Forcing Function Community AMA

 

As a thank you to those who completed our recent survey, Chris Sparks hosted an invite-only AMA.

Check out the video, audio recording, resource list, and full transcript below!

Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.

Chris: Hey guys. Welcome to the Survey Respondent AMA. I hope you're all doing well. Thank you so much for your feedback on upcoming content and programming for The Forcing Function. And as a thank you . . . I received some of your guys’ questions, things that you've been wanting to ask me, and would love to share some thoughts. Some things that I've written about before, some things that I've been thinking a lot about, especially lately, and some things that I think we're hoping to put out new articles on in the near future. So this would be a good opportunity to try on some of these ideas. And you know, today this is going to be recorded, so we're going to be going for about an hour and get through as many of these questions as I can. If you have to leave early, no worries. We're going to put the recording online, so you'll get that via email. And yeah, let's get started. 

So first question here, one that's near and dear to me:

What does it mean to be performing at your peak?

I like to differentiate between productivity and performance here, where I think that productivity's a little bit more of the means, and performance is the ends, and so inherent to that question is you know, what are you trying to achieve? And my belief is that if you are performing at your peak, you are taking the most effective or most directed path towards those goals. And that's the difference between being effective and efficient, where it's not necessarily working harder or moving faster, but are you going directly towards your goals? And the key here, I think really the key to life, is ensuring that you are consistently moving forward. So, do you have the right habits and systems in place to ensure that you are always making progress? And a lot of that comes from having the conviction and the direction that you're heading, and in the actions that you're taking on a day to day basis. That you're going in the right direction and that the things you're doing day to day are leading you on that path to get there.

So a couple metaphors I'd like to give you here. I think performance is definitely offense rather than defense. It's definitely proactive rather than reactive. You're acting on your own priorities; you're taking action rather than seeing what's coming in. It's an investment mentality. You're thinking very long-term. You're planting lots of seeds that you hope to harvest later. And finally, it's the difference between abundance and scarcity, where abundance thinking you have so many opportunities, so many ideas to act upon, and the bottleneck is simply deciding which of those ideas is the most pressing, is the biggest opportunity. I think that the way to live a good life and live a life full of challenge and without regrets is just to try your best. It seems a bit simplistic, but as long as you're trying your best you can never have any regrets, because that's all you can do. And that's really what I think about in terms of peak performance, is do you have those systems in place so that your best self shows up, so that you can try your best and you leave nothing on the field?

And I think a good way to know whether you're performing at your peak, I think about this as the bookend of the day. How do you feel that moment that you open up your eyes? How easy is it to get out of bed? I think that's really our biggest constraint sometimes is having a good reason to get out of bed in the morning. How excited are you to do what you're going to do? And I think you'll see it on the other end as well. As you're laying down, as you're trying to get to sleep, you may have noticed the difference between a day where you feel accomplished, where you know you worked on the right things, where you did your best, you did all you could, versus you maybe held back a little bit. Maybe you avoided, maybe you didn't do the right things. And sleep comes a little bit harder, and it's a little bit like you don't want to go to sleep because you have to face that in the morning. I think kind of keying into that feeling first thing in the morning and last thing at night will be a good kind of indicator in an objective sense of how you've been performing on that day.

The world is on fire right now. How do I stay focused? How do I avoid getting stressed and overwhelmed?

Agreed, agreed. These are tough times, and it feels like the odds are stacked against us. It's hard to know what we can be doing, are we doing enough. I really like this metaphor (this comes from Richard Hamming, his excellent speech called, "You and Your Research"). And he's talking about researchers. You know, some of the preeminent scientists in the world, but it's not necessarily those who are smartest who are doing the work that actually moves the field forward. He says that some of these scientists work all the time with their door open, and others work all the time with their door closed. The distinction he makes is if you work with your door open, there's lots of distractions. People come in and talk to you, there's noise from the hallway, you're constantly faced with "what is going on?" All of these supposed distractions. But it allows you to know what's going on in the world, and most importantly it allows you to do work that is relevant. Where he says those who work with their door closed, you know, you go into your cave and come out with the perfect product, the stone tablets handed down from the mountain, and even though you do more work, that work isn't actually relevant. It doesn't actually matter.

I like to think about this distinction:"When do you need to have your door open? When do you need to be open to what the world is telling you that it needs right now? Once you know that, once you have a good idea of what's most important, can you close that door? Can you go inward and take action?" And you know, I think it's really important to know that moment for you, where you know enough to know what's actionable and what's relevant. It really comes back to that question of, "Is this actionable?" You see something online, it brings up a lot of emotions, and I like these questions, "Does this change my opinion on things? Is it just reconfirming my preexisting beliefs? Will this still be relevant one year from now?" It's interesting how many things fail the test on one of those, in that there's nothing we can do. It's not actionable. It's very temporal. It won't be relevant one year from now. Or it's just confirming what we already knew to be the case. So it's a very good filter for what we let in from the world.

