Waiting with purpose

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

During the day we all have spots of time that we need to “kill”. Waiting outside of the dance studio for your child. Waiting for the doctor to see you. Waiting in line to check-out at a store. What do you do with that time? I have two vastly different approaches.

Be Productive

Ideally, I take that time to try to be productive. In my case, I’ll work through any remaining Anki cards that I have for the day, then look at my RSS feeds, then move into email if anything is outstanding there.

Depending on your needs, you might have other things you can work on. As Jason Womack suggests in Your Best Just Got Better:

If you’ve got a few minutes to spare, try writing a short thank-you card to a colleague or anyone who has helped you out lately. Not only will this keep you productive, it’ll also help you focus on the present and the things you’re thankful for – a better energy boost than a cup of coffee!

Be Thoughtful

On the flip side, particularly if my Anki, RSS and email are looking good, simply doing nothing can be great. Consider it a form of a clarity break. You’ll have distractions around, for sure, but avoid your phone and the pile of magazines on the table and just observe the world around you. It might give you an idea for future writing or just remind you of other things you need to jot down.

Just Kill It

All of that said, sometimes it’s best to just grab the phone and literally waste some time. If it’s been a long day and a quick round of Clash Royale or Sudoku is what you need, go for it. We don’t need to be productive 24/7, so wasting a bit of time can be a good thing.

My point here is to simply have a plan in mind for those downtimes. If you have a busy day and have a good way to make use of those random minutes, it can really add up over the course of a week.

The Digital Efficiency Framework

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Reading Time: 10 minutes

It’s 10:30 Monday morning and you now have 742 unread emails in your inbox. You have three notes you scratched in your notebook, your boss just asked for a few things, and you have no idea what’s in your Evernote anymore. Things are a mess.

Digital tools are great. Never in our history have we had access to so much knowledge, as well as so much access to one another. The consequence is that we are becoming overwhelmed with our digital workload.

As much as I love digital tools, getting out of them is the key. If you can ever finish your digital work for the day, you can then use that time for more valuable offline thinking, time with your family, time for hobbies, or whatever else needs to be done.

My goal with this framework is to help you escape your digital prison, while separating the content from the tools. You’ll hear me talking about things like “consumption lists” and “reference data” in an effort to keep things clean. However, I know that people love to hear about new tools so I’ve included a list of my favorite tools for each area at the end.

Information about this framework, including this post, can always be found at DEFramework.com.

The three parts

The framework ultimately consists of just three areas:

  • Processing, to help manage the stuff that gets thrown your way.
  • Inputs, to help you control what actually gets thrown your way.
  • Growth, to always be improving.

Let’s dig in.

Processing

The first piece of the Digital Efficiency Framework is Processing. Processing is all about managing what comes your way. As things come in throughout the day, you need to be able to quickly put them in their place.

This isn’t really a single step, but a series of actions to take depending on what kind of content arrives in your various inputs (which we’ll discuss in the next segment).

The key to remember is that all inputs must process to zero. These inputs can come from email (a lot of them!), notes to yourself, phone calls, sites you read, etc.

When it comes to inputs, particularly email, many items just need a response or a forward or a quick task done. You should knock those out and archive the email. In many other cases, though, there are a variety of things that could be done.

When it comes to processing the stuff that comes your way, there are really six types of things you need to deal with.

  1. Events – For your calendar
  2. Useful sites – Bookmarks
  3. Things to read/watch – Bookmarks that you really want to get back to which go on your Consumption List
  4. Things to remember to do – Your Task List
  5. Things to just remember – Quotes, stats, names, etc, which go in your Flashcard / SRS tool
  6. Other stuff – Everything else

Let’s dig into each of those.

Events

Some of your inputs will be about an upcoming event; this could be a weekly status meeting, or it could be your dream vacation in Italy. Either way, get those on your calendar.

If your boss emails you and says “Let’s meet next Tuesday at 2:00 about the Acme project”, put that on your calendar, respond, and then archive the email.

Useful Sites

You may come across a useful website, either from something someone sent you or perhaps just in your daily browsing. When it comes to saving sites, there are two ways to save them.

