It’s an oft-quoted truism in books on learning and productivity that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve true mastery in any skill, from composing symphonies to playing tennis.

Is it true? I have absolutely no idea. It’s certainly an appealing concept, though. We’re used to thinking of genius as an elusive, magical thing that springs fully formed. Boiling down Mozart’s greatness to a regime of dozens of hours a week at the piano until he he’d hit the 10,000-hour mark (before his voice changed) makes the idea of learning to play the piano seem more approachable. It gives you a sense of the distance between point A and point B.

Still, at the rate of 20 or 30 minutes every week or two when you’re feeling restless won’t add up to even Yanni-level playing any time this decade.

Let’s take the baby steps approach.

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Posted in: learning, mastery, practice, skills

Divination is the art of foretelling the future through the interpretation of seemingly random signs. For instance, hieromancy is the art of divination using animal entrails. (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what kind of entrails are involved in anthropomancy.)

Clearly, ancient peoples had even more anxiety about how they were going to spend their day. Without a clear roadmap, they were apt to turn to the nearest crystal ball, a pre-Gutenberg version of a Filofax.

Personally, there are days I’d rather be elbow-deep in cow guts than take another scan through my to-do list. At least a good hieromancer would give you a clear answer, from “the crops will be good this year” to “you will crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!“

This got me thinking: perhaps the lessons of divination can be applied to productivity…

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Posted in: anxiety, deadlines, Productivity, tasks

You’re about to ask your boss for a raise.

You’ve got a big pitch meeting with a potential client in five minutes.

It’s time to negotiate your first home purchase.

The adrenaline’s pumping. The stakes are high. You’ve got all the salient points of your argument down pat, your various counter-arguments holstered, and you’re ready to give ‘em hell.

Then you open the door, shake some hands, and your body shifts into fight-or-flight mode. Your conscious, analytic mind shuts down.

Like a battle, an intense personal interaction is too demanding to properly think about what you’re doing as you do it. You just act, shoot from the hip, work from your instincts. All your preparation goes out the window.

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Posted in: meetings, presentations, speeches

After marveling at Michelangelo’s statue of Goliath-vanquishing [David,][1] the Pope asked the sculptor, “How do you know what to cut away?”

Michelangelo’s reply? “It’s simple. I just remove everything that doesn’t look like David.”

While I’m not totally sure of its accuracy, the conversation still offers three very sage design lessons:

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Posted in: Design, Process

Del.icio.us was a big discovery for me. The ability to access my bookmarks anywhere, share them with others, and discover my friends’ favorites: Wow!

But I had a moment of truth the day I clicked a months-old bookmark only to discover that one of my favorite pages on Web design had vanished. D’oh! I’d really depended on that material! Suddenly apprehensive, I started going through all of my del.icio.us links one-by-one, discovering that a large percentage had vanished off the face of the Web.

It felt almost like I’d had a hard drive failure. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to depend on Web-based content.

Sure, for finding the odd missing page, there’s always Archive.org, but that saves pages intermittently and it’s a fairly clunky solution for an ongoing problem. What I really needed was a social bookmarking service that cached a full version of each bookmarked page with all the graphics and formatting intact.

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Posted in: archiving, bookmarking

Hey, you. Yeah, you, the one reading this post instead of working.

You need sleep. Seven to eight hours. Really. More than exercise. More than your weekly review. More than World of Warcraft.

How many times have you read an article in some magazine about a Tony Robbins-obsessed CEO who claims to get up at 4 AM seven days a week so that they can hit the treadmill before their 8 am morning staff meeting?

Notice how it’s those same CEOs who embezzle the company’s retirement fund and flee to a remote tropical island?

In this country, sleep deprivation is synonymous with power and success. Winners don’t need sleep, right? Edison claimed to sleep 4 hours a night. He was also wildly unethical and electrocuted an elephant. Draw your own conclusions.

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If you read productivity blogs and self-help books regularly, you’ve probably gotten something useful out of them.

