Balance doesn’t mean 50/50

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Us humans are weird. When given two similar choices, we often assume that the odds of each choice is 50/50. That’s true in a lot of cases, like flipping a coin, but it also causes us to struggle to understand variances like in the Monty Hall problem.

When it comes to work/life balance, you don’t need to hit 50/50 either. Maybe that’s appropriate for you, but maybe it’s not. In his book “Take the Stairs“, author Rory Vaden says it like this:

“Balance shouldn’t mean equal time spent on equal activities. Balance should mean appropriate time spent on critical priorities.”

“Critical priorities” could mean an important document that you need to create for a client, but it could also mean your son’s t-ball game that evening. It could mean staying at work late one night, and then slipping out early the next day to pick up your daughter from school (if your job allows that kind of flexibility).

Balance in life is important, but it’s not about getting the scales to perfectly align. Sort out your priorities in all areas of life and work from there.

Save 50 steps a day

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Sometimes the little things can add up to make a big difference. For example, for most of us, taking more steps during the day is a good thing in terms of our health. For a business owner, though, reducing steps (and time) for their employees can be a better way to go.

Henry Ford once said that “if I could save every one of my workers 50 steps a day then I could save miles by the end of the year“.

Those miles are hours, and those hours are dollars, so it was a good move. Ford was famous for always looking for tiny ways to improve the efficiency and profitability of his company, and this was a great example.

Nearly 15 years ago I talked about how great Gmail’s “Send & Archive” feature was, and at the time I estimated that using it saved me roughly 24 hours per year, or three days worth of work. The math still seems solid, if not a bit low, so that means this one tiny button has saved me somewhere around 360 hours of effort over the years. For one little button!

Solving big problems should always come first, but if you can continue to refine and optimize, the savings can add up to huge numbers over time.

Your inbox is other people’s agenda

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Email is a tricky thing. I still think it’s one of the most valuable tools that we have, but it’s so easy for it to be taken over by others. As has been said for years, your inbox is essentially a to-do list that is built by other people.

When working through your email, it’s good to remember that. If you have priorities for the day, make sure they retain their importance even as “other people’s agenda” starts piling up in your inbox.

This is also why I’m such a proponent of frequently getting to inbox zero (which I first talked about in 2009, and with more detail and tips in 2013). If you have unread emails in you inbox, it’s difficult to appropriately sort your tasks. Once you’re at zero, you know where your world is and you can make proper decisions about what your highest priority is.

When people are unable to consistently get their inbox to zero, it’s often because they don’t have proper support systems in place and they find it easier to just let things pile up. My full system is laid out here if you need some direction, but it’s essentially just making sure that you have other tools to deal with the content in emails — notes, reminders, calendars, etc. If you have places to put all of the stuff that comes in via email, it’s easier to get your inbox cleaned out and to have a solid overview of everything that you need to do.

Your inbox will always be full of other people’s tasks for you, and your ability to sort through them and prioritize will help you keep everything on track.

The signal and the message

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When trying to remember something there are two basic parts to it:

  • The signal, letting you know that there is something to be remembered.
  • The message, with the details of what you wanted to remember.

In his book “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman explains it in more detail:

There are two different aspects to a reminder: the signal and the message. Just as in doing an action we can distinguish between knowing what can be done and knowing how to do it, in reminding we must distinguish between the signal—knowing that something is to be remembered, and the message—remembering the information itself. Most popular reminding methods typically provide only one or the other of these two critical aspects. The famous “tie a string around your finger” reminder provides only the signal. It gives no hint of what is to be remembered. Writing a note to yourself provides only the message; it doesn’t remind you ever to look at it. The ideal reminder has to have both components: the signal that something is to be remembered, and then the message of what it is.

Technology helps a ton

Don references the old “tie a string around your finger”, but technology allows us to bundle the signal and the message almost by default. 20 years ago, you might have added something to your paper calendar but it was tough to add details in that small square of paper. Today, you can click on that link in Google Calendar and have notes, attendees, location, and everything in one place. The challenge is taking the time to add those details before you need them.

On the other side of things, I still see struggles with “the signal” in a lot of places where notes get lost in the digital void. It’s super easy to add a note to Apple Notes or Google Keep or Evernote or whatever you prefer, but the easiness of it also leads to people putting a lot of stuff in there. Many of these tools allow you set a reminder based on time or location, but it takes effort to do that and many notes just slowly disappear.

Put things in their place

The solution that, at least for me, is my weekly sweep. I toss a lot of notes into Google Keep throughout the week, and deal with them from time to time, but I make sure to completely empty it every Friday into the systems where it makes sense (and includes a “signal” if needed, like on my calendar).

