This is part five of a nine part series on How to Accomplish Anything When You Don’t Have Any Time.

Previously I addressed a mantra to stay focused, prioritizing only three things for action, stacking functions, and avoiding time sinks. Today I’ll talk about outsourcing work.

Outsource

Purpose: Free up time and maintain focus

Gifford and Libba Pinchot ran a consulting business, authored multiple groundbreaking business books and founded an MBA school, all while raising three children. They were smart, passionate, hard-working people, but at some point, that’s not enough. 

Guess what? They hired someone else to wash the dishes and clean the house.

Outsourcing household work (cleaning and yardwork) is often one of the first steps. But it’s sometimes harder to figure out the next step.

After I published Avogadro Corp, I knew that I wanted to send review copies to newspapers, bloggers, and other folks in the tech industry. At the same time, I needed to be blogging and engaging online. And I needed to work on the sequel. I simply could not do all this in the time I had. 

I was able to hire a friend to work about ten hours a week over the course of a month to research outlets, draft cover letters, and send out review copies. For my second novel, I hired someone to research Amazon’s top reviewers for me.

The trick to outsourcing creative work is to have a clearly defined goal (e.g. send a copy to each person in this 150 row spreadsheet, with a cover letter customized to them), and to set up a review point part-way into the work (e.g. “Draft all the material for the first ten rows, and let me review it before you go on.”)

Are you concerned about the investment? Are you wondering how you could justify spending money on an activity that might only be a hobby? In my experience, once I’m investing money, I’m even more motivated to ensure that I’m using my own time wisely. If I’m going to spend $15 an hour to have someone else do something, I want to be using my own time to do something worth way more than $15 an hour.

This is part four of a nine-part series on How to Accomplish Anything (When You Have No Time). My first three posts included:

1. a mantra to stay focused on what matters and shortcut the use of willpower
2. picking the top three priorities and focusing only on those
3. permaculture stacking: making sure that you get at least three uses out of everything you do

Today I’ll talk about avoiding time sinks.

Avoid Time Sinks (aka Why All-Clad is better than a Nintendo DS)

Purpose: Free up time

In 2006, I’d gotten a check for my birthday, and was wondering what to spend it on. 

My friend Gene Kim, cofounder of Tripwire and author of The Phoenix Project, suggested I get a handheld gaming device. (This was before smartphones.) 

He promised that it was not only a ton of fun, but that the games were playable in five minute increments. But as I had a full time job and three kids in diapers, I couldn’t even imagine having five minutes.

That’s when it hit me: I couldn’t bring anything into my life that consumed more time. No matter how awesomely great the handheld game console was, I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy it if it required a new investment of time. 

The corollary to this is that I could bring things into my life that either reduced an existing time investment or replaced time spent.

I pondered this for some time, and eventually decided to spend my money on an All-Clad pan. I already spent time cooking. An insanely great pan would improve my quality of life doing something I was already doing. 

Although I don’t have kids in diapers any more, I still think about the stuff and activities I bring into my life, and consider whether they require a time investment, create time savings, or are a one for one replacement. 

Writing, time with my kids and spouse, and my day job all deserve time, and require strategic time decisions and tradeoffs to ensure I have enough time for them.

If you’re trying to free up time to take on a new project, you can evaluate the things in your life to see what time investments bring you value and which ones don’t.

(Just in case your thinking that deciding on a pan versus videogames has more to do with growing up than with time, I will point out that I did choose to bring videogames back into my life at a later point when I felt that it had a particular value that justified the time spent on it.)

This is the third install on my series on How to Accomplish Anything, especially when you have no time.

In my first post, I shared my mantra for focusing on the task at hand. In my second post, I shared a strategy for prioritizing only the three most important tasks.

Today I’ll talk about stacking functions.

Stacking Functions: The Permaculture Principle

Purpose: Task efficiency


There’s a permaculture principle known as stacking functions, the notion that everything you plant in a garden should serve at least three functions. For example, an apple tree might provide fruit to eat, shade for another plant, and beautify your landscape. 

The higher level idea is that you want to get the maximum usefulness you can out of anything you dedicate resources to (time, money, garden space, etc.)


