was required for succeeding in later sessions as well. (This is why good teachers make such a big deal about the fundamentals. Get them right and they help you every time you go to work. Get them wrong and every task suffers because of it.)

This is what deliberate practice looks like. I like the 10,000 Hour Rule because it is a reminder that you have to put in your reps. But it’s not as simple as working for a long time. It has to be vigilant work. And in many ways, you have to be continually obsessed with building upon your current skill set in small ways.

3 Questions for More Deliberate Practice

From what I can tell, the experts who embrace the idea of deliberate practice continually ask themselves three questions…

1. Do I understand the fundamentals? No matter how advanced they become, experts never lose sight of the fundamentals. In many ways, they are advanced for that very reason: they understand the fundamentals better than anyone else.

2. Am I working on the next step? There are a lot of smart people who know what the next step is, but never do it. Similarly, there are many people who take action, but waste time working on skills that don’t build upon each other. Experts build knowledge and skills that are cumulative.

3. What am I missing? One of the greatest pitfalls of the 10,000 Hour Rule is that it makes expertise seems like a finish line that can be crossed. It can’t. Expertise is not a race that can be won. It is simply a process that can be embraced. Experts are constantly asking themselves, “What am I missing? What new information is out there? What can I learn? How can I grow?”

Expertise is a process, not an outcome. “Elbow up.”

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Sources

“Building the Minimum Badass User” by Kathy Sierra. 2012.
Let it be known that Charlie Hoehn, a true American hero, is an expert at expertise. This article does not apply to him.

Minimalism, Success, and the Curious Writing Habit of George R.R. Martin

In 1971, a young writer graduated with his Masters degree in Journalism from Northwestern University. He spent the first 13 years of his career writing professionally and made a living from it, but without major success. In 1983, he released his fourth book, The Armageddon Rag.

Nobody read it—the book was a total flop. In the author’s own words, “It essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time.” [1, 2]

But he was determined and so he found ways to keep writing. He landed a job writing a television script for CBS. Soon after, the show was cancelled. He managed to work his way onto another TV series, this time on ABC, but it was cancelled again. In 1991, after nearly a decade of bouncing around, he decided to start writing fiction again.

Two million words later, George R.R. Martin was famous.

Martin is the best-selling author of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, has also been turned into a blockbuster television series on HBO. (The first season of the show was nominated for 13 Emmy awards.) [3] The epic 7-part series that hasn’t even been finished (Martin is currently working on the sixth book), but it has already sold more than 25 million copies.

What is most surprising isn’t how good the books are, but how, exactly, Martin writes his best-selling works…

The Power of WordStar

In total, Martin has written almost 2 million words for the series thus far…

Book 1: A Game of Thrones – 298,000 words
Book 2: A Clash of Kings – 326,000 words
Book 3: A Storm of Swords – 424,000 words
Book 4: A Feast for Crows – 300,000 words
Book 5: A Dance with Dragons – 422,000 words

That is a total of 1,770,000 words—an incredible effort. [4] And what does Martin use to churn out such an amazing quantity of work?

He writes the novels with a program that most people have never even heard of: WordStar 4.0. To give you an idea of just how ancient this program is, here’s a picture of the typical WordStar screen…

Martin says, “I still do all my writing on an old DOS machine running WordStar 4.0, the Duesenberg of word processing software (very old, but unsurpassed).”

He goes on, “I am not on Facebook. I am not on Twitter. I will not be on the next new thing to come along, the one that makes Facebook and Twitter as obsolete as GEnie and CompuServe and The Source, those halcyon communities of yore.” [5]

Focus, Consistency, and Patience

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from weightlifting is that there are 3 simple things that you need for success.

Focus: You can’t be good at everything and it’s hard to be great at more than one thing, so pick the one thing you’re going to become great at and focus on it.
Consistency: Focus is useless if you’re only focused every now and then. It’s showing up time after time that makes the difference.
Patience: If you’re focused and consistent, then let time work for you. Results will come when they come. Focus on the system, not the goal.

