What I learned in week 11 2023
I was travelling and on workshops the entire week. But did discover two actionable strategies I’m excited to implement:
Investing your attention like money
I love the book How to Invest your time like money. It’s one of those books that should be an article, but it helped me understand how to think about how I use my time. It’s a finite resource, and I want certain wins out of it.
The same is true for attention. But I didn’t have a strategy for how to direct my attention except “feel bad for binging on stupid stuff” every week when I review what I learned. Which is why I’m excited about this idea by Tiago Forte:
“You should always get some kind of ROI on your attention
How? Just write down what you noticed, learned, or experienced”
Writing it down forces you to iterate on what you learned, and shape your thoughts on the topic. This makes it a lot easier to take action.
Focusing your time on high leverage work
A few years ago I read Antifragile by Taleb (highly recommended!) and ever since I’ve been trying to implement a minimalist attitude in my work and minimise the amount of busywork in my life.
That’s why I love this example by Jakob, this actionable way of minimising busywork both works for individuals and entire companies.
Write down every day exactly how we’re spending our time.
Analyze which of these tasks we really should be doing ourselves ($1k+/hour work).
Do whatever necessary to spend less time on everything else ($10/hour, $100/hour work).
Such a simple exercise, and I suspect it will yield results every time I do it. I have another week of workshops coming up. After that I will try it and see how it works out.