— 16 minutes read —

Under the umbrella term “time management” are a collection of skills one can develop and use in order to tackle any kind of project ; especially the larger and more challenging ones. Although most of us are battling with procrastination and various setbacks ; I’m not going to talk about that today. I will assume we are in a perfectly capable mindset with a bunch of time on our hands and a goal to pursue. I want to focus instead on what to do once we are sit in front of our projects and ready to work. When working independently, planning can certainly be daunting. In the absence of any sort of manager above our heads to direct our focus ; prioritizing and organizing the work is left for us to do. Below is one way to break a project down and plan its execution in a manner that tries and maximize the odds that all tasks will move-on to completion without major hurdles. This is how I’m currently doing it and accounts for the main errors likely to arise as we move forward on our adventure. Let’s take it step by step.

Open a text editor

The first thing I ideally want to do before tackling a fat project is to sit down in front of a good text editor and start planning out the ins and out of the work-life I’m going to try and adopt in the following weeks to month. My software of choice for such a task has been Typora for a while now. It’s all about simplicity of use. It features the markdown syntax which probably figures among the most efficient ways to add essential formatting to a document. From easy to read plain text format, markdown will convert your writing to structurally valid HMTL. It makes web formatting accessible for people who don’t know a thing about HTML while still allowing the use of html tags within the document if additional formatting such as progress bars is needed. This means we can skip on word processors all together. It features checkboxes to create simple todo lists, tables to cover all our OCD needs, it imports images and links without any trouble. There’s a file management column on the left for easy access to all the ongoing work. Typora really distinguishes itself among other markdown editor by supporting other markup convention such as LaTex for writing math formulas,or Mermaid that can effortlessly produce diagrams and pie charts. All the basics are covered in the simplest way they could be covered. No tweaking needed, just sit and write. One more good thing about this piece of software is that it is currently free.

Set a goal

Now that this is out of the way ; let’s get to it.

Time management always starts with setting a goal. Writing it down will certainly help in the prioritizing department and set-up the mind for the challenge to come. Once you have an aim ; you start to perceive differently. The world becomes a matrix of tools and obstacles. The solutions can only be found once we start looking for them. Hence we must define what it is we’re chasing. It also provides some accountability. Refusing to set-up conditions for failure, although understandable ; ensures life-procrastination. We do not want that.

Goal setting isn’t done randomly though. We want to maximize the probabilities that our ambitions will manifest in actuality. If you’re somewhat distractible ; you might want to avoid setting goals that span too far into the future. We aren’t fixed creatures. We morph and evolve. Our wants and desire are subject to change. What we are aiming at right now might not be what we’ll end up chasing a while from now.

Moreover the goal has to be somewhat realistic otherwise it won’t get done, independent of how good at time management you are. Once again, bigger goals that do not present a finish line before the dawn of times ; even when achievable ; tend not to be actionable. They are floffy ; they lack detail on how to actually implement them.

The solution is to focus on a smaller time scale. Humans have grown accustomed to the natural cycles emanating from the sky and the sun. I’m talking about the seasonal changes that occur every 3 months or so. I’d suggest therefore in an effort to conform to our inherited biology to settle for 3-months time periods when organizing our work. That’s 13 weeks. 90 days or so. There is plenty of room to move the ball forward and make stuff happen in such a timeframe.

Oh and I forgot to mention ; there is one more thing you might want to do aside from goal setting. And that is “fear setting”. Although stress gets a bad rep ; this mechanism remains one of the strongest motivator we know of. It is sometimes far more potent than desire. You are much more likely to postpone a desire than you are a to do the same with a fear. What would happen should you fail to meet the goal ?

Gauge your time pool

You are now in possession of two things : a motivated goal, and a due date. I’d say it’s a rather good place to be at but we shouldn’t stay still. Let’s keep moving. The next step is to go micro and break all of that down.

What is this due date ? How many weeks does that represent ? How many work days ? How many hours ? There are a number of things to consider when making such calculations. Extracting the number of days available should be easy enough ; but then we go down one level and already mistakes arise. When we talk about work hours ; we should always understand fully focused work hours. Not half-assed lazy barely conscious and distracted hours. Twitter hours do not count. YouTube hours do not count. And we are largely guilty of overestimating how much hours are truly up for exploitation in any given day. Using a time tracker such as RescueTime for a while should really open your eyes to the unfortunate reality of your average work day. In order to understand how off we can be ; I need to tell you ; a typical 8 hours day for most knowledge worker barely accounts for 3 to 4 hours of truly productive time. No more than that. The rest is constituted of social media, video consumption, communication… Half the workdays goes out to distractions essentially. What we are often tempted to do is to plan according to how many hours we wish to work rather than how many hours we realistically can and will work each day. That’s called wishful thinking. Should there be a mismatch ; you will almost certainly get late on every single task or, if out of some sort of miracle you still manage to achieve what you set out to achieve despite the uncontrolled optimism, you would have condemned yourself to cut on sleep and ultimately on life-expectancy. No-one wants that. That’s not a sustainable strategy.

In fact, even after you get a clear picture of how much time you can realistically count-on ; you still need to push aside some of that time. We are optimistic to a fault when it comes to loading our future selves with tasks. We’re counting on our best selves to be present and do the work each day. The reality is that sometimes we will fail to sleep properly, get tired and work rather slowly, garbage output will need to be redone from scratch, unexpected problems will happen and need fixing, life-events will take priority here and there and I’m missing out on some. We need to account for all of that and more. The way it is traditionally done is to add a half of your total time estimate as a reserve bank of time. Some people even go as far as blocking out only half the total time and keep as much reserve as they have work estimates. Whatever the margin you chose ; have a margin. All the time available shouldn’t be blocked otherwise the plan will suffer from a total lack of resiliency should anything go wrong. And things will go wrong.

Adjust your workload

Once we know how big your time pool is ; we can switch our focus to the other part of the equation. What are the constituents of the goal ? What tasks need to get down for that goal to manifest ? Let’s just write everything we can think of. Then make an estimate of how much time each task will likely require to get performed. How much juice will you have to put in to cross those marks in terms of work hours ? Estimates are error-prone ; there’s no way around it but make your best guesses. Experience tend to help in that regard. If you’ve done a task a thousand times, you probably have some idea of how fast you can expect to pull it off. I will advise to go especially conservative regarding tasks that are very novel. All sort of unseen trouble probably lies there.