Right now, this is something I'm talking a lot about with clients. It's very important to account for the priorities that don't fit on your to-do list. I know I've found, and I'm sure you guys could say the same, that I had to really redefine what I considered productivity with the pandemic, with recent events. That I couldn't really account for all the things that I was doing. I was confident that I was doing the right things. They felt important. But it wasn't crossing things off of the to-do list in a traditional sense. That these emergent priorities, like family, like safety, like activism, they don't neatly fall into the to-do list, but they're clearly important. They're clearly actionable. And so I needed to lower my own expectations on what I could accomplish in terms of the tangible, and be open to these intangible, these illegible goals that are a little bit harder to track, a little bit harder to measure progress on, but are for me clearly much more important.

Account for those. And be aware that your productivity is going to go through cycles. It's very common to have this regression. We have these periods—I know for me, March was one of them—where adrenaline is flowing. Every day feels like a 10, because it's just so clear what we need to do. Something is so pressing and urgent. And that period ends and it no longer feels like our lives are in danger, or the lives of others around us are in danger. And that regression, that recovery is very normal, is very to-be-expected. So account for that. Know that productivity is lumpy, it's not going to be consistent from day to day. I think right now, especially, it's important to be aware of your emotional triggers. And you know, when you're avoiding something, what are those outlets for you? When you find yourself clicking through the feed, or for me recently playing a game, it's like, "What am I avoiding right now? What's triggering me?" It can be really helpful to create constraints around those, especially during your peak energy, your peak productivity times. 

I've been finding a lot of mileage using Freedom to block social media during the day recently. And I really encourage you when you're . . . it's very important to stay informed. If you're looking to learn more about what's going on, direct that process for yourself. Don't let the algorithms serve you, don't let news media serve you a narrative that's been packaged and packaged in such a way to be maximally emotionally-inducing, maximally controversial, confirming the beliefs that you might already hold. Look for alternatives. Look to disprove your assumptions. Seek outwards rather than being served.

All of this just goes into having a supportive environment. And you know, that's not just your desk space, that's not just who is around you. But think about the environment in which you work and live. Actively be aware of, "How is this environment serving me in positive and in negative ways?" Is there a way to make your environment so that it's a little bit more supportive of your goals, a little bit more supportive of positive mental health? I think that it's a good thing to realize that our behavior in a lot of ways is deterministic and determined by our environment, so if we put ourselves in a more supportive environment, we'll naturally nudge ourselves towards better behavior. I think this ties in really well to the next question which is:

How do you improve your mental game?

I think a lot of this being on your game in terms of staying focused, not being stressed, not being anxious and overwhelmed to the extent that you can, is a big part of that. And I've written about this both in the mental game chapter in Experiment Without Limits as well as an article called, "A Guide To Getting Unstuck," which is probably the article that I refer back to the most personally for going back to the well, looking for ways to get myself unstuck. Because it does happen. A big part of improving your mental game is realizing that some days you're just not going to have it, and that you need to prioritize recovery. On the days where you feel sick, you feel overwhelmed, you're not feeling motivated, acknowledge that and prioritize getting yourself back into a place where you can be performing at your peak. Over the long term, who accomplishes the most is the person who is most consistent. Continually try to be aware of and support your ability to show up.

And when your best self hasn't shown up, prioritize getting back on track. Within mental game, there are three concepts that I find really critical that I'll just highlight. The first is this concept of a warning light. And so imagine yourself sitting in the Starship Enterprise, and you have this big dashboard in front of you. All of these indicators. You can have something like that for your mental state. The problem is, when we're feeling off that’s when our perception is most distorted. When we're least able to see how we're doing. The warning light is an objective sign that something isn't right. That something is going on. And for me, it's these outlets. Playing games, scrolling through articles, scrolling through Twitter, feeling myself emotionally volatile. You guys might know that I play high stakes poker, so I'm constantly losing large pots for large sums, and if I hear myself swear out loud, because I took a bad beat for a large amount of money, I can tell by that saying out loud that this is affecting me and I need to course correct. And the nice thing is that it's objective. I can't deny reality.

So what happens when I notice one of these warning lights on my dashboard go off? I implement what I like to refer to as a firebreak. This comes from the way that we've been putting out fires for thousands of years. If there's a big forest fire, what you do is you dig a hole around the forest, so that when the fire reaches the hole it dies out. And in the same way, when you realize that your mental game is off, you create this firebreak so that you limit the damage, that the fire burns itself out. Another way I like to think of this is you close the container. So this is a way to reset yourself to zero. Like, wherever you are, what does it make sense to do now? And I like to think that a really nice firebreak is removing a source of damage. One that's served me really well is unplugging the router. Turning off my phone. Forcing myself to get away from devices, and in that sense to slow down, to go inward. You know, hopefully going outside. You know, nature can be healing in a lot of ways.

But think about your own firebreak. When you aren't feeling well, what are the outlets that you go to? What are the ways that you can make things worse for yourself? And can you remove that source of damage, so that the fire burns itself out?

Then the final thing is just interventions. These are all about recovery, and I have a nice list on The Forcing Function website in the "Unstuck" article which I'll link to. But you know, when you correlate what the things that you do on a daily basis, and what makes the day feel well, go back to these. Go back to that well. What always makes you feel better? You know, for me I track a lot of these correlations. Things that I do, and you know, one to ten, how was the day? And it's interesting that the most critical correlation was, "Did I go outside today?" And you know, I spend a lot of time on the internet, and it was surprising how many times that I would just go the whole day without seeing the sun. Reliably, those days did not go as well. So that's usually the first thing that I do when I'm not feeling well.

