MC10 | Bankless Consulting
One of the hardest things you need to manage when you're running a business is knowing where to direct your effort and spend your time. With so many things to worry about, various fancy shiny objects waving at you, ever-increasing distractions from the digital and physical worlds, it may be difficult to choose where to concentrate your attention.
You face similar challenges in your personal life too.
Most people have high time-preference: they are very bad at delaying gratification. We, humans, are instinctively lousy at understanding that something feeling not-so-good now will be actually very good for us later, and the other way around. People have, in general, poor instincts for discerning between productive and non-productive activities.
This notion may sound crazy to you at first, but let’s spend the next six minutes together to discuss it.
In life, when dealing with your personal growth, and in business, when dealing with your organization’s growth, there are activities that, if tackled intentionally and purposefully, do move the needle.
The same set of activities, when performed mindlessly and sloppily, do not actually get you closer to your goals: they only give you the illusion of progress.
Knowing that you acted mindlessly and sloppily is not always easy.
There are certain types of time-wasting activities that like to wear a mask and you’re cheated into believing they are the right things to do at a point in time. I’ll give you a couple of examples.
Perhaps, you may have heard of people that claim to read 100 books a year. If your favorite hobby is wandering around Twitter, you surely have.
Most people have to juggle the activity of reading books with lots of other (professional and personal) chores - many of which are stressful, tiring and time-consuming. For some people, reading books may be their primary occupation, but in that case we would be dealing with a very lucky bunch. And a very small one.
Practically, the most likely scenario is that within this group of “voracious readers”, the vast majority of people is, yes, reading a lot but, no, not retaining much.
In other words, they believe they are spending their time productively (reading books is useful) when in reality they are treading water. Possibly, simply avoiding to take action by reading a few more pages.
If you, like me, spent a chunk of your life in corporate environments, you know that one of the favorite time-killers of corporate bureaucrats is organizing meetings. Often, the outcome of the meeting is a (consensus-reached) decision to arrange the next one.
Days and weeks pass by where you see yourself hopping from meeting to meeting, with little or no significant progress at the matter at hand.
If you just run your professional life on autopilot, it is very likely you are mistaking an essentially time-wasting activity, such as arranging a meeting so that you can have another one right after it, for a productive one.
Drawing the line between a productive and a non-productive activity is harder than it seems because certain tasks are very good at disguising themselves.
Imagine you spend your day binging on Netflix. You sit on your sofa, can of Coke and bag of chips in your hands, and you don't leave the comfort of your cushions for the next 8 hours.
Well, at the end of the Netflix marathon watching the Kardashians, you need only a few seconds of reflection to know that you just squandered an entire day.
It’s not that straight-forward when you’re dealing with masked time-wasters.
Back to our examples, reading books can be tremendously helpful, but only if you understand what you are reading, retain the author’s core messages, and give yourself time to digest them. If you don't do that, then reading is just another way of procrastinating.
Same goes for filling your calendar with meetings, by the way. All you are doing is avoiding work. I have been there.
This is what you are doing:
You are focusing on the easy things at the expense of the hard things.
Then, how do we handle these masked time-wasters to ensure we act effectively without indulging in procrastination and complacency?
What actions can we take to improve our outcomes?
My friend Franz has his own theory about it, and I buy much of it. He loves anki as his spaced repetition tool of choice.
His premise is that it doesn't matter how many books you read, what’s relevant is how much of the important information discussed in those books sticks with you. Spaced repetition ensures that your brain crystallizes ideas you may have read, and that you successfully internalize them.
We internalize a concept when it becomes part of our personal arsenal of knowledge and we naturally leverage that knowledge to make decisions and take action.
When we look at “reading books” from this perspective, suddenly we're no more counting how many books we have read, but rather how many big ideas we have internalized.
Metacognition can also help you dealing with death by a thousand meetings.
It is no secret I am a huge fan of remote work. I wrote a post about it here.
I find remote work more efficient and more manageable because it allows a better balance between my personal and professional lives. I also find that remote work naturally forces me to interact more asynchronously with my team members.
We can learn a lot from this.
Asynchronicity requires that your writing (if you do it properly) does most of your communication. You discover that what would have typically been a meeting can be replaced by a memo. A meeting can still be helpful or necessary, but only when it’s context-heavy, and only if you have pre-agreed that its outcome is an actionable decision, not some make-work strategy like “we need another one”.
As we discussed before, people don't have an intuitive way to discern what to do now, from what to do tomorrow, from what not to do at all.
I suspect the ability to get better at business productivity is one where experience does matter. You won't know how this whole thing really works unless you've done it yourself.
But experience by itself is worth little, as K. Anders Ericsson explains well in his book Peak: doctors who practiced for decades but never really cared about practicing deliberately (ie, with a focus on improving and keeping their skills up to date) perform worse than younger doctors.
Whenever I talk about experience I don't just mean “number of years”: I give a much more qualitative connotation to this metric. I care little about what you did in the last 20 years, but I care a lot about what you learned. I care about the mental frames of reference you internalized to identify priorities, act on what's important and cut out the noise.
OK, MC10. Enough fluff. Any actionable advice?
I’ve got some.
It all starts with realizing that you may have encountered a masked time-waster. Metacognition (thinking about thinking) helps you keep your actions in check. Run your brain in debug mode, as I once heard Naval say. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing.
Brainstorm options with a trusted person, somebody who already went through what you are going through now. Avoid generic coaches. Instead, go straight to people that have scars, because they have field-tested the solutions they suggest.
Cross-pollinate as much as possible. Often, we tend to look at problems with a narrow perspective. Instead, think of what you can learn from adjacent disciplines that could be relevant to the challenge you are facing.
Try “stuff out” and be intentional with evaluating the feedback you inevitably receive from reality. Make calculated mistakes and never trade safety (that keeps you in the status quo) for recoverable mistakes (that have the potential to advance you).
You owe it to yourself, your business, your partners and clients to act on the things that are most useful and to tackle the activities that actually ensure progress.
In life and in business, it’s hard to know how to direct your efforts to make progress.
While certain activities are obviously a waste of time, some others are very good at hiding. These masked time-wasters are particularly dangerous because they give you the illusion of progress while, in truth, they enable procrastination.
Learning from people with the right experience, metacognition, cross-pollination and experimentation are all tactics that can be helpful for you to apply so that you keep moving the needle.
