Alexandersmap

    Category: Productivity

    • These Next Five

      “Excellence is not a ‘hill to climb;’ excellence is the next five minutes.” — Tom Peters

      Tom Peters tweeted a one page summary of accumulated wisdom yesterday. I’ve quoted Peters’ “next five minutes” statement before, because it lays it all out there for us so succinctly. I’m using it again with fresh perspective after attending a trade show these last few days and reconnecting with so many people who have been integral in my career. It’s always been about now, not next quarter or even tomorrow. What we do with the rest of our life is nothing more than these next five minutes, stacked incrementally one after the other to form its substance.

      We can’t sustain high levels of urgency, but we can celebrate the ripe potential of each moment and remind ourselves to do something with it. Life is now, we all sense that. The concept of time is very human. Five minute increments are but a basis of measurement, conveniently contained in one hand. Imagine what we can do with these next five.

    • Plans

      What is an intention when compared to a plan? —Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

      What you intend to do is meaningless.

      What you actually do is everything.

      What requires a why for fuel in its darkest hours.

      What flounders without a plan.

      Habits carry plans to their completion.

      Plan your habits wisely, then follow through as if your life depended on it.

      Doesn’t it?

    • The Battle Inside

      “The greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end. You must declare unceasing war on yourself.”
      — Robert Greene

      We all have our moment-to-moment skirmishes with ourselves. We fight through our worst traits or we succumb to them. It’s easy to let things slip, easy to settle for good enough, easy to wrap up early or scroll through Twitter or your social media feed instead of focusing on what must be done in the moment.

      Seth Godin calls it our Lizard Brain, this thing that prevents us from doing the things we most want to do. Steven Pressfield calls it the Resistance. We’ve all felt it when it comes to following our calling: imposter syndrome, distraction or lack of focus, busywork, putting others first… and on and on.

      Routine breaks through the bullshit. Habits force a reckoning with the truth of the matter. We must get past ourselves and simply start doing what we were called upon to do. The battle inside rages, but it becomes a war of attrition. We either give in to it or we see things through to the end.

      Every moment we take meaningful action towards our calling or we slip backwards or sideways on the path. Becoming is dirty work full of blood, sweat and tears. The largest battles are with ourselves. But don’t we have to fight them? Decide what to be and go be it.

    • The Thing About Busy

      “Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.” — Tim Ferriss

      We have a love/hate relationship with busy. We all want for more quiet time, but when we get it we quickly yearn for the energy of hustle and bustle. This is compounded by the story we tell ourselves that those who get ahead are the busiest and hardest-working among us. That might help make you a Partner at one of the “Big Three” consulting firms or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But how often do we stop and ask ourselves why in the world we’d ever want that title? It’s a Faustian bargain—a deal with the Devil to have it all now in exchange for your soul.

      Screw that.

      Status doesn’t mean you’re successful at living. It just means you ground out more miles. Do we ever stop to ask what really gets ground in the process? Think about the last conversation you had with a “really busy” person. Was it meaningful or a transaction? Frazzled is a posture that doesn’t highlight one’s positive traits. To be calmly efficient is a choice; just as much of a choice as frazzled. But with better hair.

      We can be successful in life without sacrificing 300,000 heartbeats a week for the profitability of whatever stock symbol we happen to align ourselves with. The thing about busy is it’s a story we tell ourselves as an excuse for not doing what we really want to do. It takes courage to stop hiding behind busy.

      Instead we might choose contemplation and conversation and the deliberation of taking meaningful steps. We might seek experience accumulation and relationship building. We could delight in pregnant pauses. We can give ourselves permission to celebrate deep thinking and active listening and finding the right word without Googling it. We can rejoice in finishing what we once so boldly started but put aside because we’ve been so damned… busy.

    • Focus in Chaos

      How do you stay informed in a world gone mad without losing focus on the things that are most important for you? It’s not easy–we can all find something very distracting and completely out of our control just a click away. I allocate time for my daily news update from trusted sources, absorb the weight of it and do my best to keep crossing the stream of time one leap at a time without drowning in the abyss.

      When you refocus on that next leap, does it mean you’ve chosen ignorance, or discipline? For all of us to remain sane in a time of escalating tension, we can’t keep drinking from the fountain of bad news. Be aware, react and refocus on what we can control. We don’t cross the street without looking both ways, and we shouldn’t completely ignore the world around us. But it doesn’t mean we should huddle in fear and never take the first step towards our destination. We can’t bring light into this world without action.