That could go for any of your keystone habits. I know playing some of my favorite songs goes a long way. Meditation recently has been a huge win. But just slowing down your breathing, slowing down in general. And you know, high level here, improving your mental game, it all comes back to awareness. That for me is the keystone habit, and what I always come back to. That practice of, "Can I be aware of my current mental state? How alert am I? How present am I?" And once I am able to calibrate that, I can take steps to bring myself closer to where I want to be.

What's the fastest way to get a new project off the ground? How can I go from zero to one?

I'm gonna answer this in terms of, you know, "How do I set up forcing functions in my life?" I think that's the most reliable way to get started. Getting started is the critical element here. I think of this as a verb change, where the way that you talk about this potential project is completely different. It's "I am writing a book," versus "I'm going to write a book." "I have a startup," versus "I want to create a startup." It's putting those stakes in the ground, that you're already taking action. You're no longer staring at a blank page, but you are in the middle of it. And it's important here to skip the research stage. I think particularly those of you guys on the call are pretty susceptible to this, as I know I am, that we put these artificial barriers between ourselves and taking action. 

In our next Lunch Hour I'm going to be hosting Nat Eliason, who I admire a great deal for starting new projects rapidly in domains that he knows nothing about. We're going to talk about, essentially, "How can you build the parachute on your way out, after you've already jumped out of the plane?" And I think the biggest thing to put in place here is a forcing function. Something to raise the stakes for you. And some commonalities here. I talk about this in the "What is 'The Forcing Function'?” article, is that you have taken a goal that lives inside your head and externalized it. It no longer is something that you can overwrite mentally, but it lives in the world. And ideally, others who care about you, who want to see you succeed, know about it. And this not only creates some accountability but opportunities for feedback. I think feedback is really fuel for a project in its early stages. It goes back to this open door idea of, "Who are you creating for?" And the earlier in the process you can get this other person involved, the more that what you do will be relevant, will be useful.

It also cuts off a lot of these, let's say, "rabbit holes" or perfectionism drives to do things that are unnecessary. It gets back to this most-effective path. If you're creating with this one person in mind and regularly getting feedback, whether this is your ideal customer or your client or your friend, the more that you will make which will be useful. This is peak performance.

In the startup world, we talk about this as an MVP, but I like to think about this as, "What is the crappiest possible version that you can create of what you're trying to do that's at least close enough that someone understands what you're trying to do?" And then show that to them. And it's important to pick a deadline. It doesn't matter what the deadline is, but pick a date where you're going to have something to show. Force yourself to show up. The way that you take something that's important and non-urgent, and make it important and urgent, is you have a deadline. You have manufactured that urgency. And I think that the fastest way that we learn is by teaching. This was one of the ways that I was able to become such a good poker player, is I had a lot of poker students. I was constantly teaching what I learned and what I was learning, and it allowed me to stress test some of my most critical beliefs, learn from others, as well as make these beliefs more accessible so that I could use them in real time. I could internalize them. 

So while you're building in the early stages, share your work. Share the process. Not only will others find it very valuable, they'll get more invested in your eventual success because they've seen the journey, they've seen what's gone into it. 

I talk about this in the learning chapter in Experiment Without Limits, which I think is the most important chapter, because if you can learn how to learn you can accomplish anything. The difference between you and the person who has accomplished what you want is becoming that person, learning those skills. So become that person. Decide what skills you need in order to get this project off the ground. Don't research them, but take a project that you will have to learn those skills in order to accomplish the project. And finally, just make sure that you block off the time in your schedule. If this project is a priority, myself or some other third party should be able to look at your calendar, look at the way you're spending your time, and say, "Clearly this project is a priority for you. Clearly this is something that you are prioritizing." If you're not making progress and you're not spending the time on it that you need to make progress, clearly that's where you begin.

What did you learn from poker that the rest of us can apply?

There's a lot here. I'm in the middle of a post that should be coming out later this month called, "Lessons For Investors From A Professional Poker Player." I've talked about some of these themes as well in an article that I wrote, "How to Build a Service-Based Business.” There are so many lessons from poker, and it really informs what I do a great deal. I would like to just highlight a couple of them that I've been thinking a lot about lately. The first is this gap between talent and skill. What is the difference between those who have the ability to achieve things and those who actually achieve them? In a poker sense, the best players, those who have the most skill, are rarely those who are making the most money. And I set out to ask why. And these are normally referred to as "soft skills," to plug that gap between talent and skill, is that you need to be good enough in order to win, but it's your mental game, your ability to show up, make good decisions, avoid risks, play in good games, that allows you to make the most. But you don't need to be the best in order to succeed, but that you need to show up and you need to be consistent.

