Do less of everything. And more of it.
I started writing morning pages about four months ago. Morning pages are a practice evangelized by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way in which I write continuously in pen on a notepad for three pages. I do this while waiting for my morning coffee to brew. The practice now takes about ten minutes. When I shared this with another practitioner of morning pages who found it difficult to maintain, she was astounded. How could I write so fast? I shared my secret: my notepad is half-size: 5.5x8.5. In contrast, my interlocutor was writing on a legal pad. She was writing twice as many words per page as I was.
The difference between us was that I had a habit that I had carried forward for over 100 days. My friend had a ritual that was hard to keep up with because it consumed so much of her morning. By going small, I enabled consistency of habit.
Another recent example is meditation. I started meditation just a couple of weeks ago and wondered what would drive value. The key to getting started was keeping them brief: just a 5-minute meditation could teach me techniques and give me a rest from the screen. I found fitting the five-minute window into my day much more manageable.
I have since moved up to 10 minutes as part of the curriculum. The meditation is now a transition between different parts of my day to recover focus and energy. I hear that master practitioners meditate for an hour each day. I am sure they get far more out of it than I do. But if I can get half the benefit from one-sixth of the time investment, I can build a consistent habit.
One great way to go small - and go "wrong" - is to allow elapsed time to do the work for me. Processes that take some time can be to my advantage. For example, allowing a google ads campaign to play out over time at a relatively throttled dollar amount will generate helpful information when I come to check on it. Still, there's no "hustle" for the bootstrappers and no "scale" for the real ad-people.
Using elapsed time to get leverage on my work time is an area I am endeavoring to improve. The ability to have experiments doing the work for me while I focus my energies elsewhere makes me feel like a farmer. I till the field, wait, and reap. The land and the calendar do much of the work for me.
When an initiative is outside of your experience, trying to "do it well" often leads us to do more to avoid being called wrong. I remember scenes on The Sopranos in which people talk about technology. The discussion of merits turns on how expensive a given gadget or device is. They do not understand it, so they spend more on it. The ability to internalize a thing comes from a willingness to do it wrong or dirty - whatever we need to do it more.
Doing things small means being willing to do it wrong in the eyes of others - and be called out for it. I took a little opprobrium from "real" writers (who I admire!) for my half-size morning pages. They told me that I am doing morning pages "wrong" because I should be writing the manner that Julia Cameron advised.
Maybe. But when I ask about morning pages, I hear about how people tried it, but it was just too much work. Making it less work was a straightforward solution to creating a habit and gaining the longitudinal benefit. One of those benefits is before you today: after writing morning pages for a couple of months, I started these essays.
Leaving page-count aside, I had written over 40,000 words in morning pages as of that meeting: that's a short book! Put a different way, doing "less" morning page work allowed me to write more morning pages. And I had the value from getting my brain cleaned out and focusing on what I thought mattered for the day every day.
Similarly, making a small experiment in the market gets called from "real" entrepreneurs for being lazy - especially when I am willing to let it ride for a while.
The above call-outs are all friendly - people mean well. They offer their thoughts from their experiences, and I appreciate their wisdom. Drawing their fire is nothing but a benefit: they will share their experiences which might otherwise have remained alien to you.
Attempt more small experiments to learn more. Form more small habits to build aptitudes.
Do it fast. Do it wrong.
And do more of it.
Photo by Duminda Perera on Unsplash