      Just like those before us, our time is full of challenges and assaults on our senses. And like those who came before we must find a way to focus anyway. The only real choice is to assess our place, summon up the necessary audacity and make the leap.

      Be bold, despite it all.

    • What You Put Out


      “Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority… When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.” — Derek Sivers, How to Live

      “When you ship, you silence the lizard brain. You beat the resistance and your ideas get out in the world. It’s not easy, but it’s very important. I am shipping because I don’t want to create art for art’s sake; I want to do work that matters, that makes a difference in people’s lives. Not tomorrow, today.” — Seth Godin, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work

      Anyone who does anything creative knows the scorecard. What you intend to do has no place at the table: The only thing that matters is what you produce. If you don’t put it out there you aren’t a part of the Great Conversation.

      I focus a lot on productivity in this blog. More than some think I ought to. For me, productivity is the natural outcome of habits and routines and the gumption to click “Publish” every damned day. The lizard brain is a very real struggle, so is imposter syndrome, and so is the relative comfort of low agency. To overcome each of these hurdles, you must learn to be audacious. For most of us this doesn’t come in a spark of magnificent insight, it comes through incremental daily actions: teaching the brain that this is what is expected of it today and every waking day from here to the very last.

      This daily routine of writing profoundly changes you. I’d read that for years in Seth Godin blogs before I finally started posting regularly. I don’t look at my early posts often, for they’re full of typos and grammatical errors and run-on sentences (some things don’t change). But each brought me here. And here brings me to whatever comes next.

      What you consistently put out builds boldness and audacity and a blatant disregard for keeping up appearances. What I’ve learned during this dance with daily productivity is to avoid telling the world what you’re going to do. All that matters is what you have done. So by all means: ship it. Lizard brain be damned.

    • Best Intentions

      “What one does is what counts. Not what one had the intention of doing.” ― Pablo Picasso

      “Do or do not. There is no try.” — Yoda

      Intentions. We all have the best of them. I intended to have a stellar week of work and working out. Both have been a struggle. Such is the way. Life is funny and fickle. We either do or we do not. The trick isn’t in the intentions, it’s in the verdict after the fact. Judge or judge not. There is no getting around it.

      You reach a point where you become. You decided what to be and you went out and became it. Or maybe you didn’t, but you had the best intentions. Life is assessing what you are and deciding whether you like it or not, and then deciding what to be next. One hop across the stream of life at a time, you look for that next landing spot, with an eye on the far shore. Sometimes you slip and get wet. Sometimes you took a hop in the wrong direction. Sometimes you park yourself on one comfortable rock a little too long. Intention and action are the only things that get you to the other side.

      Intentions are nothing but a direction we wish to point ourselves in. Intent only matters when it meets consistent action. Which begs the question, what are you doing?

    • Action Plans and Comfort Zones

      Don’t look now, but as I post this on February 9th, we’re almost 11% through the year. How are those New Year’s Resolutions looking? Yeah, I know what you mean. Action plans without execution soon fall away like so many broken dreams.

      I don’t make resolutions, I chip away at habit formation. I’m particularly locked in on writing every day, as quirky and all over the map as it might be for the reader. I’m a streaker, if you will, committing to not breaking streaks in the habits I want to have in my life. Writing, reading, learning a bit of a foreign language or two, getting a full night’s sleep and eating relatively well are consistently checked off on the streak list.

      But then there are the broken streaks: rowing and lifting every day, not drinking on weekdays, and some work productivity goals that pain my friend on sabbatical too much to mention. My action plan for each of these have all succumbed to the comfort zone. It’s so much easier to just make a coffee first thing in the morning and begin writing than it is to jump on the rowing ergometer and row for 10,000 meters. It’s so much more pleasant to have a glass of red wine with dinner than to drink yet another glass of water. Comfort trumps committed action when you haven’t established routine.

      So I’ve put the action plan aside in favor of the habit tracker. Each morning I have my reckoning, checking off the things I did the day before. And leaving a glaring void where the things I meant to do (or not do) missed a day. And then I try to avoid having two of those voids in a row. Sometimes it works, sometimes I go a long, long way between check marks.

      Ultimately, life is meant to be lived to our fullest extent possible. But we live in a pay me now, pay me later reality. The bad habits add up, just as the good habits do. Decide what to be and go be it. But don’t lie to yourself.