That really is the key. When I think about performance, that's what I try to ensure for my clients, that their best selves can show up every day. In a poker sense, I don't know what I’m going to find when I sit down to play. There are some days where there's not a lot of action and I end up deciding, "Hey, my time would be best spent elsewhere," or even just recovering or studying and preparing for next time. There are other days where I sit down and I think, "Well, it's probably going to be slow today," and I end up playing for sixteen hours straight because my expectation, how much I expect to earn, is so high that I assume that, "Hey, if I keep playing now, I can make three times as much per hour if I stick around for another hour than for another day where it will be a little bit quieter." The interesting thing about this idea that "Ninety percent of success is showing up," is I have to be reading for both of those. I have to be ready to sit down, and say, "Well, this isn't really a good use of my time right now," or "I'm not really feeling it, my mental game isn't super strong, I'm going to do something else," or "Wow, this is one of the biggest opportunities I've had in a while, I need to be prepared to be in this seat for sixteen hours of peak focus."

How can you sustain that level of performance? That's really what separates people, because in life, the windows of opportunity are so imperceptibly small, but you need to know what you're looking for and you need to be ready. A lot of that comes down to what we refer to as game selection, which is the biggest determinant of who makes the most in poker: who plays in the best games. I like to say that you can be a Little League baseball player, but if you get yourself into a T-Ball league, you'll be MVP every year. It's knowing where your strengths are, where your sources of advantage are. What do you do that comes easy to you but looks like running up a wall to someone else? Find ways to lean into that, to double down. Be very, very conscious of where you choose. And notice that I don't say "compete" here, because I've learned through poker that reputation is everything. Poker really operates on this one strike rule, where you mess up once, you're ostracized from the community forever, and that the long game is competing to collaborate more.

This might seem like a misnomer, but it's like, "How can I be more helpful to others? How can I work with them more?" You'll always get farther by collaborating. Even in poker, I don't feel like I have competitors, I have peers that I can learn from. These are my coworkers, in a sense. I'm always thinking about my image and my reputation and how I can cultivate that in order to have better deal flow, more opportunities to collaborate with other. A lot of this is simply risk management. Protect your downside. I mean, tail risk is really the only risk that matters. So you know, in a poker sense, most poker players go broke at some point. What can you do to prevent these failure modes? How can you protect your downside? A lot of this comes down to your mental game. On days that you're not performing, you'd be better off not doing anything, so spend that time recovering instead.

The key skills that I use from poker when I'm working with clients I think come down to different forms of pattern recognition. So I think we're all pattern-driven creatures. I talk about a lot of this in terms of physical and mental habits, that if we find ourselves in the same situation, we tend to repeat the same action. So, identify your own patterns. What are the things that you keep on doing? Assume that if you don't change your environment, your circumstances, you'll continue to repeat those patterns.

I think another one is simulation. Every move that I make in poker, I'm trying to simulate how it's going to play out in the future. What are the second-order effects? If I bet here on this flop, I'm already expecting what they're going to do on the turn and river and have counter-strategies to that. I'm simulating this future and thus I'm helping to create a different future, because I'm making these failures in simulation rather than reality. I've thought about all the different permutations of what could occur, all of these alternate universe, and I'm doing my best to choose that universe which is most in line with what I want to accomplish.

This really comes down to extrapolation. We live in a dynamic world and everything that we do has these effects. Right? We exist within a complex system, and so knowing if we do this, what will change? How can we reorient to that new environment? And extrapolating from, "This singular instance has occurred. What does this say about the world? How does this change my beliefs?" The formula here is Bayesian. Something new happens in the world, and based off of that, how do I reorient, how do I recalibrate my beliefs in order to be in line with this new state of the world? Because it's dynamic. It's always changing.

That's just a bit of a preview. You know, keep an eye out for that "Investor Lessons" post that will be coming out. I love talking about this stuff, so hopefully it's not getting too deep into the poker, but these skills are very transferable.

One thing that I forgot to mention that is really near and dear to me in terms of system thinking is feedback loops. I like to say that your improvement in anything that you do, that that speed is proportional to the tightness of your feedback loops. In poker, I'm fortunate that a thousand times an hour—literally, because I'm playing so many games, I have a decision every couple seconds—that a thousand times an hour I'm testing my assumptions, saying, "I thought this was going to be the case, how did that match up to my assumptions?" And because that feedback loop is so tight, if I'm reorienting every time that I make a decision and it doesn't go the way that I want it to, I can get better faster. That skill is relative. And this ties into the next question, which is:

Is there a hack to making better decisions?

I think the hack is to make lots of decisions. The more that we do something, the better we will get at it. And decision making is no different. The key to making better decisions is that feedback. When you make a decision, take those results and look back at that moment that you made that decision. "Did I do the best I could with the information that I had?" I think of this as a decision journal. Especially when you're making a big decision, capture all of the thoughts that are going on so that you can go back to them later and see, "Hey, is there a way I could have gone about this decision differently which would have led to a better outcome?" And it's also just useful to externalize, to get these thoughts on what you're using to make a decision out of your head.

I have a tool that I love for this called the Expected Value Calculator, which you can download online. And the hack of the Expected Value Calculator is that it reveals what criteria is most important to you. I think a lot of decisions become more difficult because we haven't decided what is most important. There's all of these trade-offs. So we're talking about getting projects off the ground. What's most important to you right now? A project that has a high chance of success, or a project that has a high upside? Is it more important to have a project that you can do all the work now, say like a passive income business, and you set that up and you continue to collect dividends, or is it something that's more of a side hustle where you don't need to spend much time on but it goes on continuously? Coming to terms with these different value trade-offs makes a lot of these decisions clear. That's the litmus test: what value are you optimizing for?

