We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains… for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. [But with deliberate practice] If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

– Anders Ericsson, Peak

Recently I discussed how we can think about applying deliberate practice to knowledge work, looking at Professor Anders Ericsson’s book Peak and thesis of deliberate practice, a theory of skill development which focuses on performance and how to improve it, rather than just knowledge for its own sake.

The first post discusses some of the challenges in applying deliberate practice to “knowledge work”. Ericsson’s focus is on areas with objectively defined expert performers and well-established training methods; think chess or tennis, not “knowledge work” like development or marketing.

As the post explores, there are ways of taking the key tenets of deliberate practice and applying these. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Identify the expert performers in the field
2. Figure out what makes them so good
3. Come up with training techniques to replicate the experts

This is what the first post discussed. Doing this would be a good start, but you’d miss out on the related skills you need to use deliberate practice in practice with your day-to-day.

How do you develop your “training techniques”? How do you make sure you stick with it and don’t quit? How do you self-monitor your progress?

Answering these questions is essential to actually doing deliberate practice. That’s what this post is about: how to actually do deliberate practice, in practice.

Continue reading “Deliberate practice: a practical guide to practicing knowledge work” →

I found Sam Altman’s post How To Be Successful very interesting. Sam is President of Y Combinator, a startup incubator which has funded the likes of Dropbox and Airbnb, and thus spends his time talking to extremely driven – and in some cases – extremely successful people. This gives him a unique situation from which to judge, which is in part where this post comes from: “how to be successful”.

There’s a lot packed into here, and if one wanted to I’m sure it would be possible to pad out each of the sections into a successful business book.

I was struck by how much of this revolves around cultivating long term thinking, and then executing on that. Short term thinking is fun because you get the answer quickly, but we’d probably all do better to look into the future more.

The post breaks out eleven points, a third of which revolve around “think deeply about what you should be doing, look further into the future, and then get on with it”. Another third revolve around believing in what you’re doing, and not caring too much about what people think, and the final third are miscellaneous points.

Continue reading “Getting things done in the long run: think harder and further ahead” →

Nearly two years ago I wrote how I was doing Deep Work in practice as a remote worker. The post discussed the “Deep Work” idea that you should focus hard, on hard things, for a long time in order to yield the best results.

The idea comes from Cal Newport, a Computer Science Professor, and is something he expands on in his book of the same name. Here’s the idea in Cal’s words:

Deep work is cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve… . Deep work results in improvement of the value of your work output… and an increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.

The post clearly struck a nerve, “going viral”: it hit the front page of Hacker News, had a thousand plus shares on Twitter and Facebook, and fifty thousand or so visitors.

In the two years since writing this I’ve continued to heavily subscribe to the Deep Workthesis, and as I’ve transitioned first from freelancer to running my digital marketing agency Ellipsis I now run a small team and have been able to build a company culture that revolves around Deep Work, deep focus, and giving everyone the space to do their best work.

This post is about working deeply in a remote team: about the why, about the how, and about the benefits.

Continue reading “Deep work in practice for remote teams” →

I’ve been self-employed full time for the last three months now (minus a bit of time in Japan and I’m starting to appreciate the importance of asking the right questions in life and in business – but mainly in business.

“Asking the right questions” is a key theme in any business book. It’s a genre one should generally err on the side of caution and skepticism with, but there are some very good examples.

One mostly good example is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Ries basically spends the whole time startups need to be “asking the right questions”. Furthermore, Ries argues if only managers were better at asking the right questions, there would be more innovation and fewer missed opportunities.

I think Ries has a point: asking the right questions is a way of getting the feedback you needed but perhaps didn’t know you wanted.

So what are the right questions? These are the queries I’ve been using to frame my thinking, split into different categories.

Targets

What are my goals? This is simple to the point it risks being vacuous, but this is a legitimate question to be answering: what are you trying to do? You’ll often see “10x your goal”, but you can’t do that if you don’t know what your goal is in the first place.

We all know this, but if you had to write down goals for three months, six months, two years right now, could you do it? I’m willing to bet you couldn’t answer it straight away.

Goals need to be specific and measurable to be of any use. Again, probably know this but there’s a difference between knowing something’s a good idea and putting into practice.