Maybe you’ve gotten rid of some bad habits, or organized your desk (and kept it that way).

Maybe you lost weight, or quit smoking, or developed a better relationship with your spouse.

On the other hand, you’ve almost certainly failed many times more than you’ve succeeded. Implemented systems only to drop them, tried diet techniques and failed, struggled to shift your sleep schedule around and snoozed all three alarms.

If you’re teaching a rat a behavior, like pushing a lever or completing a maze, giving it a piece of cheese each time will help. But if you really want that rat to learn something cold, you’ll give it cheese once, then no cheese a couple of times, then another cheese, then maybe a three-cheese break before a third cheese.

Intermittent reward is the most powerful form of behavior modification. That’s why gambling is so popular. By making rewards unpredictable, they become far more satisfying to the subject when they are given, making the behavior in question much more ingrained.

See the parallel? This is why we become productivity junkies. When a few systems and techniques are helpful here and there, we are inexorably drawn to try each new one as it appears whether we need it or not.

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Posted in: Lifehacks, Productivity, relaxation

It happens all the time. You start with the best of intentions. You’ve implemented your new productivity system or habit, you have a clear, manageable set of tasks, a strong goal, all the motivation in the world.

Then, the lightning bolt. Suddenly, your energy and willpower drains out of your body. You slump forward, a limp, unmotivated mess. It isn’t a physical exhaustion, although you certainly feel tired, but rather an emotional and mental exhaustion, a fog that feels too heavy to lift.

“Damn it,” you think to yourself. “Here I am with a solid hour to write that book chapter and I all-of-a-sudden don’t want to do anything but watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer until one in the morning. I was jazzed on the commute home. What happened?”

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Posted in: diet, Lifehacks, Motivation, willpower

It’s that happy-joy-joy time of the year again. Yes, Macworld Expo kicks off next week in San Francisco on January 15th. Steve will be delivering the keynote, and is expected to entice Apple fans with a new mouthwatering product. The rumor mills are abuzz with whispers of an overhaul to Apple’s notebook line and the launch of an ultra-portable Macbook. Sweet!

Don’t have passes yet? You can still get a free exhibit pass here.

If you can’t make it in person, check out live coverage at Mac Rumors Live.

So are you going? Do you believe the rumors? What are your predictions for MacWorld?

Photo by acaben

Posted in: Apple, Macworld

In his excellent book, Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger quotes Socrates, who suggested we “carve nature at its joints.” In other words, when categorizing, we should look for natural distinctions to make before inventing our own.

When I first became interested in productivity, I tried simplifying my life with a better system. I tried to build every possibility into the system so that it became a sort of artificial intelligence, figuring out what I needed to do and handing me one discretely packaged 20-minute-or-less-task at a time. Every task had a duration, a start date, an end date, a priority, tags, notes, an associated project…insanity!

Today, I simplify my system for a better life. The fewer steps (and the fewer arbitrary distinctions), the better.

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Posted in: Lifehacks

It’s tough keepin’ up with the gluttony of “insanely great” Mac utilities. Everyday, VersionTracker lists scores of new apps ready to tweak, optimize, and organize all the crap on your computer. For the most part, I ignore them. Usually, they’re so buggy and poorly designed, I just send them straight to trash after trying them out.

But there are always exceptions.

I’ve just discovered a utility that I now can’t live without. It’s called 1Password, and I’ll never ever throw it in the trash. So what does it do? Here’s the tagline straight from the developer’s website:

“1Password keeps track of all web passwords, automates sign-in, guards from identity theft.”

In other words, it’s the Barry Bonds of password management utilities, injecting your Keychain with a little something extra to hit a home run. It does the basics like storing web passwords, forms, and identity information. Where 1Password really flexes it’s muscle, however, is how smoothly it lets you access that information. Direct browser integration, automatic form submissions, and synchronization all make this a must-have app for any Mac user.

