Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Handle Your Distractions (Especially if the distraction is Mr. Fuji)

You’re in the zone. You’re dominating. There’s even a photographer here to take a photo of your performance. He’s getting pretty close.


Okay his camera just exploded in your face. Not great.

Have you ever felt distracted? Of course you have. Then you’ve also wanted to feel less distracted.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity has something for you. It’s comprehensive for handling items in every horizon of your life. Even if you don’t start using the entire system, you’ll find something valuable that you can apply pretty much right away.

Work toward trusting your calendar. Then you’ll have a bucket to put things in and truly get them out of your head. One step closer to a mind like water.

1.) Reduce distractions (and get closer to a mind like water)

Let’s oversimplify your mind really quick. Let’s say you’ve got 100% of your attention available. You can put that attention in two categories: focus or distraction. At any moment, you can only have one thing to focus on, but an infinite number of things to distract you.

You can practice shifting the intensity of focus. Things like meditation help. But it takes practice.

Mind like water. Skin of a hot dog.

Instead, weaken the distraction. Get rid of some. Take their intensity away. From Getting Things Done:

It is possible. There is a way to get a grip on it all, stay relaxed, and get meaningful things done with minimal effort, across the whole spectrum of your life and work. You can experience what the martial artists call a “mind like water” and top athletes refer to as the “zone,” within the complex world in which you’re engaged. In fact, you have probably already been in this state from time to time.

You might call it Hulking up.

2.) Got a minute? How about two? Okay take care of something.

Who knows what else was on Hulk Hogan’s mind that day. Maybe he was thinking about the groceries he’d have to pick up after the match. Maybe he was reminiscing about the 80s. Maybe he was thinking about his future in Hollywood.

Start with the easy things. From Getting Things Done:

If the next action can be done in two minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up.

…

The rationale for the two-minute rule is that it’s more or less the point where it starts taking longer to store and track an item than to deal with it the first time it’s in your hands—in other words, it’s the efficiency cutoff. If the thing’s not important enough to be done, _throw it away_.

Here’s a tip for some quick momentum: Clean a drawer or do the dishes. It will never take up so much time that you regret doing it.

Build the habit of getting small wins in.

Then you can move on to the hard things? Wait, what are the hard things?

3.) Get rid of some good things (so you can focus on the great things)

It’s easy to stop doing clearly bad things. Well, not that easy, but at least you know that you should. It’s harder to stop doing good things because you don’t initially have a reason to. (But they’re taking time up from you working on the truly great things.)

The strongest distractions are things worth focusing on, just not right at this moment.

It’s also probably a bigger thing that needs to be broken down into smaller parts. So how do you handle that? Ask a key question: What’s the next action?

From Getting Things Done:

What’s the Next Action? This is the critical question for anything you’ve captured; if you answer it appropriately, you’ll have the key substantive thing to organize. The “next action” is the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move

The more you practice this, the better you’ll be at figuring out the next action for any project. If you schedule it and trust your calendar, you’ll be able to take it off your mind.

A little less in your head to distract you. A little more focus.

You’ll be able to get things done.

Summing up:

  • Work toward a mind like water. Get rid of all those little distractions bouncing around in your head.
  • Does it take two minutes or less? Take care of it now.
  • Ask, “What’s the next action?” Figure out the next action.

You’ve been practicing your leg drop for months. But today just isn’t going well. You’re getting dominated. It’s not looking good. But you took care of everything else so you can focus on the task at hand.

You duck.

Wax on. Wax off. Leg drop time.

The best backpack for the gym (Spoiler: it’s the GORUCK GR1)

Tim Ferriss often asks his guests this question:

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

Okay so I’m not one of his guests, and it’s not $100 or less, but if I were one of his guests I’d say “It’s not $100 or less… but the GORUCK GR1 has been my favorite purchase of the past year. I use it every day.”

Note: GORUCK links on this post are affiliate links. (I really do use the backpack every day!)

A few months before buying a GR1, I decided I needed a backpack. I also decided not to buy a GR1. Instead, I got The North Face’s Big Shot. I loved it when it was on my back. Really comfortable. But there were a few too many things that irritated me when it wasn’t on my back.

