Study Hacks

The Fixed Schedule Phenom

Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook.

Last year she was paid over $30 million dollars in stocks and salary.

This year she was named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list.

But here’s what interests me most: in April she revealed that she leaves work every day by 5:30. She has practiced this habit since she first had kids, but only recently did she build enough confidence to talk publicly about it.

This is a fantastic example of the fixed-schedule productivity philosophy that I’ve long preached. As many have discovered, fixing strong constraints in your working life can paradoxically make your work much stronger (as it forces you to focus on what’s important, which in turn helps you get better at what you do).

E-mailing during every waking hour might make you feel more important, but as Sandberg’s accomplishments verify, it has very little to do with your actual impact.

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Speaking of interesting articles, my friend Elizabeth Saunders has a thought-provoking piece on the Harvard Business Review blog about the different types of passion and their implication for our working lives.

The Dune Revelation

In July 2009, I took a trip to San Francisco. At some point, I ended up hiking at a sand-duned nature preserve, not far south from Monterey on Highway 1.

What I remember about this hike is a thought that struck not long into the route. In the summer of 2009, I was two months from defending my PhD dissertation. I had arranged for a post doc after graduation but found the academic market beyond to be uncertain for me and my skills. It was in this context that I had my insight:

Why hadn’t I systematically studied the most successful senior grad students when I first arrived at MIT?

Every year, a small number of computer science students at MIT easily generate multiple job offers while the rest have to sweat the process. What do these students do differently from the others? It’s a basic question and yet almost no one arriving in Cambridge seeks an answer. We instead carve out our paths blindly, sticking our heads up only at the end to see if we’ve stumbled anywhere near our destination.

I ended up fine, landing a great tenure track position at Georgetown, but the 2009 version of myself did not have this certainty, and my failure to more systematically plan for my arrival on this market suddenly seemed a glaring omission.

The $100 Startup

This 2009 experience came back to me earlier this week as I read an advance copy of Chris Guillebeau’s new book: The $100 Startup. In this book, Chris tackles a topic made popular by Tim Ferris: how to build a lifestyle business in a digital age.

Lots of people are enamored by the idea of having a business that requires little investment and yet supports you financially while injecting flexibility into your life.

What sets Chris’s book apart, however, is that he was not content inventing a bullet-point system that simply sounds good. He instead systematically studied people who had actually made these types of businesses work. He started with a survey of 1500 such entrepreneurs which he then narrowed down to 100-200 that he interviewed in more detail. He lists them by name in his appendix.

The result is often messier than the internally-consistent, inspiration-boosting acronmyized systems of competing books and blogs, but the advice come across with an authenticity that’s rare for this topic.

Put another way: Chris did with his interest in lifestyle businesses what I should have done as a grad student with my interest in becoming a professor. The only plan he was interested in was a plan grounded in reality.

The Big Question

I’m telling these stories because they inspire an important question: Why do so few people do what Chris did? Most of us are content, it seems, to work hard and build complicated systems, but we avoid basing our efforts on a reality-based assessment of what really matters.

And I think I finally have an explanation…

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Feeling Low on Flow

In a trio of recent articles, I emphasized that flow is dangerous (see here and here and here). It feels good, so we’re tempted to seek it out, but it doesn’t actually help us get better: the key process in creating a remarkable life.

Most of you liked this concept, while a few of you thought I had missed the boat. Here’s an example of the latter sentiment:

I disagree with [your] point. Flow is the experience of being lost in one’s effort. That can easily happen when one is highly challenged and enjoying the intense effort.

There was also quite a bit of discussion on what, exactly, “flow” means, with enough different points of view presented that I soon felt that the whole issue was becoming muddied and difficult to wade through.

Then someone sent me an article penned by Anders Ericsson — the psychologist who innovated the study of how we get better by introducing the idea of deliberate practice. In this article, which was published in 2007 in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Ericsson addresses the difference between flow and deliberate practice:

It is clear that skilled individuals can sometimes experience highly enjoyable states (‘‘flow’’ as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) during their performance. These states are, however, incompatible with deliberate practice, in which individuals engage in a (typically planned) training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.

In other words, the feeling of flow is different than the feeling of getting better. If all you seek is flow, then you’re not going to get better. There is no avoiding the deliberate strain of real improvement. (This is not the say, however, that you should not seek flow in addition to deliberate practice as a strategy to recharge, or experience it as unavoidable when you put your deliberately honed skills to use.)

Ericsson concludes by echoing a warning familiar to Study Hacks readers:

The commonly held but empirically unsupported notion that some uniquely “talented” individuals can attain superior performance in a given domain without much practice appears to be a destructive myth that could discourage people from investing the necessary efforts to reach expert levels of performance.

He said it. Not me.

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This post is part of my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying the principles of deliberate practice to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building a remarkable working life.

Previous posts:

• The Satisfying Strain of Learning Hard Material
• Beyond Flow
• How I Used Deliberate Practice to Ace my Computer Science Final
• Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player
• Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice
• Perfectionism as Practice: Steve Jobs and the Art of Getting Good
• Complicate the Formula: John McPhee’s Deliberate Practice Strategy
• If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

(Photo by Kofoed)

A Deliberate Morning

This morning I finished my notes for an upcoming lecture in my graduate-level theory of computation course.

