Everyday Excellence

Bryant July 24th, 2009

One of the best ways to get something done is by brute force. If you want to write a book, all you have to do force yourself to write a page a day and by the end of the year, you can publish your wonderful 365 page (unless it was a leap year) book!

But the problem with that idea is that it requires a sustained commitment for a year. Many people, myself included, have a hard time saying I’m going to do something every day for a year. It’s a bit too daunting and I like to be somewhat flexible with my time.

There is an alternative.

The Sprint

Instead of focusing on something for a year which can be thought of like a marathon, you can focus on it for 30 days with overwhelming force like a sprint. In training for my marathon, the idea was that you didn’t want to push yourself too hard. It was most important to hold back and to just keep running so you could make it long term.

A sprint is different. In a sprint you go ALL-OUT because you know it will be over soon. It’s sort of like pulling an all-nighter to finish a project. You can do it because you know that the end is in sight.

There are some great benefits to taking the sprint approach when trying to reach a goal:

• Work fills up the time you give it: This was first articulated Cyril Northcote Parkinson in the economist and was later christened as Parkinson’s Law. He observed that government bureaucracies seemed to grow and need more resources even when there was less work to do. The idea of the sprint is to short-circuit that and give a set work task less time (similar to timeboxing)
• Your focus during the sprint is very clear: Time is our most limited resource. During those 30 days you can ruthlessly prioritize and eliminate distractions because it’s crystal clear what your priority is for that time.
• You can do anything for 30 days: A year sounds daunting, but 30 days is much more approachable.

Concrete Examples

You may be saying that this all sounds great in theory, but has anyone actually used it successfully? There are lots of great examples of 30-day sprints, but my favorite is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo):

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

You have to love the crank-it-out philosophy of NaNoWriMo.

As for myself, I’ve definitely sprinted in certain areas to hit goals in my life. For the first three months of my working career, I spent all of my free time deeply studying the latest technology books in effort to get up to speed on all the technology out there and to prove myself.

Last fall, my main focus was getting ready to run the Disney Marathon in Jan. So I ruthlessly focused on running every few days and steadily increasing my mileage each week. This meant having to drop other activities I enjoyed like reading and tennis, but I had signed up for running a marathon on a specific date so I knew that there was an end in sight.

Lately, I’ve been sprinting to get an iPhone app developed and placed in the app store. It’s taken up all my free time at night and limited my exercise time, but that’s OK because I can do anything for 30 days…

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven

Ecclesiastes 3:1

Tags: Sprints

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Bryant July 7th, 2009

Which Bird Are You?

Do you love nothing more than getting up at the crack of dawn? Do you do your best work a few hours before lunch? Does the idea of staying up late make you cringe?

Or

Do you love sleeping in? Do you do your best work in the evening? If you had your druthers would you stay up until 3 am every night?

If you identified with the first set of questions, then you are a lark. If the second set rang true, then you are an owl.  As for myself, I’m a diehard lark. I love getting up early and usually am about to fall asleep in my soup around 10 pm. And I find that I am by far the most productive during the morning before lunch.

According to the book Brain Rules By John Medina, about 30% of us can be categorized as a lark (ie – early chronotype) or an owl (ie – late chronotype):

The behaviors of larks and owls are very specific. Researchers think these patterns are detectable in early childhood and burned into the genetic complexities of the brain that govern our sleep/wake cycle. At least one study shows that if Mom or Dad is a lark, half of their kids will be, too

The fact that this is genetic makes total sense to me. My dad is a lark in the extreme. He gets up at 4:30 AM — even on his days off!

But what about the stories we hear of people who only need 4 hours of sleep?

The Outliers

Of course, there always have to be those annoying people that break the mold and make us all look bad. Dean Karnazes, the Ultramarathon Man, who runs 100 mile races regularly had this to say about his sleep patterns:

My average night sleep is about four hours. I absolutely believe that diet is huge in that, and learning to sleep that little was also about a month’s process. It was really, really tough. I used to set my alarm and force myself to wake up, and I’d be groggy. But what I’ve found is that now, those four hours of sleep are a really good, solid four hours, where I used to have seven or eight before, and a lot of that was restless stirring around. Now when I sleep for four hours, it’s very restorative sleep.