At this point we have two numbers. A time pool ; and a time estimate for our workload. And now you might look at those two numbers and realize there’s a mismatch. Good. That’s what we are here for. This is where it gets real. Most likely you have piled up way too much work for the time pool you dispose of. In that case what you have to do is to tame your ambitions a little bit and cut on that crap. What are the least essential tasks you have put in that list ? What needs to be done no matter what ? Is there a way to reduce the scope of the project to make it doable. When I was studying animation in Paris ; one way to ensure we got to finish our short films in sound time, despite them being solo projects, was to limit our stories to a single place and time as well as keeping the number of characters down to a bare minimum. We also had a time limit for how long the short film should be. This meant less environment modeling, less character modeling, less character animation. Truth is, we would have need a very good reason to push against those limitations : our plates were seriously full already ! And those rules didn’t prevent us from telling compelling stories. They only prevented us from failing the task. So get creative and revise your plan until the two columns match. Your time estimate should match the depth of your time pool. No more. No less.

I need to mention that it’s also possible to delegate tasks rather than simply crossing them off. These days we can find virtual assistants and all sorts of professionals for hire online. This comes at a cost and might require upfront time investment in order to find and then train the person to the task. But it might fit some situations.

Finally, in the rare cases where you have less tasks than what your time would allow ; well you can add some or aim at a better quality level by dedicating more time to each task. You have room to push further ; use it.

Establish your typical day

The next thing I want to do once I’m set on all my checkboxes is to separate all tasks into a bunch of categories. For instance, I’m currently working on the next iteration of my website. I plan to add a bunch of music, some illustrations, blog posts, and try my hands at audio-fiction as a cross-domains production. On top of that I will have to go and edit the website itself to present all of that content in a somewhat convincing way. That means I have five different buckets. And by adding the time estimates of all the tasks that constitute each of those categories ; I have an idea of how much each block eats from the global time pool. So, it’s time to make a pie chart. I can still do that without leaving Typora, my text editor. I want to set my typical day in a way that mimics the overall project. If my illustration category represents 34% of the total time pool ; I will allocate 34% of any given day to that category.

This is done to ensure diversity at the local scale. I find switching tasks often to be beneficial both for productivity and for learning. Some degree of novelty keeps me alert and focused. It can also prevent unhealthy absorption into a single task that could easily border on obsession and lead to over-working parts of the project at the detriment of others.

It also promotes some degree of flexibility. In any given day I have the options to reorder the tasks to my liking. It can make it easier to get started provided there will most likely be at least a task I’m prone to doing at the moment. Once the ball is moving it gets easier to keep going with the least desirable tasks. There’s also the possibility to spend more time on a domain than initially planned ; as long as it is compensated for the next day. Having an idea of what the day should look like is in fact what matters most. “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable” said Dwight D. Eisenhower. That’s because every single conceivable parameter is bound to fluctuate, making the perfect plan inapplicable in real life. Still, planning is the part of the process where valuable information is gathered and thought-up that will inform us in all our on-the-spot decision making. Or to quote Jack Sparrow “the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules”.

Draw a Gantt chart

Now we’re going to get into the knitty-gritty of what gets done when. Since we know how much time we’re going to work on each bucket each day and we know how long each task in the bucket should take to completion ; we can draw a Gantt chart. Timelines and tasks get converted to horizontal bars showing start and end dates. This is a really useful tool for anyone who plan to run tasks in parallels.

There’s a bit of ordering that goes into it initially. Of course ; we should take dependencies into account and not plan child tasks before their respective parent task are completed, it goes without saying.

Once all is said and done we end-up with an eye-pleasing diagram that tells you everything you need to know. All the deadlines are there. The completion dates for such and such task are clearly indicated.

If the planning was accurate ; it only requires constant execution the “typical” day to meet all the dead lines without additional trouble. Of course things rarely go that smoothly.

Garbage collect

There’s one more safety measure I like to implement. One I call the garbage collector. The term is borrowed from computer science. It is the systematic recovery of all the crap that programs leave hanging in memory when it is no longer needed. In the context of project management ; what I’d call garbage collecting is similar in that it’s all about taking care of the stinky trash we tend to leave behind. What I mean is that, I at least, have a tendency to get tasks to an almost finished stage. You know those times when you’re like “well there’s only this little bit left to do, it should take a quarter of an hour at best”. Maybe you’ve written a bunch of blog articles but they’re not published yet and they could benefit from a last proofreading. Maybe you noticed a missing detail in a painting after the fact and you thought you would take care of it later. Maybe there’s a transition you were left unsure with on a score you sped-run yesterday and you are pretty sure you’d fix it in no time with fresh ears at some other time in the unspecified future. Well, those things, although individually quite harmless ; they tend to add-up quite fast ! Way faster than we imagine. There’s a saying that the last 10% of a project take up 90% of the time. This is the reason! Putting off all the areas we are unsure of until the end tends to backfire big times. This is the crap we need to get rid off. A good habit to develop is to note each of those little things on a task list rather than relying on your memory to store the information and then scheduling work blocks dedicated to clearing said list. If it is done regularly enough, a very short amount of time is probably plain and sufficient to keep things under control. It functions just like chores. The dishes are best done everyday soon after their respective meal. It gets a lot messier the longer you wait.

Beat the clock

Once the plan is ready ; there’s only one thing to do and that is to get to work. Try and be fully present at each moment. Uninterrupted focus counts as work. Distracted time does not. Some sort of timer is a great aid when working in conjunction with some variant of the Pomodoro technique. Keeping track of how much time went into each task is also great feedback to have. It will promote better planning over time since everything starts with awareness. Again, keep in mind that only truly focused time counts. When your attention drifts ; stop the clock, stand-up, go for a walk, drink some water, think about anything but the task. Come back, start the clock again, keep going. Counting distracted time leads to the formation of a habit of working more and more hours at a lower efficacy level. It’s akin to self-deception. It is entirely possible to work more-than-full days while still getting very little done. We must remain aware of this trap. With those basics clearly understood, you can then try to do beat your own expectations. Provided they were reasonable in the first place, it should be possible to do so. Try and achieve your tasks faster than anticipated. And then, if you still have some energy after your typical day and nothing better to do ; maybe you can try adding some. I must add sport, sleep, and quality time with close friends and relatives are absolutely better things to do. However if the situation permits it ; there are certainly worse ways to use one’s time than to try getting ahead. Take it as a challenge. Running to the front and with a margin is a great feeling to experience ; as opposed to feeling behind every step of the plan and having to push harder and harder either way just to keep-up.