I think the easiest way to force yourself to a decision is to timebox it. And I mean literally set a timer. This is something that I do often. I'm struggling with a decision, and a lot of times this uncertainty, this ambiguity causes me to procrastinate. And so I prioritize making that decision. I set a timer for thirty minutes, and I say, "At the end of this thirty minutes, I am going to make a decision. I'm going to take some sort of action that manifests in the world that I am now pursuing this path." And you know, it's remarkable, when you put a deadline on it, how quickly you get to the crux of the decision.

I work with a lot of investors, and investors have difficulty understanding when to execute a trade. Something I work on with them is calibrating their conviction level. On a simple level, zero to a hundred, how confident are you in this decision? And have a hurdle here. How confident do you need to be to take action? Bezos talks about seventy percent, that if you're more than seventy percent confident before making a decision, you've waited too long. That speed is key. That most decisions are actually reversible. I like to think about these as chicken or steak decisions. Like, "What are we having for dinner tonight? Is it chicken? Is it steak?" Doesn't really matter. At a certain point, you know, we're hungry and we need to eat. A lot of decisions aren't really that important and are fairly reversible. So think about that. How confident do you need to be in order to act? And that power of having a number, calibrating that conviction level . . . Let's say I'm sixty percent confident. Well, now that you have a number, you can see what would change that number. What would take me from sixty to seventy percent? What is that key assumption that my conviction level is resting upon? What would change my mind?

If I can identify what information is most valuable to me for this decision, I know the research that I need to do, the person that I need to talk to in order to be more confident in this, in making this decision. Think about that, that these decisions, they really come down to, "What are the assumptions underlying them?" And if you know what you need to change your mind, and you know how confident you need to act, you can make more decisions faster. And that allows you to iterate, that allows you to have these tightened feedback loops that you improve, that you naturally get better at making decisions. That's the hack. Make more decisions.

I think the key decision that we face every day is this next question:

How do you navigate the day's repeating priorities, both at work and at home?

So why is this such an important decision? I talk about this in the Time chapter in Experiment Without Limits, that when it comes to productivity most people are doing it wrong. There's this obsession with being more efficient in trying to do more within a set period of time, or to work harder. This hustle-porn mentality that, "How do I work more hours? I'm going to hack my sleep or I'm going to structure my day so that I have more hours." And you know, I'm not saying that these are a waste of time, but they're not as useful as this core habit of planning, which is, "What is the most important thing to be doing?" Think about this in terms of, the most important thing that you can be doing at this moment is more important than everything else you could be doing combined. Time operates on a power law, and so the way that you become more productive is to spend more of your productive time doing the most important thing. It's that simple.

You know, Ferriss gets a lot flak for The 4-Hour Workweek, and rightly so. It's just a catchy title. But the truth is you can work a lot less if you use that time on the most important things. I talk about this in the Time chapter. How do you identify what that most important thing is? In general, what this really comes down to, is leverage. I like the exercise of tracking your time. This could be for a day or even for a week, and just putting a dollar amount on that time. How much do you value it? And you'll find that you're doing a lot of ten-dollar-an-hour-type tasks, and occasionally there'll be a thousand-dollar-type task. You know, putting stuff like spending time with friends and family aside, which is obviously high value and I'll get to soon, thinking about all of the things that you do in the context of quote/unquote "work." The example that I love to give was I was working with a restaurant franchisee, and she often both found herself creating and menus and creating SOPs for the employees across her ten restaurants to follow, but she also sometimes found herself washing dishes. And there's clearly one of these tasks that's worth ten dollars an hour, in a literal sense, and one of these tasks which is worth a thousand dollars an hour, which is much higher leverage. So identifying those for yourself.

On a given day, this really comes down to just choosing the most important thing. The framing here is, if I only accomplished this—so having some sort of deliverable in mind—what would make the day a success? If I can only do one thing? In general, the fewer priorities that you choose, the smaller the menu of options that you give yourself, the more likely you are to work on something important. Something that I like to do is, I think the daily theme is, "Today I'm going to be writing." "Today I'm going to be studying poker." "Today I'm going to be compiling resources for my AMA." Have that one theme to return to. Start there. Before you check your email, before you jump into the priorities of the world, before you check social media, just spend an hour working on that most important thing. And if you do that, the rest of the day is a bonus.

Just like in meditation, you can constantly come back to this most important thing with this question: is this the most important thing I could be doing right now? You know, on the hour, whenever I notice it . . . I try to be aware. I don't worry if I miss it, but if I notice it, I ask myself that. Is this the most important thing I could be doing right now? If it's not, if I'm doing something that's clearly not, the follow-up question is, what am I avoiding? Usually, that is the most important thing. That could be a conversation, that could be something that people are waiting on me for, that could be that project we talked about earlier which is sitting on the backlog because no one's asking for it. How can I return to it?