In way, that almost causes me issues with the “message” side of things. If I’m in the car listening to a podcast, I’ll use Google to put a quick note in Google Keep with my voice, but I’m sometimes not verbose enough. I know I’ll see the note again, so the signal is good, but if I don’t add enough detail I sometimes forget why I wanted to remember it in the first place.

This most often happens while I’m driving, so it’s hard to put a lot of detail into a note. In those cases, I’ll often create a few short voice notes instead, like:

  • “Write a post about that saying in Founders about Steve Jobs”
  • “The one where he talks about xx when you’re doing yy.”
  • “It reminds me of (that other post).”

It creates a bit of a mess, but I can quickly combine them into a single note the next time I’m at my computer.

I’m frustrated when something comes up where I’m missing either the signal or the message, so I’m constantly refining my processes to help eliminate both issues as time goes on.

Digitally prepping for a trip

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Over the next few months I’ll be heading to both New York and San Antonio for some fun trips. My goal is to work very little on those trips, but I still want to keep up with some of my daily streaks (such as this blog), so preparation is key.

Blogging

I generally stay a week or so ahead on blog posts, but I’ll try to push that even a bit further before those trips so that I’m not out of posts when I get home. Last year when we went to New York, I had enough posts pre-written for the duration of the trip trip, but just barely, and when I came home with COVID I simply had to stop blogging for a week.

While that might largely unavoidable, I still would like to give myself a bit more cushion for these trips. To write more I need to read more, so I’ve been pushing hard to build up a nice buffer.

Anki

The other big one I need to consider is my daily use of Anki (flashcards, as shared here). I’m currently on an 1,930 day streak, and I’d rather not break it. Fortunately, Anki does two things that help.

  1. First, the streak is counted if you review just one card. If things get busy, I can always review a single card.
  2. You can “study ahead” whenever you want. In the week or so before each trip, I’ll study ahead so that my daily card count will be much lower while I’m away.

It also helps that I tend to study Anki cards in fits and starts, which works well for those kinds of trips where I can just slip in a few minutes here or there when time allows.

Duolingo and others

I have other daily tasks that I routinely do, such as Duolingo and Wordle. Those are short and easy and I can likely just knock them out as we get moving in the morning. I also consider them to be less important, so it’s ok if I miss a few days.

In the case of all of these items, it helps that I enjoy them. I wouldn’t have that huge streak in Anki if I didn’t enjoy doing it at least to some degree.

Of course, I haven’t talked about how I plan to handle normal work stuff (emails, meetings, etc), but I think most people already have a solid plan in place for those. The bulk of my time lately is in meetings, whether that is with clients or at Chamber-like events, so blocking those from my calendar takes care of most of it.

Now it’s time to go work a bit further ahead to make my time away that much easier…

Intentional imbalance

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Work-life balance is something that many strive for, but it’s often a fool’s errand. Not that work should consume your life, but that trying to balance them neatly may be impossible.

In “The 12 Week Year“, author Brian Morgan suggests this instead:

Trying to spend equal time in each area is unproductive and often frustrating. Life balance is not about equal time in each area; life balance is more about intentional imbalance.

This is similar to a concept Ali uses that she calls “structured variety”. To her, this means that she can plan to take the afternoon off to read books at her daughter’s school, and then she’ll also plan to do a bit of work that night from 8-10pm to catch back up. It’s a trade she’s happy to make, because many jobs don’t allow that kind of flexibility. It’s no fun working that late at night, but to be able to trade it for time with your child at school? Absolutely!

As Brian says, the “intentional imbalance” is the key. Be careful not to be consumed by any one part of your life, but it’s not worth trying to strike that perfect balance either.

Does it work on paper?

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As I’ve shared before, the “weekly preview” that I do each Friday is one of my favorite things. It helps me to make sure the coming week is well-organized, it gives me a chance to tidy up any tight spaces, and leaves me feeling good about the week before the weekend hits.

My weekly previews are intentionally inefficient, and that’s what makes them great. A big part of the weekly preview is my “weekly sweep” as well, where I dig into my various note systems and make sure that everything has been accounted for.

In reading Brian Morgan’s “The 12 Week Year“, he had a couple of great insights about weekly planning. First:

To use your weekly plan effectively, you will need to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes at the beginning of each week to review your progress from the past week and plan the upcoming one. In addition, the first five minutes of each day should be spent reviewing your weekly plan to plan that day’s activities.

I’ve not written about it here, but the early morning walkthrough of the day is quite helpful to me as well. More importantly, and the reason for this post, was this other thought from Brian:

It is crucial that you construct a week that works on paper before trying to execute it. If you can’t get it to work on paper, then there is no way it will work in actual practice.

There are times when I’m looking at the coming and wonder how I’m going to fit two meetings so closely together. Spoiler: I can’t. If I can’t make them fit together on paper, there’s not way they’re going to work together when the time comes.

