Tech, Strategy, and other interesting things by Roberto Zoia
What seems like a difference in talent often comes down to a difference in focus.
Focus turns good performers into great performers.
Two keys to focus are saying no to distractions and working on the same problem for an uncommonly long time. Both are simple but not easy.
(From Farnam Street Blog Newsletter, May 16th.
Part of the attractive of this book are its authors. Jake Knapp spent 10 years at Google and Google Ventures, co-founded Google Meet, and among other products worked on the Gmail team. John Zeratsky worked at Google, and led the design for AdWords Editor, and was part of the team that created the YouTube Channels platform. He also was a partner at Google Ventures. I was really curious to learn how they approached their daily work and what productivity hacks they used.
Make Time is a book about finding focus in daily life. The authors propose a methodology based on defining a highlight for every day, a single activity that you write down and protect in your calendar. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing you’ll do, but it ensures that you spend the time on the things that matter to you and don’t spend the day reacting to other people’s priorities.
To beat distraction the authors propose several tactics to achieve laser focus. To manage your energy, you need to take care of exercise, food, sleep, etc. Reflection at the end of the day helps us refine our strategy by asking what worked and what not.
The idea of the book is not to implement all the proposed tactics. “Some tactics will work for you, but some won’t. Pick and test. Look for tactics that seem doable but a little challenging. Look for tactics that sound like fun. Start with one tactic for each step, and build from there.” What works for weeks may not work when circumstances change. After understanding the base of the methodology, you can skim through the book and try what suits you best.
If you are looking for a complete methodology like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, this is not the book. However, if like myself you find GTD too heavy and prefer a more lightweight and flexible approach, you’ll enjoy reading this book.
Neal Stephenson writes speculative fiction. In his books, he explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science.
Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.
— Neal Stephenson, Why I am a bad correspondent
There is so much written about the importance of focus to achieve your goals, that it can be distracting.
It’s easy to deceive ourselves by thinking that working hard all day long means working in the right things. A simple tactic is to use some kind of metric to check, every day, if we are advancing towards our goal, spending our time and energy in the right things.
In his book Triggers. Creating Behavior That Lasts, world-class coach Marshall Goldsmith shares a straightforward technique he’s been using for years. He calls it the “daily questions”. Every day, at the end of the day, he asks himself a series of questions. This questions have been crafted to reflect his priorities, the change he wants to achieve.
The first versions of these daily questions asked directly if he had achieved a particular result or taken specific action. Later, with some experience and better understanding of human nature, he changed the formulation to ask if he had done his best possible effort towards that particular result or action. For example, Did I do my best to have a healthy diet? Goldsmith considers this simple mean so important, that he has a person hired to call him every day and ask him the daily questions.
It doesn’t have to be the daily questions, but focus goes in hand with some kind of review at the end of the day.
(Photo by Romain Vignes on Unsplash.)
Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. According to Newport, the unprecedent growth and impact of technology are creating a massive restructuring of our economy. Deep Work is a book about thriving in this new economy, where jobs that can be automated will be replaced by software or outsourced. “In this new economy three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.”
How does one join one of these groups? Leaving those with access to capital aside, Newport argues that there are two core abilities that are crucial for thriving in the New Economy: the ability to quickly master hard things; and, the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed. These two abilities, explains Newport, depend on your abillity to perform deep work. “If you haven’t mastered this foundational skill, you’ll struggle to learn hard things or produce at an elite level.”
The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
Newport defines Deep Work as professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. In contrast, Shallow Work consists of noncognitevely demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
The book is divided in two parts. The first part explains what deep work is about, why it’s important, and how it will set people appart in the New Economy. The second part of the book contains several strategies for trainning your brain and transforming your working habits. The goal is “to place deep work at the core of your professional life.” The underlying strategies are valuable, but you’ll probably have to adapt the rules the author proposes to suit your needs.