Design Your Work: Praxis Volume 1

by Tiago Forte

my eclectic mix of experiences simultaneously made me underqualified for specialist roles, and overqualified for entry-level ones.

My blog became my R&D lab: a place to ramble, rant, play, test, dissect, entertain, summarize, explain, argue, advocate, theorize, and generally way overthink all the ideas I was encountering in my work and my life.

This random walk of exploration is evident in the wide spread of topics I co...

You see, I have to write to know what I think. All my ideas sound brilliant in the echo chamber of my own mind. It is only when I put down my thoughts, letting them stand on their own strength, that I start to see the cracks and imperfections.

It actually goes beyond this – I have to write to think. Otherwise the same old ideas keep circulating round and round, clogging the synapses. Writing is not a result of thinking – it is thinking itself, scaffolded by the external props of a keyboard and screen.

And this is no accident. It became painfully clear to me, upon returning, how much our modern world is designed to erode this capacity. Advertisements, videos, mobile apps, commercials, social media, the news, email, notifications — these are the forward operating bases in a concerted campaign to fragment, subvert, and monetize our attention, a resource even more scarce (and therefore more valuable) than time or money.

Not paying attention to what you were doing. And it didn’t matter if the thing you were thinking about was more positive or negative than what you were doing. Just the fact of not being present was the cause. Now think of the implications for a society where none of us is truly paying attention to anything we do.

But what if depriving pain of much of its power was as simple as paying attention to it? Anger, doubt, shame, envy, vengeance — all these feelings have such a hold over us only because they operate in the dark. Shine a light on them, and they wither.

I’ve come to believe that we as a society, employers and employees alike, have made a collective pact not to ask too many questions when it comes to measuring productivity. We don’t want to define objective metrics for success, because we would realize that our day-to-day responsibilities barely resemble the job description we were hired for. We don’t want to quantify the time we spend, as this may reveal the ungodly number of hours we work every week, at the office and on our digital tethers. And most of all, we are afraid to understand the real factors that affect our productivity, lest we discover how deeply dysfunctional the modern workplace has become.

There are real risks to an excessive focus on improving your own performance. Overoptimizing your life, paradoxically, makes it harder to enjoy it. Perfectionism has now been shown to be an underappreciated risk factor in suicide. Stories of burnouts with long-lasting physical and psychological consequences are slowly becoming more commonplace.

So which behaviors are desired and undesired when it comes to organization? In any organizational system, the constant temptation is to overorganize, i.e. to create too many categories, too many subdivisions that are too specific. As the number of tags grows arithmetically, their complexity grows geometrically, for multiple reasons, both technological and cognitive (see memory fatigue above). This phenomenon is all the more problematic with unlimited digital information that never runs into physical constraints.

Ask yourself this: when you have an idea, any idea, what do you do with it? Do you obsessively write every single one down, but never look at them again? Or do you let it pass, thinking “Well it probably wasn’t that good of an idea anyway”? Both these extremes represent people with low creative self-esteem — they don’t put much stock in their own ideas.

Don’t worry about creating the perfect system, as if that exists. Just start capturing. Your mind, noticing you start to record and value your ideas, will respond in kind and start producing more. Begin the cycle, and eventually, maybe, one of those great ideas that will occur to you down the road will reveal the “perfect” system for you.

It’s usually because I didn’t have a filling, healthy breakfast. And that was because I didn’t get up early enough. And that was because I went to bed late. And that was because I worked late, because I didn’t get enough done that day, because I didn’t have enough energy, because…I didn’t have a healthy lunch.

I started by narrowing my analysis to “medium difficulty” habits. These are habits that I perform consistently, but not as consistently as I’d like. They are the low-hanging fruit of behavior change — strengthening them would quickly and relatively easily improve my quality of life.

I realize that gratitude is not a fixed quantity. A list like this one is not merely a mirror reflecting some objective reality. It is a lens, with the power to reinterpret anything — any mistake, any failing, any trauma, any crisis — as the seed of something good. I think gratitude is a skill: the more you practice viewing things through this lens, the more appear.