One that I like, you know, when I work with executives who . . . sometimes they have direct reports, or people that they're reporting to, and the objection I get often is, "Well, things are assigned to me. I'm not always able to choose what I work on." And this is something that I experienced very acutely when I was working in startups, where the founder that I was working with—who shall remain nameless—constantly came to me with, "This is the new top priority. Whatever you were doing, forget that. I had a dream, I saw this article." Whatever it was. "This is now your most important thing." And the question that I would ask him that I recommend for you is, "Thanks, I appreciate you sharing that. My current priority is X. Is Y more important than that? This is what I'm doing, this is what we said was the most important. Is this new thing really more important than that?" And if you frame it in that way, it will usually become apparent, like, "No, I guess Y can wait." And so that's what it is. Like, the default is the plan, and if something else comes up you need to have a very good reason why it's more important than the plan.

All right, this is fun, guys. Next question.

What are your personal daily routines?

I talk about these a little bit in the Routines chapter, Chapter Four, Experiment Without Limits. I think the most important thing to take away here are the principles behind a routine. I think a lot of people have a hard time sticking to routines because they take them wholesale off the shelf, that they see something that someone else is doing, these classic, you know, "What do you do before 10:00 AM" listicle posts, and they try to follow that. But good routines arise organically. They start small and you build from there. And it all comes back to what are these conditions? What are these things that if you do regularly allow your best self to show up? So I'm going to share some of those for me, and you know, hopefully, try to think about some of the principles behind these, rather than the activities themselves.

There are four routines, so these are two sets of bookends. First is the morning routine and evening routine. So clearly, morning routine is starting the day strong, building momentum. You know, keystone habits. Evening routine is getting ready for bed, unplugging, winding down, getting ready for tomorrow. Those kind of are the bookends for the day. You know, how you start and stop the day tends to reflect how that day goes and how the next day goes as well. That intermedium, in the middle, is what I call the "power up" and the "power down" routines. So power up routine is how you start your workday. What do you do when you first sit down at your desk? Power down routine is you're done working for the day. How do you create that separation, how do you finish strong, so to say?

My morning routine right now is three habits. Takes me about ninety minutes, but on days that I have less time I scale it back accordingly. I think it's important to have a minimum viable or like an 80/20 version of your morning routine, that you can do some version of every day. So even if I only have fifteen minutes, I'll do five-minute versions of these. First is morning pages. This comes from The Artist's Way. It's simply just three pages of longhand writing about whatever comes up. So this could be . . . think of this as like verbal diarrhea. I'm clearing my mind of all the things that are going through it in order to create space. Space for presence, space for new ideas, space for focus. I rarely go back and read these, but there's a subtle confidence in knowing that these thoughts, these ideas have been captured somewhere, that I can go back to them at any time. 

I follow that up with meditation. I'm aiming for twenty minutes a day. Sometimes I only do ten, depends on how much time I have. The process there is super simple. Focusing on breath, particularly the out breath. Any time that I notice thoughts come up, which are often, I just note thinking, and go back to the breath.

Finally is yoga, which is essentially just a set of stretches that I do to get the cobwebs out of my muscles. Motion creates emotion, so if I do these stretches I find that a lot of my afternoon energy issues go away.

I follow that up with, when I start my workday, the first thing I do is I review my plan that I created the day before. This is where I use my simulation muscle. So I'm looking at my plan and thinking about ways that my plan could go awry, that let's say I don't work on this top priority at all. You know, what could have caused that? And I anticipate these distractions or these failure modes, and I mitigate them in advance. Anything that could cause me to get distracted or get up. So, do I need to set up a blocker on this site that I want to check? Do I have water? Do I have tea nearby? Do I have my headphones so I can put on music? And if I'm doing something that requires deep focus, do others around me know not to disturb me? Just simply thinking, "What can I do now to make this day more likely to be a success?"

It gets to the end of the day. For me, I like to have a hard stop, so I have my gym session scheduled at 5:30. So 5:30 I have to end the day no matter what. And so 5:15 is a quick power down routine. And I think of this in Getting Things Done terms as closing open loops. So things that are pending, carrying over for tomorrow, you know, someone I need to follow up with, an idea I have, something that isn't finished I need to come back to, I just write it down and I capture it so that I can come back to it. So I can put that down. And the key here is that it creates a separation, which is especially important. I talk about this in the recent post I did on my guide to working from home, is that you really need to have that separation between your work and your personal life. And this power down routine creates that clear transition, where if you've captured these pending items, you can put them aside. You don't have to think about them, and thus you're better able to recover, to relax, to be present with the people that you love.

I love to just take a couple moments here to reflect on what I accomplished. It's very tempting to just move on to the next thing, and it's powerful to celebrate. No matter how small the win, celebrate the wins. This is a good space to do so. You know, what was accomplished? What is different because you got out of bed today? And then finally, I think of this as reset to zero. This comes from Work Clean, where they talk about high-end chefs treating cleaning their kitchen space as just as important as creating the food itself, is you know, "Is my desk clean? Is it an approachable place to come back to? Can I make it as easy as possible to be productive tomorrow? How do I set myself up for success?" I think that's a missing part of the morning routine. Or even just starting the day that people miss, I like to say that a minute in the evening is worth ten in the morning. You know, what can you do at the end of the day to make tomorrow more likely to go the way you want it to. 