Plan often

Now as I mentioned several times ; it is a normal part of any plan to eventually break. After-all ; there is one way for the plan to go well and near-infinite ways for the plan to go slightly to completely wrong. Hopefully the safeguards we put in place as we planned should prevent things from derailing to the point where project completion in due time is compromised ; but if this happens to your plan, do not panic.

Maybe you are willing to brute-force your way through what is left. You should have time left on your typical day that you can reallocate for such an effort before eating away at your sleep if you planned well in the first place. I would strongly advise against doing that for prolonged or even recurring periods of time though. Keep in mind that efficacy will suffer ; this is not a linear process. Putting in twice the time does not get twice the work done ; far from it. Moreover it does not protect against further bad surprises and there won’t be any margin left then. If your only way to tackle such problems is to work more ; you will encounter a hard limit soon enough. And you will end-up with an inflated need to recharge afterwards. Burnout can take one to three years of recovery.

What I suggest instead is that It is time to sit down and go through the steps again from beginning to end. Draw an other plan. A revised, better plan.

Maybe this will involve stepping down the expectations again and limiting the scope of the project further if there is not enough time left to get it all done. Maybe it will mean allocating less time to some tasks and figuring out solutions to make that possible ; for example by switching technique to a less time consuming one. I’m not going to lie ; it might require getting seriously creative ; but time spent here will do wonders for your long-term health.

Maybe your deadline isn’t such a hard one and the solution might simply be to move it around a bit

However you do it, taking some time each week or at key moments such as mid-project to review what went well and what didn’t is good practice. The sooner you make the needed adjustments, the less likely you are to get eaten alive by stress.

On a side note, if you are doing contractor work ; know that the sooner you discuss displacing a deadline or modifying a brief with your client, the more likely that this discussion will go well. Put yourself in their shoes ; the really painful parts are the uncertainty of not knowing when and if the work will get done and last minute reshuffles that might negatively impact several other participants that depend on the completion of your part of the job to do theirs. Both of those are major stressors. If you give your clients time to see it coming ; they will most likely be able to adapt with minimal sweat broken. The worst case scenario would be to say nothing and fail to meet the agreed upon deadline. So please, share the Intel with your team, stay transparent.

With all that said ; I wish you some fine strategizing and lots of -hopefully- unneeded luck in all your endeavors ! Just remember to be as honest as you can with your time accounting at all steps of the process and you should be fine.

— 16 minutes read —

“A pantologist is jack-of-all trades; one who likes to learn about many different things. Why specialize in one thing when there’s so much more you could do ? That would be boring.”
— Urban dictionnary

Gaming foreshadowing

As a teenager, I used to play this wonderful game called Dofus. It’s an action RPG that used to feature 12 different character classes. As with most strategy games ; according to the current meta, some classes and builds were better performing than others. There were a bunch of archetypes that were true and tried so to speak ; the strong warrior, the agile rogue-like character, the fire cat and so on and so forth. I was playing an Osamodas. They are summoners. And they are typically a mid-range class with a strong emphasis on having the bigger HP pool. At least that’s how they were typically played. They rely on their creatures to inflict the damages and play hide and seek in the meantime. Sometimes they would buff-up their Intel stats and cast a bunch of fire spells that could benefit from that. I gave my Osamodas stronger stats in agility, strength and damage instead, as well as some HPs and a decent quantity of summons. At the time ; this was definitively not a thing. The Osamodas had a very limited to non existent deck of spells in those elements. But what it did for me was to render my character less vulnerable to close range combat when equipped with the appropriate weapon ; as well as better able to distance itself from its opponents should there be a need to, and even capable of topping-off the dps dealt by the summons during key moments. Although none of my character’s spells were high DPS ; they were almost all strong enough to end-up somewhat useful in specific situations that were calling for them. It was a highly adaptable character. And more importantly ; I had fun playing it. Every. Single. Time. I did not encounter situations were I was left with nothing to do and no hope at all to switch the board. Games were not made in advance. They were dependent on my ability to react appropriately to the current situation ; not some very obvious weakness that hadn’t been addressed during the prepping. As a result ; this was not a character that I played using the same recipe every time. Options were numerous and it was my job to sort through them in real-time.

The reason I bring this up is because I noticed patterns in the way people tend to play games and the way they approach the larger one called life. And sure enough ; I have this tendency to go wide in my interests and the skills I develop over time. I am certainly not the only one walking this path. Yet there is this emphasis on over-specialization these days. I want to examine what, in my opinion, makes the “Jack of all trades” experience so rich and worthwhile despite the drawbacks and limitations that we are sometimes quick to point out.

Specialization is over-rated

And sure enough ; there is a good rationale to justify specializing as soon as possible. For one ; it’s an easy path to market. You offer a solution to a specific problem. Explaining what you do comes with no difficulty ; you are simply the guy that does the thing. The expectations are crystal clear and from there ; should what you do fit the needs of the prospect, then you would be hired. Simple. Clients are willing to pay a premium for expertise. In addition to that ; if you were to hone a skill for many years ; you would develop efficiency as a side effect of repeating the same process many many times. This means speed. You’ve seen it all regarding that narrow topic ; you do not need to research or waste any time, you know what to do ; you’re on it already. And, done. More money in less time ; essentially. That is certainly a competitive advantage and that is the promise made by Adam Smith during the 18th century in his well known work “the Wealth of Nations”. Ultimately he argues, it is the better path to divide labor into multiple specialized units. Society as a whole benefits far more than if each person was to try and do it all by him or herself. As long as we are able to freely exchange goods and services ; there is no need for that anyways. Give people time to get uncannily good at their very specific craft by freeing them up of anything else they would otherwise have to do, others will take care of the rest of their needs by becoming good themselves at their own very specific craft.

