Active Recall!

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71: “Work Clean”

Check out the full notes for “Work Clean: The Life-changing Power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind” by Dan Charnas

We’re back (and probably need to stop starting every episode with “we’re back for real this time!”) talking about Work Clean, one of our favorite books from last year and maybe a top-10 all timer.

Some concepts we talk about from the book

  • Daily plan
  • Clean as you go
  • First actions

Work Clean

Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind is really one of the top books for me and Wally if you’re rating it by “I read this book and changed some behavior in my life immediately.”

Some things I’ve written previously about Work Clean

Here’s what I wrote about Work Clean in my 2019 reading list:

It was also refreshing to read a book in this space with similar lessons and completely different stories than you’d usually see in business books. I’ve also had a casual interest in cooking or at least a high interest in being entertained by watching other people cook. So it kept my attention. I continue to want to find books like this: work adjacent. Books with lessons at the right level of abstraction, helping me improve in the work I do without directly thinking about the work I do.

I also wrote about Work Clean in a separate reading log post. Here’s what I wrote about Work Clean then:

  • Pay attention to your movements — There are different movements that slow things down over time. If your arm is going across your body multiple times during prep, you might be able to move whatever it is you’re reaching for over to the side where your arm is. It’s a small change but they add up. Can you cut a movement out of your workflow to reduce friction? Can you automate something that takes 30 seconds that you do multiple times a day?
  • Pay attention to your workspace — For me, this has made me think a lot about how cluttered my digital workspace is. While I can get away from a messy desk by heading to a coffee shop, the digital workspace comes with me. This book makes me think I need to be more honest with the time it takes to keep things organized. And really believe it’s worth it to keep things clean a little bit at a time every day so that I don’t need to do huge audits every once in a while.

An example of my Figma disorganization

In the episode we talked about cleaning up messy spaces, including messy digital spaces.

Like my Figma files. Here’s one with some notecards from blog posts.

figma-notecards

I can just get pretty disogranized. I like pasting stuff into pages as references. After reading Work Clean, I started to see that it caused some dysfunction in my system because those things just pile up. The idea is that I could batch the cleanup later and tidy up.

Gooooood idea. Bad execution.

It’ll end up being this thing where I have a bunch of these scraps of things on the Pages and then going through each piece I sometimes forget why I had it there in the first place and tidying up is more energy than it should be.

Clean as you go is one of the mindset shifts that has stuck with me since reading the book. It’s something I did pretty well already in terms of cooking dinners and things like that so that a good amount of the pots and plans used for cooking are already cleaned by the time we start eating.

It’s something I didn’t apply as much outside of the kitchen. Since reading the book I’ve been trying to be more mindful about deleting these scraps as I continue on with what I’m working on.

Do you have a spot for your keys?

We talked about whether or not you have a single spot for your wallet and keys. I mentioned a technique Cal Newport wrote about called The Phone Foyer method. Here’s a separate post where I wrote about my experiencing with leashing yourself, which I should have titled Leash yourself, UNLEASH YOUR MIND!

Okay that’s it for now

I’m working toward slowly re-organizing the site. Tidying things up a little more here to make sense of all the content. There’s about 250 posts published on this site right now, we did 70-ish podcast episodes, and I have 133 videos that are barely represented on this site at all.

I want this site to tie things together so that all this work can start working together. It won’t be an overnight thing but starting with writing notes for new podcast episodes is a good step forward.

Spider mines and more

Check out the full notes for “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg

The joys of a spider mine. This is also the result of some Siege Tanks firing at the same time. This was from about half an hour ago and not like a decade ago.

Some quick links…

  • Ryen Russillo has Nick Bilton on to talk about American Kingpin — Off the top of my head, top 3 of my favorite audiobooks. (And Bilton’s other book Hatching Twitter might be right up there also.) Russillo also had Tom Wright on last year to talk about Billion Dollar Whale. Bill Simmons mentioned in some episodes this year that he’s trying to read 75 books this year. Would love if Simmons and Russillo discussed those books and brought the authors on, or had Klosterman/Gladwell/Michael Lewis doing Rereadables episodes.
  • I’m continuing through Sam Sheridan’s The Fighter’s Mind and finished the chapter on Josh Waitzkin this morning. Always good to read more about Waitzkin, beyond his book The Art of Learning and his appearances on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. When The Fighter’s Mind was written (2010), Waitzkin was still a brown belt. From chess to push hands to BJJ to hydrofoiling. An expert at becoming an expert.

