“The GoldenEye was a fictional electro-magnetic orbital weapon developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” [GoldenEye (weapon) | James Bond Wiki | Fandom] bit.ly/36rz6sF

You don’t like sex or video-games quite as much as you think you do.
These activities are not that intrinsically interesting (obviously, they are a little bit).
What really makes them seem fun is the focus with which they are performed.
If you want to be happy, focus.

Now, you’re probably thinking: “Khatz, you’re a tanned basement weaboo, you’re no poonslayer”.
And you would be right.

But my lack of experience is made up for by the depth of the insights I’m about to drop on you.

Dopamine is designed to trick you into making things seem funner than they actually are.
Dopamine rewards anticipation, not action.
Ask Bob Sapolsky. He’ll fill you in. Tell you all about it.

• [The Dopamine Seeking-Reward Loop | Psychology Today] bit.ly/2XDRFGj
• [Shopping, Dopamine, and Anticipation | Psychology Today] bit.ly/3bTQcQZ

Hijack the system and use it to enter flow instead.

You think you want pleasure.
What you actually want is a structure that can envelope you and allow you to engage in bounded self-abandonment.

Focus and clarity create flow, an almost complete state of self-abandonment.
Fun and happiness are directly proportional to time spent in the flow state.
You can induce flow more or less ex nihilo through total, unabashed, undiluted focus on a single, clear tactical goal.

Clarity, specificity, narrowness, doability, brevity. Sequences of winnable games. These are the ingredients of flow-inducing tactical goals.
Which is an overwrought way of saying: happiness.
It doesn’t mean you’re not also, say, hearing audio in your adopted language.
It means your focus is stable and singular.

The secret is this: always multiplex, never multitask.
Take input from multiple sources simultaneously, but give attention and output to one thing and only one thing at a time.
Focus on that one thing as if it were the most important thing in the Universe.

What about reading while watching TV? Isn’t that two things?
I mean, yeah, but no.
Depending on your constitution, it’s either
(1) just a special compound type of “one thing”, or
(2) two things, but with a rapid, binary, fun-driven, stable focus switch.

The point of focus, laserlike, like a GoldenEye EMP satellite, on a single thing, is not to take a puritanical stand on pleasure.
It’s actually super hedonistic. The idea is Promethean: stealing the fire of pleasure and spreading it throughout your life.

Just, pretend the GoldenEye system was more like SDI than it actually was.

Anything can be like video-games or multiplayer bedroom sports if you respect it enough to give it your undivided attention.

Focus. Timebox. Slay.

PS: Thích Nhất Hạnh has spent almost his entire career trying to teach this to noobs: focus induces happiness.
ティク・ナット・ハン
WIKI: bit.ly/2VdamOi
AMZN: amzn.to/3c0zIGM

Eckhart Tolle is, like, a German, non-celibate Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Their teachings are only superficially “spiritual”.
They come down to attention management (OMG that sounds dry).
Both will teach you how to be happy and productive.
エックハルト・トール amzn.to/3gjZskQ

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” so said Prometheus, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875).

For AJATT purposes, I would change that to read: “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from timeboxing“, or, more generally, “whom the gods would destroy, they first prevent from obeying the principle of proportionality“. The principle of proportionality is more or less the central dogma of John Lewis Gaddis‘ thesis in his more-than-awesome book “On Grand Strategy“, an audio review (by me!) of which you can find here at this link.

Let’s not beat around the bush like a 1970s blue movie: I get overwhelmed easily. Very easily. Painfully easily. I used to think it was just me, but lately I’m beginning to think it’s quite widespread, if not common. It’s definitely not just me. The personal is universal, and all that.

Think of the people — often women, because I love me some casual misogyny lol — whom we describe as drama queens. These people are real. These people exist. These people treat the soiling of a decorative towel with the same gravity as finding out that someone has molested their child — indeed, sometimes, they seem treat them in inverse proportion. These people violate the principle of proportionality on the daily: that is why they’re mad; that is why we mock and dislike them.