That was the idea. The rest is history. Fordism happened. Labor was organized in a way where any individual was assigned a single task that he would repeat ad nauseum every day. And it worked. We, as a society, produced more cars, more fridges, more everything, and standards of living went up overall. Or did they ? The devil lies in the details. Although in this case, it might be more appropriate to talk about the elephant in the room. Rates of anxiety of depression have been steadily rising for decades since we started organizing our work-lives this way. Close to 15% of the population is stricken with enough anxiety to warrant a visit to a psychologist in France. The body also seems to suffer ; half of all French people are now overweight. Alienation is the term that is most often used to describe the lack of agency and overall disengagement from work felt by specialized workers. As we become more and more specialized, our work becomes more and more repetitive with little to no spot left for learning, improvisation, novelty. It turns into a chore. Research indeed suggests that functional specialization reduces job satisfaction while job enlargement programs contribute to enhanced work attitudes. Working as if we were cogs of larger machines just isn’t that fulfilling, especially on the long haul. We’ve essentially achieved a state of joyless productivity.

Jacks are resilient

Let me tell you about burn-outs. The term was first coined in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberg in his book “The High Cost of High Achievement”. He originally defined it as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.”. The choice of words here seems remarkably accurate to me. People doing work they love and feel passionate about are particularly prone to burnouts as it can lead to obsessive passion as opposed to harmonious passion.

Trying to master any discipline is an enduring game. The time scale that is relevant is measured in years to decades of focus-intensive work. During all that learning time ; the craft isn’t going to pay its dividends. Plateaus are going to happen. It will seem we aren’t getting better anymore no matter how much harder we push. And most often, we first try to push much much harder indeed. Maybe we won’t get the jobs we thought we would get. Or maybe we’ll even get that perfect job, only to find out later it is no longer needed and be told the industry has moved on. No matter how we twist it ; we’re bound to encounter disappointments sooner or later as is the nature of life.

When that happens, if all you have to keep you afloat is a craft ; then you’re in trouble. Should you attach your entire identity to it ; you run the risk of feeling funny when it abandons you. Hyper-dedication comes at a cost. Basing your entire self-worth to a single discipline implies that the day you fail to perform will also be the day when you will feel worthless.

Opening multiple quests in parallels can prevent getting whipped-out of the game at the first burnout induced depressive state. You do not have one well of confidence. You have multiple. When you encounter that plateau there, you’re still climbing over here. The energy you get in either pursuit should sustain you during the flat-lines on your other quests.

It’s essentially the same idea that investors put to practice when they talk about diversification. You’ll find self-employed persons tend to put some emphasis on the idea of having “multiple streams of income”. Such an income structure is often highly valued as it allows one to stay afloat should one of those streams run dry. Although it might takes a very long time to develop a diverse portfolio, it offers the holder the luxury of resiliency. It’s the same with a skill-set.

Multi-quests foster full attention

In fact if you are interested in a wider learning experience overall, rather than being attached to mastering a single topic ; then you will find that splitting your attention might be really beneficial. Indeed, although you are dividing your energy bar in two or more ; you also get a bigger zeal pool overall since you avoid the near-complete life-force depletion that can ensue from obsessing over a single thread for too long. You’re feeling curious, energized, vibrant.

In fact some people’s productivity really benefits from doing 5 different tasks a day and rotating over those different skill-sets rather than trying to block-in 10 hours on single tasks. They are able to maintain speed easier. Multiple sprints are sometimes more efficient than going for that seemingly never-ending marathon. That sweet novelty factor really rejuvenates the brain in preparation for the next task. Being a little bit scattered might be a small price to pay in exchange for low-pain prolificness.

To put it bluntly ; no-one is able to perform at their best when they are bored. Getting into a flow-state requires an optimal challenge. And part of setting yourself up for an optimal challenge might be to pick multiple challenges instead. Juggling multiple balls is hard. But it can also ensure that you bring in your full attention to the table rather than half-ass life itself.

Diminishing returns when honing a skill

Plus you might have realized by now that learning a topic of interest comes with its specific learning curve. There’s no faster learning than that at the beginner stage of a new skill. Everything is new ; you’re building up from nothing. Jumping from 0 to 1 is infinitely rewarding. But then as you move on your quest ; you may notice a slow-down. You have already unlocked all the main branches. No it’s a matter of sorting through all those smaller ones. Maybe you’re even down to the leaf level. The stuff you learn does not make much of a difference anymore while simultaneously asking more of your time. It asks more and more out of you to produce similar scale improvements to those you once had. That my friend is what is called the Law of diminishing returns. It is an economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output. When we are confronted to such mechanics, and still regarding this whole thing through a lens of wanting to maximize learning overall ; we might think “Maybe I should invest that time unit in some other thread to maximize my overall learning experience ; this well is slowly getting exhausted”.

And you might be right. The Pareto principle states that 80% of the effects usually stem from 20% of the causes. In a learning environment that means that you can cover most of the knowledge tree in a somewhat limited time. The last 20% improvements are going to require the most effort by a large margin. This is especially true if you get good at identifying what the big branches are in any discipline in order to cover the most territory the fastest. And that in itself is a skill that is developed through the practice of learning multiple skills.

Meta-skill of learning new skills

Fortunately, being a pantologist comes with its own positive loop. Learning a topic well facilitates learning other topics. Rather than getting in the way ; past experiences are a stepping stones for the next skills to learn.

A staggering example are polyglots. The more languages they learn ; the faster they get at learning the next one. You might think that learning 10 languages would require 10 times more time than learning one ; and you would be wrong. YouTube Steve Kaufman’s counter is currently set at 18 languages acquired in the span of 14 years from age 60 to 74. At this point he does not teach specific languages ; he teaches how to learn languages which is the higher level skill that he has honed and perfected through his experience as a polyglot. There is no other way to max-out this one than to tackle multiple quests.

