June Review: Results and hard work are mutually exclusive

It's already time to reflect back on the entire month.

I was healthily hypomanic for the first two weeks. My willpower and confidence was through the roof- I felt like I had the discipline to break through any obstacle. And indeed I did. I easily wrote off thoughts of other's expectations (does X person expect Y from me right now?) and was able to focus on what I thought was most important.

I didn't get much stuff done in lab this past week. Most of what I did do failed. I'm OK with that. I was trying to accomplish a lot before next week's International Worm Meeting in LA, but I think ultimately my brain told me I didn't have enough time to do everything I had planned. My brain felt saturated- by everything I wanted to do, AND everything I thought others expected me to do. I took Thursday off to run some errands and read, and that was easily the best decision of the week.

My time is now constrained- I leave for LA on Wednesday morning, and I still need to make my two posters for the meeting and take care of some obligations. Not to mention do laundry and pack. So I have little doubt that today and tomorrow will be a productivity bonanza.

Then the upcoming Worm Meeting is the perfect chance to incorporate everything I've been working on these past few months- interviewing successful scientists, my first manuscript, practicing eye contact, teaching, literature reading, my current projects, and gathering ideas for the next phase. It has the potential to concretely advance my work in a measurable way. Time to level-up.

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Embrace the Cycle

There is a clear cycle at work here. When I started this month, I thought I'd be working hard every week and be relentlessly results-focused the entire time. That's what I had developed my scheduled bursts for. But hard work is NOT the best time to get results.

• Phase I: Perspiration. Work intensely to the point of discomfort. Acquire new skills and try new things. Ignore results.
• Phase II: Rest. Mental distance. Do something else, and don't worry about your work.
• Phase III: Level-up. Concrete progress. Demand results from yourself.

Phase I vs Phase II: Progress takes discomfort and hard work. There's no way around it. But that sort of mental training is impossible to maintain. As biological creatures, we need Phase II- time to rest and let our bodies and thoughts reorganize themselves. 

Phase I vs Phase III: One should NOT be results-oriented during the hard training phase. Obsessing over concrete results leads us to take shortcuts and take solace in easy and ultimately unimportant accomplishments, because it is impossible to make meaningful gains on a daily or even weekly basis. Instead of focusing on what you accomplish, focus on how you work. Refine your process and treat it like a craft. Once you have built a solid base, then you can later apply them to getting results.

Phase II vs Phase III: Phase II gives you the time to consolidate your newly acquired capabilities and build up your mental energy for the final push for results. Then, you can tell yourself during Phase III that you WILL do something amazing, and this brings the exhilaration and adrenaline required for a truly meaningful accomplishment.

The entire perspective of this post was inspired by weightlifting. My weekly workouts cycle between  intense training, a light workout, and a PR day. Analogies are awesome.

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Just because I promised it

No schedule for the upcoming week, since it will be inherently dictated by the Worm Meeting schedule.

Green blocks are successful scheduled bursts, red blocks are failed, and blue blocks are prior commitments.

Weekly Report: Discomfort Solved

This was a very interesting week to start my experiment, because I bought a condo! That obviously took a lot of time, and I faced some other personal challenges this week as well. But my scheduled bursts still allowed me to get a lot done, and my habits have taken a lot of the stress out of my life.

If you haven't read up on my new system yet, see my last blog post.

See after the calendar for the lessons I drew this week.

Report (see calendar): I met my scheduled bursts (green) on Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday without much trouble. However, on Wednesday (yellow) I had an urgent interruption related to the condo, so I simply did my burst later in the day, under non-ideal (i.e. distracted) conditions. On Thursday (red), I was simply exhuasted from the condo closing and decided to take a nap instead. Yes, I would call that poor planning, and in the future I will avoid planning bursts on days surrounding major events.

Green = success. Yellow = urgent interruption. Red = failure. Blue = other commitments.

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My new favorite thing: discomfort

But overall, I got a lot done this week. I tackled two big experiments that I had been putting off, partially because of lack of time, and partially because I was a bit fearful and didn't know where to start. However, just 1 hour of focused concentration in each case proved sufficient to break through the barrier. At the beginning, I felt stupid and perhaps a bit guilty. After that very uncomfortable hour, I knew what I needed to do, and I was able to get started on real work. And I managed to get real (and exciting) results for both of them.

This illustrates what I've known for a while, informed by bloggers like Cal Newport and Scott Young: 

~Comfort with discomfort is one of the most important skills a person can develop. Forcing yourself to persist through discomfort is critical when starting any new project. Otherwise, it is too tempting to go back to easy work that only makes you feel productive.~

Scheduled bursts are a great way to force yourself to embrace discomfort. They are time-limited, so the task no longer seems as daunting and it's easier to get started. The process of systematically eliminating distractions also helps to psychologically prepare you for the discomfort.