So how do you put this into practice? I cribbed a great idea on this from Nat Eliason, I like to update a spreadsheet of “quantifiable goals” every Monday morning to see how I’m progressing vs where I need to be to meet goals. This keeps you laser focussed. Here’s Nat’s spreadsheet for doing this.

How do I go bigger on my goals? It’s so much more important to spend the time on what your goals are before you move on to thinking about how they can be bigger. Very clearly set your goals in the first place before you start doing this.

Sketching out “what would this look like if it was 10x bigger” is a useful exercise: you’re forced to adopt a different mindset and think of how what your doing would work on a much bigger scale. You’ll often think of tactics which will help you reach your original goal faster.

You’re unlikely to get to 10x, unless your original goal was wildly wrong in the first place, but this kind of thinking can help you make sure you do get to the original goal. Anything over that’s a bonus.

Work

How would this work if it took half the time? This is a great one! Radically reimagine your workflow and only get the important things done.

I’ve long subscribed to a thesis somewhere between Basecamp’s four day week, Tim Ferriss’ four hour week and John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren (written in 1930, argued only 15 hours of work a week would be necessary). Basically, if you have less time you’ll:

1. Generally work faster.
2. Spend less time on less important stuff (rather than the deep work).

Asking how your work could be done in half the time again forces the big thinking: you might not get to half the time, but 80% of the time would be a great result. Do that for everything and you can have an extra day a week off!

Reading other people’s advice

These absolutely applies to this post, just in case you’re wondering.

Is this post on Twitter/Reddit/Hacker News good, or just relatable? I have a new thesis that the content that gets the most shares is typically good and highly relatable, rather than excellent in its own right.

Good content is fine, but excellent content is better. I’ve found reading from high quality weekly newsletters is a much better option than checking Reddit or Twitter (I’d recommend Pocket Hits, Hacker Newsletter, The Modern Desk, Nat, Femke, Sean and… me).

Is this good advice? This is highly related the previous question. Bullshit advice, to quote an excellent piece by Henry Wismayer, is the stuff that:

“is utterly vapid, offering nothing beyond a few nauseating blandishments designed to appeal to the reader’s individualism and thirst for success”.

Great advice goes beyond throwing in a couple of statistics, a click baiting title and please enter your email to discover these AMAZING techniques. It also doesn’t fall foul of survivorship bias. Great advice is actually practical, explained in such a way you can properly understand it and is transparent about potential pitfalls.

Understand what the underlying lesson is and take out specific ideas, but recognise most advice doesn’t directly transfer.

Getting the right answers

A lot of this is relatively obvious, but sits in the hole between “things we vaguely know” and “things we actually apply to our work”.

Nothing here is especially groundbreaking, but I hope it’s though-provoking and you’ll start to put these into practice.

When I spend the time working out what I need to be working on, what needs to be done to get there and how I’m doing along the way, I’m a lot better at getting there. I very much doubt I’m alone in this.

The key takeaway here should be you’ll get huge benefit thinking about “the right questions”, and it’s well worth the time it takes to do this. Time to get the thinking hat on 🎓

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say adopting Deep Work has changed my life, and I’m not the only person to claim this. I first wrote this post four years go, and it hit a chord: “going viral” and being read by 50,000 people.

I’ve been a Deep Work devotee all this time, and it’s allowed me to produce – as the theory says it should – “remarkable results”. But what is theory of Deep Work? And how can one use it in practice, in the modern knowledge workplace?

The idea of “Deep Work” comes from Cal Newport, a Computer Science Professor at Georgetown University, and is something he expands on in his book of the same name. Here’s the idea in Cal’s words:

Deep work is cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve… . Deep work results in improvement of the value of your work output… and an increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.

Deep work lets you do the above by demanding you focus, distraction-free, for long periods of time. This state of distraction-free concentration gives you the space you need to create valuable breakthroughs in your work.

This probably wouldn’t have been too interesting fifty years ago, but now we’re more distracted and have demands on our attention all over the place. As philosopher Alain de Botton says:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

Sitting still and thinking has become impossible for many of us, and even after nearly three years of following Cal’s Deep Work method, if I’m not careful I fall back into the same bad habits. That’s why this is important, and that’s why this is urgent. This post is about Deep Work, and actually putting it into practice in your working life.