Knowledge compounds. You might find yourself thinking while learning a language “Oh, this specific part is just like english/french/russian/fill-in the gap”. The wider the territory, the higher the chances that there will be something for the new information to lean on ; making its acquisition easier than it would otherwise have been. Generalists naturally develop more transferable skills.

With that comes increased confidence. Generalists feel like they could do well in diverse situations. They have options and might feel like nothing is out of reach (of course they might be faced with the paradox of choices but that’s another story.)

I came across the following daring claim that I would gladly share despite its edge in celebration of all the jacks among us. “Intellectually curious men become generalists. Intellectually lazy men settle for being specialists.” – Mokokoma

Jacks can still be experts

There is this idea in marketing of the blue ocean.

The out-of-the-box course of action for any specialist is essentially to become better than everyone else in a single dimension. Beside the obvious psychological harm such line of thinking is inflicting on people, this can also be extraordinarily difficult to pull-off ; especially in saturated fields where competition is fierce. Although there sure is some existing demand to be exploited ; it is typically distributed to the few top dogs, unless you are willing to significantly cut on price in exchange for your service that’s essentially a lower-standards version of what they do. This gets tricky doesn’t it ?

Here is a solution. Find a market where there is essentially no competition. How would you do that, you ask ? Well, you create it from scratch. You do what no-one does. You venture into unexplored territory. The places where there are no guidelines. Yes ; this is also tricky. Maybe even trickier. But certainly being a jack-of-all-trades is adding to your odds on that front. Specialists tend to be so intensely focused on a localized field of knowledge that they render themselves blind to most things that do not fall in that category. If all you have is a hammer, then everything becomes a nail, essentially. In fact you would find that when things go sour, the well established figures in their field are usually not the ones turning luck around. The greatest breakthrough of this last century instead happened at the cross-section of several fields ; where knowledge and ideas from one field where used to push forward in the next. The essence of this strategy can be summed-up through this famous quote attributed to Henry Ford : “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

In that sense, possessing multiple skills is a great asset to have. There is distinctiveness that stems from the unique combination of competences that an individual can develop. No one else has that same exact baggage under their belts and it’s going to be hard for others to replicate since it took so long to develop all those various skills. One of the biggest challenges for the Jack of all trades among us will therefore be to figure out ways to make the various parts that constitute their skill-set work together rather than separately or even against each other. The relevant questions become ; how do they combine ? Where is the synergy ? Once you find out the blue ocean ; that unique recipe that you created is going to be unique enough so that you will become the de facto specialist in your micro-field. The whole will indeed become greater than the sum of its parts. At this stage you will be living the best life of any Jacks : the specialized you.

Leadership positions

While I’m on such an uplifting line of thinking, it should be noted that Jacks can make good leaders. Indeed, they’re so well versed in so many different topics than they can develop good overview of the different parts that go into any enterprise. They are good candidates for that “big picture thinking style” that’s required at the top of hierarchies. Military generals were called so because they were generalists. Strategizing is best done with a wide array of experiences to pull from. They know what can be expected from their team and can provide useful feedback. They understand how to channel the various expertise around them into a single light ray ; a skill they developed through their own effort to do so at the local level.

Jacks are also valued and appreciated in small companies where people typically need to wear more than a single hat in order to get the job done with the limited human resources available. In fact, even in larger companies, generalists are often the last people fired when things go sour. If you have only so much bucks to spend on labor, you might as well keep the guys who can cover the most ground. Switching gear quickly and adapting to changing environments with ease is best done by such people. Flexibility rather than being a liability is one of the greatest asset one can possess when resources get scarce. A player that can be used across a wide variety of strategies and who is redeployable are less substitutable than pure specialized workers.

And it might be said that at an even smaller scale ; working any independent profession absolutely requires some of those qualities. Being one’s own boss is a Jack position. A typical day would probably include the main craft, prospecting, marketing, maybe some teaching ; and almost certainly a pinch of creativity to continually figure out new and better ways to make it all work. Most independent artists have to become de facto Jacks in order to do at the local level what others dedicate whole teams to doing. Generalists as freelancers can even become one-stop shops. Competence in many fields might spare clients the need to go to numerous places for hire to get their needs met. The cat who markets him or herself as a designer might also be one’s de facto marketer, virtual assistant, writer and else of their clients.

Time ; the limiting factor

After all that deliberating, maybe you might agree with me that there is a lot going on in favor of becoming some sort of generalist. Yet there is this huge non-negligible caveat. Learning many skills well enough so that they are useful and pay dividends requires massive amounts of learning time. Although they are most-likely not all going to reach specialist standards ; all the generalist skills still need to get mastered enough so that they become useful and practical in real-life situations. They need depth. As a consequence, good generalists are often late to the party. They need a lot of prep’ time and make their best contributions during the end-game rather than early-on. Time is a commodity that is tough to unlock in a world where merely living comes at great expanses. We all need roofs over our heads and food on our tables. Securing enough time is a major challenge for people walking down this path but absolutely necessary to develop that depth that should go along with the range in order to make it useful.

Moreover even older generalists with a lot of skills at their command still cannot handle more than a task at a time. Until they become able to replicate themselves and become multiples ; they follow the same physical laws as everyone else. They need 7,5 hours of sleep and can only operate within the limited wake time they have on their hands. Although they can work on seemingly anything at any moment ; they cannot work on everything. Adaptable does not mean omnipotent. Prioritizing is even harder for such people because of the crippling paradox of choices that perpetually lies in front of them. Being competent at multiple skills does not make it any easier to decide on what to do on a moment to moment basis.

On the other hand you can also twist the table and understand that time is generalists biggest ally. Jack of all trades get better with age. They are like fine wine. Their efforts to continually learn means their skillset is never done expending until it becomes seemingly all encompassing. They will ultimately find a way to combine all the elements of their toolkit into a unified expression. And although it might require a leap of faith to pursue effort during the developing phase of all their branches ; eventually things will connect in a way that is going to be unique to them and representative of their truly unique life-experience.

An ideal worth fighting for

Finally and most importantly ; the pantologist’s path is the funniest there is. Note that I might be biased in saying that. However, being a Jack of all trades means never being bored a single day again. Having a mouth constantly full of new knowledge is a great way to live life to the fullest. It brings intensity to the picture ; it makes the colors pop so to speak. It might even be a bit funnier for the people around, or at least for the 99% of people who do not happen to be specialists in the very same area you do.