This is the beauty of this planning — I can sort out those issues well ahead of time and slide things around to fit. I’d much rather email someone on Friday to push a meeting next week by 30 minutes than to be in the chaos of the moment and need to apologize for being late.

Get it working on paper, and the odds are much higher than it’ll work for real too.

Too much feedback is a problem

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I talk a lot about giving feedback on here, both in terms of how to give good feedback to others, and how to appreciate feedback as a gift when it’s given to you. In both cases, though, too much feedback can be problematic.

Too much feedback could mean that your work is simply not good at all and requires being completely redone, but too much feedback could also just be getting too nitpicky and risks burying the helpful feedback among the cruft.

Excessive feedback can also be problematic when designing tools and devices. We’ve all had tools that beep and buzz and are constantly giving “feedback” to the point that you just tune them out. In his book “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman shares this insight:

Machines that give too much feedback are like backseat drivers. Not only is it distracting to be subjected to continual flashing lights, text announcements, spoken voices, or beeps and boops, but it can be dangerous. Too many announcements cause people to ignore all of them, or wherever possible, disable all of them, which means that critical and important ones are apt to be missed. Feedback is essential, but not when it gets in the way of other things, including a calm and relaxing environment.

Is the website down or not?

Excess feedback is something we’ve had to fight with at GreenMellen, but not (often) from our clients.

Among other services, we help manage a few hundred websites for our clients, and one thing we do is monitor them to make sure they don’t go down. Most of these sites are on a variety of inexpensive website hosting companies, and some of them tend to go down very briefly every few days. Well, “once every few days” times a few hundred sites can lead to a lot of “website is down!” messages from our monitoring tools.

In most cases, by the time we get the message and check out the site it’s already back up and running — it was just a little blip for a few seconds. Once you get those kinds of results dozens of times in a row with essentially meaningless alerts, you begin to tune out the uptime messages and you’re more prone to miss the real outages. Too much feedback was a big problem.

In our case, we simply refined the system to check twice. If a site is reported as down, our system would keep it to itself and then check again in a few minutes. In most cases, the site was back up by then and we wouldn’t be alerted at all. However, if they site was still down a few minutes later, this was likely a situation that required our attention and we’d jump right to it.

Work to reduce feedback where you can

On either side of the table, working to reduce feedback to an appropriate level of need is helpful. If you’re giving feedback, try to stick to items that will really make a difference. If you’re receiving feedback, particularly from inanimate systems, reducing the frequency of the feedback can greatly increase the value of it.

Multitasking makes learning difficult

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I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the idea of multitasking. I know that it’s mostly a myth (you don’t really “multitask”, you just “switch between different tasks quickly”), but I also have three monitors on my desk.

That said, this is a reason why I enjoy devices like the reMarkable tablet and the Kindle Scribe, as they help me focus on a single task with no notifications or interruptions getting in my way. In David Clark’s book “Tao of Charlie Munger“, a few quotes from Charlie are shared along these lines.

First, we have this from Charlie:

“Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading. If you want wisdom, you’ll get it sitting on your ass. That’s the way it comes.”

David shares that reading personal biographies was a huge piece of what Charlie (as well as Warren Buffett) attribute much of their success to.

The second quote from Charlie is much shorter, but I really liked David’s commentary about it. Charlie simply says “I think people who multitask pay a huge price.“, but David explains:

“Many people believe that when they multitask, they are being superproductive. Charlie believes that if you don’t have time to think about something deeply, you are giving your competitors, who are thinking deeply, a great advantage over you. Charlie’s ability to focus intensely and really think about something has been his competitive edge in beating Wall Street at its own game.”

There are large parts of my day where “multitasking” is the right move. Jumping from email to email, helping our team in Slack, hopping on a call with a client, etc. The problems begin when that’s all you’re able to do. If you can’t find some consistent time to get away and just think (like a clarity break), that can be problematic.

Depending on your role and your stage in life, that can be tough to do, but working to find time to make it happen can pay huge dividends.

Can you speed it up?

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Most tasks in this world could be sped up with improved processes, but in many cases that’s not what’s best. I recently wrote about un-automating parts of my note-taking in order to better understand what I have in there, and there are other areas like that to consider.

For me, a big one is the website development process that we have at GreenMellen. It takes around six months for a typical site, and speeding it up is counter-productive. If someone needs a site done more quickly, we refer them out to local friends that have a faster approach. For us, to build a site the way we believe they should be built, takes time.

This came to mind while reading Arthur Blank’s book “Good Company“, which included this anecdote about his mother:

“I remember one time when my mother was sick and required a blood transfusion, a painful process that took several hours. I asked the doctor, “Why does it take so long? Can’t you speed it up?” He replied “If I did it any quicker it would kill her.”

I’m all about productivity, processes, and automation to help streamline things, but be aware of places where speeding things up could lead to poor results.