So, back to me, I feel overwhelm really easily: I am the drama queen that I mock ¹. Like a tyrant, a mad caesar, I try to command myself to be instantly awesome, to have it all done and perfect right now in fact yesterday or else I’m going to cry and throw a tantrum, motherlover. But when I get that way, I say to myself “remember you are human; even caesar must budget”. There’s a rich history behind that phrase, but I really super duper can’t be bothered to explain it to you myself so I’m going to have someone else explain it to you for me:

“After every major military victory in ancient Rome, a “triumph,” as it was called, was celebrated in Rome. It was a ceremonial procession granted to victorious generals…The victorious general who drove throughout the streets of Rome in the chariot, decorated with gold and ivory, was followed by his troops and preceded by his most glamorous prisoners and spoils, taken in war. The triumph for the victorious general offered extraordinary opportunities for self-publicity and therefore popularity with the people of Rome. The victorious general was seen as, in some way, divine, representing the god Jupiter…One of the most interesting parts of the triumph was that behind the victorious general in the chariot stood a slave, holding a golden crown over his head, and whispering to him throughout the procession, ‘[Memento te hominem esse (remember you are human)]’…reminding him that he is a man even when he is triumphing.”

[In Ancient Rome, a slave would continuously whisper ‘Remember you are mortal’ in the ears of victorious generals as they were paraded through the streets after coming home, triumphant, from battle] [Emphasis Added]

Dr. Mary Beard, of SPQR fame, even has a whole-a$$ book about it:[Amazon.com: The Roman Triumph (9780674032187): Mary Beard: Books]

Even caesar must budget. Even Rome must budget her time, her energies, her resources, her gold, her men. Everybody is a balling on a budget — even if they don’t realize it yet — the only difference is where the decimal point goes. Some budgets are bigger than others, but they are all finite.

Our modern analogue to Roman military power is the United States and its armed forces — easily the most powerful in known human history. But even these are not immune to the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. Even the American military can lose, would lose, will lose, has lost when it(s civilian leadership) has failed to apportion its goals according to its resources. Even America(‘s military) has to focus, has to narrow down its working target list. Even America must budget.

What is true of the world’s mightiest fighting force, a million men strong, pricier than the ten nearest combined, is darn well true of us as individuals as well. In many essential ways, the folly and wisdom of organizations is just the folly and wisdom of individuals writ large.

The genocidal bigots of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party may have been right ² — the Teutons may well have been the master race — but even master races have to obey higher laws — again, the laws of physics, of war, of logistics, of proportionality, of time and resource management. You can’t just stand around wearing Hugo Boss outfits and flossing about how masterful you are while committing all the textbook errors of Eurasian warcraft.

Even so-called “geniuses” (assuming they exist at all), are subject to these higher laws, are created and destroyed by them. In a very real, direct and brutal (if still highly metaphorical) sense, these laws are our “gods” — everybody, of all religions and none, submits to them and more or less knows that they must submit to them. And if they don’t know, they are “punished”, not for their “sins”, but by them.

Even master races must budget. Budget time, budget money, budget resources, and (most importantly) budget mental and physical energy. Hubris comes for us all, like a cougar in tasteful lingerie, offering drama-free, no-strings-attached…interaction. Be not tempted. You will never be too good for the fundamentals. You will never be too good for the basics. You will never be too good to need to practice Japanese. Nobody is.

I say “even” a lot, don’t I?

We’ve brought up the concept of “sin”. We don’t want to get too moral, though. For best results, strategic calculations should be conducted amorally. The less we moralize, the clearer we think and the better we do. Generally, we want to be amoral in our ratiocination but not in our implementation. ³

So focus. Narrow down. Be here now. Do one and only one thing (even when you multiplex). Wash one dish. One. One thing. One target. Don’t get caught up in wars so long that some of the people now fighting them were not even born when they started. Don’t invade France and Russia at the same time, in fact, don’t invade Russia, period (lol), there is clearly nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by doing so. Don’t be that dog, dawg: you know how some dogs will try to fit gigantic sticks into tiny doorways? Well, that’s us when we don’t focus: we try to fit multiple things into singular moments.

You don’t need to be a “genius” — just marginally smarter than your average dog.

You are, were and will always be human. When you were a child, you were just human. When you did that awesome thing ten years ago, you were human. You are human now. Should you live be ten thousand years old and own your own planet, you will still be human. Still bound, still finite, still fallible. So you need not be nostalgic for a past when you were great, or yearning for a future when you will be great. You need not feel regret for some counterfactual whereby you could have been great. You need not blame yourself for your failings and failures. You are here, now. Live here, now. Work here, now. Play here, now.

You can be, do, have and learn it all. But you can only be, do have and learn one thing right now.