Of course nor pure generalists nor pure specialists actually exist in the real world and maybe we would be better off discussing specialized generalists and generalized specialists. The ideal figure would be that of a pit of knowledge that is both richly wide and masterfully deep. That ideal figure we call the Renaissance man and is best exemplified by the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci ; one of the deepest generalist to ever walk the earth. Such a man would have loved the internet, that’s for sure ! There’s never been an easier time to pursue such an ideal. Difficult as it might seem ; I feel it is worth pursuing.

— 17 minutes read —

Why should we even be productive ?

There’s nothing natural about working the way we do in our modern cultures. The human brain and body were never designed to sit at a desk and work all day long and there’s a real possibility that we are asking too much of it. The statistics for depression and anxiety have done nothing but rise since the industrial revolution. For people aged 18 to 24 ; the rates of anxiety have doubled in the last decade alone. It’s staggering. It seems the surge in productivity we kept asking for in the OCDE came at a cost. We are increasingly overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, and socially-isolated ; all of which are risk factors for mental health problems. Burnout is a thing. Tim Urban pointed out in his talk about procrastination that if you were born a dog, doing nothing but eating when hungry and sleeping when tired would have meant you were a pretty successful dog. Why should we act any different ?

Well the thing is ; we’re not dogs. We somehow managed to develop awareness of the future. And given the huge mess we’re perpetually in, this is causing us anxiety. It ensues that a lack of productivity is a common and massive source of suffering for many as it invites more chaos into our lives. We’re surrounded by those constraints and we feel that in order to survive them, we need to up our game and tackle all problems one by one without a frown. There seemingly aren’t enough hours in the day to meet all the demands that fall upon us nor those we impose on ourselves. Speeding-up it seems, might get us out of a perpetual state of overwhelm by helping us manage our work-lives better.

And beside sheer surviving our circumstances ; we also understand that we can expect around 29 000 living days if all goes according to plan ; about 9 500 of which have already been consumed in my case. That’s almost a third of my life expectancy gone already. Then we start considering the implications of that thought. We have aspirations, an ideal self we strive to become, things we feel we need to do before we pass. We might need a little push on the accelerator if we truly want to get the most out of our earthly time.

Recognizing that, the question becomes ; how to become more productive while simultaneously managing the risks associated with it ? What is an healthy way to get the most out of ourselves ? We certainly do not want to brute force our way to productivity like those guys in japan who end up dying on their work place from some sort of heart failure or suicide, but still we can’t realistically nor aspirationally keep staring at clouds all days either. So what’s the plan ?

Work capacity and happiness go together

First of all ; we should acknowledge that being productive while remaining happy and healthy is possible. In fact it might even be downright necessary. Research tells us Happy people are more productive by as much as 12%. But it goes further than that and is probably more like a two way street : conscientiousness could equally lead to a state of being happier as it allows one to mitigate the uncertainties that come with life. The big five trait Conscientiousness is all about things such as “grit” and “work-ethic”. Conscientious people tend to be the more productive people in our society. Here are some of the things conscientious people are more likely to do ; exercise, maintain proper sleep and diet, do not miss bill payments, keep their promises, show up on time. They are less likely to engage in risky behaviors such a smoking and heavy drinking. They are good at self-regulation and impulse control. You could easily see how that could lead to a happier life, especially on the long run.

Although the five big traits are different enough so as to grant them different labels ; there exist some correlation between different traits which result in various clusters. One such cluster bas been nicknamed “the role model”. People falling in that category are high in agreeableness, high in conscientiousness, low in neuroticism, high in extroversion and high in openness to experience. It turns out scorings on the Conscientiousness and the Agreeableness scale increase with age ; to some small degree they work in tandem. Neuroticism decreases with age. The personality cluster we call the role model could just as well be called Wisdom as we are more likely to fit into that category as we age. Now, there is of course such a thing as too much Conscientiousness ; and it paradoxically correlates with poor success at work. Decisions take longer, the ability to improvise and prioritize is lost. Those people are no fun, that’s for sure. It might even start to resemble obsessive compulsive disorder past a certain threshold. That being said ; the more complex jobs require and tolerate more conscientiousness than simpler jobs ; in part because they are also the jobs with the greater degree of freedom and thus the employee’s personality impacts the outcome way more. For artistic jobs ; especially for those traveling the independent road ; you probably could benefit from some more work-ethic.

Willpower alone doesn’t work

But please keep in mind ; Conscientiousness is not about flogging yourself day in and day out.

Truth is ; we are and will remain fallible. The planning and monitoring part of you really isn’t anywhere close to omnipotent. It is subjected to distractions and moods. Therefore you cannot rely on it to prevent the slips. As strong as you are at battling your various urges ; you cannot fight your way to productivity indefinitely. You’ll get tired. It’s only a matter of time before you get derailed. I’d go as far as saying that if discipline feels painful ; you are most likely doing it wrong. There are ways to work 12 hours work days where you’re enjoying every minute of it. I’m sure you had some of those days. You were flowing through the whole thing and then woke up early the next morning with your head still filled with ideas to pursue the run even further. It was agreeable. Blissful even. Were you brute-forcing your way through productivity then ? I doubt so. Conversely, there were also times where even 30 minutes of focused attention felt like utmost torture. How did going harder on yourself went ? For me it resulted in headaches and barely any more work done. It might even produce a deep hatred for the work itself from which one may never recover. After all, why should you keep working on stuff that’s hurting you every single time ? Is it conceivable that maybe the hyper-productive people among us are not doing it through self-abuse ? Our minds wouldn’t comply to that.

In fact they don’t : that’s how burnouts come into existence. Although you can will yourself into working hard for a time, unless the work starts to feel good and rewarding at some point ; there’s no way this is going on indefinitely. You will lose motivation, your willpower will fail, and all will ultimately crash. Denying and rejecting your emotions simply won’t work. What about acknowledging instead that you truly don’t fucking want to sit and work your ass-off right now. That you are distractible. That you have a tendency to not finish stuff. That you aren’t that great at following through with your longer plans. That you do prevent yourself from asking the help you need. And then prevent yourself from going after your own mind with a fork and from shouting all sorts of insults at it. Respect your challenges. Avoid thinking that somehow you’re fucked-up for falling short on such an “easy task”. They are not easy tasks by any mean. You need to work with your emotions rather than against them. An healthy approach to productivity is based on self-acceptance. And yeah. Achieving that is way more complicated than it sounds.