To facilitate getting into "the zone," I have implemented a checklist for when I start these sessions. Checklists are obviously ubiquitous, but I'm using them for two very specific reasons:

1) Mental attention: It gives my mind one less thing to keep track of. Making deliberate changes to one's productivity system itself requires mental attention, and checklists lessen that requirement. The checklist makes it easier to fully focus on the task in front of me.

2) Ritual: This tells my brain that it's time to enter a state of "deep work."

My checklist for scheduled bursts.

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Habits are investments

I won't comment much on these this week. But I've observed two things:

1) I've already begun noticing changes in how I perceive events and how I interact with people. In particular, I make much better eye contact and feel much more confident.

2) These habits are now always running in the back of mind. Thus, I can automatically activate them when appropriate.

Lift habits.

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Next week's schedule

I also noticed last week that front-ending my bursts (e.g. scheduling more towards the beginning of the week, and beginning of the day if possible) makes good use of my abundance of early-week energy. It also eliminates feelings of guilt if I have to tend to other things later in the week. This week, I have to front-end my schedule, since I will be away for a wedding Friday-Sunday.

Scheduled bursts are in orange. Other commitments are in blue. Everything else must fit into the white space.

June plan: Scheduled bursts and worthwhile habits

Last time I described my goal of combining two productivity regimes: drip and burst.

To recap, the hybrid approach has three levels:

1) pre-scheduled bursts of intense, focused and distraction-free work on my most important and difficult projects (regardless of urgency).

2) a limited number of high-yield low-cost daily habits performed intentionally and mindfully

3) batches (ideally 2+ hours) containing everything else

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Accountability is critical

I promise to my readers, that for the rest of June (and possibly beyond), I will do the following each week: 

1) I will post a calendar at the start of the week indicating my scheduled bursts and how I work around them.
2) I will post a calendar at the end of the week indicating successes and failures.
3) I will post a screenshot of Lift for daily habits that week.

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Orange indicates scheduled bursts of work on most important projects. I can work on those projects other times, but not in focused bursts (to avoid exhausting my mental energy).  Blue indicates other commitments. Everything else gets crammed into the white spaces.

Lift on iPhone for the past 2 weeks.

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Tier 1: Scheduled Bursts

1. Lab (most important project- 2 related experimental protocols I've never done before and will yield the missing data required for submission)
2. Literature review: 15 papers read in-depth, 30 skimmed, 100 abstracts. Aiming to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Rules: 

• Scheduling: Must schedule these in advance at the beginning of the week for at least 3 hours each. I treat these as commitments. These are non-negotiable (overrule other things that come up, like meetings). However, I will not overly fret about making an "ideal" schedule ahead of time. Perfectionism and over-planning are forms of procrastination.
• Distractions: I shut off my phone/Internet and isolate myself as best I can. If I give into ANY distraction, I must stop and mark it as a failure, and report it on this blog. If I decide an unexpected interruption is important and urgent enough to stop what I'm doing, it is not a failure, but I make a note of it to see if I can find a way to avoid it in the future.
• Focus: Use a timer for 60 continuous minutes (optional to do more on given day after a 15 minute break). Increase by 10 minutes after completing 10 successful sessions in a row.
• Visible Progress: Have something to show for each session. This can be in a summary in an idea notebook, an updated master project document, an updated manuscript, talking to my PI, prepping slides for lab meeting, etc
• Breaks: At least one day a week, I cannot work on my most important projects

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Tier 2: Worthwhile Habits

1. Check e-mail/FB/news/Feedly once a day
2. Write 30 minutes per day
3. Make good eye contact
4. Meditate
5. Do something I fear
6. Say "no" to one thing

Rules:

• Aim to do these everyday. Accomplish as many as possible early in the day
• Checking e-mail a single time is the most important and most difficult. For motivation, as soon as I check a 2nd time, I am barred from recording more habits for the day. At other times, Gmail is blocked from my computer, and Mailbox is put on the last icon screen of my phone. I do check "important" e-mail folder 1 extra time per day. It is also OK to open e-mail to obtain information necessary for a project, but getting distracted by unrelated e-mails constitutes failure

Summer plans: Big projects and small habits

I've tried two alternative paradigms of productivity in the past year. 

