I just got done coaching my son's baseball practice. It has been amazing to watch this group of 7 and 8 year olds improve over the course of the season - learning the fundamentals and now starting to make some pretty great plays. I had a great baseball coach as a kid. I'll never forget the feeling of having the coach show us the right way to throw, and how weird it felt at first, and then how normal it felt eventually. He said: "practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect", and that has always stuck with me. It is the idea in Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, that sustained, directed effort is the thing that gets people from good to great. Making little steps every day, targeted to improve the weaknesses you want to work on. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, the CEO of a very large, successful and fast growing company said something to the effect of "we have always reminded ourselves to have a big vision, but to take small steps to get there" (I am butchering the language but you get the idea. It really struck me because it is easy to think that for companies to grow and be great and big, every improvement has to be a giant, immediate leap. That's a hard mindset to shake, because it's just so intuitive, and there is also so much pressure to grow and succeed. But really, all you can do is focus on getting a little better every day. And over time, each of those improvements is part of the overall improvement, which compounds as it grows. I think it can be hard to give yourself the space, and have the patience, to just focus on making small improvements every day. But it feels to me like this is a very healthy and productive mindset if you can find it.
The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness. My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival, the outlook won't be clear for quite some time. It's been enormously trying on the whole family, and will continue to be for a long time; maybe forever. The issue I want to reflect on here is how, in the face of previously unimaginable circumstances, we seem to have the ability to quickly reset to the new normal. Two weeks ago it was unthinkable that this would have happened and she'd be in this condition, and now, that's just how things are -- that's where we're starting from and it's what we have to work with. I find that encouraging, and also a little bit scary. On the one hand, it shows how adaptable humans are, how we can handle more than we might think. On the other hand, it shows how fragile any current environment or situation can be. I'm inspired by our ability to take things in stride, and also a little bit terrified by the reality of how quickly things can change. For instance, lots of the talk this election cycle has been drawing parallels between now and the WWII era, in particular looking at what people did or didn't do to stop the rise of Hitler. As with Trump today, Germans of the 1930s
A while back, I wrote about Anti-Workflow Apps -- apps that solve problems for you without forcing you to adopt a workflow that you may never fully be able to adopt. Workflow apps (CRMs, to-do lists, project management tools) are super hard to drive adoption towards, as everyone works differently and really resists this kind of change. (of course, it's possible when the reward is super good -- e.g., slack and git/github -- bit those times are rare and more often than that an attempted re-workflow goes splat) So I've been on the lookout for Anti-Workflow tools. Solutions that solve a problem that you think requires a new workflow, but may actually be more effectively solved another, more clever way Today I want to talk about to-dos, because I seem to have found my own personal anti-workflow solution. I've always struggled with to-dos -- I've used every to-do management tool on earth, and have never been able to adopt a workable, effective system. I've tried everything from complicated tracking systems like OmniFocus to simple to-do lists of every possible flavor. Nothing has stuck. For years and years, I kept trying, trying and trying again. In the end, I just gave up and said, fuck it, I'm not using a to-do list anymore. Not going to even try. What happened was that I ended up keeping track of my priorities in a totally different way -- a way that was actually more in tune with my existing workflows. One part of the solution was pretty obvious, and one was surprising. On the obvious side: the calendar. For things that I absolutely must do, and that require dedicated time, I just use my calendar. I'm in my calendar all day long, so it's the perfect place to block out time for important things. So now I set calendar entries for myself, to make sure I set aside time for things that need focus. The calendar is good for things I know I need to do, and that I know are important. What it's not good for is capturing notes, ideas, and small to dos, which often just need to be captured in the moment and prioritized & dealt with (or not) later. This is the use case that has always drawn me back to to-do apps, to no avail. In particular, the really bad thing about a to-do list for this use case is that all it does is make you feel guilty. Items get added to the list, and whether you really need to do them or not, you feel drawn to. And then when it doesn't happen the to-do list just becomes a giant pile of guilt that you do your best to ignore (that's what happens to me at least). That brings us to the less obvious solution. What I've found is that a great way to handle both the capture / prioritization issue and the guilt issue is to use a
I just got done coaching my son's baseball practice. It has been amazing to watch this group of 7 and 8 year olds improve over the course of the season - learning the fundamentals and now starting to make some pretty great plays. I had a great baseball coach as a kid. I'll never forget the feeling of having the coach show us the right way to throw, and how weird it felt at first, and then how normal it felt eventually. He said: "practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect", and that has always stuck with me. It is the idea in Angela Duckworth's book, Grit, that sustained, directed effort is the thing that gets people from good to great. Making little steps every day, targeted to improve the weaknesses you want to work on. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, the CEO of a very large, successful and fast growing company said something to the effect of "we have always reminded ourselves to have a big vision, but to take small steps to get there" (I am butchering the language but you get the idea. It really struck me because it is easy to think that for companies to grow and be great and big, every improvement has to be a giant, immediate leap. That's a hard mindset to shake, because it's just so intuitive, and there is also so much pressure to grow and succeed. But really, all you can do is focus on getting a little better every day. And over time, each of those improvements is part of the overall improvement, which compounds as it grows. I think it can be hard to give yourself the space, and have the patience, to just focus on making small improvements every day. But it feels to me like this is a very healthy and productive mindset if you can find it.
