Monthly Archives: June 2010

Time Allocation Goals vs. Output Goals

Posted inBusiness5 Comments on Time Allocation Goals vs. Output Goals

When people set goals they usually define clear, measurable outputs. E.g.: “Today I’m going to write 1,000 words” or “This afternoon I’m going to finish QA testing this version release.”

But this approach doesn’t work as well for tasks of considerable complexity where what’s required of you is uncertain. Projects where there’s a clear end-goal but it’s in the distant future. The specific intervening steps, and the time required for each step, are unknown.

I’m involved in such a project right now. When I work on it I set goals around how many hours I want / need to spend. My daily goal might be: “Spend four hours working on [specific thing related to general project].” Then I’ll put my head down and make progress. And if I spend four solid hours, I consider the goal met. I am very disciplined about making sure I only count time that’s real work — if my mind wanders or if I get distracted, I turn off the clock.

As I’ve set time-allocation goals I’ve figured out the maximum amount of time I can realistically apply toward different types of tasks in a given day. I can usually do at most 4-5 hours of “hard focus work” and 4-5 hours of “light focus work” (email, blogging, Skyping) per day. A big variable for people is whether meetings fall into “hard focus” of “light focus.”

Bottom Line: The right kind of goal setting depends on the person and projects involved. For long-term projects where the specific steps and time necessary for each step are uncertain, setting short-term time allocation goals works well for me.

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All inbound email to me is now automatically marked as “read.” No more bold messages that scream to be opened. I would find myself opening the bold messages even before I had finished dealing with an older email. Thanks to Cal for this idea. I reccomend trying it.

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Assorted Paragraphs

Posted inRandom1 Comment on Assorted Paragraphs

It's too hectic in Chi-Chi-Chi Le-Le-Le to write anything of length myself, so I will instead pass on the following paragraphs which have recently caught my eye.

Ryan Holiday comments on the importance of doing rather than over reflecting and advising:

What caught my attention about your post – and let’s face it, I get hung up on things most people don’t – was you that you were reflecting on a process that you’d only just begun. More honestly, you were giving advice to other people because it’s easier than focusing on yourself. It’s easier than quietly setting out to do your work, creating a position of credibility and then speaking from it.

This is a nasty distraction and habit that the internet completely enables. Think about a comedian in your position 20 years ago – who would he have published those pieces to? He couldn’t have, at least until he was much further down the road. In a way he’d be lucky because he wouldn’t have this gratifying avenue to publicly “reflect” on the process. He’d be more likely to spend that time actually engaging in that process. His sense of self and confidence would be built through the result of that labor, not from the false image he’d crafted in front of a different audience. In some cases, the most honest thing to do is to say nothing at all.

Robin Hanson a few years back on innovations and economic growth:

The truth is that the artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking “creativity” matter little for economic growth. Instead, most of the innovations that matter are the tiny changes we constantly make to the millions of procedures and methods we use. And changing these procedures does not require free-spirited self-expression. Instead, it is quite natural for people to constantly think about tiny changes to their procedures as they follow those procedures. In fact, we imagine far more such changes than we can afford to pursue.

Christopher Hitchens being interviewed about his memoir:

There are still people who want to criminalize homosexuality one way or another, and I thought it might be useful if more heterosexual men admitted that they are a little bit gay, as is everyone, and that homosexuality is a form of love and not just sex.

The close of a piece on how the Thailand riots have affected the country's notorious sex trade:

At about midnight, an adorable little girl who looks like she might be about 6 years old comes into the bar selling flowers. "Where else in the world," says Terry, "could I give that girl 1,000 baht, take her outside and do whatever I wanted to her?"

On the authenticity of Ron Artest:

We love Ron Artest because he's real. Not just as a hip-hop cliche—unapologetic, unflinching loyalty to his roots—but as an authentic, honest-to-God example of human complexity. Against a backdrop of cardboard cutouts in jerseys and shorts, Artest gives us three dimensions.

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If You Want to Know How Things Are in Reality

Posted inPhilosophy12 Comments on If You Want to Know How Things Are in Reality

Kaj Sotala, a self-described pursuer of truth, a few years ago offered some tips for those who want to "know how things are in reality." Excerpts below with my bolded highlights:

* Study things from as many points of view as possible, and try to understand as many models of thought as you can. This way, you can better understand the behavior of other people, and how people can think in ways that seem incomprehensible to you. If an atheist, talk to religious people until you understand them well enough not to consider them silly; if religious, talk to atheists until you understand them in the same way….

* Recognize your fallibility. Realize that in a quest for the truth, your own biases become your worst enemy. To defeat your enemy you must understand it, so set forth on studying it….Find the time to peruse articles like Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases and Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks. In your interdisciplinary studies, especially emphasize the sciences that help you in understanding and combating your bias, and the ones that allow you to think clearly – in his Twelve Virtues of Rationality (which is required reading for you), Eliezer Yudkowsky recommends evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory and decision theory….

* Discuss the same subjects repeatedly, even with the same people. If you are losing a debate but still cannot admit you're wrong, ask for time to ponder upon it. Decide if your hesitation was you being too caught up in the defense of a topic, in which case you only need time to get over it and accept your opponent's arguments, or because there was more relevant information in your mind that you couldn't recall at the moment, in which case you need time for your subconsciousness to bring them to your mind….

* Avoid certainty, and of all people, be the harshest on yourself. 80% of drivers thinks they belong in the top 30% of all drivers, and even people aware of cognitive biases often seem to think those biases don't apply to them. People tend to find in ambiguous texts the points that support their opinions, while discounting the ones that disagree with them. Question yourself, and recognize that if you want your theories to find the truth, you can never be the only one to evaluate them….Meditate on the mantra of "nothing is impossible, only extremely unlikely". Think of the world in terms of probabilities, not certainties.