George R.R. Martin’s creative process employs all three of these methods.

Focus. He writes on a computer without the internet, without social media, without apps or distractions or graphics. But his computer can do one very important thing: type words. And typing words is his craft. That’s what he needs to create. He is 100 percent focused on doing the work that matters and he has completely eliminated anything that impedes that goal.

Consistency. Martin was a working writer for twenty years before he sat down to write A Game of Thrones. He worked on shows that were cancelled and found himself without a job. He wrote early books that flopped commercially. And I’m willing to bet that if A Song of Ice and Fire was a total dud, then he would have found another way to keep writing. He’s not just focused on writing when it’s easy. He’s focused on writing, plain and simple.

Patience. I’m sure Martin wanted to achieve glorious success and commercial fame just as quickly as we all do. I’m sure he would have liked his first book to sell 25 million copies. I’m sure he didn’t want to put in 20 years of work to find commercial success. The difference is that he didn’t let the urge for overnight success derail his commitment to daily work. The greatest display of patience is a continued commitment to the process when you’re not being rewarded for it yet. [6]

The Minimum You Need to Succeed

George “WordStar” Martin is selling more books than nearly anyone on the planet and his computer can’t even send an email. Think about that for a moment.

So often we think that we need more to be successful. More outside funding for our startup. More software programs or productivity tools to handle our to-do list. More business contacts, a bigger network. More clothes or cars or credit cards.

But maybe what we really need is less. Maybe what we really need are fewer distractions and more focus. Maybe what we really need are a few carefully chosen constraints that narrow our energy onto what really matters rather than compiling a bunch of resources that pull us away from what we actually need to do.

It’s very possible that eliminating distractions, not accumulating resources, is the best way to maximize your potential. Constraints drive creativity. What is the minimum you need to succeed?

Click here to leave a comment.

Sources

Lunch with the FT: George RR Martin by Isabel Berwick, Financial Times. June 2, 2012.
George R.R. Martin Wikipedia entry.
Game of Thrones (TV Series) Wikipedia entry.
Wordcount of popular (and hefty) epics. March 6, 2009.
The Social Media by George R.R. Martin. February 17, 2011.
Sticking with something even when it’s not working can also be a sign of stupidity. How can you tell the difference? If you figure that one out, let me know. Managing the tension between persevering when results aren’t coming and knowing when to quit and move on is something that we all try our best to manage, but nobody really knows for certain.

Thanks to my friend Jon Krohn for sharing the story about Martin’s writing habits with me.

Hacking the Workout Journal: How to Track Your Workouts in the Simplest, Most Effective Way Possible

Today I’m going to share my system for recording my workouts.

In my opinion, tracking your workouts (whether it be with a workout journal, a fitness app, or something else) should accomplish 3 goals…

It should be quick and easy, so that you can spend your time exercising. Your time should be spent doing the work, not recording it.
It should be useful. Our modern world is overflowing with data and most of it is never acted upon. I prefer a system that records the essential information of what I have done (so I can see my progress), that reduces errors while I am working out (so that I can be more effective with my time), and that helps me make informed decisions about what to do during my next workout.
It should be versatile. I don’t want to have to find a new app or develop a new system every time I want to do a different style of workout. I should be able to adapt my current system to any style of training.

With those goals in mind, here’s the workout journal tracking system that has worked best for me.

Hacking the Workout Journal

To start, I use a ruled Moleskine notebook. Obviously, any notebook will do, but I like this particular one because it is small enough to fit in your pocket and it has a firm cover that doesn’t bend or tear with repeated use.

Here are three notebooks I’ve filled with workouts. (They are also lovingly covered with sweat and chalk—as they should be.)

STEP 1: Write the date and your bodyweight (if you wish) at the top of the page.

