Manage Your Day-to-Day

A great novel, a stunning design, a game-changing piece of software, a revolutionary company—achievements like these take time, thought, craft, and persistence.

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it. So whatever else happens, I always get my most important work done—and looking back, all of my biggest successes have been the result of making this simple change.

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Notice when you seem to have the most energy during the day, and dedicate those valuable periods to your most important creative work.

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And don’t waste any of it on administrative work!

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We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.

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Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break.

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Frequency keeps ideas fresh.

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While there are many advantages to frequency over the long term, sometimes it’s fun to take a boot camp approach, to work very intensely for a very short period of time.

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have a long list of “Secrets of Adulthood,” the lessons I’ve learned as I’ve grown up, such as: “It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,” “The days are long, but the years are short,” and “Always leave plenty of room in the suitcase.” One of my most helpful Secrets is, “What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.” Day by day, we build our lives, and day by day, we can take steps toward making real the magnificent creations of our imaginations.

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The strategy is simple, I think. The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.

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Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it.

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couple of key scientific findings point the way. The first is that sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional. Even so, we’re all too willing to trade away an hour of sleep in the false belief that it will give us one more hour of productivity. In fact, even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity. The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth. Less than 2.5 percent of the population—that’s one in forty people—feels fully rested with less than seven to eight hours of sleep a night.

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The second key finding is that our bodies follow what are known as ultradian rhythms—ninety-minute periods at the end of which we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level.

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“attentional residue”.

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First, people have a really bad habit of coming in and checking e-mail first thing in the morning. And for many people, the morning is the most productive time. E-mail is very, very tempting, so they basically sacrifice their productive time for e-mail. The second issue is that in doing things, we like to feel that we’re making progress. So if you get to erase ten e-mails from your inbox, you feel like you have achieved something. But if you think carefully about it, it’s not clear that you’re going to get something out of it. The next thing working against us is the calendar. It has a tendency to represent tasks that can fit in thirty-minute

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hours—which could be how long it takes you to complete a meaningful creative task—don’t naturally get represented in that calendar. Then there’s opportunity cost. With money, opportunity cost is the fact that every time you spend three dollars on a latte, you’re not going to spend it on something else. With time, there is also an opportunity cost—but it’s often even harder to understand. Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something

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random reinforcement. Usually, when we pull the lever to check our e-mail, it’s not that interesting. But, from time to time, it’s exciting. And that excitement, which happens at random intervals, keeps us coming back to check our e-mail all the time.

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Another thing to understand is the notion of choice architecture, which means that the environment in which we make decisions tends to have a lot to do with what our final decisions are. So if you’re in line at the buffet, the way the food is organized—whether the fresh fruit and salad is easily accessible or tucked in the back behind more tempting options—will determine what you end up eating.

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The basic combination of these three things: (1) that the world around us tries to tempt us; (2) that we listen to the world around us (e.g., choice architecture); and (3) that we don’t deal very well with temptation… if you put…

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think the general notion is that, when temptation hits, it’s going to be incredibly hard for us to resist. So if your e-mail is running and it is telling you that a message is waiting for you, that’s going to be very hard to resist. In your mind, you’ll keep thinking about what exciting things are waiting for you. Now, if you never opened your e-mail, you would do much better. It would probably be best if managers went to the IT department and asked that e-mail not be distributed between eight and eleven…

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There was a study by Ralph Keeney showing that if you estimate what percentage of human mortality comes from bad decision-making it will be about 10 percent for people a hundred years ago. If you look at it these days, it is a little bit more than 40 percent. Why? Because as we invent new technologies…

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smoking. Think about texting and driving. All of those are self-control problems. Self-control solutions are all the things we try in order to get ourselves to behave better. We think that if we pay a lot of money to join the gym, we will feel guilty and we will keep going. It turns out that guilt does work—but only short-term. Eventually, the guilt goes away. We buy hundred-calorie…

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What should we focus on to help us manage our time better? I think one of the biggest factors is progression markers. For many things, it’s hard to figure out how much progress you’re making. When you answer a thousand e-mails, you see every e-mail you answer. When you are thinking about a difficult problem, it feels like maybe there were thirty wasted hours and then finally you had a half hour at the end that was useful—because the idea kind of came to you. There isn’t a linear progression and a sense of…

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marshmallows. Set a timer and race the clock to complete a task.

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FOCUS WHEN YOU’RE FRESH Tackle the projects that require “hard focus” early in your day. Self-control—and our ability to resist distractions—declines as the day goes on.

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MAKE PROGRESS VISIBLE Marking progress is a huge motivator for long-term projects. Make your daily achievements visible by saving iterations, posting milestones, or keeping a daily journal.

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These complex goals are elusive, subject to the ebb and flow of our time, energy, and opportunities.

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The most important rule in achieving your goals via your inbox is that distracting opportunities have to die for your most important goals to live.

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or finding new ways to hotwire your brain’s perspective on a problem.

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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20

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A professional is someone who can keep working at a high level of effort and ethics, no matter what is going on—for good or ill—around him or inside him. A professional shows up every day. A professional plays hurt. A professional takes neither success nor failure personally.

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