Sites you need often

If you have a site that you need to reference frequently, I often find it best to use the native bookmark tool in your browser. Those tools don’t scale well for a ton of bookmarks, but make it pretty easy to quickly go to your top 20 sites.

In my case, this includes things like Google Photos, weather sites, and various agency tools (CRM, task list).

Sites you just want to save

More common are sites that you just want to save. This could be medical info, Google tips, products you like, information to help with parenting, etc. Those typically should not go in your browser bookmarks or you’ll have a huge mess. I use a different tool for those, which you can find in the tools section at the end.

Things to read/watch

This is different from a normal bookmark. I consider bookmarks to be for reference, for things you may want to look at again. What we’re talking about here are specific items that you want to reach or watch, so these will go on your “consumption list”.

This is a list that you should revisit as frequently as is reasonable so it doesn’t get out of hand. If I come across an article that I really want to read, bookmarking means it’ll likely never get read. Instead, I put it on my consumption list and I know that it’ll resurface again when I have time to work through that list. This works for articles, videos, or anything else that you’d specifically like to dig into when you have some time.

Things to remember to do

Or, put another way, your task list. How you execute that list will be completely up to you and your job, and is really too broad for the scope of this. Just make sure you have a solid, reliable place to put your tasks. Some ideas for this are listed in the tools section at the end.

Things just to remember

This is a system that many people don’t have in place, but I find it invaluable. If you see a great quote or a stat and think “I should remember that”, then do it. Nothing is worse than saying “I should try to remember that quote” and then literally doing nothing to actually try to remember it.

This will go into your “Flashcards / SRS” (Spaced Repetition System) tool. Spaced Repetition is a deep subject, but in short it’s a way to memorize information over time. As you learn each item a bit more deeply, the “repetition” gets further “spaced”, so items may only show up in your flashcards every few months. Once you get it going, you could have hundreds of cards in your system, but only a dozen to review each day. It can be wildly useful. We’ll discuss SRS a bit more as we move forward, and here is a deeper post about SRS if you’d like to learn more.

Other stuff

This is the tricky one, as you’re going to have other things come in that you just want to store somewhere.

Some examples might be:

  • Paint colors used in your house
  • Books you want to read
  • Gift ideas
  • License plate numbers
  • Blog post ideas
  • Contacts
  • Printer cartridge model numbers
  • Code snippets
  • Apps to try
  • Book notes

The list goes on and on. Having a specific place to store that info is huge. There are vastly different approaches that you can take, but having a place to put them is the main thing. As with others, see my tools list at the end for some ideas of where you can store this kind of information.

Now that that you have some pieces in place for processing the inputs that come your way, let’s look at the inputs themselves.

Inputs

Inputs are all of the ways that digital information gets to you. Some of them you can control precisely, some you can control a little, and some you have no control over. The more you can control the inputs feeding your digital life, the better. As things flow into your world, you can use the processing steps from above to deal with them.

Ultimately, the more you can control your inputs the easier it is to get them to zero. As I mentioned before, all inputs must process to zero. Yes, this includes your inbox. This doesn’t mean your work is done, but just that everything is in their proper places (events on the calendar, tasks on the task list, etc).

As David Allen says, it will help you have a “mind like water” and give you amazing clarity to attack the day. You might have a calendar full of meetings, a bunch of stuff you want to read, and 37 items on your task list, but everything is where it belongs and is waiting for you to tackle it when the time is right.

There are three main types of inputs: Controlled inputs, Variable inputs, and Uncontrolled inputs. Let’s look at each three.

Controlled Inputs

These are items that you have 100% control over, because you literally put everything into them. No one else feeds these inputs, and no algorithm has control of them. This is really two areas:

  1. Your flashcard / SRS system, which you should get to zero each day.
  2. Your “consumption list”, which can only hold so much. You may never catch up, but it’s not infinite.

Variable Inputs

This is where most of your stuff will show up, but other people can feed these systems and make them messy. The key here is that they can all be worked to zero. They include:

Email

The best thing you can do for your email is to consider everything in there an action, not a message. Everything needs something from you (even if it’s to just delete the message), so figure out that “something” and move on to the next.

If you leave things hanging around in here, you’re letting other people dictate your priorities.