Self-criticism has its limits

The idea of giving yourself the benefit of the doubt and sticking to your own side even when you’re under-performing can feel a little scary and for good reasons. Would you remain productive if you stopped spending so much energy condemning your bad behaviors ? Certainly if you weren’t bullying yourself all the time you would become contempt and stop moving forward all together. If you admitted to be the way you are ; what do you fear would happen ?

I would object that first of all ; self-criticism isn’t as good a motivator as we made it to be. Self-critics are much more likely to be anxious and/or depressed. The most prominent symptom of depression is a lack of motivation and will to do ; a bias towards inaction. One way to manage anxiety is to procrastinate ; which is another bias towards inaction. An other way to manage anxiety is through excess of control ; and that admittedly could get you going as far as productivity goes ; but it also shatters resilience should anything go wrong. And for sure things will go wrong. And then you would hard stop through lower self-efficacy beliefs and a growing fear of failure ; an other path to inaction. Ultimately self-critics just stop trying to achieve their goals when they can’t take the self abuse anymore.

To understand all this jumble clearly ; picture a parent dealing with the problem of his kid not doing so great at math. It’s well established by now that the harsh and critical approach doesn’t work well enough. You won’t motivate the kid by telling him how stupid and useless he is. The fatal line would be to tell him how hopeless he is, leaving him no room for improvement even in imagination. “Why even bother?”, asks the kid, resigned and now ready to give up math altogether.

Self-compassion has merits

A better path would be to act understanding and supportive. Not bullying the kid for his failings ; as it is a fact of life that everybody fails at some things some times. It’s instead about displaying confidence in the kid’s ability to rise to the challenge. Offer help, look for solutions to accommodate him. This approach is NOT about ignoring the problem and letting it slide. When problems need attention, they need attention ; there’s no way around that. You’re still doing what needs to be done. That being said ; aggravating the child’s suffering is not going to help. So let’s alleviate it instead. Give him back some much needed strength in the form of hope. That’s a great gift to grant someone.

If you reflect back on your own history ; you might find, maybe, that the time periods where you felt the more motivated and driven where also periods where you’ve had family members, friends or significant others put faith in you despite knowing all about your flaws and shortcomings. They believed in you when you yourself weren’t even sure if you were worth believing in. Such encouragements ; they can last you for years. These are the purest energy pills you’ll ever find.

Self-compassion is the same, except in that story you are both the child and the parent responsible for helping the child. It’s a completely different story than that of the boss and the employee. Now all parts of yourself are working in the same team rather than one against each other. If you can pull it off, it’s a killer team.

In fact there is growing research suggesting that people who have developed a solid sense of self compassion set high-standards for themselves yet aren’t upset when they fail to meet them. They are more likely to set new goals for themselves after failure rather than wallowing in feelings of frustration. They’re fueled with more intrinsic motivation ; they try hard because they want to grow and enjoy the process rather than to impress themselves or others. They take responsibility for past mistakes while not getting bugged down by them. They have an easier time sticking to healthier behaviors such as not smoking or exercising, which have the potential to kickstart positive loops. That’s all good and well as far as I’m concerned.

Your challenges should be respected

Plus, I might add that you know perfectly well that it’s not fair to bash yourself this much.

I’d like to remind you that studies have shown that people typically manage around 3 to 4 hours of truly focused productive time. Everything above should be taken as a bonus rather than a must. If you’ve ever tried to maximize the amount of hours working on your personal projects ; you might have noticed a very noticeable and brutal drop in concentration past a certain point. This is not something to lose sleep over. It is perfectly normal and working while in the midst of brain fog can even be counter-productive at time ; adding to your pile of future work the necessity to rewrite, repaint, rerecord all the crap you mind-numbingly produced earlier. The fact that you can’t produce anything worthwhile and you’ve been at it for hours already and your brain is fried is fine in my book.

Moreover it takes a long time to turn intentional behaviors into second nature. Even when you build yourself good routines ; they can easily revert back to their previous state should a negative event occur. It is a protective mechanism ; we have a tendency to crawl back to what we know when our learned behaviors fail. If you get punished after you tried working hard for a while in the form of say a lack of results ; you would have a natural tendency to let go of the reins for a while. It is normal and to be expected. You need to be patient with yourself and try again without dwelling on the past slip.

Beside you’re operating against a whole world of internet companies and other entertainment industries that are doing nothing but conspiring on how to steal as much of your focused attention as they possibly can. They are many and you are one.

Not everyone is dealt the same hand at life. Whatever it is that is pushing you back ; you can’t put this much expectations on your shoulders. We all have our unique sets of strengths and challenges and they both need to be equally respected. Just because some behaviors come easier to others do not make them trivial the least bit. You need to celebrate every win on the path and not get discouraged. Just play your cards the best you can and keep trying. No cursing.

Oh and there’s also that other little trap that we need to avoid : we shouldn’t judge ourselves for not being self-compassionate enough ! Funny how our minds work sometimes, isn’t it ? It is what it is ; just accept it ; move from there.

Help yourself the way you do others

So ; how do you get better at all this self-compassion crap ? Maybe the parent in you isn’t well developed and you do not know where to start. Here is a take on the issue : try putting other people first for a while. Helping other people almost certainly comes at a cost for oneself ; yet we tend to do that quite naturally. We expend energy and do it regardless of how we’re feeling in the moment. Altruism is training our mind’s capacity to set aside what we want in favor of what is good for someone. We’re generally way better at doing stuff for people we care for than we are at helping ourselves. It is way more likely that you’ll drag yourself into doing something as simple as even cooking if you’ve got someone dependent on you to eat tonight. Had that just been you ; you might have skip that meal; but now you’re cooking and even doing a good job at it. It’s not that you aren’t tired anymore or you’ve suddenly been stricken with a strong urge to cook. It’s more that doing it feels more important than the pain associated with it. If you’re a single mom whose only child is left over in your home country and is dependent on money you send him to get by ; then you’re not going to fail your obligations and you’ll keep coming back for work ; even those days when it is excruciatingly painful. You are sacrificing for the sake of something or someone beyond yourself and you draw strength from that. And as you do that, you are training your mind to be less impulsive ; to not get controlled by your own cravings. This is where the bridge to the idea of self-compassion comes in. A conscientious person would treat themselves as someone they are responsible for helping.