The week before last, my in-laws were hit by a truck while crossing the street after dinner. The time since has been a disorienting whirlwind of sadness, fear, hope and thankfulness. My mother-in-law suffered a very serious brain injury, and while she has cleared the first hurdle of basic survival, the outlook won't be clear for quite some time. It's been enormously trying on the whole family, and will continue to be for a long time; maybe forever. The issue I want to reflect on here is how, in the face of previously unimaginable circumstances, we seem to have the ability to quickly reset to the new normal. Two weeks ago it was unthinkable that this would have happened and she'd be in this condition, and now, that's just how things are -- that's where we're starting from and it's what we have to work with. I find that encouraging, and also a little bit scary. On the one hand, it shows how adaptable humans are, how we can handle more than we might think. On the other hand, it shows how fragile any current environment or situation can be. I'm inspired by our ability to take things in stride, and also a little bit terrified by the reality of how quickly things can change. For instance, lots of the talk this election cycle has been drawing parallels between now and the WWII era, in particular looking at what people did or didn't do to stop the rise of Hitler. As with Trump today, Germans of the 1930s
A while back, I wrote about Anti-Workflow Apps -- apps that solve problems for you without forcing you to adopt a workflow that you may never fully be able to adopt. Workflow apps (CRMs, to-do lists, project management tools) are super hard to drive adoption towards, as everyone works differently and really resists this kind of change. (of course, it's possible when the reward is super good -- e.g., slack and git/github -- bit those times are rare and more often than that an attempted re-workflow goes splat) So I've been on the lookout for Anti-Workflow tools. Solutions that solve a problem that you think requires a new workflow, but may actually be more effectively solved another, more clever way Today I want to talk about to-dos, because I seem to have found my own personal anti-workflow solution. I've always struggled with to-dos -- I've used every to-do management tool on earth, and have never been able to adopt a workable, effective system. I've tried everything from complicated tracking systems like OmniFocus to simple to-do lists of every possible flavor. Nothing has stuck. For years and years, I kept trying, trying and trying again. In the end, I just gave up and said, fuck it, I'm not using a to-do list anymore. Not going to even try. What happened was that I ended up keeping track of my priorities in a totally different way -- a way that was actually more in tune with my existing workflows. One part of the solution was pretty obvious, and one was surprising. On the obvious side: the calendar. For things that I absolutely must do, and that require dedicated time, I just use my calendar. I'm in my calendar all day long, so it's the perfect place to block out time for important things. So now I set calendar entries for myself, to make sure I set aside time for things that need focus. The calendar is good for things I know I need to do, and that I know are important. What it's not good for is capturing notes, ideas, and small to dos, which often just need to be captured in the moment and prioritized & dealt with (or not) later. This is the use case that has always drawn me back to to-do apps, to no avail. In particular, the really bad thing about a to-do list for this use case is that all it does is make you feel guilty. Items get added to the list, and whether you really need to do them or not, you feel drawn to. And then when it doesn't happen the to-do list just becomes a giant pile of guilt that you do your best to ignore (that's what happens to me at least). That brings us to the less obvious solution. What I've found is that a great way to handle both the capture / prioritization issue and the guilt issue is to use a
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
, and I'm sure couldn't believe that such a radical change in national character could happen so quickly. Whether or not you find that comparison fair, the point is that things can change quickly (or
). Given that, I'm thinking about two things: First, man you gotta appreciate what you have when you have it. Looking back at photos from two weeks ago, or thinking about the last time we saw each other a day before the accident -- that's a lifetime ago now. And it's cliche, but realizing how quickly things can change really helps you motivate to appreciate what you have. Whether that's family, friends, democracy, or the environment (however imperfect each may be). For the past week, every time I've been snuggled up with my kids & my wife, or enjoying a moment with a friend, or tackling an interesting work-related issue, I've been hyper aware of how awesome is to be alive and doing that. Second, maybe change isn't so scary after all. Someone once explained this to me as
. We burn a lot of effort and energy worrying about what might happen and what it might mean, resisting any exposure to pain. But this is ineffective and counterproductive, and in fact only
increases