I typically do this once I show up to the gym. It’s part of the pre-game routine that I go through before working out. I put on my lifting shoes and knee sleeves, get out my lifting belt, write the date at the top of the page, and weigh myself.

STEP 2: Write your planned workout routine for the day in the following format:

[Exercise] – [Weight] – [Sets] x [Reps]

At this point, I write out what I expect to do for the day. In the beginning, you may need to think about this a bit or spend some time finding a program that you enjoy. After the first or second time, however, writing down your workout is a very quick task.

Currently, this process takes me less than 60 seconds because I usually measure backward and base the weights I lift today on what I did the week prior by simply adding 5 more pounds or an extra set. (This is another advantage of using the notebook. Your recent workouts are just one or two pages away, so you can pull information instantly.)

I prefer to write out every set I’ll do, including warm up sets, because it makes the process of working out even more mindless and automatic. Once I have a plan, I can just pick up the weights and go. In the rare case that I don’t know exactly what weight I will hit (for example, if I’m maxing out on a particular day), then I’ll just leave a few blank lines under that exercise so that I can write in the numbers as I do each set.

STEP 3: Record tally marks as you complete your work sets.

When you’re in the middle of a workout, it can be easy to forget what set you just completed. This is especially true when the weight gets heavy and you’re too busy huffing and puffing to remember if you just finished set 4 or set 5.

To avoid this occasional mental lapse, I like to use tally marks to note when I finish each set. One quick mark and I always know where I’m at in the workout.

For me, the lifting sequence usually goes like this:

Do the lift.
Make a tally mark.
Start the stopwatch to record my rest interval. (I use the stopwatch application on my phone to track rest intervals, but a regular stopwatch or a glance at the clock on the wall works just fine as well.)
If necessary, change the weight for the next set.
Repeat.

STEP 4: Vary this basic structure as needed for the training session.

The beauty of this system is that it’s incredibly versatile while still being clean and simple for any given workout. (Most apps and pieces of software meanwhile are either simple but limited, or versatile but bloated with features.)

For example, I rarely add rest intervals to my strength training sessions because they are almost always between 3 to 5 minutes. When I sprint, however, I prefer to have the rest interval listed because it is more integral to the workout. No problem. I just add it to the line under the exercise.

Here’s what a typical sprint workout looks like for me…

And that’s it.

Bodyweight workouts, strength training workouts, sprint workouts—it works for all of them. It’s simple, it’s adjustable, and it works.

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Note: In the examples above, I only listed one exercise per workout so that I could lay out the format clearly. Obviously, when you are doing multiple exercises per workout, you simply follow the same structure and add each additional exercises under the previous one.

Sisu: How to Develop Mental Toughness in the Face of Adversity

Without warning, Soviet Union planes came roaring over the city of Helsinki, Finland on November 30, 1939. Finland was about to receive a violent shove into World War II.

The Soviets dropped more than 350 bombs during the raid. Innocent civilians died. Entire buildings were turned to dust. And it was just the beginning. Three hours before the air strike, more than 450,000 Soviet soldiers began marching across the Finnish border. The Soviet soldiers outnumbered the Finnish army almost 3-to-1. That wasn’t the worst of it. The Soviets also commanded more than 6,000 armored tanks and almost 4,000 aircraft. Finland, meanwhile, had just 32 tanks and 114 aircraft. [1]

It was the beginning of what became known as the Winter War. For the Finns, there was no question whether some of them would die. The question was whether any of them would survive.

The Winter War

The winter was brutal that year. In January, temperatures dropped to 40 degrees below zero. Furthermore, at that time of the year and with Finland being located so far north, the soldiers were surrounded by darkness for almost 18 hours per day. Vastly outnumbered, fighting in a brutally cold darkness, and facing near certain death, the Finnish soldiers relied on a concept that has been part of Finnish culture for hundreds of years: Sisu.