With every message in your inbox, you can do one of five things:

  1. Delete. Just get rid of it. If you want to keep it around, then “archive” instead, but get it out of your inbox. Related, you should always be unsubscribing like crazy.
  2. Delegate. If someone else needs to handle it, then let them handle it. Forward and move on.
  3. Respond. Some emails need a response, so you’ll need to get back to them.
  4. Defer. Some emails you can just pause on for a bit to see what needs to happen, but these usually turn into “respond” (for details) or put them on your task list.
  5. Do. A lot of emails can just be dealt with immediately, so do it and move on. If someone needs their password reset, then go reset their password. I’m a big believer in to-do lists, but if you can avoid the meta work of adding to a list and just knock it out, do it.

You can also look to move some of your future emails to other systems. For example:

  • Internal emails are frequently being replaced by tools like Slack inside of organizations.
  • Urgent communications can happen via text.
  • Project updates should be in your project management software, not in your inbox.

RSS / News Feeds

I’m becoming a bigger fan of RSS as time goes on. If you’re not familiar with the term, RSS is simply a way for you to get updates from many sites in one place. Rather than you visiting 20 sites to see what’s new, those 20 sites all show up in your RSS reader.

This offers a few huge advantages:

  1. You control the news that comes to you, and you don’t let a never-ending algorithm decide for you.
  2. You don’t need to worry when sites go dormant. If they don’t post an update, it wastes none of your time.
  3. You can process to zero. You have a fixed list of sites you get news from, and they have a fixed list of items. You’ll never hit the bottom of Google News, Reddit, or Facebook, but you can (and should) get your RSS reader to zero fairly often.

You should block a little bit of time each day to clean up your RSS feeds. You don’t necessarily need to read the items in-depth, but just process it to zero. If you see a good idea in there, add it to your to-do list. More often, though, you’ll come across a great story that you want to read so you can add it to your consumption list and move on for now.

Quick Notes

These are notes to yourself that you take during every area of your life. It might be in a meeting, in the car, listening to a podcast, or anything else.

As David Allen has said, “only think about cat food once”. Constantly trying to remember something silly like “don’t forget to pick up cat food” is a huge waste of mental energy. Get thoughts out of your head and onto paper, and then process through them when you have time.

As you’re processing your notes, some can be done immediately (like “change the mouse batteries”), and others need to be processed elsewhere using the steps from before.

Uncontrolled Inputs

Uncontrolled inputs include social media sites, news sites, Reddit, things like that. I consider these to be entertainment, not proper inputs. They’re all neverending, and algorithms heavily dictate what you see.

I’m not saying to avoid them, but treat them how they deserve to be treated — as toys. Get your proper news and ideas via RSS so you can get to zero and move on with your day.

That said, I certainly spend some time in these areas most days, but I don’t rely on any of them for information. Enjoy your time there, chat with friends, but treat them as the entertainment venues that they are.

Certainly there are exceptions, such as if you’re a social media manager, but social sites are explicitly designed to suck you in for as long as possible, so use other methods for your inputs when you can.

Growth

A big part of our era is the never-before-seen ability to become better as time goes on. As with other parts of your digital life, though, the areas in which you can learn can easily spiral out of control as well.

For these areas, visit them as often as you can. Specifically, try to visit and process some of them daily, and some as time allows (which will vary greatly from person-to-person).

Daily

Flashcards / SRS

Try to study these to zero daily. You control what goes in here, so keep it small to make it doable. If you do it correctly, spaced repetition systems are like magic.

RSS / News Feed

As with SRS, try to get this to zero daily. Again, you’re controlling what goes in here, so simply unsubscribe if anything gets too noisy.

As time allows

Your Consumption List

Work through this as you’re able, perhaps even block off some time on your calendar for it. I have a personal task each day to try to read at least one thing from this list.

Books and Podcasts

Any notes from books will typically end up in your Reference Data, and perhaps in your SRS. It’s important to read books (or listen to audiobooks) and listen to podcasts on topics of interest, so making time for them is a big thing. Determining where to fit this into your daily or weekly schedule is up to you, as the opportunities vary greatly among different occupations and stages of life.