You are real and you are powerful. Your ideas are infinite. Your mind is infinite. But your hands are finite. Ya only got two (hopefully). And only one even writes (typically). So…act like it. Narrow it down. You can do it all, but you can’t do it all now. You can only do one thing now ⁴. Eliminate. Focus. Repeat.

What is an entropy bomb? It’s basically this, recast, reimagined and placed on a rigorous course steroids : [Three Minutes Of… | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time] goo.gl/rTK8BN

No plan. No thought. Just set the (timebox countdown) timer and fight back entropy, more or less violently and indiscriminately, for three minutes.

While I did just say “indiscriminately”, I do tend to focus the bomb in space — narrow down the “blast radius”, so to speak — because focus is power, but the point is to think less and do more, because that is how productivity, happiness and success happen.

The trick with entropy bombs (which, strictly speaking, should perhaps be called “anti-entropy” bombs), is to not be the Soviet Union, which is to say, don’t try to make one big entropy bomb (one big timebox): instead, hit your targets with multiple, smaller bombs — hence the 3-minute temporal yield limit. Entropy bombs are, fundamentally, a tactical weapon, not some deterrent for decoration or strategic posturing. They’re for raiding and skirmishing, not laying waste to cities. Put another way, they are a theater weapon, not a theatrical weapon.

So, that’s more or less the “how” of it. But what about the “why”?

Why do we, humans, do the things we do? Why do we seek the experiences we seek? Why do we (or many of us, at least) pursue sex, pursue orgasms, join cults, consume mind-altering substances, go drinking, go to nightclubs and discotheques, go to music festivals?

There are many levels at which you could answer that. There’s the Bob Sapolsky dopamine level, which is super awesome but not the one we want right now. Instead, I’ma go for the Thích Nhất Hạnh-level answer: we do the things we do because we want to experience, well, moksha. We want to be free of fear, worry and even thought itself. Perhaps even life itself — that’s the attraction of suicide: the freedom. Perceptive as always, the French call orgasms “la little death” — the petite mort, if you will.

But seeking that kind of freedom, that kind of release, can be both dangerous and counter-productive; I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the kind of society where we’re all dissipated druggies or spaced-out saddhus or both. We are all better off because Steve Jobs became an entrepreneur instead of a monk; hippies promise heaven but always produce chaotic hellholes; I want water that runs and trains that come on time. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to choose between happiness and success: entropy bombs in particular, and timeboxing and force concentration in general, are a powerful and productive way to both channel and realize that healthy and legitimate desire for flow, for peak experience, for moksha, for freedom, for release.

Don’t be an irresponsible hedonist. Don’t be a dutiful masochist. Be an entropy bomber .

When you’re doing one thing (which by, definition, is something you can do, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it) never, ever, not for even one femtosecond, think about the infinities of other things you aren’t doing. That includes all the things you can’t do, won’t do, didn’t do, should do, would do, could do and/or wish you were doing. Ignore them like a phone call from a telemarketer or a chick you’re ghosting, I dunno: I’m not here to judge how you handle your romantic relationships, brah.

(Unless, that is, you want to be depressed, unproductive and suicidal, in which case, yeah, go nuts — always be thinking of all the things you aren’t doing ).

Always be here now. Completely and utterly immersed in this moment. Inhabit it totally. Move in like it’s your house for the rest of eternity. Dive all the way in. Lose yourself like Eminem’s mom’s spaghetti. Let this moment swallow you up like a black hole connected to a pocket universe.

Does this mean you never think of the future or the past? Yes, except for scheduled, timeboxed contemplation sessions, it means exactly that.

The upshot of all this is that you’re highly likely to start thinking, planning and acting better, because you’ll love the freedom of losing yourself so much that you’ll fill your day with things you can gladly lose yourself in, things that reward you both in the present and the future. But that’s not the actual aim of the game — it’s just a lovely side-effect, sort of like how Viagra was originally actually a heart medication, and helping guys perform for women they’re not attracted to was just a serendipitous side benefit oh crap I’ve said too much.

Anyway!

Wiser men than I have had something to say on this, among them the man who singlehandedly popularized the Pareto principle in our time, Ricardo van den Kochden aka Richard Koch:

“In a word, selectivity.

Live in the present for most of your time.

But live in the future – be concerned about building a better life for yourself and the people you truly care about – for the vital moments when you can make a difference.

When you make the decisions that may change your life, and that of others.

