Related: You’re never as bad as they say you are. My agent used to send me every blog or media hit for The 4-Hour Workweek. Eight weeks after publication, I asked him to only forward me positive mentions in major media or factual inaccuracies I needed to respond to. An important correlate: You’re never as good as they say you are, either. It’s not helpful to get a big head or get depressed. The former makes you careless and the latter makes you lethargic. I wanted to have untainted optimism but remain hungry. Speaking of hungry …
Eat a high-protein breakfast within 30 minutes of waking and go for a 10-to-20-minute walk outside afterward, ideally bouncing a handball or tennis ball. This one habit is better than a handful of Prozac in the morning. (Suggested reading: The 3-Minute Slow-Carb Breakfast, How to “Peel” Hardboiled Eggs Without Peeling on www.fourhourblog.com.) I dislike losing money about 50x more than I like making it. Why 50X? Logging time as an experiment, I concluded that I often spend at least 50 x more time to prevent a hypothetical unit of $100 from being lost vs. earned. The hysterical part is that, even after becoming aware of this bias, it’s hard to prevent the latter response. Therefore, I manipulate the environmental causes of poor responses instead of depending on error-prone self-discipline.
I should not invest in public stocks where I cannot influence outcomes. Once realizing that almost no one can predict risk tolerance and response to losses, I moved all of my investments into fixed-income and cashlike instruments in July 2008 for this reason, setting aside 10% of pretax income for angel investments where I can contribute significant UI/design, PR, and corporate partnership help. (Suggested reading: Rethinking Investing—Part 1, Rethinking Investing—Part 2 on www.fourhourblog.com.)
A good question to revisit whenever overwhelmed: Are you having a breakdown or a breakthrough?
Rehearse poverty regularly—restrict even moderate expenses for 1–2 weeks and give away 20%+ of minimally used clothing—so you can think big and take “risks” without fear (Seneca).
A mindset of scarcity (which breeds jealousy and unethical behavior) is due to a disdain for those things easily obtained (Seneca).
A small cup of black Kenyan AA coffee with cinnamon on top, no milk or sweeteners.
It’s usually better to keep old resolutions than to make new ones.
To bring in a wonderful 2009, I’d like to quote an e-mail I received from a mentor of more than a decade:
While many are wringing their hands, I recall the 1970s when we were suffering from an oil shock causing long lines at gas stations, rationing, and 55 MPH speed limits on federal highways, a recession, very little venture capital ($50 million per year into VC firms), and what President Jimmy Carter (wearing a sweater while addressing the nation on TV because he had turned down the heat in the White House) called a “malaise.” It was during those times that two kids without any real college education, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, started companies that did pretty well. Opportunities abound in bad times as well as good times. In fact, the opportunities are often greater when the conventional wisdom is that everything is going into the toilet.
Well… we’re nearing the end of another great year, and despite what we read about the outlook for 2009, we can look forward to a New Year filled with opportunities as well as stimulating challenges.
Happy New Year, everyone.
How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less
Hauling a five-piece Samsonite set around the planet is hell on earth. I watched a friend do this up and down dozens of subway and hotel staircases in Europe for three weeks, and—while I laughed a lot, especially when he resorted to just dragging or throwing his bags down stairs—I’d like to save you the breakdown. Trip enjoyment is inversely proportionate to the amount of crap (read: distractions) you bring with you.
Practice in 30-plus countries has taught me that minimalist packing can be an art.
I returned from Costa Rica last Wednesday and have since landed in Maui, where I’ll stay for one week. What did I pack and why? (See the companion video at www.fourhourblog.com.86)
I practice what I’ll label the BIT method of travel: Buy It There.
If you pack for every possible contingency—better bring the hiking books in case we go hiking, better bring an umbrella in case it rains, better bring dress shoes and slacks in case we go to a nice restaurant, etc.—carrying a mule-worthy load is inevitable. I’ve learned to instead allocate $50–200 per trip to a “settling fund,” which I use to buy needed items once they’re 100% needed. This includes cumbersome and hassle items like umbrellas and bottles of sunscreen that love to explode. Also, never buy if you can borrow. If you’re going on a bird-watching trip in Costa Rica, you don’t need to bring binoculars—someone else will have them.
Here’s the Maui list.
1 featherweight Marmot Ion jacket (3 oz.!)
1 breathable Coolibar long-sleeve shirt to prevent sunburn. This saved me in Panama.
1 pair of polyester pants. Polyester is light, wrinkle-resistant, and dries quickly. Disco dancers and flashpackers dig it.