Sisu is a word that has no direct translation, but it refers to the idea of continuing to act even in the face of repeated failures and extreme odds. It is a way of living life by displaying perseverance even when you have reached the end of your mental and physical capacities. During the Winter War, the extreme mental toughness of Sisu was all the Finnish soldiers could rely on.

Finnish troops man a machine gun during the Winter War. (Image credit: The Library of Congress)

The Finns would suffer more than 70,000 casualties during the Winter War. But that number would pale in comparison to the 323,000 Soviet casualties during that same time. By the end of winter, the Soviets had seen enough. The Moscow Peace Treaty was signed in March 1940. In total, the Soviets had attacked with over 900,000 soldiers during the Winter War. By the end, 300,000 Finns had managed to fight them to a standstill. [2]

Sisu

Emilia Lahti, a PhD candidate at Aalto University in Helsinki and former student of Angela Duckworth at University of Pennsylvania, studies the concept of Sisu and how it applies to our lives. According to Lahti, “Sisu is the concept of taking action in the face of significant adversity or challenge. It is not so much about achievement as it is about facing your challenges with valor and determination.” She goes on to say, “Sisu provides the final empowering push, when we would otherwise hesitate to act.” [3]

In many ways, Sisu is similar to grit, which has been shown to be one of the best predictors of success in the real world. For example, Angela Duckworth’s research on grit has shown that…

West Point cadets who scored highest on the Grit Test were 60% more likely to succeed than their peers.
Ivy League undergraduate students who had more grit also had higher GPAs than their peers — even though they had lower SAT scores and weren’t as “smart.”
When comparing two people who are the same age but have different levels of education, grit (and not intelligence) more accurately predicts which one will be better educated.
Competitors in the National Spelling Bee outperform their peers not because of IQ, but because of their grit and commitment to more consistent practice.

(If you’d like more, I wrote about Duckworth’s research here.)

But Sisu runs even deeper than grit. It is a type of mental toughness that allows you to bear the burden of your responsibilities, whatever they happen to be, with a will and perseverance that is unbreakable. It is the ability to sustain your action and fight against extreme odds. Sisu extends beyond perseverance. It is what you rely on when you feel like you have nothing left.

Failure is an Event, Not an Identity

Joshua Waitzkin, a martial arts competitor and champion chess player, says, “At a high level of competition, success often hinges on who determines the field and tone of battle.” [4] It is your mental toughness—your Sisu—that determines the tone of battle.

Most people let their battles define them. They see failure as an indication of who they are. Mentally tough people let their perseverance define them. They see failure as an event. Failure is something that happens to a person, not who a person is. This is attitude is what helped carry the Finnish soldiers through the Winter War. Even when surrounded by failure, by death, and by insurmountable odds, their Sisu did not let them see themselves as failures.

We will all face moments when our physical and mental resources feel tapped out. There will always be times when we are hammered with failure after failure and are called to find a fire within. And perhaps even more frequently, there will be many moments when we want to achieve something, but it feels as if we face incredibly long odds. In those moments, you have to call on your Sisu.

When you start a business even though you have nobody to look to for guidance. Sisu.
When you are two miles from finishing your race and it feels as if you can’t make it another step. Sisu.
When you are running on fumes and bleary eyed from caring for your young children, but still need to find the strength to nail your presentation at work. Sisu.
When you step under the bar and prepare to squat a weight that you have never tried before. Sisu.
When you’re in the middle of a season slump that never seems to end. Sisu.
When you feel as if you have tried everything you can to achieve your goal and still you haven’t made it. Sisu.

We all experience failure, but mentally tough people realize that failure is an event, not their identity. Sisu.