Choosing a life partner. Deciding on a career. Accepting a job offer or rejecting it. Helping a friend in need. Starting a business. Inventing a new product or service. Cultivating a new friendship with someone who can possibly change your life, and certainly enrich it.

These are all examples of decisions and activities that are of crucial importance. Making the right decision is a highly leveraged action. A small amount of time will have a huge influence on the future.

But these decisions don’t come along all that often, or consume – even in total – a large proportion of your time.

So live in the present moment most of the time – perhaps 95-99% of it.”

[SHOULD WE REALLY LIVE IN THE MOMENT? | Richard Koch]

1%-5% of the time means that you get at most 10 to 72 minutes per day to plan, fret and worry. The rest of the time, it’s present time all the time, baby.

• “フェムト秒 1000兆分の1（10^-15）秒のこと。フェムトは10^-15を表す補助単位で、fと表記する。” [フェムト秒(ふぇむとびょう)とは – コトバンク] goo.gl/xySRjC
• “a femtosecond is to a second as a second is to about 31.71 million years; a ray of light travels approximately 0.3 µm (micrometers) in 1 femtosecond, a distance comparable to the diameter of a virus.[2]” [Femtosecond – Wikipedia] goo.gl/4xNM4Q
• “在一飛秒中光可以在真空內傳播0.3微米” [飛秒 – 維基百科，自由的百科全書] goo.gl/ggpAEc

“You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

This is one of those ones where it’s especially difficult to take the ideas out of my head and put them in a way that other people can understand. But, at the risk of sounding conceited, it is my honest opinion that these ideas are so valuable that they’re worth being expressed even partially and incompletely. To quote myself ¹:

“To be human is to be misunderstood most of the time and in most places, even by the people who like you, even by yourself. And that’s perhaps part of why we spend so much time and effort communicating: not to eradicate the problem but to mitigate it.”
[Speaking: You Don’t Have A Linguistic Problem, You Have A Humanity Problem — Why You Still Suck At Speaking and How to Fix it Fast | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time]

Alrighty, then! Here we go:

You know, there are as many ways to use timeboxing as there are things to do and try and see and explore in this world.

OK, maybe not that many ways, but there’s still a lot of variety.

Personally, I am constantly trying more, different, new, better, faster, funner, easier ways of doing things. A couple of things things that are working really well with me right now include ramp scaling and polar switching.

At the core of both of these ideas is the idea of satisficing, which is just a fancy way of saying: doing the best you can with what you’ve got (which includes all resources — time, energy, knowledge, friends, acquaintances, etc.), not the best possible and definitely not the the best imaginable.

“Satisficing is a decision-making strategy or cognitive heuristic that entails searching through the available alternatives until an acceptability threshold is met.[1] The term satisficing, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice,[2] was introduced by Herbert A. Simon in 1956…Simon used satisficing to explain the behavior of decision makers under circumstances in which an optimal solution cannot be determined. He maintained that many natural problems are characterized by computational intractability or a lack of information, both of which preclude the use of mathematical optimization procedures. He observed in his Nobel Prize in Economics speech that “decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world. Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science”.[6]

Simon formulated the concept within a novel approach to rationality, which posits that rational choice theory is an unrealistic description of human decision processes and calls for psychological realism. He referred to this approach as bounded rationality”
[Satisficing – Wikipedia]

Theoretically, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they’re not even the same type of thing. You might call it the Theory of Task Relativity: Never do your absolute best. Do your best within the context, that is, your best relative to what you’ve got. What is your context? Well, the timebox is your context. Your physical energy is your context. Your physical location is your context. Whether or not you’re next to your computer is your context. All the particulars and limitations of time, space and resources are your context. You wanna do your best within these limitations, not outside them; there is nothing for you outside them (except for the eternal emptiness of perfectionism).

Ironically, however, doing the best you can with what you have (actually, if we’re to follow Pablo Picasso’s advice, with less than what you have) is what will produce transcendent (man, I hope I’m spelling this word right) success for you.

Don’t believe me?

Think, for a second, about all the things you love: Star Wars, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, smartphones, custard pudding, homemade popcorn with coconut oil and nutritional yeast, nduma, that MPDG from that movie…all these things are all finite and limited. And yet, they’re so awesome it’s almost otherworldly.

The irony, then is this: We do not create despite our limitations but because of them. Limits set us free.