But don’t go to the other extreme, being too picky about what you save. The best rule of thumb is not to set out explicit decision criteria for what you keep. Just thinking about that is exhausting.

Instead, use resonance as your criteria. As in, “that resonates with me.” We know from neuroscience research that “emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking.” Often, when something “resonates” with us, it is our intuitive/right brain/System 1 mind telling us something is valuable before our analytical/left brain/System 2 mind even knows what’s going on. It’s no coincidence that the former is the same part that drives creativity, spontaneity, and self-expression.

” And it’s true. If we consider these periods of intense, focused work as our primary asset as knowledge workers, and think about how precious few hours of quality attention we have to spend each week, and how few weeks and years we have on this planet to make something that matters, it is unforgivable that we make no effort to build a knowledge base that appreciates over time. Each day we start again from scratch, trading something invaluable for something merely valuable.

Start believing that you’re exercising, even without changing your behavior, and you actually will be. This is exactly what we’re using Evernote for: if you start acting like you are creative, your body and mind will respond, and you will be. Start acting like every idea you come across or come up with has the potential for brilliance, and that potential is more likely to be realized.

What’s most interesting about attractors is that they function identically to goals or intentions. They organize diverse means toward coherent ends, creating order out of disorder. In fact, the well-established “order from noise” principle states that the more random variation (“noise”) such a system is exposed to, the faster it will self-organize.

As the inimitable Venkatesh Rao has written, we’re moving from a world of containers (companies, departments, semesters, packages, silos) to a world of streams (social networks, info feeds, main streets of thriving cities, Twitter). Problems and opportunities alike resist having neat little boxes drawn around them. There’s way too much to absorb. Way too much to even guess what you don’t know.

Increasingly, the only metric that will matter in your journey of personal growth will be ROL: Rate-of-Learning. We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the importance of hands-on learning and practical experimentation. We get it. Burying your head in a book by itself gets you nowhere.

People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the notion or experience that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.

Let’s rewind a bit. Productivity as we know it is based on delayed gratification, which described a world that was predictable and structured. It was clear what you had to do and in what order — it was just a matter of scheduling and pain tolerance. But delayed gratification is obsolete in a world dominated by VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), because the pain you’re pulling into the present might not even be necessary, and the gratification you’re pushing into the future might never materialize. It is not at all clear what must be done and in what order; in fact, it becomes ever more clear that most of the tasks we execute don’t make much of a difference, while a tiny percentage randomly and dramatically influence the course of our work and our lives. It makes sense to invest more and more resources in making that distinction, because the absolute fastest way to complete a task or reach an objective is to realize you don’t have to.

States of mind drastically influence the amount of energy it takes to complete a given task, which gives them leverage. When you’re in Errand Mode, running an additional errand not only doesn’t take much extra energy, it actually increases your energy as you feel the delicious alignment of necessity with inertia. Similarly, we often forget that the first stage in reaching that “state of flow” we all crave is actually struggle. You cannot reach the state of “optimal experience” — what Daniel Goleman describes as “a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task” — without that initial feeling of anxiety and fidgetiness. This is the true toll of constant interruptions: with each distraction you stop and start the process again and again, never quite getting past the struggle stage to the flood of mood-enhancing neurochemicals.

There’s also research support. This HBR report and this Scientific American article describe studies showing that unusually creative people are characterized by “their ability to mix seemingly incompatible states of being depending on the task, whether it’s open attention with a focused drive, mindfulness with daydreaming, intuition with rationality, intense rebelliousness with respect for tradition, etc.” (also called “blends of emotions”). Affective engagement — the extent to which people are open to the full breadth and depth of their emotions — was found to be a better predictor of artistic creativity than IQ or intellectual engagement. Meanwhile, Gallup reports that 87 percent of global workers are either unengaged or actively disengaged from their workplaces.

If we consider that our numerous selves have very different priorities, Alignment of their actions becomes more important, and harder. Instead of forcing all of them — past, present, and future — to line up with an unchanging predetermined outcome (a “mission” or “purpose”), it makes more sense to start with what excites your current self right now, and then work from there to define that motivation in increasingly subtle shades over time. The more precise your understanding of what exactly excites you about any particular project, the better your ability to generalize it to other projects and topics — to thread and follow that particular needle winding through the haystack of life.