There are two points I wanted to make about these notes…

1. The process of creating them is very hard. On average, it takes me between 2.5 to 3 hours to prepare a lecture. This preparation requires that I work with absolutely zero distractions as the material is too difficult to be internalized if my attention is divided in any way. Furthermore, the work is not particularly pleasant. Learning things that are this hard does not put you in a flow state. It instead puts you in a state of strain, similar to what is experienced by a musician learning a new technique.
2. I have gotten better at this process. The lecture I prepared today was the twenty-first such lecture I have prepared this semester. The earliest lectures were a struggle in the sense that my mind rebelled at the strain required and lobbied aggressively for  distraction. This morning, by contrast, I was able to slip into this hard work with little friction, tolerate the strain for three consecutive hours, then come out on the other side feeling a sense of satisfaction.

Recently, we have been discussing the deliberate practice hypothesis, which argues that knowledge workers can experience big jumps in value if they apply deliberate practice techniques to their work. My three-month experiment in timed, forced concentration provides a nice case study of this idea. I am now better at mastering hard concepts than I was before. The mental acuity developed from this practice translates over to the research side of my job, helping me more efficiently understand existing results and more deeply explore my own ideas.

To toss the ball back in your court, imagine what would happen if you replaced “graduate-level theory of computation” with a prohibitively complicated but exceptionally valuable topic in your own field, and then tackled it with the same persistence…

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This post is part of my series on the deliberate practice hypothesis, which claims that applying the principles of deliberate practice to the world of knowledge work is a key strategy for building a remarkable working life.

Previous posts:

• Beyond Flow
• How I Used Deliberate Practice to Ace my Computer Science Final
• Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player
• Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice
• Perfectionism as Practice: Steve Jobs and the Art of Getting Good
• Complicate the Formula: John McPhee’s Deliberate Practice Strategy
• If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

The Chess Master and the Economist

A reader recently sent me an interesting interview with Ken Rogoff, a hotshot economics professor at Harvard.

As a young man, Rogoff was a world-class chess player. He eventually translated his ability to grad school where he studied economics with a focus, naturally enough, on game theory. What caught my attention in Rogoff’s interview was his dedication to diligence.

Even two interests, in Rogoff’s thinking, represented one too many:

[A]t graduate school he became convinced that dividing his attention meant that both his chess and his economics were suffering. He had to make a decision. [He chose economics.] “Part of my strategy of moving on was to give it up completely. I don’t play chess casually…Not unless it’s incredibly rude to decline playing.”

He elaborates:

“Being very good at anything involves being somewhat addicted.”

Bottom line: I am increasingly stricken by the yawning gap that exists between the feel-good, follow your passion, be the change you want to see-style chatter that fills the online world, and the reality of how people actually end up making a true impact.

(Image by jojoivika)

Professorial Exodus

Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I did for many years after college, I learned to recognize a curious ritual. Come June, the academic offices of Harvard and MIT would clear out as a significant fraction of these schools’ professors decamped to New Hampshire, Maine, and, for the more remuneratively famous among them, Martha’s Vineyard.

Some professors I knew would fall off the radar completely, while others would shift to three day a week schedules. But come summer time, you couldn’t take it for granted that a professor would be on campus.

Interestingly, the biggest predictor of a professor leaving was status: the more important a person’s work, the more comfortable they were taking time off. Here’s my hypothesis: once they built confidence in their understanding of value — how to identify what really matters and what it really takes to produce it — they gained the confidence required to push everything else aside.

Are You Busy or Valuable?

When the weather turns nice, as it has been recently down here in DC, I remember this Cambridge ritual. It reminds me of an important point: creating value is unrelated to busyness. When you find yourself — as I sometimes do — working long hours, day after day, reacting and e-mailing and hatching schemes, it’s useful to remember that you’re working more than some of the world’s most respected and impactful thinkers.

The hard part, of course, is that it’s easier to be busy than it is to be valuable — but this shouldn’t stop us from every once and a while taking advantage of a nice day to shut things down and spend a few hours trying to figure out the difference.

(Photo by Christopher Wisker)

A Career Crossroads

In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good job offers.

The first was from Microsoft. It paid, by 2004 standards, about as much as you could possibly earn right out of college (around $85,000 in cash and stock per year).

The second offer was to join the computer science PhD program at MIT. It paid considerably less (around $28,000 in stipend) but promised near complete freedom (MIT is quite unstructured and entrepreneurial).

I had no clear preference for which job to take — they both seemed exciting. But in my effort to make a decision, I stumbled on a key tool in the career craftsman toolbox.

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A Nervous Sophomore

The following question came from a sophomore finance major at a well-known state university:

I have read and heard that entry-level investment bankers have to work long hours doing meaningless grunt work assigned by bosses (sometimes portrayed as evil)…How can your career craftsman philosophy be applied to high stakes fields such as finance?

This reader believed in my career philosophy and was perfectly happy to sidestep the flawed idea that he should “follow his passion.” But the option of heading into investment banking — a popular choice for his major at his university — was making him nervous.  The requirements for standing out in this field seemed brutal and he wasn’t inspired by the rewards you can obtain for banking stardom (more respect and money in exchange for more work hours and stress).

I told him not to become an investment banker.

Here’s why…

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