First I used the "drip" method, where I try to do a little each day on all of my goals. Most importantly, this helped me build habits. It reduced procrastination because I just told myself I only had to do a little bit. But as I discovered, "drip" creates too much anxiety, and costs mental energy and time for every switch to an unrelated task. Because it takes time to get fully adjusted to a new task, this meant my actual results output was often minimal unless it was a particularly good day.

Therefore, I adopted the "burst" method where I focus exclusively on one project for a half or full day. This is the only way I could've finished multiple major projects with tight deadlines. This change also coincided with getting a decent handle on applying the Pareto Principle, forcing myself to focus on the 20% of work that yields 80% of results. It is worth obsessing and enduring mental pain for that work. Everything else gets done in a rapid-fire batch, but poor quality is perfectly acceptable.

However, even the Pareto-Driven Burst is flawed. I definitely excelled at my 3 most important projects, and all the small tasks were completed efficiently. But I stopped developing productive habits, because they got mixed in with the small tasks. I started wasting time on the Internet again during my free time. I stopped writing in my journal, meditating, generating ideas, practicing gratitude, and eliminating negative thought patterns. Obviously I stopped writing on my blog. I stopped practicing good eye contact and thinking about how I interact with people. I had no time to examine my habits on a daily basis.

Bursts get results, but they are hard and can easily burn you out. That's where habits come in. They manage stress. Productive habits serve as a solid base from which you can launch your most-important projects. There's no way I could've managed the "burst" period without the thought patterns, personality changes, and habits that I developed during the "drip" period. I would've procrastinated and self-doubted at every turn.

So, it is time to combine drip and burst. Let's examine how we can add habit formation to my current method.

Burst-only (current method):

1. Pick a most important project, work on it. Another day I'll work on another project.

2. Put everything else in one pile. Once the pile is large enough, spend a half day doing it and get it out of the way.

I had a pretty full schedule before. But if I can isolate most-important projects and batched tasks to particular time slots, I will have more time. This will be accomplished by scheduling. This should be made easier this summer since I have fewer batched tasks like meetings and required seminars.

Burst/drip combo (new method):

1. Each week, schedule continuous lengthy work sessions on most important projects, >3x per week. Once scheduled, no last-minute interruptions will be allowed.

2. Assign time each day for habits (early morning, usually). Accomplish as many as possible, then be sure to do the rest later in the day.

3. Fit everything else into batches of 30+ minutes. This includes e-mail.

There's nothing glamorous about habits. They don't advance your career. But they are reliable and will get you ready for the big time.

Next time I'll lay out my exact plans and accountability scheme to test-drive this method.

Iguazu Falls: Simple vacations are better

26 hours and 5 airports later, I peered out into the subtropical rain forest. It was dark already. A van picked us up, and we bolted down long windy roads through the jungle. Finally, a building appears as we enter town. But we veer right off onto a completely unlighted dirt road which the van can barely fit through. We brake every 20 feet to carefully dodge a tree. 15 minutes later, a 5-star hotel rises out of nowhere.

We are there for my dad's conference. There are some hiking paths nearby, but absolutely nothing else except solid rainforest for miles. Since it was hard to get out, and my dad was occupied, my mother and I spent most of our time in the hotel. I ended up reading 3 books and leaving the hotel only once to go see Iguazu Falls. Speaking of which…

Exploring Iguazu Falls (2 min)

Argentine side of Iguazu Falls

Up close

Devil's Throat

More pictures at the bottom.

At first, I felt a little lame. Aren't vacations supposed to be full of seeing and doing? I imagined answering the question, "why fly 10,000 miles just to sit in a hotel and read books that you could read anywhere?" I had frequent urges to organize a group to get a taxi and go exploring, but honestly I just wanted to sit back and think. 

Every morning, I wrote for 30 minutes, meditated, explored various thoughts and ideas in a handwritten Moleskine journal. I also tried to check e-mail/Facebook/news together one single time each day- a practice I intend to continue. I didn't need to network, but I attended events primarily to accomplish one thing: practice good eye contact. Interpersonal skills tend to suffer when you're lost in your own thoughts while working in lab for extended durations.

Relaxing by the pool

I reflected back on some of my previous vacations- taking whirlwind tours around various cities, staying in a different place every night, frantically trying to catch a ferry or train or bus, always on the move, always trying to plan the next destination, meal, or shower. Honestly, I don't remember very much about them, other than a few key moments.

I see no reason to trade a busy worklife (which I always need to simplify further) for a busy vacation. Relaxing, clearing my thoughts, attaining some distance, and then dispassionately examining my own life. That's what I needed, and that's what I did.

And suddenly, I started making progress on everything I had been stuck on.


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More photos