And to be clear, doing stuff for others doesn’t require high levels of empathy. There’s two components to empathy ; one is emotional empathy, the other is cognitive empathy. People on the second category do not act out altruistically from an ability to feel the pain of others in their skin ; they do it cognitively. They’re are many good people who aren’t empathic in the traditional sense. They choose to act altruistically. And here is a good argument in favor of doing so : putting others first can train you to become more conscientious. It fits the finding that empathy is positively associated with conscientiousness. Try it out ; the worst that can happen is you’ll have done some good around you in your attempt. The best that can happen is you’ll also up your conscientiousness stat leaving you better equipped to tackle future challenges.

Practical tools for better productivity

Productivity is emotion management first and foremost. However, once you’ve put your mind in a place where your interests are finally aligned with your feelings ; you can start looking into more practical advice on how to get more productive. Here are some of mines.

When asked student reckon they waste 5 to 6 hours a day on average. You might want to check it for yourself using time trackers such as Rescue Time to properly fathom how vast your margin for improvement really is. Awareness is the first step prior to tackling any problem. Once you realize just how much time goes to social media, mails, YouTube and the likes, and just how little goes into genuinely productive time ; you might be tempted to try and max-out the amount of time dedicated to your work. And maybe you should do that for a time in order to realize how far you can push yourself. But I’ would imagine you would eventually find out that it’s not all that sustainable especially when you start doing it through the constant use of a metaphorical stick.

What I would like you to do instead is to pay special attention to how focused or scatter-brained you feel on a moment to moment basis when you are working. Those states correspond to two different modes of thinking that have a natural oscillation from one another that must be respected. When you start to feel the burn ; get up and do something else ; let your mind wander for a while. Come back fresh 5 minutes later and plunge back into focus mode. I found it really important to allow the scatter to happen. It’s all to easy to spend hours staring at the computer screen while producing virtually nothing of value. I would call that the zombie mode. If you find yourself in zombie mode ; immediately stop. You are hurting yourself. The Pomodoro technique is a wide-used tool that taps on that natural oscillation and have been proven to substantially boost employees productivity. Meditation practice can also increase the likeliness that you would catch yourself when the switch from focused to diffuse happens.

Beside that ; managing your environment is often the easier road to take when it comes to maximizing the likeliness that you will be effective during your work session. You need a dedicated space for your work. It is especially important if you’re working from the comfort of your own home. Eliminate distraction as best you can. If your entire living space feels like a dark playground ; then consider spending time in public libraries. I absolutely love them. That’s the first places I visit when traveling to new cities. There’s just a reliable “place to work” mood that I find really helpful. As an added bonus ; walking there also ensures that you get your vitamin D through sun exposure (on that note ; know that if you have a dark skin ; you need even more sun time that your paler friends).

While I’m at it ; you will likely find that among all potential culprits ; bad sleep is the most potent productivity killer by a long shot. There’s just no way you’re going to be consistently efficient if you’re under-slept all days every days. In fact lack of proper sleep is a hallmark of depression. Paying attention to sleep hygiene is really important and it starts with seeing the sun in the morning. When late for bed ; you should still try and wake up at your normal time and see the early lights of day in order not to unset your circadian rhythms. Know that glasses block-out at least half of the rays ; it’s better to physically get out or at least open those damn windows for that to count. Doing so will prevent you from sleeping even later the following night, which is all too easy. You can still go back to sleep and finish your night as long as you’ve exposed yourself to sunlight at a normal waking time. It goes without saying that late screen lights are sub-optimal.

Next ; routines make life way easier. They take out the decision making out of the equation ; which prevents decision fatigue. You do not think about brushing your teeth each day and yet you do it consistently and without effort. That’s the beauty of routines. They are built one at a time through conscious effort. Try to maintain a routine for a prolonged period of time. 30 days is often what people go for. During that time you should only focus on executing the habit at all rather than executing the habit perfectly. If you’re trying to exercise ; just go for a couple of push-ups everyday until it becomes a normal part of your day. You will naturally go for more over time ; do not worry about it. Just worry about consistency. Consistency over-time leads to huge improvements.

In the same vein ; planning takes some of that moment to moment deciding off your plate. What has been decided is not to be decided anymore and that certainly clears the mind from unnecessary uncertainty. It will ground you in the present moment better. Journaling can also be used to take your feelings and emotions off your head and to the page ; which comes with the same benefits of clearing the mind and getting it ready for solid work.

Finally ; sports are important. They get your heart to pump blood all over your veins and arteries and that scrubs the whole system all the way to your brain. You get better oxygen flow and that will translate to an easier time maintaining focused attention. It also helps prevent depression and/or anxiety. And it’s pretty the only thing you can do to minimize the loss of fluid intelligence that typically occurs when ageing. Not sudokus. Sport. It is vastly underrated quite frankly. “If exercise could be packaged in a pill, it would be the single most widely prescribed and beneficial medicine in the nation.” Robert Butler, National Institute on Aging.

Final note

I hope those tips were useful, but here is the thing ; we are all figuring it out as we go ; it’s a never ending work in progress. Developing a system of getting things done takes experimentation. It’s going to be different from person to person. It might even be different at different points in the life of a same and unique person. Tricks often come with an expiration date. So the whole process is going to need constant tweaking. Sometimes you will function as a well oiled machine ; sometimes not so much. Sometimes you will feel like you are making progress, only to accidentally step back a feet or two into numbness. Life happens. It is hard to keep pushing when the weather isn’t so great. Respect your challenges. Try and help yourself rather than boss yourself around. You are a human being trying his best through adversity. That’s certainly something to be reckoned.

Good luck. I wish you the best.