Being overprepared can make things look easy

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If I need to travel to a business that I’ve never been to before, I almost always scout it on Google Maps Street View first, so I have some idea what I’m looking for. Just a few weeks ago, this habit paid off when I discovered that I had the address wrong and would have been driving in circles. Instead, that two minutes of looking at Google Maps probably saved me 30 minutes of frustrating driving.

That said, it’s a tough balance — how much effort should you put into preparing? Taking my example above further, I could have pulled up Street View for every turn along the route, figured out which lane to be in after each turn, looked for landmarks, etc. That would have helped, but would have taken an absurd amount of time and not been worth it.

Backups

Another example is how we handle website maintenance with our clients. We back up every site at least twice a day, we run at least two different malware scans on them each day, and we monitor their update and stability every five minutes. That’s beyond the core work we do with content, plugin updates, etc.

For almost every client, that is far more than needs to be done. We manage roughly 200 sites, so that’s 12,000 backups that we run every month, and we maybe need to use one of them every now and then. For that one, though, that backup is worth gold.

If a site happens to crash, we can get it back up and running in minutes and it seems super easy — and it was. Because of the effort we’ve put into being prepared, we can make problems disappear quickly.

I like what Barbara Corcoran has to say about preparedness:

Time-shifting

In a way, I see being over-prepared as another way of time-shifting your effort.

  • When I was heading to that meeting, I was able to use some time from the night before to make the drive easier.
  • When a website goes down, we’re able to use the time from earlier in the day (the backup) to save time right then and get things resolved quickly.

In both cases, being able to use some earlier time to speed things up when they really matter is absolutely awesome. If you’re careful not to go crazy with it, being overprepared is a wonderful thing.

Get rid of busy and leave productive

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When it comes to your workday, it’s often filled with two types of work:

  1. Things that keep you busy
  2. Things that are productive

I was recently talking to someone that had brought in a consultant to help them streamline their manufacturing, and he dropped a great quote on me. Their goal was to become more “lean”, and he described it like this:

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Lean gets rid of busy and leaves productive

The more lean you can make your team (and yourself), the less busywork you’ll find yourself doing and instead you’ll have more time to actually do productive work.

Busy can feel appealing at times, because it seems like you’re getting a lot done, but we all know that true productivity is something different. Work to be more lean, drop as much “busy” as you can, and leave the “productive” in your schedule.

Manage your time or your energy

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I’m a big advocate of time management, and have well over 100 posts on here about productivity of various forms. When you get down to it, though, your time isn’t what you need to manage — it’s your energy.

In the his book “The Personal MBA“, author Josh Kaufman puts it this way:

Here’s the problem with “time management”: time is not what needs to be managed. No matter what you choose to do, time will inevitably pass. The implicit assumption of time management systems is that every hour is fungible—equivalent to any other. Nothing could be further from the truth: all people are created equal, but all hours are most definitely not.

I’m sure you’ve experienced it; you managed your time carefully so you’re able to set aside a few hours to work on that big project, but it’s at a time when you just don’t have much energy to put into it.

Dr. Andrew Huberman has a fantastic podcast that digs into topics like these, and actually published one last year that hits it precisely. In his “Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools“, Andrew walks through a typical day and explains how he gains more energy when needed, and how he plans his day around those peak energy times. It’s roughly a 90 minute show, but it’s fascinating and well worth your time.

Managing your time is an excellent thing to do, but you’ll gain even more if you can manage your energy as well.

You can subscribe to his podcast here, or watch that particular episode in the video below:

Why should I be doing that?

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There are times in my life when I know I should be doing something differently, but I just can’t convince myself to change. This could be exercising more often, writing more frequently, or just buckling down to finish the contract that I’m writing. In most cases, it’s because I’ve lost sight of the “why” behind the task.

In Jim Kwik’s book “Limitless“, he explains it very simply:

“If you’re struggling to find motivation to learn, or to accomplish anything else in your life, there is a good chance you haven’t uncovered the why of the task.”

If I’m not exercising enough, I need to remember that I want live a longer and more active life.

If I’m not writing enough, I need to remember that I want to always be working to become a better thinker.