When I first read this and other stories of people sleeping only 4 hours a night, I thought that was the secret to success. Just imagine what all you could get done if you only needed to sleep 4 hours per night! So I decided to run the following test on myself:

1. Each night reduce the amount of my sleep by a half hour
2. See how I felt during the day
3. Repeat step 1 until I felt like it’s really impairing me

The results? I got down to about 5 hours and after doing that regularly, I began to accumulate a tremendous sleep debt. I started to feel very hazy during the day. I was irritable and couldn’t think clearly for long stretches.

My own tests confirmed what Medina found in his research:

When sleep was restricted to six hours or less per night for just five nights, for example, cognitive performance matched that of a person suffering from 48 hours of continual sleep deprivation (emphasis added)

The Importance of a Nap

During World War 2, it is said that Winston Churchill got by with only 4 hours of sleep a night. He must have been one of those outliers. What did he say was his secret to needing so little sleep…Naps!

Here’s what he had to say on the subject:

You must sleep some time between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one-well, at least one and a half, I’m sure. When the war started, I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.

Edison and Einstein were famous nappers as well. NASA concurs. Their research (as quoted by Medina in his book) showed that:

a 26-minute nap improved a pilot’s performance by more than 34 percent. Another study showed that a 45-minute nap produced a similar boost in cognitive performance, lasting more than six hours.

Does it Matter What Bird I Am?

The short answer is Yes!

The reason it matters is because once you have the knowledge of when you work best, you can schedule your highest priority tasks for that time of the day. For example, if you are a lark and you have an important presentation to give, you should schedule it for the morning if possible. Owls should schedule their most important tasks for later in the day.

Also, the knowing that you are genetically wired one way or the other, somewhat puts to rest all of the self-improvement blogs which claim titles like “How to become an early riser.” Many of them talk about reprogramming yourself to be one way or the other as if it’s a learned skill rather than a genetic trait. My guess is that there is some wiggle-room, but if you are hard-wired as an owl, it may be exceedingly difficult to make yourself a lark. Instead, embrace it and optimize your life for it.

So in summary, you can use this knowledge to:

• Schedule Key Tasks at Optimal Times
• Incorporate Naps into Your Day
  
• Accept Your Sleeping Habits

Sleep is the best meditation

-Dalai Lama

Tags: Sleep

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Bryant July 1st, 2009

Alzheimer’s is a particularly nasty disease. It robs you of your memories – arguably your most valuable accumulation in life. Anyone who has seen the movie the Notebook or even worse had a relative befall it can attest to the sadness it brings. My own grandmother had Alzheimer’s and it was tragic seeing her slip away right before our eyes.

So I’m always interested in any research that shows promise at reducing the Alzheimer’s risk. Recently, I started reading Brain Rules by John Medina. In his book, Medina attempts to condense the latest brain research into a set of rules for improving your life.

After looking across the vast swath of existing research, his number 1 rule is Exercise Boosts Brain Power:

Is there one factor that predicts how well you will age? It was never an easy question for researchers to answer. They found many variables, from nature to nurture, that contributed to someone’s ability to age gracefully. That’s why the scientific community met with both applause and suspicion a group of researchers who uncovered a powerful environmental influence….one of the greatest predictors of successful aging was the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle (emphasis added).

And by “aging well”, he goes on to describe what exactly that means. Not only were the elderly that exercised more mentally alert than their couch potato brethren, but they out-performed them on nearly every mental test as well. In regard to Alzheimer’s they noticed the largest effect:

[T]he results are clear. Your lifetime risk for general dementia is literally cut in half if you participate in leisure-time physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise lowers your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent (emphasis added).

Wow! I’d always known that exercising had benefits for the body, but who knew that it could improve the mind as well? According to studies explained in the book, the benefit appears to come from increased blood flow to the brain. Whatever the reasons it is ample evidence to make exercise a priority. With that in mind, here are my favorite tips on how to incorporate exercise into your routine:

• Start Small: Working out can seem overwhelming especially if you have not done it in a while. By starting small, you can ease into it and eliminate the most common excuses like lack of time. The research even shows that adding just two 20 minute cardio workouts a week provides benefits
• Create a schedule: When I was training for my marathon, the most useful technique for me to stay on track was to create a schedule and then commit myself to it. That way I knew every Sunday would be my long run and I could plan for it.
• 30-Day Trial: Commit to doing it for 30 days. By timeboxing it, the task becomes more manageable and easier to commit to.
• Focus on Benefits: Like much else, exercise is what you make of it. You can either focus on the pain or think about how much better you’ll look and feel afterwards.

And by making it a habit now, your brain will thank you later

Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

-George Sheehan (physician, author and running enthusiast)

Tags: Excercise

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