Steps to get started

That was a lot to cover! To make it a little easier, there are really just three steps to get started with this:

  1. Get your systems in place
  2. Keep it simple
  3. Focus on consistently getting your inputs to zero.

Get your systems in place

You likely have most of these set up to some degree, but you really need them all so that all of your information has a home.

For most of you, you already have:

  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Bookmarks
  • Tasks
  • A reference system of some kind
  • Quick notes

That means that all you really need to add is:

  • An RSS reader
  • A “to consume” system
  • SRS / Flashboards

These don’t need to be overwhelming items, and you certainly don’t want to make things even more cluttered in your life. Add in the items that you’re missing, and then make regular habits of zeroing out your inputs and getting everything processed to where it needs to be.

Keep it simple

The key to most of these is to take care of what needs to happen on a consistent basis. For example, a 30 minute SRS review that you do a few times a week is worthless; a two minute review that you do every day is much more valuable. Start small, and build up as time goes on if you’re getting value from it.

Focus on consistently getting your inputs to zero

This isn’t too difficult once you get rolling, but you might be in a big mess right now. A good way to start might be to go “instant zero”

  • Email: If your inbox is a huge mess, just move everything to a folder to work on, and keep your main inbox at zero going forward. Work on that “old stuff” folder as you have time.
  • RSS: If you get way behind here, remove the troublemakers that post a ton and just “mark as read” for the rest.
  • Quick notes: Move everything into a folder to work on, or just process through it like mad. Remember that with quick notes you don’t need to “do” the items on each note, but just move it into the right processing bucket. My quick notes sometimes stack up too much because I want to execute directly from there, so I force myself to just process the notes into their proper systems.

My tools

I hope you’ve found this helpful! If you have questions or ideas, please feel free to reach out and I’ll answer what I can.

My specific tools tend to change fairly often, which is why I largely kept them out of this post. However, you can always find an updated list at mickmel.com/tools

Planning for Growth

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I’ve always considered myself to be a pretty good planner, but as I’ve learned more I’ve realized how poor a job I often do. Over the past year, I’ve refined my processes quite a bit and I feel I have things in a much better place (though always looking to improve).

For me, planning really consists of two pieces:

  • Planning for the day/week/quarter/year ahead.
  • Keeping a rough log of what happens so I can use that knowledge going forward.

Planning Ahead

There are a lot of tools out there on goal setting, so we won’t be digging too deeply into that. A good place to start would be books such as “Your Best Year Ever” by Michael Hyatt for help in that area. In terms of goals, I see it essentially like this.

You should have roughly 100 lifetime goals, worked into 10-12 goals each year, perhaps 3 goals each quarter, and then a “big three” each week and each day that point toward those goals. Those daily and weekly big three don’t always point toward your quarterly goals, but should be set with those in mind.

My yearly planning and quarterly planning are similar, where I look at my overall goals and try to plot things out. The weekly and daily planning are where things get tactically useful for you.

Be SMART

This article isn’t about goal setting, but it’s worth touching on how goals should be developed. Ideally your goals should be “SMART”, using the framework that George Doran came up with decades ago.

  • Specific: What exactly are you trying to do? “Get more fit” is not a goal, but “lose 20 pounds” works much better.
  • Measurable: How will you measure what you are doing? Using the example above the “20 pounds” is a very easy metric to track.
  • Attainable: To lose your weight, you might set a goal to run 10 miles every day. That’s specific and measurable, but not likely attainable. Setting goals that are attainable is important. Don’t make them easy, but don’t put them too far out of reach.
  • Relevant: Make sure your goals are relevant to your bigger life plans. A goal might be to complete an Ironman triathlon, but if you don’t have the time or desire to work out that frequently, it will be a difficult goal to attain.
  • Timely: Your goals need a timeline. “Lose 20 pounds” is a good goal, but with no backstop you’re never really behind. “Lose 20 pounds by May 1” sets some guidelines and you can do the math on how to get there.

So if one of your annual goals is to lose 20 pounds, you need to work that into your quarterly goals. Those could be weight measurements, or just activities. For example, your goal for the quarter might be “Go outside and walk at least one mile three times per week”. That’s specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

As you get into your weekly and daily goals, those walks can be part of what you need to do.