Here’s a quote from Josh Waitzkin in The Fighter’s Mind. He’s talking about a small, high-level chess tournament and the area usually gets rained on at some point during the weekend. He watched how his chess peers reacted.

“If they put their hands up and run, they’re controllers. So, over the chessboard, you take a critical moment and make it chaotic, out-of-control. Make it so they have to embrace the unknown to perform. “But if they stand and just get wet and enjoy the rain, then maybe they embrace chaos—that was the kind of player I was. So for them you create a position where it takes painstaking, mind-numbing calculation to succeed.

Which reminds me of something else he’s talked about, in raising his son. One of my favorite ideas that I’d love to use down the line when the time comes. When there’s a storm, he takes his son out to go play outside in it.

I don’t think we’ve missed a single storm, rain or snow from going outside and romping in it. And we’ve developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so now whenever it’s a rainy day, Jack says, “Look Dada it’s such a beautiful rainy day,” and we go out and we play in it.

I wanted him to have this internal locus of control; to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.

You can ruin your day just worrying about what’s coming.

Or not.

It’s up to you.

Here’s something from BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, where he talks about starting the day with his ‘Maui habit’—saying “Today will be a great day.”

If you do the Maui Habit and feel that it won’t be a great day, I advise you to still say this phrase. I say it even on mornings when I feel exhausted or overwhelmed or anxious about the day ahead. In that moment, sitting on the edge of my bed, I try to feel optimistic. But if this feels phony, then I adjust the phrase and my intonation as I say, “It’s going to be a great day—somehow.”

That somehow can be throwing your rain gear on and stomping in the rain.

Okay so the connection I’ll pull together here with Starcraft is that Waitzkin has talked about using an efoil to get a lot of paddleboarding reps in without needing to wait around for the environment to participate.

Starcraft lets you get rep after rep of thinking about building an economy and then directing your attention to different things. Whether that skill can transfer directly to other disciplines is another question. Tobi Lutke (foudner of Shopify) has credited Starcraft with helping him learn concepts he’s later applied to business.

Not to say it’s all because of Starcraft.

Just that games can be really good. What have I been learning? I do actually think playing Starcraft has made me a little bit better at directing my attention to the right places when I’m in Figma. To stay moving when working on a user flow instead of narrowing down too early.

Macro for the long run.

Ramblings: Fighters, new archive page, and random links

Every time is a good time for a little bit of free writing. A little bit of rambling. I wonder if I could channel the setup that Bill Simmons had on Page Two where the captioned images are shown on the right and they related to the bullets on the left.

  • I should know enough CSS to do this. I’m a professional gosh dang it.
  • Let me just grab a random photo…
    Ufc 1
    Here’s a random photo from Saturday night: CCC, COVID KING, Salt King 1, Salt King 2
  • Okay so here we go, I think that photo worked. I just needed to do a little bit of tinkering in MarsEdit to get this to work right. Now this should be to the left of the bullet? Let’s see… it worked!
  • This, of course, took way longer than expected. So now I’m going to just drop this quote in here that I always think of at times like this—weeknights when I decide it might be a good idea to start tinkering with the site.

From Jessica Livingston’s interview with Joshua Schacter (founder of del.icio.us) in Founders at Work:

Livingston: When you were doing this in your spare time, did you ever say, “Ugh. This is too much work”?

Schachter: Not really. I was always very careful (not anymore, because the guys that I work with are better programmers) to structure the code—each chunk of code wasn’t larger than the screen—such that I could come in and look at it, figure out what I’m doing, do it, and be done for the day in 15 minutes. So if I could get one thing done a day, I was happy. A lot of stuff, if I could spend more time, I did, but as long as I could get one or two things done a week total, if I didn’t have time, I didn’t have time. So it moved pretty slowly. I worked on it for years.

