Leveraging Time

“It is not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it is that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.” - Gary Keller, The One Thing

This week, we came across an interesting productivity guide written by Marc Andreessen back in 2007. There are the more radical pieces of advice such as "don't keep a calendar" and "don't answer your phone" that may work for some, but not others. Elon Musk runs 5 companies. He probably keeps a calendar.  Warren Buffett owns hundreds of companies. His calendar is wide open. There are others such as the "3 most important items to do list" and "check email twice per day" that stuck out as more achievable. 

While some of Andreessen's recommendations may be more applicable than others depending on your role and the nature of your work, the main principle behind the guide centers around controlling and focusing the use of your time. 

Time is the only asset that everyone possesses equal amounts of, and yet, how we choose to spend those precious minutes can lead to vastly different outcomes. Each of us leverages our time in a positive or negative direction daily, and the effects of this leverage compound as momentum builds - for better or worse. 

Picking up the phone every time it rings may not be the best solution if you are an executive looking to optimize for a state of flow while writing a major proposal or report, but it may be the best course of action if you are optimizing for bringing in new business. 

Checking your email just twice per day may not be tenable if you're in an operations role, but may be a necessity for busy executives who need to carve out time to allow for strategic and creative thinking. 

Keeping a clean calendar may not be possible for some executives in fields requiring large amounts of team coordination, but may be more than attainable for others in different fields requiring more solo work. 

To increase personal productivity, leveraging your time may look different than Andreessen's recommendations, but there will always be a focus on doing less (urgent but unimportant tasks) to achieve more (strategic, important tasks). Gary Keller says it best in his book, The One Thing:

"Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects." 

There are not hard and fast rules that work for everyone, but there are principles that remain timeless. Maximizing productivity boils down to having the discipline and wisdom of knowing when to say "no" to a task in order to allow your "yes" to remain open for more important work. What are you saying "yes" to today that needs to be a "no"?

Marc Andreessen's guide to productivity (a16z)

+ "Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List. The more into lists you are, the more important this is. Into the Todo List goes all the stuff you "must" do -- commitments, obligations, things that have to be done. A single list, possibly subcategorized by timeframe (today, this week, next week, next month). Into the Watch List goes all the stuff going on in your life that you have to follow up on, wait for someone else to get back to you on, remind yourself of in the future, or otherwise remember. Into the Later List goes everything else -- everything you might want to do or will do when you have time or wish you could do. If it doesn't go on one of those three lists, it goes away."

The economics of the Tour de France (The Hustle)

+ "Cycling’s most important race was born out of financial necessity. At the turn of the 20th century, a French newspaper called L’Auto was struggling to stay afloat. The paper’s staff was asked to come up with ways to increase circulation — and Géo Lefèvre, a 26-year-old sportswriter, suggested putting on the biggest cycling race the country had ever seen. Launched in 1903, the Tour de France was an immediate success. In its first year, the Tour nearly tripled L’Auto’s circulation from 25k to 65k newspapers per day — enough to kill off their main competitor, Le Vélo. Over the next 3 decades, this figure would see a 34x increase."

Shopify, suddenly worth $117 billion, is one of the biggest pandemic winners (Wall Street Journal)

+ "Millions of small businesses have had to adapt to a world where online sales abruptly jumped to levels that weren’t expected for years. U.S. e-commerce sales surged 37% to $200 billion in the second quarter, according to the Commerce Department. Shopify’s software lets merchants choose a theme to create an online storefront and mobile application. Merchants have to upload images and details on their products and organize their inventory. Shopify’s software processes payments and calculates shipping rates. Sellers typically ship items directly to buyers, but Shopify also offers fulfillment services where merchants can store and ship items."

Get ready for the great urban comeback (Derek Thompson)

+ "On October 11, 1871, as the city smoldered, the Chicago Tribune published an editorial with an all-caps headline: cheer up. The newspaper went on: “In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years’ accumulations, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that chicago shall rise again.” And, with astonishing speed, it did. By 1875, tourists arriving in Chicago looking for evidence of the fire complained that there was little to see. Within 20 years, Chicago’s population tripled, to 1 million. And by the end of the century, the fire-flattened business district sprouted scores of buildings taller than you could find anywhere else in the world. Their unprecedented height earned these structures a new name: skyscraper."

The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (Guardian)

+ "In some respects, Frank’s was like any number of small shops in Britain. It had once been essential to the local community, depended-on. And now it was marginal, perishing in plain sight as the people of Dronfield chose to buy their goods in one of a trio of supermarkets, or to have deliveries brought to them by van. Open at 9am sharp, Frank had waited until 11.30am for his first visitor of the day – and here I came, not with an empty shopping basket, but a reporter’s notebook. I’d read about his shop in the Yorkshire Evening Post, and about how Frank was refusing to shut, even as his strength declined and he struggled to keep the lights on. His was the last butcher’s shop in the middle of town. The last traditional shop on the main road. He was the last butcher in an ancient family of them, and he insisted that he wasn’t ready to hang up his white coat just yet."

Where remote work saves commuters most (UpWork)

+ "To understand the potential gains, it’s important to quantify the economic burden commuting currently places on Americans. In 2018, the average person spent 54.2 minutes commuting each day.2 This translates to 4.6 hours a week, 18.4 hours a month, and 9.5 full days a year commuting. And commutes are only getting longer; compared to 1980, the average daily commute has increased by almost 11 minutes a day, which translates to two full days a year."

How to run an impactful offsite retreat (First Round Review)

+ "If your offsite consists of several days of teams just presenting slide decks with a few breaks peppered in between, something’s failed along the way."

The inside story of the $8 million heist from the Carnegie Library (Smithsonian)

+ "In addition, the Oliver Room had Priore himself. His desk sat at a spot that commanded the room and the table where patrons worked. When a patron returned a book, he checked that it was still intact. Security for special collections simply does not get much better than that of the Oliver Room. In the spring of 2017, then, the library’s administration was surprised to find out that many of the room’s holdings were gone. It wasn’t just that a few items were missing. It was the most extensive theft from an American library in at least a century, the value of the stolen objects estimated to be $8 million."

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