Hello busy bee 🐝

Today, I want to tell you why operating at 100% is a recipe for failure.

100% looks great on paper, and maybe it's for this reason we sometimes crave it. It's oddly satisfying to see gauges filled with colour in our task management apps, or know that not one ounce of potential productivity is going to waste.

But it's a trap. Don't fall for it.

The problem with constantly giving everything your all is that life, as you know it, is freaking weird, man. Life is the client who changes the brief halfway through the project, then swoops in with game-breaking additions just before you're due to launch. It's your teenaged offspring whose secret other life you discover when it knocks on your door and flashes its badge. It's your subtle off-white, tastefully thick, watermarked business card, fresh from the printer just before the post-COVID economy forces your company into acquisition. Rebrand, anyone?

Dramatics aside, here's the lowdown, courtesy of Justin Warren from The Crux (Issue #43):

If people are already working with high efficiency—if they are already close to maxed out getting their existing work done on time—there is no spare time you can use to catch up.

Such a system [working at 100%] is efficient, yes, but it's also brittle. If any task slips, all of them do. Attempts to catch up invariably cause even more breakages to happen as people start missing other things, distracted by the catchup work. The whole thing starts to fall apart remarkably quickly.

(You'll need to wait until 8th June to find the full article in their archives, but signing up for The Crux will shunt their latest and most interesting into your inbox.)

What to do instead?

Short answer: Let things occupy no more than 80% of your capacity. At a team level, it leaves room for accidents, emergencies and unforeseen developments. At an individual level, you're still free to devote 100% of your focus to a task at any given time, while giving yourself space to recover, context-switch, and deal with your biological processes.

It's simple, but not easy. Some of us are so wrapped up in a "100% system", there's just no way to budge without having a lot of stuff fall over. But that's the reality of this lifestyle, and perhaps the number one reason to transition out of it.

I'm no expert, but my trusty teaspoon and I have been digging our way out for the 100% hole for the better part of a year. Here's what we've found useful so far:

• Combining or batching tasks. Group tasks by type, location, or some other common element instead of scattering them at random times throughout the day or week. Then set aside a single chunk of time to get them done. You'll be able to tackle them with more focus, and prevent wasting time and energy on context switching. What's more, seeing similar tasks all together may reveal opportunities for cancelling some or scoring two goals with one kick.

• Automating or outsourcing what you can. Like getting pet food and groceries on repeat mail order, scheduling emails for more appropriate times, setting up sustainable routines, organisation systems and build scripts... you get the idea. Some people hire cleaners, dog walkers, personal trainers, virtual assistants; others use calendar reminders, app schedulers, chatbots, etc. The idea is to reduce the overall number of decisions you make on a daily basis, since all of them, no matter what they are, increase your cognitive load.

• Blocking out time for rest either before your schedule fills up or while you're deciding when to do things. This is vital if you're at the mercy of people (including your excited self) who forget that you're a human who needs to eat, think, recover, and use the bathroom. Creative and entrepreneurial types may struggle to avoid filling this time with work, in which case it could help to enjoy a hobby.

• Saying no. There are core things you can't say no to (or you'll cease to function, lose your job, increase your chances of dying, etc.). But there are so many things you can refuse. Make a list of stuff you do you "because you've always done them", "because wouldn't it be nice", or "because everyone else is doing it" — then start culling what's not central to how you want to work, live and contribute to the world.

• Defending the time you get back. Through trial and error, the previous three endeavours should eventually give you back a chunk of resources, be it time, energy or breathing room. The trick, then, is not to give those resources away too readily. Remember: we want to NOT fall back into the old habit of being full to bursting.

Good luck, friend. If you've found other things that work, please hit reply and send them my way.

By the way, I know some of you want archives and RSS for this newsletter. I'm sorry I've been slack on both. My new newsletter system has an automatic archiver, but I'm afraid of relying on a third party for this after losing the archives on my old newsletter provider. I'm working on it; ETA sometime later this year.

Sandy.
sanlive.com

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A good read...

Over the last few years, a rough consensus has emerged that there really are significant harms in giving young people unrestricted access to the internet through smartphones. This is particularly true for pre-pubescent girls.

This consensus arose in part because the main critiques raised during The Data Wars (the period between 2017 and 2020) were resoundingly answered, and because, more recently, multiple independent threads of inquiry (including natural experiments, randomized controlled trials, and self-report data) all pointed toward the same indications of harm.

That's from a summary of a presentation about the current data on smartphone safety for kids. Here's the rest of the summary, but you might find the full presentation with charts and graphs more interesting: On Kids and Smartphones (What Age Is Safest to Get a Device?)

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Finally, here's what I'm up to now.