I also updated the site archives page to just be a list of all posts, month by month. There’s something about seeing it that way that helps reinforce that something’s adding up, post by post. It’s also just easier to skim than the grid of thumbnails I used to have.

I do want to bring back that archive of card animations in some form.

Here’s something from Gerald Weinberg’s The Fieldstone Method:

If you’re preparing to make a fieldstone wall and you don’t have a stone yard handy, you’ll have to accumulate a pile of stones, one or two at a time. During this gathering phase, you’ll traipse about in the fields of your life with an eye peeled for stones that might go into some wall, some day, some where.

I try to remember the fieldstone method whenever I start questioning why I’m writing here at all. Maybe it’ll add up to something some day. (And maybe it won’t!)

I’m starting to think I should try to channel Bird by Bird a little more often, with a better defined end in mind that I’m getting to slowly.

Oh yeah, these are supposed to be ramblings. With recent links and all that.

  • UFC 249: Fight Motion is a collection of slow motion clips summarizing my Saturday night. It seemed like such a circus leading up to the event. And so far it doesn’t seem like there’s much fallout from it. I can see how tempting it is to get into resulting—thinking it was a good idea to run the event because the event turned out to be one of the most exciting, unique cards in history.

Annie Duke describes (and pretty much the entire book is about) resulting in Thinking in Bets:

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting.” When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run.

Oh yeah, those slow motion clips. I started reading Sam Sheridan’s The Fighter’s Mind again and it’s making me grateful to have somewhere to go to just pull up clips of fights mentioned in it. There’s so much video available right at our fingertips.

It looks like I’m just going to paste a hodgepodge of quotes as they come to mind. Here’s something from The Fighter’s Mind about Marcelo Garcia and practicing BJJ with people at lower belts (which is pretty much everyone when you’re at Marcelo’s level)

One thing Marcelo does do, when he rolls with blue belts or white belts, is try for perfection. “The reason I like to train with lower belts is to practice for myself, and look for the perfect positions, to get to places with more facility. To really try and make a perfect position.” Marcelo cherishes the notion of perfection. “I can really improve my holds, and practice new things. You can train exactly the position you want to train.”

I’ve been putting videos from Day9’s Let’s Learn Starcraft series on in the background here and there in the past couple weeks. He did a podcast series a decade ago and one of the episodes is called “Why you should play against worse players”. It reflects a point similar to what Marcelo says. You can reduce focus on some aspect you’re already good at and shift that focus to really cleaning up those execution mistakes here and there.

Practice one thing at a time.

What do MMA fighters and professional gamers have in common?

It seems similar to how rappers want to be ballers (I miss basketball) and ballers want to be rappers (let’s go with Can’t Stop The Reign here instead of 9 out of 10).

Plenty of fighters stream. Here’s Max Holloway in Warzone. Here’s Mark Hunt with an AWP a headhunter in the ring and de_dust2. (As always, I need to link to The Making Of: Dust 2 — one of my favorite articles ever.)

Last book quote for the night.

Mark Hunt really loves Counter-Strike. Enough to mention it as a distraction in his biography, Born to Fight.

When I first started playing there were many times I’d fire on an opposing player who hadn’t even seen me, and find myself dead. It felt like they were cheating. I know they weren’t, though, because eventually I got to that crazy, twitchy level of speed.

I figured out that I liked to play CS the way I liked to fight, choosing to equip myself with the AWP (Arctic Warfare Police) – the big heavy sniper rifle – and the slow-firing but high-calibre Desert Eagle pistol as my weapons. My CS game was all about the one shot that would take you out.

One shot king.

Writing down a schedule (Steps toward fixing my focus)

Just going to keep writing here. With each post, I’ll try to include at least one of the following:

  • A drawing
  • A photo
  • A book quote
  • A podcast episode
  • An embed from Instagram, YouTube, or Libsyn

That photo above is from a Field Notes notebook that I got this week.