Weekly Planning

Much of what I do each week is based on concepts from Michael Hyatt’s “Full Focus Planner”. It’s an excellent paper planner, and really shaped how I handle my weekly planning.

While I no longer use the paper planner (I went back to digital), the lessons from it were invaluable.

People generally work through their weekly planning on Friday afternoon, over the weekend, or on Monday morning. I do mine on Friday afternoons for two big reasons:

  1. If you get it out of the way on Friday, your head will be a bit more clear on the weekend knowing that next week is already firmed up.
  2. If you are confirming meetings for the following week, people are likely to respond on Friday afternoons, but not on Sunday evenings.

Here is an example of how that looks in Roam Research:

No matter what tool I use, the basic content is always essentially the same:

  1. Work through the “Big Three” goals for the upcoming week.
  2. Go through each day of the week individually, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
  3. Add other tasks for the week, such as workouts, car pool, food planning, etc.
  4. Look at wins from the past week.
  5. Ask a few other questions such as:
    1. “What worked and what didn’t?”
    2. “What will you keep, improve, start or stop based on the above?”

I find this 60 minutes each Friday to be some of the most valuable time of the week, as it keeps me focused on my goals, prepared for the week ahead, and cognizant of what happened the previous week.

Daily Planning

My daily planning really consists of two areas. The main one is filling in the scheduled events, for things that I know are coming (meetings, etc). Equally important, though, is tracking the unscheduled events that pop up each day.

Scheduled Events

As part of my weekly planning I look at each individual day in the upcoming week. I manually build out pages for each day coming up, and manually populate it with my plans and goals for the day.

To answer your question, yes, it’s redundant to do it that way, but that’s intentional. Just taking a moment to review each upcoming meeting will give you a chance to jot down ideas for the meeting, confirm details with attendees, or even decide that it’s no longer necessary.

In addition, it can be a good time to add alarms to your phone if you see a situation where you might lose track of time before a meeting and need that nudge.

Here is an example of how I’ve done that in the past, with this sample from Notion:

Unscheduled Events

Perhaps of greater value is keeping a log of unscheduled events that pop up throughout the day. You don’t need to log everything you do (unless you want to), but it’s very valuable to log bigger things. If done right, it’s like magic.

For this, I’m talking about things like random phone calls, unexpected meetings, and content that you consume and find useful (articles, videos, etc).

For those, just add them to your daily log and below is an example of that. The red arrows highlight some of the things I added during the day, like an unexpected call at 2:43pm (“14:43”), various notes on other planned calls, and a new online gaming system that my daughter and I were trying out.

There are two big reasons that I do this.

First, it can be helpful to be able to look back to see when someone called you and how that call went. It takes 30 seconds to jot that down, but could be great to have on hand next week when you have a follow-up call for that.

Second, it can help tie interesting things together. For example, I took some notes at a business luncheon one day and put them in my daily log. A few months later when I was reading a book passage that sounded very familiar, I was able to find that passage in my notes from the luncheon and connect the dots. That led me to dig a bit more into the speaker from that luncheon (Kevin Paul Scott), as well as gain more context around the ideas in the book (Essentialism).

Planning and goal-setting don’t come natural to a lot of folks, but taking the time to set things up can make a huge difference in how smoothly your days go and what you can get out of them.

If you need help getting things organized your end for solid planning, my Roam Research course covers much of this very stuff and will give you a great outline for getting started.

To write more, read more

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As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m trying to write every day. So far, so good. It’s been excellent, but it’s not always easy. There are times when I’m not sure what to write, and I find the reading is often the solution.

David B. Clear sums it up rather nicely by saying that writers’ block comes from a lack of inputs. Austin Kleon has a similar take, simply saying that problems of output are problems of input.

Read Writing

The first place to start is to read what others are writing. I’m developing a pretty solid process for that, and it helps immensely. I have a variety of reading-related goals that I try to hit every day (and I hit ~most days) and that makes blogging so much easier. As I’m reading and taking notes, I use a #blogideas hashtag in Roam Research and I always have a list of good ideas in there. The more I read, the more I put in there.

