Learning about fear setting, minimum effective dose and our untrustworthy brains from Tim Ferriss, with a side of baby data tracking.
| 🎧 | Practical productivity, a talk with Tim Ferriss |
| 📱 | Huckleberry |
Listening to 🎧
Practical productivity, a talk with Tim Ferriss (podcast episode)
Jess: In this episode (66min) of Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain, she interviews Tim Ferriss for his productivity tips and oh-my-stars I wasn’t expecting to learn quite so much from a one hour conversation*
*apparently much of this was repeating ideas from his book (The 4-Hour Workweek), but I haven’t read it yet 😬
Lots of takeaways:
Fear setting
The opposite of goal setting, “fear setting” is a process Tim encourages as a way to uncover what you’re really worried about, and break it into smaller, less nebulous pieces. The steps include writing down what you would do if the thing you’re afraid of actually happened, and then the practical steps you would need to take to repair the damage, as well as the cost of not doing the thing at all. The full process is explained on his blog (skip to the part called “Q&A: QUESTIONS AND ACTIONS”).
The D.E.A.L framework
This one is a method for auditing your work to make the most of your time — Define, Eliminate, Automate, and Liberate.
- Define your target. What’s driving you? Can you quantify it?
- Eliminate anything non-essential. What can you remove?
- Automate or outsource tasks you don’t need to be doing yourself. What tools, systems, rules or resources can you use?
- Liberate yourself by freeing up your ‘currencies’. How can you get more time, attention, and/or energy?
Minimum effective dose
What’s the least you can do which will have the outcome you want? Or as Tim puts it, what’s the smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome? This can be applied to work, physical health, all sorts of things — making sure you’re doing the most valuable things, rather than a high quantity.
To boil water, the MED is 212°F (100°C) at standard air pressure. Boiled is boiled. Higher temperatures will not make it “more boiled.” Higher temperatures just consume more resources that could be used for something else more productive.
— Tim Ferriss, from The 4-Hour Body
Don’t believe everything that you think
I’ve heard this one before, but it was a good reminder that our brains are thought machines, gathering evidence from our experiences and making lots of decisions about what’s true or false. They’re not perfectly accurate! And they’re optimised for keeping us alive, rather than making us happy, which often involves a lot more worrying than we really need. (Ugh. Thanks, brain.)
Using 📱
Huckleberry (app)
Jess: As a new(ish) parent and data nerd, it tracks that I would find comfort in logging all of my child’s sleeping, eating, and pooping patterns in an app. There are a gazillion options but Huckleberry was the winner for me, based on a useful free version, nice interface, and ease of use.
It’s incredibly satisfying to see the week view from one month (dark mode screenshot of week view) beside the week view from one year (light mode screenshot of view view) to see how far we’ve come — those blue blocks are stretches of unbroken sleep!
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