We celebrate the hustle. We talk about the importance of speed in business. I hear the expression “let’s gooooo” a lot in marketing and entrepreneurship circles. I listen to people crowing about their long lists. I’ve seen the humblebrag that they worked so hard, but they could not crack the whole list. This failure demonstrates their devotion to hustle while fetishizing goals that are always just out of reach.
I am too lazy for this grind. I take no joy in “work hard, play hard.” I enjoy learning, creating, and teaching. I’ll spend many hours on these, and I will do whatever I can to get the rest off my plate.
But all that is work, and sustaining work requires focus and method. I had to figure out how to do all this a few times over my career. Most recently, the pandemic made this rediscovery necessary. I had to adjust to new work environs with my office unavailable. But this process wasn’t just recovery - it was a revelation. I discovered a higher level of performance available to me if I would put in the time to master it.
Over the past year, I have ingested ideas from all sorts of productivity experts. These included management consultants, founders, investors, and artists. I took these ideas by “reading” audiobooks. Then I experimented with their ideas in my daily and weekly routines. Future books I read would help fill in what I learned by doing. This compounding effect helped me build a thesis of growth-oriented productivity. With apologies to Feld and Cohen, it boils down to this: do less, faster.
Charlie Gilkey is the author of Start Finishing. He found that most people cannot make progress on more than three projects at a time. He distinguishes between these three “rocks” and the non-project task noise that surrounds us. I find this helpful. What are the three “rocks” that I am trying to move?
I first learned the idea of rocks from the late Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The idea is that if you know the big things you need to accomplish, you prioritize those. Other, more minor considerations (gravel and sand, in his analogy) fill around them.
Covey pere had a clear recommendation on how to implement that prioritization: do first things first. Make progress on the essential rocks first in the day. Only then do everything - or anything - else.
Thanks to the horrors of the pandemic, I was already waking very early from stress when I read the book. After internalizing Covey’s idea, I started dedicating these predawn hours to that mission.
Between wake and when my children stir, I focus on the creative activities that made up my “rocks.”
This essay is one of those creative efforts. I write these words with dawn cracking over my left shoulder.
Covey also had a more outre take that I recently re-read in the Almanack of Naval Ravikant - ignore the gravel and sand. The rocks matter. Most of the rest does not. The gravel and sand require deliberate inattention. My warning is that this inattention can be a painful way to learn: the misses bite.
This rocks-only approach seems like a bold and potentially high-leverage way of investing one’s time. But it begs the question, what makes a rock?
Sean Covey - son of Stephen - and his co-authors ask a fascinating question in 4 Disciplines of Execution. What’s the one thing that has extraordinary leverage on the most critical driver of your business? Not what is the most important thing for your business. Not what drives your business. Where’s the lever? Focusing exclusively on that lever was a revelation to me.
I have found those levers will involve learning, building, or teaching. Each rock is one of those things. Of course, breaking a boulder can reveal another rock that might be a different issue. For example, learning a discipline opens the opportunity to build a thing. Making a thing might then uncover leverage on teaching. Teaching and building can reveal the power of learning something new. So begins another flywheel of compounding value.
Knowing that I can only manage three rocks means I am stopping when I have three levers. I also don’t worry about having the “best” three levers. I focus on having three good ones to ship, free my time, and do something else.
So I have found rocks with lots of leverage. I prioritize them both in importance and sequence. I have dedicated quiet time for those that can use that and my calendar when necessary. Now I am looking to apply better consistency.
James Clear gives me some insight on accomplishing consistency in Atomic Habits. Atomic implies small, but it means unbreakable. I learned in other contexts that habits for people are systems for businesses. Make them robust, and generate returns. I look for cues “in the world” to repeatedly trigger my progress on rocks.
For my writing, I use such cues. I trigger my morning pages by pushing the “start” button on a coffee maker before dawn. Later in the day, a ritual related to going to and returning from exercise gets the next level of writing.
I don’t pretend to have the answers yet - this is a work in progress, and the progress itself is work. Today, I am focused on doing a few things well and consistently. Real artists ship. I am working on earning that mantle.
I don’t need to do it all. I want to do what matters. I will do it well. And I will ship with consistency. In short, I will:
Do less, faster.