If I’m not working on writing that contract, I need to remember the reason we have a company and the people that depend on it.

I’m fortunate that most of my situations are relatively mundane compared to some that face life-or-death decisions, but they still pile up. Remembering the “why” behind all we do can help foster the motivation to get it done.

Your tools matter less than you think

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This is a tough post for me to write, because I’m very much a tool guy. If you read back through this blog, it’s littered with new tools I’ve tried, ones I’ve switched to, comparisons, etc. I love playing with digital tools, and that won’t stop.

However, it really doesn’t matter. I’ve shared my process for writing blog posts, but anything will work. When it comes to content, there is very little difference between WordPress, Roam Research, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and others.

This came up when I was recently reading the book “Ignore Everybody“, where author Hugh MacLeod shared the following:

“The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.”

That’s not to say that tools don’t help, because they certainly do. I’ll keep sharing new ones that I find, and I hope you all will continue to pass along new ones to me.

For most forms of creativity, though, they ultimately matter much less than we tend to think they do.

Just cross the swamp

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In an ideal world, you have some big tasks to focus on each day. In the real world, you have a lot of distractions that will pop up to take you off track, and fighting through those is a key to really getting things done.

I came across a great quote in the book “The Art of Possibility“, attributed to an anonymous NASA engineer:

“I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.”

Those alligators might be email, social media, text messages, unnecessary meetings, or hundreds of other things.

If you’re crossing a swamp, there might be an alligator blocking your path that you need to deal with — you can’t avoid them all. For most of them, though, you can safely motor past them and keep pushing toward your goal.

Plan the trip, but follow your headlights

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Setting goals can be a great way to improve over time. Whether it’s goals for your business, fitness, relationships, or something else, having a goal is a great way to focus your attention.

Generally, though, you can’t just attack the goal; it needs to be broken into pieces. For example, if your goal is “lose 20 pounds in the next six months”, you can’t just go do that — you need to set times to go to the gym, purchase healthier food to have around the house, etc.

I love a quote from E.L. Doctorow about this, who says that life plans and goals:

are like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Even if you can’t see the entire picture at once, if you know where you’re going and keep pressing forward, you’ll get there.

For me, that comes down to habits. My daily routine is getting a bit longer lately, but includes goals from a variety of places of life. It includes:

  • Publishing this blog every day
  • Daily exercise (still with Supernatural)
  • Daily devotionals / scripture reading
  • Various daily work goals, including touching our task system, Pipedrive, and Nat at least once a day.
  • Some degree of reading. Ideally a chunk of a book, but at least something from Blinkist.

I’m playing with adding a few more items to the list (such as Duolingo), but it’s a tricky balance. I want to work a lot of items in there, but if I overload it then it’ll fall apart.

At the end of the day, it comes down to the goals that I set for myself, and which items are efficient headlights to help me keep seeing the way forward.

Reading versus studying

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A little over a year ago I shared my shortcut of using Blinkist to read book summaries in about 20 minutes versus the hours it takes to read a full book. There are advantages both ways, but I’m finding that Blinkist helps meet the Pareto Principle — I’m getting 80% of the value of the book in just 20% of the time.

It’s the point now where I’ve decided that pretty much every non-fiction book that I want to read will done via Blinkist, rather than taking the time to read the full book. I’ll miss some context from the book, for sure, but it allows me to read at least five times as many books.

Fiction

This doesn’t work for fiction books, though. For example, I read Mark Richt’s excellent “Make the Call” last year, and a summary of the book just wouldn’t work. I wanted to hear his stories, not a summary of what stories he told in the book.

I’ll still perhaps read a short summary or review of a non-fiction book to make sure it’s worth my time, but those still ultimately require a full read.

Favorite Authors

There’s also the case of new non-fiction books from authors that I love, such as Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and Adam Grant. If any of them release a new book, it’s very likely that I’ll read it cover-to-cover.

This can still happen with my Blinkist books, too. If I finish “blinking” a book and really feel like I want more, there’s no reason I can’t go back and read the full book. However, I find that in most cases I’m able to extract almost all of the value from the book in a fraction of the time, so why not just do more of that?