1 Kensington laptop lock, also used to secure all bags to stationary objects
1 single Under Armour sock, used to store sunglasses
2 nylon tanktops
1 large MSR quick-dry microfiber towel, absorbs up to seven times its weight in water
1 Ziploc bag containing toothbrush, travel toothpaste, and disposable razor
1 Fly Clear biometric travel card (www.flyclear.com),87 which cuts down my airport wait time about 95%
2 pairs of ExOfficio lightweight underwear. Their tagline is “17 countries. 6 weeks. And one pair of underwear.” I think I’ll opt for two, considering they weigh about as much as a handful of Kleenex. One other nice side effect of their weight: They’re much more comfortable than normal cotton underwear.
2 pairs of shorts/swimsuits
2 books: Lonely Planet Hawaii and The Entrepreneurial Imperative. (The latter comes highly recommended. Check it out.)
1 sleeping mask and earplugs
1 pair of Reef sandals. Best to get a pair with removable straps that go around the heel.
1 Canon PowerShot SD300 digital camera with extra 2GB SD memory card. God, I love this camera more than words can describe. It is the best designed piece of electronics I have ever owned. I now use it not only for all of my photos and videos, but also as a replacement for my scanner. I’m considering testing the newer and cheaper SD1000.
1 coffee-harvesting hat to prevent my pale skin from burning off
1 Kiva keychain expandable duffel bag
1 Chapstick, 1 Mag-Lite Solitaire flashlight, and 1 roll of athletic tape. The last is a lifesaver. It’s as useful as duct tape for repairing objects but gentle enough to use on injuries, which I am fond of inflicting on myself.
1 Lewis and Clark flex lock (for luggage, lockers, zippers, or whatever I need to lock down/shut together). Standard mini-padlocks are often too cumbersome to thread through holes on lockers, etc.
1 Radio Shack kitchen timer, which I’ve been using to wake up for about four years. The problem with using a cell phone alarm to wake up is simple: The phone often needs to be on, and even if you use vibrate, people can call and wake you up before you want to wake up. The second benefit to using a kitchen timer is that you know exactly how much sleep you are—or aren’t—getting, and you can experiment with things like caffeine power naps of different durations … but that’s another post;)
—JULY 11, 2007
The Choice-Minimal Lifestyle: 6 Formulas for More Output and Less Overwhelm
I was stressed out… over dog cartoons.
It was 9:47 P.M. at Barnes and Noble on a recent Saturday night, and I had 13 minutes to find a suitable exchange for The New Yorker Dog Cartoons, $22 of expensive paper. Bestsellers? Staff recommends? New arrivals or classics? I’d already been there 30 minutes.
Beginning to feel overwhelmed with a ridiculous errand I’d expected to take five minutes, I stumbled across the psychology section.
One tome jumped out at me as all too appropriate—The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen or read Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, but it seemed like a good time to revisit the principles, among them, that:
The more options you consider, the more buyer’s regret you’ll have.
The more options you encounter, the less fulfilling your ultimate outcome will be.
This raises a difficult question: Is it better to have the best outcome but be less satisfied, or have an acceptable outcome and be satisfied?
For example, would you rather deliberate for months and get the 1 of 20 houses that’s the best investment but second-guess yourself until you sell it five years later, or would you rather get a house that is 80% of the investment potential of the former (still to be sold at a profit) but never second-guess it?
Tough call.
Schwartz also recommends making nonreturnable purchases. I decided to keep the stupid pooch cartoons. Why? Because it’s not just about being satisfied, it’s about being practical.
Income is renewable, but some other resources—like attention—are not. I’ve talked before about attention as a currency and how it determines the value of time.
For example: Is your weekend really free if you find a crisis in the inbox Saturday morning that you can’t address until Monday morning?
Even if the inbox scan lasts 30 seconds, the preoccupation and forward projection for the subsequent 48 hours effectively deletes that experience from your life. You had time but you didn’t have attention, so the time had no practical value.
The choice-minimal lifestyle becomes an attractive tool when we consider two truths.
Considering options costs attention that then can’t be spent on action or present-state awareness.
Attention is necessary for not only productivity but appreciation.
Therefore:
Too many choices = less or no productivity
Too many choices = less or no appreciation
Too many choices = sense of overwhelm
What to do? There are six basic rules or formulas that can be used:
1. Set rules for yourself so you can automate as much decision making as possible [see the rules I use to outsource my e-mail to Canada, included at the end of this section, as an example of this].
2. Don’t provoke deliberation before you can take action.
One simple example: Don’t scan the inbox on Friday evening or over the weekend if you might encounter work problems that can’t be addressed until Monday.
3. Don’t postpone decisions just to avoid uncomfortable conversations.
If an acquaintance asks you if you want to come to their house for dinner next week, and you know you won’t, don’t say, “I’m not sure. I’ll let you know next week.” Instead, use something soft but conclusive like, “Next week? I’m pretty sure I have another commitment on Thursday, but thank you for the invite. Just so I don’t leave you hanging, let’s assume I can’t make it, but can I let you know if that changes?” Decision made. Move on.
