The Infinite Loops Guide To... Getting Sh*t Done
"Ordinary people think merely of spending time, great people think of using it." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
1. Gurwinder Bhogal | Make it Fun
“We live in a world where you can essentially create your own games, you can make anything you want, fun. Literally anything you want fun. So you can make all kinds of work fun. And I think that that's a great opportunity for people. I use gamification in my life. I use it for fitness, I use it to learn about the world. […] Pretty much like people who always say, “there's an app for that." Well, now there's a game for that. There's a game for pretty much anything you want to achieve in life. And you can, if you have the will, you can accomplish that.”
More from Gurwinder: Gurwinder Bhogal's Guide to Modern Survival (Ep.231)| Certainty is the Death of Thought (Ep.155) 2. Dr. Julie Gurner | Say No
“Focus is really not just about honing in. It's about what you're able to block out. And if you're not able to block the right things out, whether it be social engagements, other people, certain opportunities. At a certain level you get opportunities all the time. And you have to understand what to say no to and to say no more than you say yes. Yes should be a rarity and it should very strictly align to what your goals are and what you want to do.”
More from Dr. Gurner: Ultra Successful (Ep.176)| Five Paths to Peak Performance (our synthesis)3. Rob Henderson | Motivation is Irrelevant
“One of the things that I learned when I was in the Air Force was this distinction between self-discipline and motivation. What I learned is that a lot of people will say they need to feel motivated to do something, or I don't do that because I don't feel motivated or I lacked motivation, so I'm not going to do it. What the military taught me was like, motivation is just a feeling. Discipline is “I'm going to do this regardless of how I feel.”Whatever is going on up here inside you, that's meaningless. What actually matters is the action you take. A simple example would be going to the gym. I don't feel like going to the gym, but that doesn't matter. What actually matters is did you put your shoes on and did you go inside the gym? In the real world, that's what matters.”
More from Rob: Apocalypse Now (Ep.178) | Evolution of Social Hierarchies (Ep.64) | Talking Television (Ep.124) | Troubled (Ep.203)4. Shreyas Doshi | Not All Tasks Are Born Equal
“There are three types of tasks that you could do. L tasks are leverage tasks, N tasks are neutral tasks and O tasks are overhead tasks.
So, with L tasks, you put in x and you get 10x or a 100x back in terms of whatever the goal or metric is. Neutral tasks, you basically, they're break even, you get one or 1.1x back. And overhead tasks are ones where you get less than what you put in back, in terms of the return.
Now it turns out that for any individual, at any level you have to do tasks across the board. You can't just completely avoid O tasks. Sometimes you have to do them. But what I realized is that I was attacking each task with the same degree of attention, perfection and without discriminating between tasks in terms of when my energy is high versus when it's low. And so a simple tactic I used when I used to maintain a to-do list, I still do, a simple tactic I used to put this insight into action, is that every task that I had on my to-do list, I would just prefix it with the letter L, N or O, depending on my analysis of what kind of task it was. And so just that simple gap between deciding to do a task and just forcing myself to think, "Wait, what kind of task is it? Oh, it's an L task or, oh, it's an N task." Really made a difference in terms of how I attacked that task during the day. And also when I attacked it and the degree of perfection I pursued for it.
And again, I was, the strong, inner perfectionist who resisted doing a less than perfect job on something. But rapidly as I kind of started putting this framework in place, I was able to get myself to be less of a perfectionist with N tasks and O tasks and therefore save time. One thing I say is, for people like me, you should try to actively do a bad job on N tasks and certainly O tasks. Because you're actively trying to do a bad job will actually be a pretty decent job, anyway.”
More from Shreyas: Making of a Great Leader (Ep.118)5. Rohit Krishnan & Alex Danco | Make Things
Rohit:
“I encourage people to tinker more, to produce more.[…] There's a large amount of learning that is impossible to get by reading. Almost all of the useful learning in my opinion, which is I still don't know exactly how or why, but there is a certain process where doing something actually teaches you a lot more than reading something or listening to something. As a consequence, if I can push people more towards acting on anything, it doesn't even matter what it is, just doing something, I think it would dramatically improve the way that we actually perceive the world and are able to make use of it.”
Alex:
“The distillation of all of I think the well-intentioned and constructive theory that you can say about “how do you get people to develop agency in the world and grow out to be useful members?” is literally make things. It's really, really just this act of when you make something, all of the really hard to describe but necessary parts […] are distilled into instructions that are not hard to follow.”