Then finally the evening routine, which is for me the last hour or two before bed, so you know, I say like an hour or two. Having hard stops. So you know, stopping when you're on devices a couple hours before. Stopping when you're taking in food a couple hours before. Getting away from blue light. Turning off lights and going to candlelight if possible. Doing the things that signal to your body that it's time to get ready for sleep. And so thinking about the things that relax you. So for me you know, reading fiction. Taking a bath. I said candlelight. Meditation at the end of the day. Kind of relaxing my body muscle by muscle. What can I do to relax, get myself ready for a good night of sleep? Those are my personal daily routines. You know, again, think about the principles there and how you can implement one thing for each of these in order to . . . you know, the morning routine starts the day well. Power up—make the workday go the way you want. Power down—create that separation so you can enjoy your time off. And then evening—get a good night of sleep.

Is it possible to scale personal relationships?

I'll pair this with another question that I got, which is, "What is your system for keeping in touch?"

I think that it's important to put away the typical productivity mindset for this. Relationships, if done right, cannot scale. I think friendships are built by breaking bread together, which usually takes the form of sitting down, having meals. Obviously, during these times in 2020, that can be more of a virtual form, but in any sense, that the deepness of your friendship is proportional to the amount of time that you spend together. And so trying to 80/20 this, trying to hack your way to deeper relationships, tends to be counter to that goal because it's really about spending more quality time. So try to avoid this optimization mindset, because it will really set you back. It’s something that I've really had to work hard on. 

I think the only way to scale this is by building this habit of being the one to initiate. The friends that I see who are most successful at building a network, at having close relationships, I notice that they're the ones who are always checking in, who are always following up. So whether that's a big life moment, like a wedding or a product launch and they're messaging congratulations, or you know, just a "Hey, you know, thinking about you. What's going on?" type of thing. You know, cultivating that habit of being the one to initiate. Something that I've found, it's kind of wild, the quality of people that you can spend your time with if you're the one who's willing to initiate, whether that . . . I think of this as creating the punch bowl, where I'm trying to create events. One recently comes to mind is I have a weekly game of Settlers of Catan, where I just set the time and say, "Hey, whoever can make it can make it, no obligation, you don't need to come, but if you can we'd love to have you." And just hosting that party. You know, creating the space for people to show up in a low-pressure way.

The people who you most want to spend time with, it's interesting, they have the least amount of ability to set things up, and they actually appreciate a great deal being invited to things. So being the person who is sending those invites. I think a really nice habit that I've built here is I think of this as a weekly sweep. So I have a list of people who I actively want to stay in touch with. You know, my closest friends and family. And once a week I go through that list, and I pick five people and I send them a text. It takes a couple minutes. You know, I'm not very creative, so a lot of the time the texts are just like, "Hey, just thinking of you. How are you doing?" type of thing. But it's remarkable how often that turns into, you know, conversations and eventually collaborations. So think about that habit of, how can you ensure that you're the one who is following up and checking in?

I have to give some of the credit here to my wonderful EA and now product manager Tasha, who's on this call as well. And so that's this tenth question. So we have one more question after this, for those keeping score at home.

How do you delegate to a virtual assistant or an executive assistant?

So, this is the blog post that I'm working on which will likely come out after the investing article, so stay tuned. This is something that I get asked about a lot. And for a lot of my clients who are looking to scale their time, this is one of the first places that we look at. You know, a busy founder, their time is the bottleneck to the growth of the business. And so this goes beyond trying to minimize the time on personal tasks or low-value tasks. Having a great assistant is the closest thing to cloning yourself—you're training someone to think like you, and ideally you trust them enough in order to take action on your behalf. And I can't express the power of that, of knowing you have someone who's actively looking for ways to move your business and your life forward.

That's why I really encourage the people who are thinking about doing this to invest in it, because having someone who is awesome, who is very high agency, can take a lot of initiative, that you really trust, is worth multiples more than someone that you have to tell them step-by-step exactly what to do, and you know, be very careful about how much you give them access to. And that's why I'm very against, in general, virtual assistants, because they require a lot of overhead and exact step-by-step delegation, versus an executive assistant where you can more give that person the objective and the parameters and give them a little bit more ownership in order to take action on your behalf to actually scale yourself. 

I think in a lot of cases it can make sense for an executive assistant to be your first hire, because if you have the right person, part of this role is systemization. This could be literally creating SOPs. This could be taking the things that you do on a recurring basis and just make them easier by creating these processes. But also it makes it easier to bring on people in the future, both by creating systems for it, as well as having someone to help you filter and interview candidates. So . . . you know, because I often find us working with clients that they know that hiring and training is the most important thing they could be doing, but they don't have any time to do it. Having a really good executive assistant can accelerate this process of hiring and getting people trained for their role. And so the way to delegate best with an EA, I've found, is first to optimize for task capture. Any time that you think of something that you could want to do, just make it really easy to capture that, and then regularly get together. 

So for Tasha and I, this is usually twice a week. Once on a stand up, and other time just kind of co-working and working through the list, and just reprioritize these tasks that have come up, and decide which are the most important. A lot of these might end up being someday/maybes, but as long as you come back to this question of, “do we both know what we should be working on right now, what is the most important?”