It was top heavy so it didn’t sit up right. I had to lean it against a wall forward so the straps hang out if I lean it in the hallway. I also had to hold it up when I was packing it.

There might cheaper bags that would fill my needs, but I couldn’t find one.

Looks-wise, the GR1 is clean. It doesn’t even have the GORUCK logo anywhere on its exterior. The bag is the brand. While reading about the bag, I learned the phrase tacticool—almost always used disparagingly. Most bags with the same functionality of the GR1 end up a little too far in tacticool territory.

It stands vertically on its own. This might not be important at all for you. It probably wouldn’t be important for me if I didn’t use it as a gym bag. It can stand up in the locker room while I pack and unpack it.

It opens like a suitcase. Even more helpful if I’m just unpacking the entire thing. This helps a lot at the grocery store. Again, this also might not be an important use case for you. But just know that if you’re looking for the intersection of gym bag and grocery bag, it’s going to make you so happy.

Ok so sometimes it’s too much space. This may have been when I decided to get the GORUCK Bullet.

It has the right amount of pockets (for me). All of this is subjective, of course. But this might be the most subjective thing. I’ve read often that people find it doesn’t have enough different compartments.A common answer I’ve seen is that you use attachments and things to customize it. I didn’t do that. I find the three pockets enough.

  1. The small inner pocket at the top: holds things I use frequently like pens and chargers.
  2. The large webbed inner pocket: holds the hodgepodge things I don’t use often.
  3. The outer pocket: holds stuff I jam in there when I forget to put it inside and am on the go. This is usually a notebook or pen.

I’ve had backpacks with a bunch of different pockets. It’s great for that first day of school feeling where you’ve got a place for everything and everything in its place.

By day 4, everything is out of place. I don’t want to have too many places to look for things.

One thing I miss is having a water bottle slot on the outside.

Oh yeah, the laptop compartment.
GORUCK offers a different backpack that’s $100 cheaper which swaps the laptop compartment in the back for an embroidered logo in the front.

I considered getting that, figuring the weighted plate slot on the inside of the backpack could hold a laptop. It actually does hold a laptop pretty well (sometimes I carry a work and personal laptop with me) but it’s harder to pull out on the go.

Like they say on the site, if you’ll be carrying a laptop regularly, get the GORUCK GR1.

Be like LeBron (and take a walk)

Five seconds left.

You’re dribbling up the court. Will you have enough energy?

Lebron does. But how? Well, he walks. Kind of a lot. From “Cavaliers are surviving in the playoffs despite the dilemma of LeBron James’ rest” (ESPN):

It manifests itself in many ways. For example, during free throws, James will often walk to the other end of the floor. It saves him having to run when possession changes. He also at times will take himself out of an offensive play and stand on the wing, knowing he needs a breather.

There’s a book about everything. There’s a great book about managing your energy, even if work means mostly sitting all day. From The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz:

In most jobs, the physical body has been completely cut off from the performance equation. In reality, physical energy is the fundamental source of fuel, even if our work is almost completely sedentary.

First step to improving your energy if you sit all day: don’t sit all day.

In Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans explain the importance of energy:

Nowadays, many of us are knowledge workers, and we use our brains to do the heavy lifting. The brain is a very energy-hungry organ. Of the roughly two thousand calories we consume a day, five hundred go to running our brains.

They also suggest tracking activities and ranking them by how positively (1) engaging and (2) energizing they are.

They have a great example of what to avoid: arguing deeply to prove a point might be very very engaging but it creates a lot of negative energy.

You design your life by designing your days, so plan for your peaks and valleys. Create deeper valleys by deliberately resting then you can experience bigger peaks when you need them.

And if you happen to be very good at basketball, you can rip the Raptors hearts out year after year after year.

It’s okay to be bored (and even worth practicing)

You’re already thinking of other things to click to.

Resist the urge.

I’m already thinking of what newsletters might be sitting in my inbox. I’ll try to resist the urge.

Or, as Cal Newport suggests in Deep Work: embrace boredom.

If your goal is to focus deeply in your work, you’re going to hit walls. They can be boring. If, in the rest of your life, you grab your phone the moment you feel even a twinge of boredom, then that urge will appear when you hit a lull in your work.