Now, Nick Carr ² and many dyspeptic others (like Adam Alter of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked”) argue that our modern technology is somehow ph##ing up our attention spans. I think that that’s categorically untrue. Categorically. And not just because ADHD does not exist ³, but because of what does exist. And what exists is boring sh## that nobody wants to do. Boring s##t has and always will be boring.

But that’s not all.

Part of the issue with how “we”  — all of humanity that’s engaging with modern technology — are behaving is also due to the freedom we now enjoy. The price of personal freedom, however, is personal responsibility. And very often we — myself, unfortunately, included — are unwilling to pay that price.

You see, there used to exist many more external circumstances  and triggers that forced certain good (“good”) behaviors on us. Refined sugar used to be too expensive for anybody but actual royalty. A thick Tolstoy book was the Game of Thrones of its day; if Tolstoy were alive today, he’d be writing his own Netflix/HBO series, not Russian doorstopper novels like some hipster.

Now, though, we can all do bad things on the cheap, and ain’t nobody gonna stop us. Again, part of it is a new epochal, societal freedom. Another part of it is simply the freedom that every non-minor — every legal adult in every society that has ever existed — enjoys, but that not all of us adults exercise with the greatest wisdom and facility until a relatively advanced age (if, indeed, we ever do at all).

That’s a lot of comma-delimited parenthetic asides for one paragraph, but hopefully you’re catching my drift.

Having said that, this isn’t an invitation to wantonly wallow in pop culture to the exclusion of the “high” culture ⁴ that our ancestors (in the widest sense) have left us. Just because we can watch Netflix and YouTube all day and eat them carbs, that definitely doesn’t mean that we should.

Polar Switching

OK, so what is polar switching? It’s easy. So easy, in fact, that it may even seem anticlimactic. Be not fooled. The first thing you’re going to need to do with polar switching is to make a “to-do” list. Yes, despite all my posturing about GLOAFing and arrogantly pooh-poohing the great David Allen’s work from a great height, writing down the things you need or intend do still works and is still awesome. Brian Tracy (the Canadian-American author of personal development classics like “Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life” and “Eat That Frog!“) may be old-fashioned, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. The cooler and more elegant ideas of Tim Ferriss (4HWW) and Richard Koch (80/20) work because of that great Allen-Covey-Tracy foundation, not in spite of it; at the very least, the ideas are not mutually exclusive.

For best results I strongly recommend you write this list on paper. Digitize it for archival purposes if you like, but always come back to paper. Are we being a little hipsterish? ⁵ Perhaps. But also eminently practical.

You see, it’s far too easy to turn on a glowing rectangle (desktop PC, laptop, smartphone) and completely lose track of why you were there in the first place. And then you just default to whatever your YouTube/Amazon/Twitter/whatever social media algorithm has decided you “should” see or “might” be interested. In the immortal words of Haji from The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest: this is not good. This is a recipe for frustration and mediocrity.

Needless to say, frustration and permanent suckiness are precisely what we do not want. Fortunately, polar switching is a recipe for fun and awesomeness. So here’s how you do it:

1. Write a to-do list. Not for forever or even for the whole day ⁶. Just for the next, I dunno, five to sixty or ninety minutes.
2. Do the most important thing (priority #1 on the list. Then,
3. Do the least important/easiest thing (priority #N, assuming an N-item list)
4. Go back to step (2)

This oscillation between hardest and easiest will give you just the balance you need to move forward, without killing your golden goose.

Incidentally, Tony Schwartz is a big fan of oscillation, and he’s the first person who ever pointed out to me that it is a guiding principle of nature. Natural systems oscillate between tension and relaxation.

Wait, what the ###k am I talking about, you say?

Just this: human beings are not machines. Heck, even machines aren’t machines. No machine, literal or metaphorical, animal or mechanical, can work at 100% efficiency 100% of the time. Trying to do that will, literally and/or figuratively, kill it. Working flat out without resting is why many Japanese salarymen eventually just keel over and die every now and then.

You need to work in a way and at a pace that enables you to continue to work for a long time. This is a binary choice. Because your only other “choice”, if it’s even worth calling it that, is to try to force too much work, too hard, too fast, which will very quickly (sometimes instantly) lead you to getting no work done at all, whether thanks to burnout or procrastination.

So that’s polar switching. What about ramp scaling?

Ramp Scaling

Well, this one’s even easier. Remember how, a few paragraphs ago, we talked about how the real problem is freedom, not technology?