I encourage you to start with twenty hours a week. You'll be surprised when you get going how many hours you will actually want. And so this could be . . . I recommend handing off, you know, having one large project at any given time that your assistant is working on, that is the core focus of their time, as well as any recurring process-based tasks. So things that are happening on a regular basis to come back to. That combination tends to work really well. So large project, something that they can always be working to move forward, and the recurring task, something that can always act as a backlog-type activity. And keep the feedback loops tight. Invest in this person. Hopefully, you're finding someone who will be with you for years to come, and the more that you invest in training, getting on the same page and process, the more that those returns will continue to compound.

Last question, and I think this one's really near and dear. I'm going to take a little sip of tea. I've been talking a lot. I think it's really important to this audience, and as I go through the life cycle of being passionate about personal development, about peak performance, it's very easy to get caught in the trap of constantly looking towards an ever-receding horizon.

How do you not let optimizing your life get in the way of living it?

I talk about this most acutely in my post, "The Perils of Over-Optimization." So I recommend you checking that out, where we have these myths of perfection that we're constantly striving for, and not only is perfection not attainable . . . Right? It's an imaginary ideal . . . But going after it reduces our satisfaction in the present. And it's important to think about all of these things that we're trying to achieve, our work, our hobbies, our skills, they're all instrumental, they're all subservient to living a good life. This is what I was talking about with Khe Hy, on our last Lunch Hour, which we have the recording of online, which he refers to as the when/then trap. 

The example is, “When I have reached this magic number, then I can quit my job and pursue my side hustle full time.” “When I have an audience of X thousand people on my newsletter, then I can start working on my book.” We put these artificial barriers between ourselves and doing what we really want, rather than going at them directly. And I think that a lot of us, myself included, fall into this trap of constantly optimizing rather than thinking about, "What are we really working towards? Are these distractions? Are these substitutes for what we're trying to actually do?" The antidote for optimization is consistency. Being comfortable with taking consistent, and I call "imperfect action." Not trying to get everything right, not trying to optimize, but just think, "Given where I am right now, what can I do?" And do it intentionally in an imperfect way. Just do something. And whenever you do something, listen to feedback. Be conscious of celebrating any wins that come along the way. Those are fuel. That feedback, that celebration, that gratitude, that's fuel that allows you to keep moving and to stay out of these perfection traps, and just trust that process, that as long as you are taking consistent imperfect action, you will get where you need to go.

That is really the meta-skill of personal development and life: just finding ways to keep moving forward. So a couple of things that I find really helpful here are reframes. The first one is realizing that whoever is able to fail the most is usually the person who's most able to succeed. This comes down to the feedback loops, right? Whoever's taking the most chances. It's important to not let failure stop you, but to reframe that you don't fail, you just learn lessons. Right? The key is always not to pay tuition multiple times, that when you've learned a lesson, incorporate it and use it to take further action. And especially important for over-optimization is your to-do list. Realizing that you're gonna . . . I mean, not to be morbid, but your to-do list is not going to get shorter. It's going to get continuously longer. You're going to die with a full to-do list. That list of books in your Goodreads, in your Amazon cart, is always going to get longer. There's always going to be far more things that you could be doing than you actually will be able to do. And so it's important to think of everything as an opportunity. 

There will always be opportunities. This is the abundance mindset. And the key is just to decide which opportunity you want to pursue. I think Ray Dalio puts this really aptly when he says that life is a giant buffet, and you have to give up some things you want in order to get others that you want more. So think of everything as an opportunity. You can afford to let any opportunity go by. It's like you're waiting for a bus. If you miss a bus, there will be another bus coming shortly. There will be so many buses, so many opportunities. Just decide the ones that you actually want to pursue and go after them.

I'll end here by just saying—and this is a good question to leave yourself with—"What is the most effective path?" You know, I always ask myself, "Why am I doing this? Really?” It's very easy to lose sight of that on a day-to-day basis, but just come back to that question. “Why am I doing this?” For me, I've been privileged to learn a great deal, both through study and conversation with people who are very successful, about what allows us to take action in the world, and it brings me a great deal of purpose and satisfaction to be able to share some of these lessons with you. And so whenever I start window dressing, whenever I start going over an article for the tenth time, I come back to this question. “Why am I doing this, and what's the most effective path to get there?”

Guys, I've left you with a lot today. Thank you so, so much for joining. Thank you again for all the feedback that you guys left on the survey. I'm going to wrap here. You know, I think I addressed the major themes of the questions that you asked, but if anything that I said today really resonated or brought up further questions, feel free to reply to the email. I'm happy to take these questions offline.

You know, this was a lot of fun. If you find this AMA format useful, you know, we'd love to hear that as well. This is something that I really enjoy, having this outlet to talk about some of these things that are important to me, so we'd love do this on a more regular basis. As Tasha's saying, this is recorded, so you're going to get a full recording and transcript of this conversation in your inbox, so keep an eye out for that in the next couple days. And you know, stay safe, stay sane out there. I hope you're all thriving, and you know, thank you so much for your support and for joining us today. Thanks.

 
Chris Sparks