Instead, build your mental muscle of focus

For regular muscular strength, you can (1) have focused workout sessions and also (2) get a few reps in throughout the day.

There are a few different terms for getting reps in throughout the day, but “greasing the groove” has always stuck for me. You lower the intensity but increase the frequency. If you want to increase your pull-ups, do an easy set every couple hours. You never go to failure.

Applying that to your mental muscle, you have a lot of small opportunities throughout the day to embrace boredom. In line? Don’t grab your phone. You just woke up? Don’t grab your phone. In between sets in your actual workout? Don’t grab your phone.

The volume will add up. It probably already has, in the bad way. That reflex to check your phone has built up over time. Now you’re going to slowly turn that ship around.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport explains the danger of the frequency of distraction:

It’s instead the constant switching from low-stimuli/high-value activities to high-stimuli/low-value activities, at the slightest hint of boredom or cognitive challenge, that teaches your mind to never tolerate an absence of novelty.

Given 20 minutes, consider these two scenarios:

  • (A) You schedule a 20 minute block with a hard stop to indulge in a distraction
  • (B) 20 times randomly throughout the day, you take a minute to scroll through your social media feed.

Scenario (A) is better for preparing your mind to focus, but make sure to follow the distinct hard stop.

Unfortunately, a lot of us are in a different scenario:

  • (C) 60 times randomly throughout the day you take 20 seconds to look at like 2 new things and 5 things you already saw maybe 4 minutes ago.

Now let’s think about the focused workout session

Let’s take a pretty common plan: lift weights 3 days a week. Your goal is to work your muscles hard for 30-60 minutes.

Cal Newport has a similar suggestion to work your mental muscle. He calls it productive meditation:

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

If you’ve done mindfulness meditation, you’ll be familiar with giving attention to your attention. With mindfulness, if you notice that you’re thinking about anything, you gently bring your attention back to your breath.

With productive meditation, you bring it back to whatever problem you’re trying to solve. Try outlining something in your head. If you need time to think of something, take a walk to think about it.

The point isn’t only to solve that problem. It’s to practice sitting with a problem through the lulls. If you hit a wall, don’t just walk away from it. You recognize that wall. You’ve seen the good things that sit on the other side of it.

To sit deeply with a problem, take it for a walk. (And leave your phone behind.)

Get to the bottom of it (and then work up to your life’s purpose)

To find your purpose, start with the dishes.

In the past year, I’ve continued to take action on a couple things I heard on The Knowledge Project podcast. First, I stopped feeling so guilty about abandoning books (after hearing Naval Ravikant share his approach to reading). Second, I started finding odd pleasure in doing the dishes.

That’s because of something Ed Latimore said during his appearance in reply to “What’s one habit you’ve changed recently that’s made a profound impact on you?”:

This is silly man, this is really silly but it’s true: I wash the dishes as soon as I’m done eating.

Further on:

All I’ve done is a small thing but I’ve relieved so much. Maybe that is a sign of how cool life is these days. That like, that little hijack makes such a big difference. But I think the bigger lesson is that if you take advantage of inertia, and just do things when you’re already moving so you don’t have to start, restart, start, restart. Your life will be a lot easier. You won’t have to think about motivation to do the dishes, or clean your room, or do your homework, or go running.

You’re searching for your purpose in life. So am I. You can start with why, but it might be hard to get to the 4th and 5th why if your immediate surroundings are in disarray.

David Allen wrote Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. He knows a thing or two about teaching other people how to get things done. Here’s what he has to say about starting from the bottom:

“Intellectually, the most appropriate way ought to be to work from the top down, first uncovering personal and organizational purpose and vision, then defining critical objectives, and finally focusing on the details of implementation. The trouble is, however, that most people are so embroiled in commitments on a day-to-day level that their ability to focus successfully on the larger horizon is seriously impaired. Consequently, a bottom-up approach is usually more effective.”

David Allen also suggests organizing a drawer if you’re ever stuck. It’s probably bugging you a little bit anyway, and you’ll very quickly think of better things to do.

Before you go on organizing your entire life, start with a drawer. The small things add up. It’s important to remember that small bad things also add up. Day to day, the good choice is only a tiny bit more effort than the bad choice. But that tiny bit is enough to stop you.