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Sources

Wikipedia entry on the Winter War.
During the Winter War, the Finns employed a series of guerrilla warfare tactics that used the constant darkness and deep snow to their advantage. According to one account, “Small squads of Finnish troops would infiltrate enemy lines between larger divisions and set up machine gun lines pointing outward, towards each division. After short bursts to the left and right, the guerrilla squads would retreat and leave the two, recently alerted adjacent divisions to open fire upon each other thinking they were firing on the enemy when in fact they were firing upon the neighboring division.”
Wikipedia entry on Sisu, which includes the work of Emilia Lahti.
Conversations on Creativity with Repeat Bloomer Joshua Waitzkin by Scott Barry Kaufman. November 27, 2008.

Thanks to Emilia Lahti for originally telling me about the concept of Sisu.

Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities

With well over 50 billion dollars to his name, Warren Buffett is consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world. Out of all the investors in the 20th century, Buffett was the most successful.

Given his success, it stands to reason that Buffett has an excellent understanding of how to spend his time each day. From a monetary perspective, you could say that he manages his time better than anyone else.

And that’s why the story below, which was shared directly from Buffett’s employee to my good friend Scott Dinsmore, caught my attention.

Let’s talk about the simple 3-step productivity strategy that Warren Buffett uses to help his employees determine their priorities and actions.

The Story of Mike Flint

Mike Flint was Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years. (Flint has also flown four US Presidents, so I think we can safely say he is good at his job.) According to Flint, he was talking about his career priorities with Buffett when his boss asked the pilot to go through a 3-step exercise.

Here’s how it works…

STEP 1: Buffett started by asking Flint to write down his top 25 career goals. So, Flint took some time and wrote them down. (Note: you could also complete this exercise with goals for a shorter timeline. For example, write down the top 25 things you want to accomplish this week.)

STEP 2: Then, Buffett asked Flint to review his list and circle his top 5 goals. Again, Flint took some time, made his way through the list, and eventually decided on his 5 most important goals.

Note: If you’re following along at home, pause right now and do these first two steps before moving on to Step 3.

STEP 3: At this point, Flint had two lists. The 5 items he had circled were List A and the 20 items he had not circled were List B.

Flint confirmed that he would start working on his top 5 goals right away. And that’s when Buffett asked him about the second list, “And what about the ones you didn’t circle?”

Flint replied, “Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second. They are still important so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

The Power of Elimination

I believe in minimalism and simplicity. I like getting rid of waste. I think that eliminating the inessential is one of the best ways to make life easier, make good habits more automatic, and make you grateful for what you do have.

That said, getting rid of wasteful items and decisions is relatively easy. It’s eliminating things you care about that is difficult. It is hard to prevent using your time on things that are easy to rationalize, but that have little payoff. The tasks that have the greatest likelihood of derailing your progress are the ones you care about, but that aren’t truly important.

Every behavior has a cost. Even neutral behaviors aren’t really neutral. They take up time, energy, and space that could be put toward better behaviors or more important tasks. We are often spinning in motion instead of taking action.

This is why Buffett’s strategy is particularly brilliant. Items 6 through 25 on your list are things you care about. They are important to you. It is very easy to justify spending your time on them. But when you compare them to your top 5 goals, these items are distractions. Spending time on secondary priorities is the reason you have 20 half-finished projects instead of 5 completed ones.

Eliminate ruthlessly. Force yourself to focus. Complete a task or kill it.

The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back.

Click here to leave a comment.

Thanks to my man Scott Dinsmore for sharing this story with me. His original post on Buffett’s strategy is here.

Behavior Multipliers: 4 Reasonable Ways to Achieve Overnight Success

Most of the time, I think our constant quest to achieve faster results is a trap.

We get so obsessed on the goal that we forget that the system is what matters. We get so obsessed with the outcome that we overlook the repetitions we need to do to get there. We become so focused on the short-term results that we forget to build the long-term habits that make the real difference.

However, there are a few strategies—four of them at least—that will actually accelerate the results you enjoy without ignoring the importance of building better habits. I call these strategies “Behavior Multipliers” because the multiply and enhance your ability to take the right action on a consistent basis.

Let’s talk about these multipliers and how they work.

