In a fascinating chapter on meta-learning (that is, learning about learning) in The Four-Hour Chef, Tim Ferriss talks about the deconstruction of skills that we'd love to master. This is "where we flip things upside down and look at what the outliers are doing differently (and what they're not doing at all)."
It's through this kind of deconstruction that we can see what separates the successful from the rest of us. No, it's not where we discover their innate greatness. It's where we uncover the daily habits, rituals, routines, and processes that successful people adopt to bolster their overall productivity and success.
By borrowing just a small number of these processes and routines for ourselves (especially those for avoiding the pitfalls of pervasive technology), we might also be able to benefit from their outcomes.
1. Prioritize Like Warren Buffett
When Buffet's personal pilot was talking to the billionaire investor about career goals, Buffett took him through a simple exercise:
- Write down your top 25 goals
- Circle your top five goals
You've now got two lists: one circled, the other uncircled. Don't misunderstand the exercise, though. These are not high-priority vs. low-priority lists.
Instead, according to Buffett:
"Everything you didn't circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you've succeeded with your top five."
This strict method for prioritizing goals (and eliminating them) has played its part in helping Buffett to achieve so much in his lifetime. It could equally help the rest of us to spend our time more wisely, not just on long-term goals but also day-to-day.
2. Track Your Output Like Ernest Hemingway
Once you understand what your priorities are, tracking your progress is vitally important.
For Hemingway, his priority was to write. So each day, he would track his output (how many words he'd put to the page). This meant there were no illusions about his productivity: he knew exactly what he'd achieved that day. And once he'd met his daily goals, he could log off completely until tomorrow.
Similarly, mathematics professor and author Cal Newport keeps a tally of how many hours he spends on deep, tough work. Tim Ferriss also famously tracks much about his day so he can decipher which inputs are leading to the most valuable outputs (i.e. the 80/20 rule). What gets measured gets managed, after all!
Want to do this yourself? Tracking on a simple spreadsheet works fine, but for some extra features, there are some great habit and goal tracking apps available.
3. Email Like Arianna Huffington
If you think you receive a lot of email, take a moment to imagine the inbox of Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post and Thrive Global, author, and businesswoman.
Facing a burgeoning inbox like Huffington's would get the best of most of us, but thanks to three simple rules, she manages to keep up while still having a life.
- For better sleep: No emails for 30 minutes before bed.
- For a more focused morning: No rushing to emails as soon as she wakes.
- For deeper relationships: No emails when she is with her children.
Abiding by strict email rules is something Huffington takes seriously. So much so, in fact, that she developed a tool for when her employees are on vacation. "The way it works is simple: while you're away on vacation, people who email you get a message, letting them know when you'll be back. And then -- the most important part -- the tool deletes the email."
4. Set Artificial Deadlines Like Peter Thiel
As a billionaire investor and co-founder of Paypal and Palantir, Peter Thiel knows a thing or two about achieving big things in short spaces of time.