Today I’m thinking again about self-optimization, specifically, how to improve my work output during my work day. If you have read some of my recent posts, I’m also critical of the obsessive desire to self-optimize, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do it or think about it. Holding two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time is very human, and worthwhile I find. Or maybe it’s just schizophrenic and self-contradictory. I prefer to think of it as sophisticated, nuanced and a mark of complex thinking. Go figure, end disclaimer.
I work from home and have a great deal of time freedom and no one looking over my shoulder as to what I’m doing at any given time during the day. I value this a lot as I hate the feeling of being managed and checked up on. I find that most of my most effective work actually happens in relatively small windows of time during the day surrounded by much more flaky administrative and communication work which is sometimes valuable and sometimes not.
I’ve spent the past few months optimizing my pre-work morning routine to focus on doing things which are good for me personally. This routine is as follows. I wake up and usually rush off to take the kids to school, then drink coffee and eat a light breakfast. Afterwards when my time becomes my own, I go immediately to my chair and meditate for 15 minutes using the Insight Timer app, which I’ve written about and like very much. I listen to a guided meditation by Tara Brach, who is wonderful. Immediately after that, I write for maybe 20 minutes in my journal. I write three longhand pages. This is taken from a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which is a little breathless and starry eyed in it’s writing style but actually has a lot of good advice on nurturing your personal creativity. Weirdly I worked for her literary agent as an intern for a few months when I was 15, in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. I recommend the book if you’re not too turned off by the style, and don’t turn your nose up at ‘self-help’ as a concept.
After meditating and writing the journal, I’m feeling calm and sort of mentally loosened up, and so I sit and write one of these blog posts. Usually I write these very fast, read them over once for obvious typing mistakes, find a picture to go with them and publish. I’d say the whole thing takes about half an hour on a good day, sometimes a bit longer. The idea of writing a blog post every day is one I got from Seth Godin, the marketing guru and generally brilliant thinker about education, creativity and a lot more. Again, he may not be for everyone, but if any of that sounds interesting, he’s the best at what he does. I love his books The Icarus Deception and Stop Stealing Dreams the most.
I find that doing this routine in a mechanical way every day works well. Some days I’m traveling or something blows up in my daily life and I don’t do it, and I don’t beat myself up about it over much. I am a human after all, not a robotic assembly line. Doing multiple things in order at the same time of day is super effective for me for some reason. Once I’ve decided to get in the chair and meditate, the next two things just sort of happen automatically. And I like meditating, so there’s the least resistance to start with that. I probably have the most resistance to writing these blogs, so they come last when I’ve already built momentum.
What I want to do next is extend this routine into my daily ‘office’ routine (which is done in the same chair here in my home office in my bedroom in Berlin). Something that I’ve done sporadically in the past is used the Pomodoro method, and that works great for getting specific sprints of work done in short bursts, allowing for designated break time in between. My current idea to extend my daily routine is to extend the first hour of work time to include the following:
- First, pick three things that are actually important and high value to get done in the work day, with one at the top being the single must-do thing that really is actually important and useful
- Second, do one or two Pomodoro timer periods of 25 minutes on that task to try to get it done or majorly started to reduce friction on continuing
- Third, stop checking random work communications like slack and email until these tasks that I’ve assigned myself are done. It’s really easy to get pulled onto someone else’s to-do list and miss your own important stuff.
I am going to try making this the next set of sequenced actions in my work day and report back. If you have any good tips for this kind of work, feel free to drop a comment or hit me on Twitter via @mattmirrorfish