The Behavior Multipliers

1. Rapid Feedback.

As Seth Godin says, “The best way to change long-term behavior is with short-term feedback.” The more immediate the feedback is that you get, the quicker you can make adjustments to your behavior. (This is why it’s important to measure backward.)

My friend Ben Altman shared a good example with me recently. He had a client who wanted to improve his posture. That’s a hard thing to do because typically the only feedback you get on posture is if someone tells you that you are slouching or if you see yourself in the mirror. That’s very slow and inconsistent feedback.

Instead, his client stood in an upright position with good posture and placed a piece of tape across his shoulder. When he slouched, the tape pulled just enough on his shirt so that he noticed the change. Suddenly, he had immediate feedback whenever his posture changed and it became much easier to maintain good posture throughout the day.

The most foundational aspect of a new habit is awareness. If you’re not aware of your habits, how can you expect to change them? This is why feedback is so important. Faster feedback leads to faster results.

2. Simplicity.

The best productivity strategy is to eliminate the things that derail your productivity. If you live a life with fewer distractions, it becomes much easier to take effective action.

The Pareto Principle, often called the 80-20 rule, is a commonly shared idea that 80 percent of the results in a given endeavor come from 20 percent of the work. (i.e. 80 percent of your revenue comes from the best 20 percent of your clients.)

Most of the time, people bring this rule up as a way to point out that you should focus on that top 20 percent. “Put all of your energy into the things that provide the biggest benefit!” This is excellent advice, but what we often forget is that even if you know what the top 20 percent is, you still need to avoid the pitfall of wasting time on the remaining 80 percent of tasks.

In many cases, the danger isn’t knowing what the most important task is for the day. The danger is doing the 7th-most important thing before you do the most important thing.

Don’t just identify the 20 percent of strategies that are most effective, eliminate the 80 percent of strategies that are wasteful. When the distractions are taken away from you, it becomes much easier to stay focused.

3. Environment.

In my opinion, this is the greatest success “hack” there is. If you live in an environment that nudges you toward the right decision and if you surround yourself with people who make your new behavior seem normal, then you’ll find success is almost an afterthought.

The world around us shapes our behavior. Consider the home you live in, for example. There are many cues built into your home, probably hundreds or thousands, that shape your behavior in small ways.

Is there food sitting on the counter? You’re more likely to pick it up and eat it.
Do your couches and chairs face the television? You’re more likely to sit down and turn it on.

And it works the other way too…

Are your running shoes and gym shorts laid out the night before? You’ll be more likely to suit up and go for a run tomorrow.
Do you work at an office with healthy and fit people? If so, you’ll be more likely to see exercise and activity as a normal way of life.

Every environment promotes some behaviors and prevents others. The key is to be in an environment that supports the results you want to achieve.

The people and places that surround us fill our days with little cues and triggers that can make our habits easier to follow or harder to build. Are you fighting your environment to make change happen? Or does your environment make your new behavior effortless?

4. Ability.

If your skills in a particular area are better, then making sustained progress will be easier.

For example, if you can already do 100 pushups in a row, then developing a habit of doing 10 pushups per day seems relatively easy. If, however, your maximum is 10 pushups in a row, then doing 10 pushups per day is far more taxing.

This is also where talent and genetic potential come into the picture. It is far easier to become an overnight success in basketball if you are 7 feet tall rather than if you are 5 feet tall. Play a game that rewards your skill set and success will come faster.

Overnight Success

I still think overnight success is a myth. There’s no way to avoid one simple fact: you have to put in the work.

That said, these four strategies make rapid success more reasonable:

Get short-term feedback.
Simplify and eliminate distractions.
Surround yourself with an environment that promotes your new behavior.
Play a game that leverages your skill set.

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The Theory of Cumulative Stress: How to Recover When Stress Builds Up

It was my first year of graduate school and my professor was standing at the front of the room. He was telling our class about a mistake he made years before.

