What’s the last crazy thing you saw on the internet?
It was probably within the past day. Maybe the past hour. There are so many interesting, short, shareable things online. You can (and probably have) filled hours of a day sucked into your phone reading tweets, watching videos, refreshing for new threads, looking for comments.
At the end of a thorough session, you might have some regret. Even in the middle of it when you catch yourself going to open Instagram while you have Instagram open already, you still can’t pull yourself out of the loop.
From “Four Thousand Weeks”:
It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook.
It takes pretty conscious effort now to start trimming the fat out of your information diet. (And there’s for sure an interesting TikTok video explaining why fat is not the enemy, but you know what I mean.)
Add some buffer time (good rule, sometimes)
There are always going to be unexpected things that come up with long projects. So it makes sense to plan a little more time for it.
But be careful because work fills up the space you give it.
From “Four Thousand Weeks”:
In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse.
Use the rule when it’s worth it.
A key thing from Ali Abdaal’s PTYA course that I’ve kept in mind is that it’s important to focus your energy on getting a video out a week.
Lower your bar if necessary. Don’t expect it to be a good video each week.
But also don’t keep expanding the time you give to any one video. You’ll certainly fill the extra time up with more effort. Whether it leads to a better video is less of a certainty.
Better to put that effort toward the next video.
If it’s a feature film you’ve been working for three years on, sure, add a few more weeks to polish things.
But it’s not.
(Someday I hope to upgrade “kept in mind” to “actually applied and gained 1000s of new subscribers…)
When you think about the epiphany moments in your life…
… few of them were planned. That’s what made them so significant.
Now, you can’t live your day to day trying to optimize for random epiphanies. But it might at least remove some of the desire to control and time box every 15-minute block of your day.
From “Four Thousand Weeks”:
Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. You might never have been invited to the party where you met your future spouse. Your parents might never have moved to the neighborhood near the school with the inspiring teacher who perceived your undeveloped talents and helped you shine.
If you want to have some luck, allow yourself to leave some things up to chance.
3 principles: accept problems, solve them slowly, and stay on the bus
Those are some steps toward being patient and reaping the benefits.
(1) You won’t get rid of every problem in life. There’s always going to be something that’s an issue. If your ideal vision of a future day to day is one without problems, that itself is a problem that may never go away.
(2) You might not be able to solve some problems all in one go. You can’t complete that book in a day. Take it a bite at a time. Sometimes a radically small bite at a time.
From “Four Thousand Weeks”:
The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.
(3) If you’re trying to finish a large project, figure out the steps that lead there, then just keep walking that path. Unless you’re doing something radically innovative, there are validated paths toward finishing nearly everything. Even in innovation work, there are at least well-trodden sub-paths to stay on.
You just have to stay on that path.
Take a small step. Over and over.
Then you just keep going.
(And avoid your phone.)