skip to content W3C SVG

Scaling Yourself

2020-08-24
  • Scott Hanselman
    • 2019-12-20

    • askhole - a person who always asks you for advice but then does the opposite of your suggestion

    • “here’s a computer science fact: the less stuff you do, the more of it you can do. in fact, if you do nothing, you can do it infinitely.”

    • From Xerox studies on information overload

      • 28% of typical workday wasted by interruptions
      • 53% of people believe less than half of the information they receive is valuable

    • Effectiveness vs Efficiency

      • Effective: goal-oriented: whether you’re able to achieve stuff in general, or specific things
      • Efficient: process-oriented: whether the things you achieved are done economically (good input to output ratio)

    • Dealing with the flood of incoming information/demands

      • You have to triage, like a battlefield medic would (dead; life-threatening; serious; minor)
      • David Allen defines a 3-fold nature of work: pre-defined work; work as it appears in front of you; the work of defining your work
      • 4 D’s for a task: Do it; Drop it; Delegate it; Defer it
      • You can overlay these on top of the Covey Quadrants from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a 2x2 grid of importance (up is more) and urgency (left is more), which also listed 4 different dispositions.
      I Do It NowCrisesPhone, In-Person II Decide When To Do ItPreparationProject Work
      III Delegate ItInterruptionsIM, Tests, Most Email IV Dump ItTriviaTwitter, Web, News
      • “[Quadrant II] is where your power is”

    • Communication is Fault Tolerant

      • JD Meyer’s Rule of 3: Write down 3 outcomes for the day, 3 outcomes for the week, and 3 outcomes for the year
      • “What happens now is, you go to work, you check your email, you time travel to two in the afternoon (you don’t know how it happened), you have an awkward lunch at your desk, somewhere around 3 thirty you start feeling yourself, and you’re like “yeah, i’m kinda, oh, i gotta go home now”, and then you do it all again and you wonder why you suck.”
      • Since you’re getting started on this, focus on 3 things that’ll make you feel accomplished.
      • “People who are busy are often intellectually lazy. Because it’s indiscriminate action. It’s exciting to be busy.”

    • The Marshmallow Test implies that “willpower is either a thing that we have or we don’t, and I don’t think that’s fair”

    • Sort your communication channels by signal versus noise

      • “The reason we’re not successful is that we don’t make adjustments. You might be really stressed on Tuesday, but you still insist on doing your twitter and doing your TV and doing all your personal email.”
      • The water level will go up and the water level will go down; the goal is to be intentional about it.

    • Build up systems to make you successful

      • I have only 5 email rules:
        • emails with me in the To line are moved/kept in the inbox;
        • stuff that’s cc’d to me are moved into a folder I only read every 2-3 days;
        • emails from company-external people are moed into a box I read often
        • there’s a search folder that lets me easily find emails from any my bosses (3 layers up)
        • and another search folder for emails with large attachments (so it’s easy to clear up space)
      • Don’t check email in the morning. If you respond, they will respond, and then you’ll have another email.
      • Don’t put energy into things you don’t want more of.
      • “You need to conserve your keystrokes. You have a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die.”
      • keysleft.com will take your age and your WPM, and tell you how many keystrokes you have left and thanks to the magic of javascript it will tick down as long as you keep the window open
      • If someone asks you a question over email, am I going to give you 5000 keystrokes? What am I getting back? You gave me a gift–a great question. I’m going to put that gift anywhere with a url. Then I’ll send you a reply thanking you for the great question with that url. You only need a second person to read your blog to double your keystrokes.
      • “Do that for twenty years, and you will be a moderately successful technology blogger, and be able to speak at mid-sized conferences in small countries in Europe.”

    • Pomodoro

      • You use a 25 minute unit of time – so you have 5 minutes to pee, grab a coffee, etc afterwards.
      • Do one thing for 25 minutes.
      • Objective is to acknowledge, analyze, and minimize how often during those timespans you distract yourself or are distracted.
      • Remind yourself that everything that’s important will come back to you.

    • Multitasking

      • A lot of people think they’re good multitaskers
      • “The optimal number of threads in any system is one”

    • Don’t set up “guilt systems”, e.g. a stack of 12 books you think you want to read but know you’ll never get around to

    • I recommend Rescue Time. It builds charts for you showing you the windows and tabs that are most often in the foreground

      • I learned about myself that around 4 in the afternoon I look at news websites.
      • I learned I’m not very productive on Mondays

    • 43folders

      • 31 folders for days-of-month; 12 folders for months-of-year; treat as a circular buffer for things you need to remember to do/have at that time

    • Instead of opening tabs and leaving them open, send them to some kind of read-it-later system

    • “If it’s not helping me to ______, if it’s not improving my life in some way, it’s mental clutter and it’s out” – Christopher Hawkins

    • Homework from this talk

      • Audit and sort your sources
      • schedule work sprints (pomodoro)
      • turn off distractions
      • how are you triaging your incoming stuff?
        • are you effective?
        • are you efficient?
      • consider your personal toolbox