In The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines into Massive Success and Happiness, Jeff Olson explains how it adds up:

“The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people just do the things that seem to make no difference in the act of doing them and they do them over and over until the compound effect kicks in.”

Alright, so you know it’s important to start small. You knew that before you started reading this. We know that first piece of cake is enough and maybe we don’t need the second and third. But it tastes good.

So how do you stop yourself day to day? First understand how bad habits work. In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg explains that it’s a loop:

“This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: THE HABIT LOOP Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward—becomes more and more automatic.

That loop works for bad habits and good habits. Get the quick wins in. Look for small bad habits and figure out which part you can easily change.

It might be removing the cue. You keep a jar of candy on the counter? Well, toss that jar in a cannon and shoot it into the ocean.

You can try changing the routine. Put a padlock on the jar. Add a little bit of friction so you can be a little more mindful about what you’re indulging in.

Maybe you can change the routine. Fill the jar with something very healthy that chews like cardboard. (Don’t you wish you just shot it into the ocean?)

In any case, it’s okay if you aren’t making life changing decisions and finding a new life purpose every day. Start small.

Clean a drawer. Do the dishes. It’ll add up.

A non-master class on writing (based on Steph Curry’s MasterClass course on basketball)

Steph Curry didn’t shoot from distance for an entire summer.

He was in high school working overhauling his shot. It was mostly from the hip and his release was too low for it to work well against bigger varsity defenders. So he worked with his dad to start from scratch.

Curry talks about this in his MasterClass course on basketball.

If you’re teenage Steph Curry and shoot like a catapult and you want to shoot like an adult Steph Curry, how do you fix it?

Shoot from inside the key. A lot. Like the entire summer. (And then keep doing that.)

There was a time where I—basically for three months in the summer I couldn’t leave the paint. To really work on the mechanics of my shot, the rhythm of my shot, getting stronger so I could repeat that form every single time. You had to be patient.

Curry says the worst thing you can do is start launching from the 3-point line right when you walk in the gym. You want to start with some makes. Make from up close so you establish the mechanics when you’re fresh. If you can establish the mechanics then you can tweak the variables to increase range and adjust if you’re missing left or right. But if you start launching from the 3-point line right when you walk in, you’re going to miss a few. Or, in my case, you’re going to miss a lot. Get on track first.

Try to miss short or long (instead of left or right)

That means your mechanics are in a good place, but you just need to get in rhythm and get your touch correct. Missing left or right means something in your form is off. It’s more off than if you’re missing short or long.

All the little wins add up over time (a little bit of simple math)

The warm up he has is starting right in front of the rim with 5 makes and then taking a big step back, 5 makes, and so on until you’ve shot from 4 different distances.

Then you start right in front of the rim again but from a different angle. You do 5 angles, 20 makes each, for 100 total makes.

Do that 5 days a week that’s 500 makes. That’s 2,000 in a month. And 20,000 in ten months.

The math is straightforward step-by-step. If I guessed right at the top I wouldn’t think a ten-minute drill repeated would lead to 20,000 makes in less than a year.

Shooting is Steph Curry’s specialty.

My specialty is taking lessons from one field and ham-handedly applying them another. Let’s take basketball lessons and convert them to writing.

  • Shoot inside the key: Start your session with quality. If you’re practicing writing then do something you know to warm up before stretching yourself. Don’t jump into the hard stuff yet. Warm up a little with some quick wins.
  • Miss the right way: If you’re writing and you’re telling great stories, making brilliant connections, and writing beautiful prose but you’re making a few typos here and there. Well, good job. There are tools and copy editors that can catch those things. On the other hand, you can get all your grammar perfect and not have a single typo and create something completely boring. (Ahem.)
  • The little wins add up over time: You probably already know that. But it can be motivating to step through the math again and see just what you can accomplish over a year if you dedicate 10-30 minutes to something daily. If you write 1,000 words every weekday then you can write 250,000 words in a year. If you publish half that, then you can turn that 125,000 into many, many blog posts or a couple of books.

Don’t shoot any 3-pointers for the entire summer. Don’t aim to write a book every session.

Write a section here, a section there. Get your mechanics right in smaller chunks of text. It’ll add up.