our suffering. When bad things actually do happen, we face the pain and move through it, and only then are then able to build up. This is hard to internalize, especially with smaller things on a day-to-day basis, but I think there's something there to grab onto. To sum up, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supporting us through this time, and also thank you to everyone out there putting one foot in front of the other to get through every day, no matter
: the "slow hunch" approach to developing ideas. Another idea from that book -- unearthed by studying epic thinkers of the past like Darwin and DaVinci -- is the Sparkfile: a long, running list of thoughts & ideas. Fragments that pile on one another over time. One way to cultivate the slow hunch is not only to keep a sparkfile (in addition to other kinds of journals), but to constantly pour back through it re-reading and reconsidering your previous thoughts, ideas and observations. Turns out that this is also a pretty good way to filter inbound ideas of things to do. Just add them to the spark file, continually review the list, and occasionally do things (immediately or via calendar), and then add new stuff to the top as you think of more things. No pressure -- and absolutely no expectation -- to do everything on the list or turn it into a perfect set of priorities. Just let the mind run, capturing as you go. For me, this idea ties back into anti-workflow because I've been keeping a personal blog/journal for about 7 years now. Which was in many ways a sparkfile, though it started out slightly more long form (starting with a private wordpress blog). The big revolution happened last fall, when I switched over to using
. Diaro is a personal journal tool, with both a desktop web client as well as a mobile app. The mobile app is the key, as it makes it possible to really quickly jot down a thought -- as quickly as you'd do on a to-do app, or email, or notepad. So in the end, the solution to my to-do workflow was not to
add a new to-do workflow
. Rather, it was to extend the workflows I already had going, calendars and the sparkfile. Boy it feels good.
, and I'm sure couldn't believe that such a radical change in national character could happen so quickly. Whether or not you find that comparison fair, the point is that things can change quickly (or
). Given that, I'm thinking about two things: First, man you gotta appreciate what you have when you have it. Looking back at photos from two weeks ago, or thinking about the last time we saw each other a day before the accident -- that's a lifetime ago now. And it's cliche, but realizing how quickly things can change really helps you motivate to appreciate what you have. Whether that's family, friends, democracy, or the environment (however imperfect each may be). For the past week, every time I've been snuggled up with my kids & my wife, or enjoying a moment with a friend, or tackling an interesting work-related issue, I've been hyper aware of how awesome is to be alive and doing that. Second, maybe change isn't so scary after all. Someone once explained this to me as
. We burn a lot of effort and energy worrying about what might happen and what it might mean, resisting any exposure to pain. But this is ineffective and counterproductive, and in fact only
increases
our suffering. When bad things actually do happen, we face the pain and move through it, and only then are then able to build up. This is hard to internalize, especially with smaller things on a day-to-day basis, but I think there's something there to grab onto. To sum up, I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supporting us through this time, and also thank you to everyone out there putting one foot in front of the other to get through every day, no matter
: the "slow hunch" approach to developing ideas. Another idea from that book -- unearthed by studying epic thinkers of the past like Darwin and DaVinci -- is the Sparkfile: a long, running list of thoughts & ideas. Fragments that pile on one another over time. One way to cultivate the slow hunch is not only to keep a sparkfile (in addition to other kinds of journals), but to constantly pour back through it re-reading and reconsidering your previous thoughts, ideas and observations. Turns out that this is also a pretty good way to filter inbound ideas of things to do. Just add them to the spark file, continually review the list, and occasionally do things (immediately or via calendar), and then add new stuff to the top as you think of more things. No pressure -- and absolutely no expectation -- to do everything on the list or turn it into a perfect set of priorities. Just let the mind run, capturing as you go. For me, this idea ties back into anti-workflow because I've been keeping a personal blog/journal for about 7 years now. Which was in many ways a sparkfile, though it started out slightly more long form (starting with a private wordpress blog). The big revolution happened last fall, when I switched over to using
. Diaro is a personal journal tool, with both a desktop web client as well as a mobile app. The mobile app is the key, as it makes it possible to really quickly jot down a thought -- as quickly as you'd do on a to-do app, or email, or notepad. So in the end, the solution to my to-do workflow was not to
add a new to-do workflow
. Rather, it was to extend the workflows I already had going, calendars and the sparkfile. Boy it feels good.