Filed notes

It’s filling up pretty quickly. I’m trying to plan more on paper. I know, I have iPads of all sorts lying around, but am starting to think that I might be more easily distracted if I have two digital environments when working. In my case, I’m usually working (like, the actual job) on a laptop as my primary device. Keeping track of things separately in the iPad can be fun but also it can really just present me with two black holes.

Writing that schedule down

Schedule design

It’s difficult enough staying focused in one digital environment with infinite distractions. Having another gets, well, more difficult.

Similarly, larger notebooks invite me to just start new pages of things or write non-schedule stuff on the pages with my schedule for the day.

Here’s what I’m trying, from Make Time (and referencing Deep Work):

Rather than using my calendar or a journal, I used an approach recommended by Cal Newport in Deep Work: writing my schedule on a piece of blank paper, then replanning throughout the day as things change and evolve,

In any case, that’s what I’ve been trying to keep in these Field Notes.

There’s been a lot of redesign. Even for today, I’ve re-written the schedule 5 times. This isn’t good, but that’s the point: I’m not quite good at writing a schedule down, estimating how long things take, and sticking to it. I’m practicing because I think it’s worth getting better at to help reduce overwhelm and just get a better handle on my days.

What are those Xs?

I usually do a workout called Simple & Sinister (100 total kettlebell swings & 10 total kettlebell get-ups). This is a different workout that looks like this:

First X

  • 2 cleans, 1 press, 1 squat
  • 3 cleans, 1 press, 1 squat
  • 5 cleans, 1 press, 1 squat

Second X

  • 1 clean, 2 presses, 1 squat
  • 1 clean, 3 presses, 1 squat
  • 1 clean, 5 presses, 1 squat

Third X

  • 1 clean, 1 press, 2 squats
  • 1 clean, 1 press, 3 squats
  • 1 clean, 1 press, 5 squats

Rest 1 minute, repeat above (4th, 5th, 6th X)

Rest 1 minute, repeat above (the boxes I didn’t mark with an X)

I’m easing into this because I tweaked my back last week.

Ideas that changed your life (but from Starcraft)

I really enjoyed this Ask HN thread: Name one idea that changed your life (which credits this David Perell tweet).

As mentioned in a few recent posts, I’ve started playing Starcraft (Remastered) again. My recommended videos have been taken over by Day9 Learn Starcraft tutorials.

During all this, I’ve been writing down 3-5 sentence notes whenever some kind of life lesson comes to mind.

 

Starcraft - Life Lessons

 

In an attempt to not just have a bunch of unfinished drafts, I’ll grab one now to share some ideas that changed my life that I (at least partially) learned from Starcraft.

Focused attacks on one unit can be good (but be careful)

One of the early micro-ing lessons in Starcraft was to focus attacks on one unit at a time. If you have some group of marines against some group of hydralisks, really any unit probably works here, you’ll stand a better chance if you focus the attack so your group targets one unit at a time. When that one dies, set the group to another single unit, etc.

I’m sure there’s some useful graph of this somewhere.

Anyway, as each unit is killed, the amount of damage your group is taking per second goes down as well.

(This all assumes they aren’t also focus targeting your units as well.)

How this relates to life is to realize the importance of focusing and the unimportance of being good at multitasking.

That said, getting focus blocks is more about environment design. You need to be able to design your day to have fewer interruptions. It’s a longer game.

A short-term skill worth practicing (which could take a while to develop) is to be good at getting into that focused state. So if you’re interrupted, which will happen, your entire next hour isn’t thrown away for a one-minute interruption. Yes, having the deep block without interruptions is good. But things happen. Prep for it.

As for the “be careful” part with a focused attack, if your opponent knows you’re targeting then they can make that unit retreat. Your units will follow it without attacking, taking damage from the rest of the group.

How does this apply to life?

You should reflect on what you’re focusing on regularly. Having complete focus on the wrong thing can be as much a waste of time as doing a bunch of things without focus.

And check this other post out with some other Starcraft Life Lessons (along with some notes about Tobi Lutke, Shopify founder, and how Starcraft shaped his thinking).