4. Learn to make nonfatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible.
Set time limits (I won’t consider options for more than 20 minutes), option limits (I’ll consider no more than three options), or finance thresholds (Example: If it costs less than $100 [or the potential damage is less than $100], I’ll let a virtual assistant make the judgment call).
I wrote most of this post after landing at the monster that is ATL airport in Atlanta. I could have considered half a dozen types of ground transportation in 15 minutes and saved 30–40%, but I grabbed a taxi instead. To use illustrative numbers: I didn’t want to sacrifice 10 attention units of my remaining 50 of 100 total potential units, since those 10 units couldn’t then be spent on this article. I had about eight hours before bedtime due to time zone differences—plenty of time—but scarce usable attention after an all-nighter of fun and the cross-country flight. Fast decisions preserve usable attention for what matters.
5. Don’t strive for variation—and thus increase option consideration—when it’s not needed. Routine enables innovation where it’s most valuable.
In working with athletes, for example, it’s clear that those who maintain the lowest bodyfat percentage eat the same foods over and over with little variation. I’ve eaten the same “slow-carb” breakfast and lunch for nearly two years,88 putting variation only into meals that I focus on for enjoyment: dinner and all meals on Saturdays. This same routine-variation distinction can be found in exercise vs. recreation. For fat loss and muscle gain (even as much as 34 pounds in four weeks), I’ve followed the same time—minimal exercise protocol with occasional experiments since 1996. For recreation, however, where the focus is enjoyment and not efficacy, I tend to try something new each weekend, whether climbing at Mission Cliffs in San Francisco or mountain biking from tasting to tasting in Napa.
Don’t confuse what should be results-driven with routine (e.g., exercise) with something enjoyment-driven that benefits from variation (e.g., recreation).
6. Regret is past-tense decision making. Eliminate complaining to minimize regret.
Condition yourself to notice complaints and stop making them with a simple program like the “21-day no-complaint experiment” made famous by Will Bowen, where you wear a single bracelet and move it from one wrist to the other each time you complain. The goal is 21 days without complaining and you reset to 0 each time you slip up. This increased awareness helps prevent useless past-tense deliberation and negative emotions that improve nothing but deplete your attention.
DECISION-MAKING ISN’T to be avoided—that’s not the problem. Look at a good CEO or top corporate performer and you’ll see a high volume of decisions.
It’s deliberation—the time we vacillate over and consider each decision—that’s the attention consumer. Total deliberation time, not the number of decisions, determines your attention bank account balance (or debt).
Let’s assume you pay 10% over time by following the above rules but cut your average “decision cycle” time by an average of 40% (10 minutes reduced to 6 minutes, for example). Not only will you have much more time and attention to spend on revenue-generating activities, but you’ll get greater enjoyment from what you have and experience. Consider that 10% additional cost as an investment and part of your “ideal lifestyle tax,” but not as a loss.
Embrace the choice-minimal lifestyle. It’s a subtle and under-exploited philosophical tool that produces dramatic increases in both output and satisfaction, all with less overwhelm.
Make testing a few of the principles the first of many fast and reversible decisions. —FEBRUARY 6, 2008
The Not-to-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now
“Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
The reason is simple: What you don’t do determines what you can do.
Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs and office workers should strive to eliminate. The bullets are followed by more detailed descriptions. Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items.
1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers.
Feel free to surprise others, but don’t be surprised. It just results in unwanted interruption or poor negotiating positions. Let it go to voicemail, and consider using a service like GrandCentral (you can listen to people leaving voicemail or receive them as text messages) or Phonetag.com (receive voicemails as e-mail).
2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
The former scrambles your priorities and plans for the day, and the latter just gives you insomnia. E-mail can wait until 10 A.M., after you’ve completed at least one of your critical to-do items.
3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.
If the desired outcome is defined clearly with a stated objective and agenda listing topics/questions to cover, no meeting or call should last m
ore than 30 minutes. Request them in advance so you “can best prepare and make good use of the time together.”
4. Do not let people ramble.
Forget “How’s it going?” when someone calls you. Stick with “What’s up?” or “I’m in the middle of getting something out, but what’s going on?” A big part of GTD (Getting Things Done) is GTP—Getting To the Point.
5. Do not check e-mail constantly—“batch” and check at set times only.
I belabor this point enough. Get off the cocaine pellet dispenser and focus on execution of your top to-do’s instead of responding to manufactured emergencies. Set up a strategic autoresponder and check twice or thrice daily.
6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone. Do an 80/20 analysis of your customer base in two ways—which 20% are producing 80%+ of my profit, and which 20% are consuming 80%+ of my time? Then put the loudest and least productive on autopilot by citing a change in company policies. Send them an e-mail with new rules as bullet points: number of permissible phone calls, e-mail response time, minimum orders, etc. Offer to point them to another provider if they aren’t able to adopt the new policies.
7. Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness—prioritize.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated Page 30