There is one bright side to all this hard work: the only way to crystallize a state of mind is to use affective triggers to decide what to take notes on and keep. Instead of making a mini-outline of each book and article and podcast you consume, trying to preserve the logical structure of the argument, just wait in low-power mode for reactions like surprise, delight, intrigue, and outrage. This System 1 processing is much faster, less energy intensive, and more intuitive than the more analytical System 2. To take this approach means your notes will not be neat and ordered, like a Dewey Decimal system for the mind. They will be dominated by the contrarian, by paradoxes, by the inexplicable. Which is exactly the point. Contrarianism is the fastest method for discovering the paradox at the heart of every inexplicable phenomenon.

What I’m referring to here is multifinality. Whereas multitasking refers to seeking multiple outputs from multiple simultaneous inputs, and is impossible, multifinality refers to attaining alternative objectives from the same inputs, and is eminently possible. Can that ad campaign also be an opportunity to test the relative performance of different market segments? Can this presentation be recorded and used as a business development tool? Can captchas also be used to decipher street addresses? These questions allow you to kill two birds with one stone, each present self making life easier on multiple future selves in an expanding, branching tree of optionality. Crucially, multifinality doesn’t take more time or resources or effort — just a more diverse set of lenses to see that any action can have multiple non-exclusive outcomes.

Many have commented on the rise of chaos and complexity in the modern world, but we forget what the yogis have always known — our inner lives have always been chaotic and complex. States of mind are a better guide to modern work than values (which don’t always motivate), goals (which often change), and processes (which try to prescribe the unprescribable) precisely because moods are the only things that change just as fast as the world around us. I suspect this is where that elusive Level 3 of performance can be found — clearing the in-between space of enough biases, fears, and defenses that our inner inspirations can explode into creative “earthquakes” as efficiently as possible.

The purpose of companies is to build a culture that supports their people. Not to formulate a 5-year plan and dictate every last task to every person. Not to codify an abstract Mission and ram it down everyone’s throats. And definitely not to force everyone to “be creative,” as if creativity is programmable like a computer.

The purpose of the work is to serve as a vehicle for learning and personal growth for each employee, however they define it. In other words, having a kid counts just as much as learning a new skill. This is why maternity/paternity leave and related policies are just as important as productivity initiatives — they tie together the message that work is about holistic growth.

An important aspect of tinkering is that it is driven by people’s natural curiosity; what tantalizes and draws them for reasons they cannot necessarily explain. Following this curiosity leads in the direction of maximal interestingness — a sort of hunch that asking a certain question will lead to fruitful answers. This is the true purpose of much vaunted “collaboration” — it is a mechanism for averaging and combining the interestingness instincts of people with diverse backgrounds and skills, in the hope that it will lead to profitable opportunities that no one would find on their own.

A key concept to ensure that this experimentation process remains connected to the real world is RERO (Release Early, Release Often). The temptation and danger in an environment of accelerating change is to wait longer before releasing your creation into the world. You want to run one more test, add one more feature, make the quality just a little higher, gather just a bit more data, fix one more bug, and then you’ll be ready.

Small Wins is the technique of replacing this binary win/loss outcome with a series of progressively easier versions of the habit. If you can’t run 5 miles, run 3. If you can’t run 3, run 1. If you can’t run 1, run around the block, or walk around your house, or pace the living room, or if necessary, put your running shoes on, declare victory, and then take them off. You do only as much as you can, or feel like, or have time for. Any excuse is valid, as long as you do something. You get as much credit for the easiest version as the hardest version.