This principle can also be employed towards work. 

As a blogger, I’m always looking for good content. If I need to write a report or research something for my job, I’ll leverage that and turn it into a blog post. If I write a forum response to a question, I’ll turn my answer into a blog post. With just a little extra effort, I’m getting two functions out of my original effort. Many of my blog posts will, in turn, get repurposed into books, adding the third function.

The blog itself serves multiple functions: it’s a place for me to capture knowledge or refine ideas I want for myself, to share that knowledge with others, and ultimately to drive traffic that helps sell books.

I surf the web to read about the latest developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. That’s fodder for my science ficiton novels, but it’s also of interest to readers, so I use bufferapp to schedule out tweets to articles of interest. I’m researching at the same time I’m engaging with readers.


In my day job, I’ll take on challenges like A/B testing and social web features, skills that I can then apply to refining my own website.


Anything can be stacked, even purely personal desires: With three kids and a full work and writing schedule, I don’t get much time for social outings. So when my writing critique group meets, I bring a flask of bourbon. 🙂

In the next post, I’ll talk about avoiding time sinks.

Yesterday, I introduced the series of posts I’m writing about principles to help you accomplish anything, especially when you have little or no time.

In the first post, I covered a mantra I use (the only person I have to cheat is myself) to short-cut the decision-making process about what I choose to do, conserving the willpower I use to stay focused on the things that are most important to me.

How do I choose what’s most important? That’s the subject of today’s principle.

Prioritizing the Three Most Important Actions

Purpose: Free up time and increase effectiveness


Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek is loved by some and reviled by others. Part lifestyle choice, part time management, part promotion and marketing, and part entrepreneurship, the book advocates minimizing the time invested in traditional jobs.


One of the techniques Tim recommends is to start the day with a list of the top one to three most important actions for the day that lead towards your higher level goals. Focus on those actions until they are complete. Then you’re free to spend the rest of the day however you want.


Without clear priorities on what will achieve the most, most of us fritter away the day on email and menial tasks. All that busy work is procrastination that avoids the most important tasks.


I use this principle while working at my day job. Each morning I spend ten minutes thinking about the most important things I could do that day to achieve my higher level, most strategic and most impactful work objectives. 

I do the first task before I will even allow myself to check email for the first time. Then I work on the second and third.


By remaining truly focused on the few most important things, we can be far more effective than we are otherwise. During this period, I helped Hewlett-Packard save on the order of ten million dollars a year on customer support costs, roughly a 100x return on my salary.


This principle not only helps you be more effective at what you’re doing, it helps you free up the time to do more. When I finish the three most important things I need to do, and it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon, I’ve earned the right to choose how to spend the rest of my day. I might choose to fritter it away on menial tasks and email at HP, or I could choose to invest it in new interesting projects at HP, or I could leave early and go work on my own projects.

This principle works best when you have measurable, strategic level goals. For example, in my old job, my most important annual goal was to save a specific amount of dollars in warranty spend for the company. In this type of role, I had tremendous leeway in how I fulfilled my objective, so long as I met it. These are the best types of objectives for both employee and company because they are directly related to business goals, and employees then are incented to meet and beat the business goals.

By comparison, in my current job, I have tactical goals that are focused on units of work completed. In such a role, it’s very hard to use creative ways to meet business goals. (Gifford Pinchot III, an innovation consultant for big company, would probably say this is an example of centralizing creative thinking at big companies, when in fact, you want to decentralize thinking. Gifford famously said “The brains of the organization are widely distributed; one per person.”) For the sake of both excelling in your day job as well as freeing up the time to accomplish more, it’s worth turning tactical goals into strategic, business level ones.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about stacking functions, the permaculture principles.

Maybe you want to write an app or a book. Maybe you want to start a business or learn to play the piano. Maybe you just want to kick butt in your day job. If there’s anything at all that you’ve wanted to do, but struggle to find the time and energy to do it, the tips below will help.


In the last five years, I’ve managed to find the time to write, publish and promote multiple books, including two award-winning bestsellers, develop a web application, an ipad app, maintain a blog, and present at conferences. I did all that while excelling at my day job and raising three young children.