As David says, you can go well beyond reading to get ideas:

So don’t just rely on the written word for inspiration — books, blogs, and magazines. Add movies, TV, music, and podcasts to the mix. 

Austin goes a bit further and ties in a bit more overall adventure:

When I stall out, it’s time to start taking things in again: read more, re-read, watch movies, listen to music, go to art museums, travel, take people to lunch, etc. Just being open and alert and on the lookout for That Thing that will get me going again. Getting out the jumper cables and hunting down a battery.

In any case, if you have a desire to do more writing you should feed that habit by reading a lot more too.

Goals are a commitment to the process

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Setting a goal is easy enough: “Lose 20 pounds by March 1” sounds great. If you follow something like the SMART framework, that simple goal essentially checks all of the boxes.

While losing 20 pounds might be the goal, setting that goal really means that you’re committing to a process. This likely means eating less and moving more, consistently, for a period of time.

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As Imogen Roy would say:

Effective goals aren’t based on the end result; they are commitments to the process.

Wanting to lose 20 pounds is a fine goal to have, but it’s worthless if it doesn’t cause you to kick off a process to help achieve it.

Or maybe your goal is to “Read at least one book per month for the next year“. Again, that’s a great goal, but the process is key. Among other things, you now need to find appropriate books that interest you and set aside dedicated time to read on a regular basis.

In both cases, the goal is a nice thing to reach for, but the process is the magic. That’s where you learn to be healthy, develop better learning habits, or improve your life in some other way.

The process is the goal.

Unsubscribe like crazy

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Over the next few days, you’re likely to be inundated with emails from companies that you haven’t heard from in a while. It’ll be irritating to receive them all, but it’s a great opportunity — don’t just delete those emails, but take a few seconds to unsubscribe.

Maintaining control of your inbox is an increasingly challenging thing to do, but the Black Friday sales (and holiday sales in general) give you a perfect chance to see all of the lists you’re on and get yourself off those lists.

The two types of failure

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In Atul Gawande’s amazing book “The Checklist Manifesto“, he suggests that there are two types of failure in the world.

The first is ignorance—we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. There are skyscrapers we do not yet know how to build, snowstorms we cannot predict, heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to stop.

The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude—because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. This is the skyscraper that is built wrong and collapses, the snowstorm whose signs the meteorologist just plain missed, the stab wound from a weapon the doctors forgot to ask about.

There are solutions for each kind of problem. Atul’s first suggestion, as you might guess based on the title of his book is to use more checklists:

Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.

Checklists really only seem to solve the ineptitude issue, though. The ignorance issue can’t be fixed with a checklist, but rather by working to gain more knowledge. If there are “skyscrapers that we do not yet know how to build“, then checklists aren’t the answer. Studying and learning will give you insights on new ideas and techniques to help create that new generation of building.

Of course, while you’re doing all of that learning and coming up with great ideas, just don’t forget to use checklists to make sure it doesn’t all come crashing down because of something that was solved 20 years ago.

It’s just not a priority for me

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There’s another side to being so “busy”, and that’s when it comes to excuses. There are very few situations where you’re ever “too busy” for something. The only two I can think of are:

  • If you’re in jail.
  • If you’re in the hospital.

The rest of the time, your rejection of a request isn’t because you’re too busy, but because something else is a higher priority. You could do whatever someone asked, but you may choose not to because something else is more important.

That might be perfectly fine. If your boss is asking you to work on an important project, but your friend wants to go catch a movie, you’d be wise to turn down your friend and do your work. You’re not too busy for the movie, but your priorities lie elsewhere.

It’s like this clip from Seinfeld, where Seth skips a meeting (and later gets fired) to grab lunch with Jerry. Not a great move.

Priorities Matter

Where this can be be helpful is when you view all requests through this lens. If you keep your priorities in mind, you’ll tend to make better decisions.

For example, if your wife reminds you that your daughter has a ballet recital tonight but you have a lot of work to do:

  1. It’s easy to say “I’m too busy”.
  2. It feels a lot different to say “That recital isn’t a priority for me”. Ouch!

You face dozens of choices every day in your life, but in almost every case you can base your decision on what really matters to you, not just on what has your attention and makes you feel busy in the moment.