Here is Kaj's post on his personal values. Here is his "About Me" page on his personal web site where, in addition to basic factual information, he lists his one-paragraph stance on free will, ethics, rationality, love, religion, copyright, distribution of wealth, and medical regulation.

He is 24 years-old. For gender he writes: To paraphrase rm: "If there are men and women, then I'm a man. If there are men, women and transsexuals, then I'm a man. If there are men, women, transsexuals and something else, then I am something else."

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Movie Review: 500 Days of Summer

Posted inMovies3 Comments on Movie Review: 500 Days of Summer

Artists explore love and romance constantly. If I had to rank the accuracy and helpfulness of discussions of love by medium, from worst to least-worst, it would be: Hollywood movies, pop music, non-fiction writing, fiction writing.

The movie 500 Days of Summer is an excellent exception to this ranking. It’s the story of boy meets girl in Los Angeles. But as Morgan Freeman’s narrator voice warns, “It’s not a love story.” In this film, it’s the guy who falls for the woman, and then has his heart broken. She’s taken by him but ends it because it doesn’t feel right. After things go south, he can’t quite get over her. He tries to win her back. It doesn’t go according to plan. But he does find a light at the end of a different tunnel.

The movie jumbles the chronology — it starts near the end, then jumps to the beginning. This is an apt approach for a love story. When you reflect on failed romance, you often dwell on the low points and either forget the high points altogether or confuse when they happened.

The side plots are fun and interesting. At one point a split screen shows “Expectations” and “Reality” and proceeds through the scene showing the differences. After the guy and girl sleep together for the first time, the guy walks to work with a spring in his step, as you’d expect — and a spontaneous Bollywood dance sequence you don’t expect.

Here’s Roger Ebert’s thumbs up review of the film with these three winning sentence: “One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this.”

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The Hurt Locker is another good movie out on DVD. I thought about it for a couple days afterwards, which is always a good sign. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, one can easily forget what’s happening there. This movie brought me into that world for a couple hours. A memorable scene took place not in the war zone. The main character, who de-activated bombs in populated areas in Iraq, is in a supermarket back in the U.S. after completing his tour of duty. His wife asks him to pick up cereal so he wanders over to the cereal aisle. The dull florescent lights shine down on the abandoned aisle. Supermarket music plays in the background. He looks at the endless variations of cereal. Hundreds of different types. You could feel the triviality of the moment reverberate in his head. Going from saving lives on a daily basis to electing which type of Cheerios to purchase. He re-enlists and goes back to Iraq.

Other movies watched and recommended: Capote and Away We Go.

Finally, if you haven’t already read the excellent Esquire profile of Roger Ebert, you should.

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On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to Brazil next month for 1.5 weeks, mostly Rio, if you live there or have tips, drop me a line.

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Singular Competence = Passion = Happiness

Posted inCareers5 Comments on Singular Competence = Passion = Happiness

Eric Falkenstein channels Arthur Brooks' new book to discuss the connection between happiness and finding your comparative advantage at work:

He states that the key factor in one's happiness–not experiential happiness, but 'remembered happiness' that is more correlated with 'life satisfaction', see Kahneman on the difference–is 'perceived earned success'. This is the willingness and ability to create value in your life or the life of others. He states that if you ask someone if they feel like they are creating such value, they are happy, regardless of how much they make. Giving people money, via welfare or inheritance, does not make people happy, because this if anything discourages the effort needed to find and develop such a niche. …

Finding alpha is about finding your comparative advantage in your work. As David Ricardo noted about comparative advantage, it exists regardless of one's absolute advantage, it's what one is relatively best at, basically, one's most productive activity. When you find it, you are literally being all you can be.

Invariably, one finds one is good at what they like and vice versa, because you can only get good at something via a lot of effort, and if the task is perceived as onerous or boring you won't put in enough effort; if you are good at it, you'll find you like the appreciation you receive from others that is greater than in any other activity. Thus, finding your alpha is like Brook's 'perceived earned success'. If you find what you would do for nothing and get so good people pay you for it, you will probably be happy.

One important refinement of this idea is that there's a difference between current and permanent value: Pets.com vs. Google, the works of John Kenneth Galbraith vs. Ludwig von Mises. They might, at one time, have generated the same appreciation, but one faded, the other proved highly prescient. One's sense of whether one is creating permanent value, irrespective of current rewards, is important as well, because its rather ghastly to think one's lifework will be seen like past experts in quack homeopathy, irrelevant if not a joke.

There's more, then this conclusion:

The key is doing the best with what you can, the self-awareness and motivation to develop one's strengths so that your hard work generates a maximum payoff going forward. As Muhammad Ali once said, "You can be the best garbage man or you can be the best model–it doesn't matter as long as you're the best." 'The best' is mathematically improbable, 'really good' generates the same result. If you are really good at your job your day is filled with sincere gratitude by colleagues and customers, and hopefully you can also have a family that appreciates you as well (but for vary different reasons).

The Cal Newport shorthand would probably be something like: Singular Competence = "Passion" About Work = Personal Happiness.

I thank Cardiff Garcia for the pointer. Here's Cardiff's post on scalable careers which draws on the same Taleb chapter I blogged about last year.

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Justin Wehr's sound advice: "When in a sour mood, stop everything and ask if you are in need of food, sleep, a potty break, fresh air, or exercise."

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