Bootcamp: Life Hacking

"The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker."
                                            -Peter Drucker

Drucker followed the previous quote by stating that the most important challenge of the 21st century would be driving similar productivity gain from the knowledge worker. I have had plenty of time to ponder this topic as I have suffered through a strong head cold at home. I have found myself increasingly enslaved to the information Samba. I go from my email to my voice mail to my in-box to RSS reader. By the time I have done one round of the dance, everything has filled up again. Furthermore, like quicksand, the more rapidly I move through this routine, the quicker they fill up from responses. Lord forbid that I have core projects to take care off outside of this dance. After too many 1 and 2am mornings, my body finally put the brakes on with the help of Acute nasopharyngitis (the common cold).

Between prolonged naps and chicken soup, I have pondered how this could be the basis of a post. Thoughts ranged from viral analogies (marketing, etc) to biology. In the end, the takeaway was the simplest of them all. The demands on entrepreneurs (and VC’s) are never ending and unless systematically managed, they spread, like a weed, and take over every waking hour (and even quite a few previously nocturnal ones as well).

One brain study used PET Scans to analyze brain activity in high IQ people. Rather than showing increased activity across the brain, it actually showed focused activity around the core topic. In other words, mental superstars did well not because they could process more (though many can) but rather that they isolate out the noise and focus only on what is essential.

The Economist recently published an article "Reprogram Your Life" that was the genesis of this post. The challenges and distractions we experience today take a very different form from those even 15 years ago…email being the most obvious. The article talks about "life hacking", tricks or "hacks" to reprogram your life. It mentions ideas like setting your email client to pull down email less frequently (say every 30 min) or having "vertical days" where you turn off all distractions (cell, phone, email, etc) and focus on a core task. It mentions two sites, www.43folders.com and www.lifehacker.com which have frequent posts on suggestions.

We fill our lives with urgent activities without fully thinking through what is important. These are Stephen Covey issues on steroids. I posted earlier about how critical balancing family and work lives…well, this is the battle ground.

Some suggestions:
— lay out your goals and core principals at the beginning of each year. these become the northern star against which you can prioritize. redress/modify from time to time.
— prioritize what you need to get done on a daily basis
— weave emails into your prioritized tasks versus responding to "action" emails immediately
— at the end of each day, look at what you did, what was of value, what was not and change future scheduling and time allocation. This works best around chronic time wasting activities
— if you have an assistant, have him/her prune your email for you, handling all scheduling activities
— when you find life spinning out of control, take some time off for Mindfulness (take a walk, clear your mind, meditate, etc). It will help put things into perspective and priority.
— if you procrastinate around major to dos, take 10-15 minutes to break them down into actionable sub items and weave them into your tasks
— militantly say "no" to task forces, committees or meetings that are not core or essential
— there are hundreds of books, blogs and articles around this stuff. Find an approach or set of strategies that work for you.

As with the PET Scan study, it really is about learning what not to do rather than doing things more efficiently. If you want to play in this world, you had better learn to "hack" or be prepared to spend many hours in bed with tissues and cold remedies…