[su_dropcap style=”flat”]R[/su_dropcap]eviewing fifty days of using the five minute journal for better wellbeing and productivity. Does it work? Is it nonsense? Such mystery, wow.

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Peer reviewed scientific research suggests “expressive writing” can improve mood disorders and boost memory as well as “lead to behavioural changes and improve happiness”.

This sounds one of three things:

• Cool
• Wrong
• Self help bs

I’m normally pretty skeptical about such claims, but whilst a body of academic research could be wrong, it’s highly likely there research is making at least a decent point.

So if the research is right, how does one harness the benefits in an actually useful way?

Introducing the five minute journal

I’ve been working from home as a full-time freelancer for the last six weeks or so. In that time I’ve been practicing the five minute journal.

I came across it from Tim Ferriss. Whilst Tim recommends a lot of things (and probably the vast majority can be safely ignored), he cites the journal as the one thing that makes the biggest impact on his day and life outlook:

“The five-minute journal is a therapeutic intervention… that allows me to not only get more done during the day but to also feel better throughout the entire day, to be a happier person, to be a more content person.”

The idea comes from author Julia Cameron, who developed the practice of morning pages “as a mind dump to get rid of the clutter in your brain”. Julia’s practice involves writing 750 words – or three A4 pages – every morning on whatever you like.

The five minute journal is a more structured, shorter and more accessible version of the morning pages. The concept is very simple: you spend five minutes at the start of your day setting out what you’re going to do that day (and what you’re grateful for) and five minutes at the end of the day reviewing.

The journal gets its structure from three set questions in the morning and two at the end of the work day:

You can get the journal as an expensive purpose made thing or just use any journal (I like hard cover large ruled Moleskines cause they look nice) and write out the questions yourself. I have a document saved in Notion with the questions I load up every morning.

For your convenience here are the set questions for the morning:

I am grateful for:

1.

2.

3.

What would make today great?

1.

2.

3.

Daily affirmations. I am:

1.

And then in the evening:

Amazing things that happened today.

1.

2.

3.

How could today have been even better?

1.

Try it out, does it work?

I’ve been doing the five minute journal for the last 50 days or so in a row and feel reasonably well qualified to comment on its usefulness. The verdict is very useful.

I start work reasonably early and may not be totally awake when I sit down at my desk, but writing what I’m going to achieve and then “I am ready to get going now” really helps set intentions and kickstart progress.

Reviewing progress at the end of the day is also helpful so I can see clearly what I’ve achieved and properly switch off from work after I’m done.

The most interesting question the journal asks is “how could today have been even better?”. I usually answer this quickly, close my journal and am finished with work for the day.

I don’t tend to look back on previous days’ entries – they’re relatively self contained – but the last question is one that is reviewable. Not for checking up how any given day could be a bit better, but for picking up on problems I’m consistently having – and working out how to address them.

How could today have been even better?

I reviewed and categorised all my answers to my self assessment of “how could today have been even better?” and came up with the following simplified list of common problems:

Clearly, I have a problem focussing on deep work. I kinda knew this, but the extent to which I have a problem focussing for sustained periods of time on single, difficult tasks, hadn’t really struck me until I reviewed my journal entries. I now know what I need to work on.

It’s also fun to analyse how the most common categories change over time. Review this in another fifty days: have I made any progress?

Exercise is a good example here: I work from home where my commute is approximately six seconds and have no obligation to go outside, so it’s perhaps surprising I’ve only felt once like I needed more exercise. Since noting it down, I’ve consciously scheduled in a proper running routine and don’t find it a problem any more. Progress.

Taking ten minutes out for a better day

If you’re doing any kind of modern creative work the morning pages approach is well worth considering. It’s hard to pin-point exactly what is responsible, but in general I would say my happiness is higher since starting the practice.

The practice also helps me better switch off from work at the end of the day (Deep Work is again good on this), which is more important and harder when working from home.

The five minute journal takes five minutes to set you up for a better day. You don’t need any fancy tools: any notebook and piece of paper will do fine. The accessibility means there’s really little excuse to try it, at least for a couple of weeks. I’d highly recommend giving it a go.