Reading versus studying (or reading for work versus pleasure)

For most of the books in front of me, the reason why I want to read it is the key. If it’s a book for work/study, then hacks like Blinkist are fantastic — I simply want to extract information from it, so efficiency is key. If it’s a book that I want to read for pleasure, then taking my time and enjoying the full work makes a lot more sense.

My plans on this will still likely flex a bit as time goes on, but right now I’m really enjoying this setup. I’ll again point you back to my older post about Blinkist if you want see more about exactly what I do, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you most efficiently work through business books.

If you can’t describe it, you don’t know it well enough

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A key to understanding how well you know a subject is how easily you’re able to explain it to others. As I shared last year in “Explain it to me like I’m five“, being able to distill a complex subject down is a great skill to develop.

In the case of that post from last year, Oscar was very quickly able to come up with an analogy to share with Michael to help explain the situation, and for me, that’s a big designation of whether I really understand something. With most aspects of what I do, analogies can go a long way toward simplifying an explanation of something that’s really more complicated.

For example, understanding the difference between a website “domain name” and website “hosting” can be tricky if it’s not something you deal with regularly. A quick analogy might be to explain the domain name like your mailing address (so people can find you) and your hosting like your land (where all of your stuff is).

Another one is the example I shared last year that used an analogy to attempt to explain the difference between the data you get from Google Analytics versus the data you get from Google Search Console.

If done well, analogies can be amazing.

The Process

Taking it further, you should be able to explain the process for doing what you do. If you have to resort to “it’s just too complicated to write down the steps”, that’s not a good sign. As engineer W. Edwards Deming once said:

“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Dam Roam had a similar thought with:

“Whoever best describes the problem is the one most likely to solve it.”

Writing out the process of your work can be beneficial in a few ways:

  1. It helps you to better understand what you’re actually doing. Taking the time to write out a process is often very beneficial for the one doing it.
  2. Long-term, it makes it easier for others to help with your work. At the time of this writing, our project manager at GreenMellen is out on maternity leave, but the processes that we have in place for her work allow us to continue on relatively seamlessly (though we’re very excited to have her back soon!).

Having a solid understanding of what you do, including analogies and processes, will help make your work easier for others to understand, and the output of it more valuable for others to consume.

Time-shifting your effort

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Time-shifting can be a wonderful thing. I talked last year about how time-shifting is so helpful for entertainment and communication, which is why I suspected Clubhouse might have trouble staying relevant.

There’s another angle to be considered, and that’s time-shifting your effort.

Effort

Part of this is pretty obvious, when you schedule your work around various other priorities and focus when it’s time to focus. If you have an information-oriented job, it’s often pretty easy to slide around your workload to fit your schedule.

However, looking ahead can help a bit more and I’ve seen this come up in two ways.

Weekly

The first is the weekly preview. My routines can vary a little bit, but I haven’t missed a weekly preview in a few years now. Some are more in-depth and some are rushed, but they always get done.

The beauty of these are to identify issues well in advance, because solving them the day they arise can be way more difficult. For example, if my wife and I both have a meeting at 3:00 one afternoon, neither of us can pick up our daughter from school. If we discover the overlap a week early, we can adjust schedules or find a friend to help. If we discover the issue at 2:55 that day, it’s a big problem.

The second is just looking at the day ahead. A few days ago, I knew I’d have a busy Saturday morning running some errands, and I wasn’t sure the best route to get from one to the next. Complicating things further is that they weren’t easy things to just look up the address for (one was a weekly vegetable pickup, the other was an emissions test I needed at a place I didn’t know the name of).

In this case, I looked them up the night before and put the events (and addresses!) in my calendar. When I hopped in the car, Android Auto knew where I needed to be next and it was one tap from stop to stop. It wasn’t a huge deal, but made the morning flow so much more smoothly.

In both cases, I time-shifted my effort back to an earlier time in order to help future me have an easier time with things. I’m not always good about seeing those issues in advance, but the weekly preview really helps expose a lot of them, and then being wise enough to take the time then to solve them is something I never regret.