This explanation always elicits incredulous laughs. It sounds like a blank check for laziness. But something interesting happens when you try it: by eliminating the “barrier to entry” of even getting started, it calls your bluff that some external force (lack of time, money, or energy) is the true constraint. By reframing the black-and-white choice as a menu of options tailored to any level of effort you’re willing to expend, it calls attention to the fact that the most difficult step is 0 to 1, not 1 to n. Doing something, anything, instead of nothing. The rest is just optimization. This method shines a spotlight on the ways we twist logic into arbitrary “behavioral rules” to justify almost any decision. When you feel resistance to flossing even one tooth (which will inevitably happen), you have to come to terms with the reality that the friction is not between you and the world. It is between your conflicting motives.

Take meditation. It’s fascinating to me to hear how people conceive of what they’re actually doing sitting on the mat in silence. In my experience, the longer they stick to the unhelpful beliefs that they need to “empty the mind” or “find peace,” the less likely they are to stick with it. A more useful metaphor is bicep curls. Every time your mind wanders, the act of bringing attention back to the breath is a repetition, strengthening the muscle of focus. This allows you to greet the inevitable with a sense of progress: just as you need gravity to build muscle, you need distraction to build focus.

But my favorite model is that willpower is a story. People do what they enjoy, and then narrativize it as self-discipline after the fact. When we see someone with high performance we desire, we extrapolate from the immense amount of effort it takes for us to perform even at a low level, and conclude that if they perform at 10x our level, it must require 10x the willpower. But this ignores the critical fact that they enjoy doing it. It doesn’t take willpower for a hard-core runner to get up at 5 in the morning. It takes willpower for them not to. The hard truth is that no one really does anything they don’t enjoy for long. At most, they focus their efforts on finding the elusive intersection between what they enjoy and what they must do.

In other words, the voice of dopamine is not “That felt good!” It is “If you do this, then you’ll feel good.” Which explains that “one more…” feeling you get when eating dopamine-triggering foods like chips and fries, which persists right up until you’ve eaten so much that you’re sick. It also explains why you can still crave “junk” — from fast food to action movies to vacuous social media — even when you feel terrible while consuming it and after. The “reward” associated with anticipating the experience is far more powerful than the experience itself. By the time you sit down to enjoy that hamburger and soda, the brain has already received enough of a reward in the form of anticipation to reinforce the craving for next time, even if you don’t actually enjoy more than the first few bites.

Curiosity is a powerful phenomenon: it is a motivated state of mind that taps directly into our need for novelty, which Gregory Berns claims in Satisfaction is the most fundamental source of life satisfaction. Like anticipation, and using the same dopamine pathways, it points to “what’s next,” focusing our attention and efforts on the “information gaps” between what we know and don’t know. But curiosity has another quality that makes it a much more sustainable, potentially even addictive, source of motivation: the more gaps you fill, the more you see. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, the fractal nature of your ignorance unfolding endlessly before you.

I would argue that a similar mechanism explains how habits are broken and formed. As any product designer will tell you, your main competition is not another new product. It is the status quo. Our existing habits are so stable that it takes an outside force — a disturbance — to destabilize the system just long enough for new solutions to establish themselves. This study reported that 36% of successful changes in behavior were associated with a move to a new place (nearly three times the rate associated with unsuccessful changes). I’m sure you’ve experienced this — moving to a new city or traveling, suddenly all your behavioral axioms become unmoored from their context, and it takes all your energy to fulfill basic needs like food, water, and a place to sleep. It is during these in-between times that new habits are formed and old ones broken almost effortlessly. From the chaos emerges a new pattern of habits to resolve a new set of forces.

The main reason is that most people’s risk tolerance is very low, because self-efficacy (defined as “a person’s conviction or confidence about his or her abilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources or courses of action needed to successfully execute a specific task within a given context”) is remarkably fragile. When it comes to trying and learning new things, people have difficulty transferring success in one arena to even highly related ones. Even small failures lead to learned helplessness so quickly, we learn to protect against that eventuality by not trying new things unless success is guaranteed.