Being a curmudgeony 27-year-old, I was naturally skeptical. “Great, yet another password management utility,” I thought. But after trying it out, I’m now a believer. It has just the right amount of nifty, effective, and useful features. Here are the ones I love:

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Posted in: Mac OS X, Security, Software

First of all, a very Happy New Year to all of you LifeClever readers.

I’ve been a pretty faithful GTD adherent for several years now. Barring project lists, which have never seemed worth the effort to maintain, I’ve stuck to David Allen’s guidelines no matter what combination of calendar, task list, and capture system I was playing with at any particular moment. Until now.

A Moment of Clarity

Last week, I was reading Neil Fiore’s excellent book on avoiding procrastination, The Now Habit. (I love his psychological approach to creating a happy work environment so that you actually look forwarding to work instead of resisting it, but I’ll do a more complete review after a few weeks of use.)

As I read the book, I started to think about the things that gave me anxiety about my own system, the things that soured me on tasks. And it suddenly dawned on me how much time I spent fussing around with them. Every time I finished even the smallest milestone, I’d click into my task manager and slowly work through my contexts, reading and evaluating each and every task. Not to pick the next task, but rather to just sort of “check in” with them. Yes, it’s crazy.

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Posted in: GTD, Lifehacks

We are closing shop for the holidays from now until January 2nd, 2008. We wish everyone a safe, restful, and clever holiday.

Thank you for sticking with us, and see you in new year!

I don’t look back on classes or homework or tests with misty-eyed nostalgia. (Actually, I try not to think about school at all, if possible.) But some of my fondest memories are of learning. The perfect mental engagement of figuring out how something works or how to do something new comes more and more infrequently as we get older. It’s a special experience we take for granted as kids.

Look at any eleven-year-old and you’ll see her or him do at least one thing obsessively and joyfully, whether that’s play video games, wail on their drum set, or do magic tricks. And they get damned good at it in the process.

Remember when learning was fun?

As adults, we learn new skills out of necessity, i.e. you have to be able to do A to get to B, whether B is get a raise or get the TiVo to record America’s Next Top Model.

This holiday season, take that big juicy chunk of free time you’ve been looking forward to and, instead of spending it in front of the TV, learn how to do something new. Not for your job, not out of necessity, but because it’ll be fun. Being able to do something just for the sake of doing it is a wonderful thing. (And face it, TV doesn’t “recharge your batteries,” it leaves you feeling more drained than ever.)

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Posted in: hobbies, new year's resolutions, skills

Dear Reader,

I have friends who write effortlessly like superheroes. Crank 500 words in 2 seconds? No problem. Others sweat uncontrollably, hyperventilate, and tremble at the mere thought of writing.

If writing stirs a panic attack in you, try this: start with an email.

Instead of launching an imposing behemoth like Microsoft Word, call up your humble email program and begin your next writing piece as a simple email.

Most of my articles start this way, as lowly emails addressed to an imaginary persona. It’s my favorite psychological trick for fooling the brain into thinking a writing task is less critical than it is.

Here are the benefits:

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Posted in: Email, Writing

Productivity bloggers place a lot of emphasis on granularity. According to accepted wisdom, if a task squats on your list for a while, you probably haven’t sliced and diced it enough. Solution: Start carving until you’re left with a “next action” that you can effortlessly knock off in 10 minutes flat.

But some tasks simply don’t lend themselves to the GTD slice-and-dice. They demand time, focus, and sustained concentration for half an hour or more. Some typical examples:

• Planning
• Designing
• Outlining
• Writing
• Brainstorming
• Polishing

When I need to do manuscript editing, I can’t slice things up much smaller than a chapter, and even a pass on a single chapter in some books can take a couple hours or more of sustained, uninterrupted concentration.

There are two obstacles to achieving this level of sustained flow: the constant barrage of information and distractions and “need it now” problems we all face, and the fluctuating levels of mental energy we can bring to bear throughout the day. How do we find the time and mental energy for the big stuff while juggling all the tiny-but-still-important stuff?

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Posted in: GTD, Lifehacks, scheduling