☕ saturday mornings #34

living backwards, millionaire fisherman & turning work into free-time

Jan 22, 2022

Happy Saturday all,

I hope you’re having a lovely start to your weekend.

Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering, learning, and exploring over the past few days.

Thanks for stopping by ― I really appreciate your time.

❗ Exciting Update

I recently made a post with My Favorite Links on the Internet.

I’m on a mission to use the Internet to accelerate the spread of interesting and valuable ideas.

On this page, you can find a collection of my favorite books, blogs, podcasts, and videos. I’ve spent years collecting these links and now, I’m excited to share the best of the best with you.

I hope this page will help you spend more time learning and less time searching.

Check it out here. It’s quite good if I say so myself.

Total read time (bolded sections) = 1 minute

Total read time (all) = 5 minutes

✍️ Quote I’ve been thinking about:

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards, they try to have more things or more money in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier.
The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.”
― Margaret Young

📖 Story I loved:

The Fisherman & The Businessman

“A successful businessman on vacation was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The fisherman proudly replied, “Every morning, I go out in my boat for 30 minutes to fish. I’m the best fisherman in the village”.

The businessman, perplexed, then asks the fisherman “If you’re the best, why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish? What do you do the rest of the day?”

The fisherman replied “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, spend quality time with my wife, and every evening we stroll into the village to drink wine and play guitar with our friends. I have a full and happy life.”

The businessman scoffed, “I am a successful CEO and have a talent for spotting business opportunities. I can help you be more successful. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats with many fishermen. Instead of selling your catch to just your friends, you can scale to sell fish to thousands. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to the big city, where you can oversee your growing empire.”

The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the businessman replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the fisherman.

The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, spend time with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine, and play your guitar with your friends.”

🧦Challenge for the week ahead: Batching

“Do not work harder when the answer is working smarter”
— Tim Ferriss

How can you use an idea perfected by stay-at-home moms to power through repetitive tasks and save hundreds of hours of redundant work, turning work time into free time?

The answer is simple: batching.

I’ll explain how you can use batching to increase your productive output by up to 50% and make painful work painless.

Batching = grouping similar tasks into continuous sessions of work time.

Most work can be placed into two buckets: (i) Time Consumers, and (ii) Money Makers.

“Time consumers” are those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important but are necessary for day-to-day life, whereas “Money Makers” are high-impact, productive projects where you are operating at your highest point of contribution.

Have no fear, batching is a strategy that can be leveraged in both arenas.

1) Killing Time Consumers

Batching is a solution to distracting but necessary time consumers. These tasks steal our time and energy, cutting into our productive output and, most importantly, enjoyment of life.

If we look for a common trend across this type of repetitive work, there is often an inescapable setup time involved that is fixed regardless of the volume of work actually performed.

A simple example is doing the laundry.

Every time we do the laundry we have to stop what we’re doing, haul our clothes to the washing machine, put the pile of clothes and detergent in, and press a couple of buttons. Each of these tasks takes a fixed amount of time, regardless of whether you’re washing one item of clothing or 100.

Think of how much longer it would take if we did laundry every time we had a pair of dirty socks? That’s why you wait for a critical mass of clothes to accumulate before you do your laundry. The time and labor involved in washing one pair of socks or an entire basket of clothing are effectively the same.

We already batch tasks in many places in our life. But, if you want to be effective and efficient with your most valuable resource, time, you can lateral this handy concept to a ton of different areas. There are plenty of tasks that fit the batching criteria (fixed setup costs with little additional time required if you increase the volume).

Yet, often our default is to tackle these tasks right away, effectively “washing one pair of socks at a time”.

Instead, we can learn to let a critical mass build up and get it all done in one fell swoop.

2) Optimizing Money Makers

Batching can be used to complete high-impact, productive work in less time and help you operate at your full potential. Done right, batching is a force multiplier for your time and energy.

In a knowledge economy, the biggest threat to our productivity is our inability to focus.

On a day-to-day basis, we get 10x more in-bound than we’d like. Emails from people asking for things, requests for meetings, texts from friends, funny cat videos, and the constant pull of your social media feed.

To make everyone happy, you often resort to trying to do it all. Flipping back and forth between tasks, setting up meetings, answering email, working on a project, getting back to friends, etc. The list goes on.

But, there’s a slight problem with this strategy.

Multi-tasking doesn’t work. By trying to do everything, you usually do nothing.

It’s very easy to simulate forward motion without accomplishing anything.

While multitasking may feel productive, the constant shifting between one task to the next reduces our efficiency and increases the likelihood of mistakes.

The interruptions to our workflow caused by multi-tasking are deadly. Every time you hop between tasks, and workflow is interrupted, there is a psychological switching of gears. Part of your brain’s attention remains on the prior task for 15-30 minutes, reducing your cognitive capacity to work on your current task. This severely limits your ability to do complex deep thinking and problem-solving.

If you consistently multitask, over the course of a day, this can result in hours of your brain operating at a suboptimal level.

Multitasking is handicapping your brain. Therefore the absence of multitasking can become a superpower.

In researching top performers, the most common characteristic of people that had both the most time and the highest income was their ability to single task.

Single-tasking is the opposite of multitasking. It’s the act of identifying the critical few objectives, separating them from the trivial many, and focusing exclusively on one of them, to completion, without interruption.

Cal Newport wrote an excellent book called Deep Work with a simple thesis: we can only perform high-impact, cognitively demanding tasks if we allot 3-4 hour periods to engage in focused, uninterrupted work. (A.k.a. “batch” productive work). And, in a world with AI and machine learning, our ability to do this type of high-impact, creative work is our most valuable currency.

Batching is the solution to minimizing the damaging effects of multitasking while freeing up time to engage in Deep Work. It avoids interruptions and task switching, which makes it nearly impossible to carve out longer periods of uninterrupted time.

Batching is single-tasking. It’s using the science of our brain to hack productivity.

How do you batch?

It’s a very personalized strategy, so it really depends on what works best for you.

I’d recommend starting with one task first. As the experts say, the key to sustainable habit formation lies in starting small.

Set specific predetermined times to work on a task, put it in your calendar, and refuse to do it outside of those times.

Here is a list of tasks that I’ve batched in my life and tracked a 25-50% increase in productivity:

Email: 10 am and 4 pm each day
Phone calls / Meetings / Admin Work: Reserved for Monday and Friday afternoons. It eliminates different commitments scattered throughout the week. Plus, having another obligation stops meetings from running over time. I’ve also noticed that back-to-back calls help me get into a conversational groove, instead of awkwardly stuttering with people.
Planning: I set my schedule every Sunday morning for the week ahead.
Credit cards and Bills: Every Monday after checking email.
Chores / Cooking: Every Sunday night.
Writing / Creative Work: I try to block out time on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday until lunch to work on writing or challenging projects.
Learning: The quality of my learning and work drastically improved once I started carving out 3-4 hour time periods to engage in Deep Work.
Decision Making: I save my decision-making for mornings. There’s a reason Jeff Bezos doesn’t make decisions past noon and Mark Zuckerberg wears the same outfit every single day. Our decision-making ability is like a muscle that weakens throughout the day with each decision we make.

These are not the only examples. If you understand the principle of batching, you can come up with your own use cases.

These don’t have to be permanent changes. Think of them as two-week experiments.

Try it out. See what works.

“Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”
— Bruce Lee

Before you know it you’ll have a reliable way of making yourself more effective and more efficient.

If you enjoy “saturday mornings”, I’d love if you could share it with a friend.

That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.

As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email or shoot me a message on Twitter.

Have a great weekend. You deserve it.

Much love to you and yours,

Thomas