The primary risk of entrepreneurship and other free agent lifestyles is not financial or even social — it is the risk to a person’s very self-concept as someone who does what they set out to do. In entrepreneurial endeavors that depend just as much on luck and timing as intelligence and hard work, this feels like a terrible gamble. And it’s a gamble with odds you can’t improve through careful preparation and planning (in fact, too much planning will probably worsen your odds). This sort of risk is not any less threatening in cultures that are relatively tolerant of failure, like the U.S. If anything, it’s more threatening, since these cultures also tend to be more individualistic, with your actions reflecting more directly on your character and abilities. Stripped of risk-mitigating social structures, we are faced with the terror of total accountability. The correlation between individualism and suicide rates in developed countries speaks to the risks of this sort of attribution.

Take the example of health. This 2012 AON Hewitt healthcare survey reports that 80% of healthcare costs are accounted for by 15 conditions, which are driven by just 8 risks that are at least partly behavior-dependent (poor diet, physical inactivity, smoking, lack of health screening, poor stress management, poor standard of care, insufficient sleep, excessive alcohol consumption). We pour billions into education and training, but ignore the fact that most health-related decisions are based on habits, intuitive response or assessment, self concept, or heuristics, not rational cost-benefit analyses. When smokers are shown anti-smoking videos, it just triggers their urge to smoke. Adding healthy items to a fast food menu makes sales of hamburgers skyrocket.

Stories may actually be a more accurate way of describing how people think about and use mental models of behavior change. Stories, like emergent systems, only move in one direction. They cannot be rolled back and played again. This irreproducibility suggests the importance of another form of psychological capital that is also highly correlated with successful behavior change: self-compassion. They are two sides to the same coin — you need self-efficacy to believe you can do it, but you equally need self-compassion to be ok when you don’t. Self-compassion aids change by removing the veil of shame and pain that keeps you from examining the causes of your mistakes (and often, leads you to indulge in the very same bad habit as a way of forgetting the pain). Self-forgiveness is the first step in fostering an invitational attitude that is open to feedback, from yourself and others.

Which makes the conclusion that project creator Matt Killingworth came to after analyzing many thousands of participants’ data (as told on this NPR podcast) especially intriguing and personally relevant: the single factor with the highest correlation with unhappiness across the entire study was mind-wandering. The more someone had their mind on something other than what they were doing, regardless of whether they were thinking about something more pleasant or less pleasant than what they were doing, the more unhappy they were likely to be both while mind-wandering and in general. This is powerful evidence for the importance of what crunchy types would call “presence.” It’s also difficult to imagine how such a conclusion could be reached without random sampling via mobile devices.

Experiments do this by increasing the number of ways to win, while reducing the number of ways to lose. Experiments cannot fail — they can only produce results. At worst, the null hypothesis is confirmed, helping you narrow down the solution space. Either way, you learn something, making your next try more likely to succeed. By treating changes as situational and temporary, and holding your character constant, you mitigate permanent damage to it. Instead of tying a single habit to a single goal — where the failure of the habit is interpreted as the impossibility of the goal — you identify multiple routes. If one doesn’t work, you move on to the next.

I often recommend “habit cycling”: trying one new habit per month, on a regular schedule. Start on the first of the month, even if you feel unprepared. Especially if you feel unprepared, since your expectations will be lower. It can be as easy as trying drinking a glass of lemon water each morning (one of my personal favorites), or as big as starting a new exercise routine. The point is to avoid analysis paralysis and lower the stakes by making new experiments just part of the routine, not some pivotal crossroads. I recommend stopping the habit after 30 days, even if, especially if, it’s going well. Take a few days off and reflect on what you learned, why it worked or didn’t, and what you want to change going forward.

Sometimes these macro-laws take the form of simple rules of thumb: “I’m more productive in the morning” or “I prefer a distraction-free environment.” Sometimes they take the form of stronger requirements: “I need this particular workspace to be productive” or “I can’t get work done without my coffee.” But the most consequential ones shape the future of one’s career and life, painting possible choices in broad strokes: “I’m more right-brained than left-brained.” “I need a job that is predictable, where I can control things.” “I work better alone.” “I should choose this career path because it makes more money.” “But that doesn’t scale.” The most extensive and explicit example of personal macro-laws I know of is Buster Benson’s wonderful Book of Beliefs. He lists his metabeliefs, perceptions, opinions, and predictions in the form of an annually updated, open-source Github repository.