I’m not here to brag, but I do want to emphasize that if I can do all that while raising twins (twins, gosh darn it!), then you too can find the time and drive to accomplish something big, whether that’s starting a business, developing a mobile app, or writing a book.


I’m going to share a bit of my own personal path as well as nine key techniques to making time, creating personal drive, and prioritizing activities that you enable you to accomplish anything.

Enter the Craziness

In 2002, I met Libba and Gifford Pinchot, cofounders of Bainbridge Graduate Institute, at a retreat. The two tried to convince me to enroll in their new MBA program focused on sustainable business. I protested, saying that I was too busy. Libba said something similar to, “You can be busy for the next two years, or you can be busy for the next two years and get an MBA.” I chose to be busy and get the MBA.

Life may seem busy, but it always seems busy. That alone isn’t a reason to avoid taking on a new project. (I ultimately finished that MBA program while working full-time and with a newborn child, whom I brought to class with me.)


Once I was enrolled in the program, I grew to become friends with Libba and Gifford, frequently staying at their home. I noticed that Gifford worked all the time. Other than short breaks to play disc golf or to participate in drumming circles, I never noticed Gifford partaking in what I then considered relaxation activities: watching television or just sitting around doing nothing. I asked him about this. 

He told me that when he was doing what he loved to do, then it was enjoyable. The joy of accomplishing something worthwhile exceeded the joy he received from more mundane activities like passively consuming entertainment.


I should also mention that Gifford did take summers partially off: he would work only a third or half of the day, and spent the remaining time outdoors, chopping wood, kayaking, going on hikes, or doing woodworking projects.

The Nine Principles

Accomplishing something is a combination of having a goal (e.g. finishing a novel), making effort toward that goal (e.g. sitting down to write for an hour each morning), and making the most effective use of the effort (a combination of efficiency and priorities).


There are many techniques I use, but I want to share the ones I’ve found most helpful.

Today, it’s principles #1:

The Only Person I Have to Cheat is Myself

Purpose: Fostering motivation and focus


When I was writing my first novel, Avogadro Corp, I would spend my most productive time writing in coffee shops. 

I developed a rule for myself: I imagined that if anyone in the coffee shop saw me surfing Facebook or the web, they’d laugh at me: “He doesn’t have anything better to do than surf Facebook.”


The sad truth is that on a moment by moment basis, it was vaguely satisfying to check in on Facebook and see what my friends were doing. But the time I had in the coffee shop was precious: carefully carved out of my daily schedule, limited to an hour or two at most. I could spend that time on Facebook, but at the cost of not writing. Or I could write, which might be painful on a minute by minute basis, but was immensely satisfying as I saw my novel take form.


In effect, I was using willpower (as facilitated by imagined peer ridicule) to exercise self-control to work on what was most important to me.


The notion that willpower is an exhaustible resource, also known as ego depletion, has been much discussed regularly. However, a 2010 study found that “reduced self-control after a depleting task or during demanding periods may reflect people’s beliefs about the availability of willpower rather than true resource depletion”. (My emphasis added.)


In my own experience with weight loss, I found that the trick to avoid exhausting my willpower was to decrease the amount of time spent thinking about it. When trying to lose thirty pounds in 2011, I found myself thinking at length about the cookies, cake, and ice cream I was passing up, trying to rationalize whether I could have a small piece, what the effect might be, and whether I even wanted to lose weight. After many days of agonizing over my desire for sweets, I realized that no one else cared whether I ate those sweets or if I was fat or thin or somewhere in between. No parent, teacher, friend or spouse was going to tell me what to do, and quite frankly, I was exhausted debating it with myself.


I developed a simple mantra: “The only person I have to cheat is myself.” Instead of spending a great deal of mental energy over every sweet craving, I shortcut the process.


The phrase embodies three ideas: That your goals are important to you, you’ll disappoint yourself if you don’t focus on achieving them, and you can’t escape responsibility by expecting someone else to step in.


This simple mantra works for any goal you’ve decided is important to you.