      I still make action plans, but now I try to identify the key daily steps that lead to success down the road. Sometimes I succeed, often I don’t. But I just keep trying to check the box. After all, there’s a certain comfort in established habits too.

    • Catching Up & Bridging Gaps

      The idea of catching up is tantalizing. I use this phrase often in two contexts; catching up with someone I haven’t spoken with in some time, and catching up on work that’s piled up in my work or personal ambition buckets. This week I did a fair amount of catching up in both contexts. But we never really catch up, do we? We mostly just shrink the gap between people, workload or expectations before we inevitably see the gap widen again. We’re all just so… busy.

      The act of getting reacquainted, of meeting to see how someone’s been, what’s up with the family, how so-and-so’s doing, is a lovely form of catching up. There’s so much loneliness and division in the world today, fueled by the pandemic and political inclination, and the general categorization of people into one camp or another. It should be so easy to just put it all aside and listen to each other. Many people just don’t want to deal with conflict or focus on differences of opinion, and so we just don’t communicate at all.

      But there’s joy in bridging the gap. Finding common ground and dancing in the light of understanding and acceptance. When we close that gap we draw closer together, and feel the humanity of another. When we ghost each other, block people on social media, and gossip about what the other is doing the gap widens. I’ve shrunk from a few people over the last several years, finding their opinions repulsive. Yet I know there’s still common ground should we ever sit down to catch up. We go on with our lives without those people in it, but feel the void where the relationship calved. Stack up enough of these and it’s death by a thousand cuts. No wonder people are lonely and stressed out.

      At least there’s work to take our minds off the world, right? But even here the gap between what needs to be done and what we can possibly accomplish feels impossibly large. We catch up on one thing and see the gap widen in another. Supply chain issues, labor shortages, trust issues… it’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and buy a boat or camper to get out of Dodge. We work until the wheels come off and then teeter trying to balance on what’s left.

      The reality is we’ll never quite catch up, and that’s okay. We decide where to close gaps and where to let things stay adrift. When the time is right–if the time is ever right–we’ll come back to that which we’ve neglected and, well, catch up once again.

    • Scheduling “Accomplishing Great Things” Time

      “A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” — Naval Ravikant

      The week after New Year’s Eve is when everything hits the fan. People are back from vacations, tasks that were deferred come due, new initiatives kick in, and most people want to start the year off on the right foot with a high level of activity. You want to push hard on the flywheel to regain any momentum you lost over the holidays, and to have a running start for the year ahead. This buzz of activity inevitably translates into a very full calendar.

      You want to get things done, so you say yes to meetings and projects that you believe will carry you to your goals. In the meantime everyone else’s hopes and dreams need to be met with some of your attention as well–maybe a 30 or 60 minute block of time next Tuesday? And this is where those lofty resolutions begin to hit resistance.

      This is the whirlwind that Chris McChesney speaks of in The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The more you can stay out of the whirlwind, the more you can focus on your real priorities. And the more you can do great things in this world. Don’t we want to do a few great things in our time here in this world?

      It feels like the most important thing to do is to simplify. But that’s a convenient buzzword to throw around. It’s easy to say it, but much harder to do in the crush of daily life. The answer, I think, is to book big chunks of time for thinking and working on your top priorities. To jealously guard the edges of your day when you can do the most. I’d rather get up two hours early and write than sleep in. I’d rather spend two hours reading at the end of my work day than turn on the television. Those four hours don’t make it on to my calendar, but they’re often the most productive time in my day.

      If I were to add one thing to Naval’s quote, it would be this: “A busy calendar, an unfit body and a busy mind will destroy your ability to do great things in this world.” For I believe we forget sometimes (I do anyway) that a fit body and a productive mind are related. If we aren’t eating well, drinking in moderation, sleeping well and exercising regularly our minds pay for it. Blocking off time for exercise is as essential to accomplishing great things as giving yourself space to think.

      With that in mind, I’m beginning to use my calendar differently than I used to. I schedule more “accomplishing great things” time. I’m keeping myself accountable by listing and checking off the key priorities in my bullet journal. And I celebrate when I draw a box around my top goals of fitness, nutrition, writing, reading and my top work priority when I can check all of them in a day. My goal is to string together a full week of closing the boxes. This turns busy into productive in a visible way. When I do, I know that I’m on the path to greater things.