More from Rohit: Demystifying AI (Ep.201) | Ideas for the Future (Ep.94) | Unleashing Curiosity (Ep.136)More from Alex: Finding Mystery in the Margin (Ep.234) | Finding Method in the Madness (our synthesis) | Shopify, SPACs & Status (Ep.27) | Makes A Scene (Ep.39) | Everyone's Job is World Building (Ep.53) | On Social Hierarchies (Ep.70) | What is Web 3.0 All About? (Ep.95) | Where the Circle Begins, or Ends (Ep.117) | On Self-Delusion, Sancho Panza, Safe Words & Seinfeld (Ep.156)6. Jacqueline Novogratz & Devon Eriksen | Just Start
Jacqueline:
“Too many people sit at the starting blocks wondering what their purpose is, waiting to do something. And I've learned that purpose doesn't come to people waiting on the sidelines. We find our purpose by following the thread of our curiosity. We take a step toward it, whether we fall down or learn, we're going to know a lot more after we've taken that step. It leads us to the next step. And before you know it, you've lit the world. So just start.”
Devon:
“You don't need to wait around for somebody to say, "You can create, do so.” You can say to the world, "I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not. And the only thing that's going to stand in my way is if I fail to create something the audience likes, and then I'm just going to go back to the drawing board and try again.” It sounds like such a cliche to say believe in yourself, but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying believe in your artistic vision, in your vision, your complete whole vision of a thing that's not written by a committee that you think will be good and worthwhile, and try that because you're the only one who can do it. Nobody else can create what you see in your head. Either you're going to do it or it's not going to get done.”
More from Jacqueline: Manifesto for a Moral Revolution (Ep.205)More from Devon: Theft of Fire (Ep. 206)7. Grant Mitchell | Tell the World What You Need
“The world responds to clarity of vision. So the ikigai concept is one thing, but it's like you can't have your ikigai until you have the clarity of vision. And when you tell the world exactly what you need, exactly what you're doing and exactly why you're doing it, resources fall in line. If you tell the world, "I don't really know what I want to do. Can you help me? Can you tell me?" No one really gets behind that. You might get a mentor or two, but resources are not going to start flooding your way. When you take a stand, when you have the courage to say, "Okay, I'm going to put my line in the sand," and say, "I'm going to do this, and I'm going to take a risk to tell everyone that I know that I'm going to do it. I'm going to make the ask. I'm going to ask that guy I know that would be the world's best in this to work with me. I'm going to ask this guy that I know has got the funds to finance it, and I'm going to tell the world I'm going to do this," that's when things start happening.”
More from Grant: The Potential of AI Drug Repurposing (Ep.215)8. Julie Fredrickson | Compounding is a Superpower
“Can I see you showing up every single day and making just a little bit of progress?” I think people so underestimate the value of compounding or if you just do a little bit, show up, do something, show up the next day, it changes everything. And that's why I say linear processes aren't always linear because at a certain point, compounding starts to look really interesting, and it's not in day one and two, it's definitely as you get to day 1000, day 10,000."
More from Julie: “Circumstances change. Humanity doesn't. Plan accordingly.” (Ep.181)9. Nir Eyal | Slay the To-Do List; Embrace the Timeboxed Calendar
“The goal of a to-do list is to check boxes. That's the goal of a to-do list […] The right metric of success with a timeboxed calendar, which is what I teach in Indistractable, is not “How much did I finish?” “How many cute boxes did I check off?" Because we know what people do. They'll do the easy stuff, they'll do the urgent stuff. Rather, the metric of success is; “Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction?” That's it. […]
Why is that such a better metric? Because when you say to yourself, "I'm only going to measure myself based on was I able to just focus on that one task?" now, we have a feedback loop. We can say, "Okay, I'm going to work on this presentation, it's going to be 30 slides long and I worked on it for 30 minutes and I got through three slides. Okay, terrific. Well that means I need nine more time boxes to finish that entire task." Now I have a feedback loop. Now this planning fallacy goes away, because I can be able to understand how long things take me, and I can plan accordingly. As opposed to a to-do list. You're never done. There's always more to do. So because a time box calendar gives you a constraint of 24 hours in a day, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. Because you have that constraint, it forces you to make trade-offs. And that's something a to-do list can never do.”
More from Nir: How to Become an Indistractable Force (Ep.235)10. Dr. Gena Gorlin | Abandon Perfectionism
“Perfectionism becomes inherently pathological because it's like trying to appease your inner drill sergeant by dotting every I and crossing every T when actually what's important is just to send out the damn email now before the ship and the investor goes with somebody else or whatever. Actually do the thing or ship the product, get some feedback from customers on this first iteration. They don't care if it's shiny, they want to see if it works, you want to know if it works. And so quit procrastinating by futzing over the design of your title slide and actually ship the thing. And the issue there is that the standards we're pursuing, the quote, "excellence" that we're trying to, the bar to which we're holding ourselves is ultimately arbitrary. It's whether it's based on the expectations of others, whether it's based on just our fear driven avoidance of risks, uncertainty, judgment, or even just action. Often that we're avoiding putting ourselves out there.”
More from Dr.Gorlin: How to Build a Builder (Ep. 236)Explore previous instalments of our ‘Guide To’ series: Leadership, Failure, Communication, Creativity, and Happiness.
This was surprisingly powerful for me. Thanks for curating and sharing!
Excellent work! Again!