About a decade earlier, my professor had been one of the senior executives at Sears, Roebuck & Company, the large department store chain. They were in the middle of a massive national campaign and preparing for a major brand launch. My professor was leading the operation.

For almost two months prior to the launch day, he was flying all over the country to strike up buzz with major partners and media companies. While criss-crossing the country on flight after flight, he was also trying to run his department from the road. For weeks on end he would meet with the media and business partners all day, answer emails and phone calls all night, squeeze in 3 or 4 hours of sleep, and wake up to do it all over again.

The week before the big launch day, his body gave out on him. He had to be rushed to the hospital. Major organs had started to fail from the chronic stress. He spent the next eight days lying in a hospital bed, unable to do anything as the launch day came and went.

Your Bucket of Health and Energy

Imagine that your health and energy are a bucket of water.

In your day-to-day life, there are things that fill your bucket up. These are inputs like sleep, nutrition, meditation, stretching, laughter, and other forms of recovery.

There are also forces that drain the water from your bucket. These are outputs like lifting weights or running, stress from work or school, relationship problems, or other forms of stress and anxiety. [1]

The forces that drain your bucket aren’t all negative, of course. To live a productive life, it can be important to have some of things flowing out of your bucket. Working hard in the gym, at school, or at the office allows you to produce something of value. But even positive outputs are still outputs and they drain your energy accordingly.

These outputs are cumulative. Even a little leak can result in significant water loss over time.

The Theory of Cumulative Stress

I usually lift heavy three days per week. For a long time, I thought I should be able to handle four days per week. However, every time I added the extra workout in, I would be just fine for a few weeks and then end up exhausted or slightly injured about a month into the program.

This was frustrating. Why could I handle it for four or five weeks, but not longer than that?

Eventually I realized the issue: stress is cumulative. Three days per week was a pace I could sustain. When I added that fourth day in, the additional stress started to build and accumulate. At some point, the burden became too big and I would get exhausted or injured.

In extreme cases, like that of my professor, this snowball of stress can start to roll so fast that it pushes you to the brink of death. But it’s important to realize that cumulative stress is something that you’re dealing with even when it isn’t a matter of life or death. The stress of extra workouts or additional mileage. The stress of building a business or finishing an important project. The stress of parenting your young children or dealing with a bad boss or caring for your aging parents. It all adds up.

Keeping Your Bucket Full

If you want to keep your bucket full, you have two options.

Refill your bucket on a regular basis. That means catching up on sleep, making time for laughter and fun, eating enough to maintain solid energy levels, and otherwise making time for recovery.
Let the stressors in your life accumulate and drain your bucket. Once you hit empty, your body will force you to rest through injury and illness. Just like it did with my professor.

Recovery is Not Negotiable

I’m in the middle of a very heavy squat program right now. (It’s called the Smolov squat program. If you’re interested, I put the spreadsheet up here.)

I’ve spent the last two years training with really easy weights and gradually working my way up to heavier loads. I’ve built a solid foundation of strength. But even with that foundation, the weights on this program are heavy and the intensity is high.

Because of this, I’m taking special care to allow myself additional recovery. I’m allowed to sleep longer than usual. If I need to eat more, so be it. Usually, I’m lazy about stretching and foam rolling, but I have been rolling my little heart out every day for the last few weeks. I’m doing whatever I can do to balance the stress and recovery deficit that this squat program is placing on me.

Why?

Because recovery is not negotiable. You can either make time to rest and rejuvenate now or make time to be sick and injured later. Keep your bucket full.

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Sources

My image of the bucket was inspired by another image that I saw. I have searched high and low for the original artist who drew that bucket, but I can’t find out who it was. I want to give the credit away for this, so please feel free to let me know who drew the original image if you happen to know where it came from. For now, I’ll just thank an anonymous artist for the inspiration.

Thanks to Mark Watts for originally sharing with me the idea that stress is cumulative.