My list of daily goals

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A few weeks back I started tracking a list of daily goals. These are separate from any to-do items I might have, and unrelated to anything on my calendar. They’re simply a list of things I’d like to accomplish every day.

As of today, it’s a list of four main goals with five sub-goals in various areas. Here’s what they look like, along with some quick notes on each:

  • Publish blog: Publish a blog post daily, like this one
  • Work out: This can be checked off after both of the sub-tasks are done.
    • Pushups: Do some number of push-ups each day, typically a few dozen.
    • Walk or Run: Walk or run some distance; usually outside, if not on the treadmill.
  • Clarity break: Take time for a clarity break at some point, as I detailed in my post yesterday.
  • Reading: This can be checked off based on the three sub-tasks.
    • Pocket: Read at least one of my saved articles from Pocket.
    • Blinkist: Read at least one book from Blinkist, going through the process I described here.
    • Reading beyond Blinkist: Do some degree of reading beyond Blinkist. I’m usually working on a few books in my Kindle, so at least open it and read a bit.

Growth Without Goals

I’m constantly adjusting my list, and Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s “Growth Without Goals” article was a big help. Patrick’s has a somewhat similar list that looks like this:

  • No complaining
  • 100 push ups
  • Run
  • No sugar
  • Write 500 words
  • Read
  • Don’t eat until noon (intermittent fasting)
  • Floss
  • Spend time in the woods (running or hiking)
  • Family Time
  • Level Up

There’s plenty more to be added, but it’s already a difficult list to hit every day. While my plan is to finish them all daily, it’s fairly rare that I get to everything.

For more about how I manage this list each day, I’ve included a few sections in my Roam Research course that you may find helpful. Check it out.

Do you have a similar list? If so, leave a comment below and share with us.

My big reading shortcut

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Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the past year I’ve been trying to read a lot more. I’ve succeeded in reading quite a few books, but I’m also “semi-reading” quite a few more. Michael Simmons has coined this as Fractal Reading, and while I don’t follow his practice exactly, it’s pretty close.

Full books

First, there are some books that I simply know I want to read cover to cover. This includes things like Seth Godin’s new book The Practice, or the highly-acclaimed book Caste from Isabel Wilkerson. I buy the book on Amazon and read through it, taking notes along the way.

Other books

Blinkist

For most everything else, I start in Blinkist. Blinkist offers book summaries that are around 15 minutes each, giving a great overview of the book. As of now they have around 4,000 books in their system, and their subscription costs around $16/mo (after a free trial).

As I read through the book on Blinkist, I highlight any areas of interest. When I finish, I skim back through it again and copy my highlights and the “blink headings” into Roam Research.

This gives me a great overview of the book, and at this point I may decide to go read the full book. Either way, my next stop is over to Goodreads.

Goodreads

Among the other features that Goodreads has is a list of “quotes” (highlights) from other readers, sorted by the most highlighted items. This often gets some precise quotes and insights that Blinkist glossed over.

I copy those into Roam Research as well, and I now have a pretty good summary of the book, including quotes and references, and it’s only taken around 40 minutes.

Here’s a good example from “Growth IQ” that I recently read; you’ll notice the sections at the bottom for “Notes from Blinkist” and then “Notes from Goodreads”

Final steps

From here things can go a few directions:

  • I might be done. If it was just an ok book, then I’ve got my highlights and overview, I learned a little bit, and I’m done.
  • I might write about it. Many of the posts on this blog include notes and quotes from books, and many of those came out of this process.
  • I might read the full book. If I find myself wanting more, my next move is to purchase the full book and dive in there.

I tend to subscribe to the advice of “don’t finish bad books”, but I usually come at it from the opposite direction. By following this process first, I rarely find myself in the middle of a “bad book”, and I’m able to get the overall ideas and concepts from many more books this way but still go deep on a full book when I want to.

Personally, my goal each day is to “Blink” one book, and then spend some time (which varies wildly) reading from whatever full books I’m working on. I don’t always hit both, but I often do and it’s working out quite well.

If you need more insight and guidance on how to make this happen, I cover my book/reading techniques quite a bit in my course on Roam Research, so I encourage you to check it out.