It seems rude to call freedom a problem, after all, many people have laid down their lives fighting for it. But it is a problem. It’s just a very high-quality problem, like the upholstery company being sold out of your favorite color for private jet couches.

When other people were around to force us to do the right thing, we didn’t have to pace ourselves. Well, they’re gone now (thank Baal!) and, if we play our cards right ⁷, they won’t ever be back. We will have our freedom if we can keep it. And in order to do that, we need to learn how to exercise it, not return to a Luddite utopia that never did, never could and never will exist.

So, we have to pace ourselves. Ramp scaling allows as to do just that. The idea is simple: use incremental timeboxing any time you’re faced with doing something valuable and important and even fun, but that you’re not getting around to do it because it seems too complicated or daunting. Remember, nothing is too hard, but many things are too big, and need to be broken up like AT&T (except even smaller!).

Mental sports are physical sports. Why? Because everything is everything. You wouldn’t try to do something physically taxing without doing all sorts of preparation (assuming basic sanity, of course) — as well as resting a lot afterwards. Mentally taxing activity is the same. It’s ludicrous for us to expect to go into doing something full-bore right from the word go. That’s like expecting sex to start with orgasms, I mean, it might be nice, but it’s not gonna happen.

The problem is not that smartphones are making us stupid. The problem is that we expect Herculean, Tolstoyan levels of focus apropos of nothing. Our expectations are violently high.

Don’t be a tech curmudgeon. Instead…

Use ramp scaling — incremental timeboxing:

1. Work on your pico-project for just 1 minute. Just 1.
2. Then start again. This time, for 2 minutes.
3. Time up? Good. Now go at it for 3 minutes.
4. Then 4…
5. 5…
6. 6…
7. Keep adding a minute until you can add no more.
8. Don’t take breaks between these timeboxes. Just keep rollin’, rollin’, rolllin’, rollin’ (WHAT?)
9. And when you can’t do another N+1 timebox because you’re either done or out of juice…
10. Then stop and rest for as long as you need to. An hour. Six hours. A day. A week. A month. Whatever. (Haven’t figured out how to gamify the resting part yet).
    • Pro-Tip: Always rest longer than you worked. At he bare minimum, rest for at least half as long as you worked. Do not kill the goose: she can only lay you golden eggs while she’s alive.

Hint: It’s how this post got written, from basic idea to vague bullet points to final form (in case you’re wondering, it took about 18 consecutive incremental timeboxes or 171 minutes, give or take, no breaks, total and complete concentration). #BarryWhiteStyle

My point isn’t that 171 minutes is a lot or little or even that this post is some kind of masterpiece. That’s not the point. My point is that:

1. this post exists at all. Write this on your liver: imperfect real always beats perfect imagined. Nobody can read the perfect things you wish you would write, only the real things you did write. We’re trying to satisfice here. We work with context, in context, not outside or against it.
2. there is no way that I could have concentrated for almost 3 hours if that had been my initial goal. That is not a winnable game. Heck, even three minutes would have been too much. I started with an almost pathetically paltry dream (1 minute) and worked up from there, gradually amassing experience and confidence, gradually racking up wins. This is a lesson that has wide application across all of life. It’s a bottom-up process rather than a Soviet-Harvard top-down one.

And another thing…

You can’t just eat frogs — you want to make your life so that it doesn’t involve metaphorical eating of things you don’t like. But putting off doing the things you love but that are amorphous/complicated won’t make you happy either. The trick is to ramp up into it: you gradually scale up your timebox size to match and assist your level of concentration. It’s this smooth, natural gradient.

Sex isn’t fun when forced — and it’s supposedly the gold standard of pleasure (when we want to express how pleasurable something is we compare it to sex; even the things that are “better than sex” — like crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you and hearing the lamentation of their women — are being compared to sex; in case you’re wondering, I’m trying to see how many times I can say the word “sex” without it seeming awkward oh wait too late) Well, guess what? Neither is work. Work isn’t fun when forced. The trick is to neither be too on-task nor too absent. Don’t go in dry, bro . Give the work some foreplay (lol! phrasing). Lube up. Slide in there all smooth like. Ramp scale into it.

Dropbox is lazy. In several ways. It has to be in order to get anything meaningful done. It avoids busywork like eye-contact with a panhandler. If it can avoid uploading a file, it will. If it can use LAN transfer instead of burdening the WAN and its own servers, it will. And most importantly (for our purposes today), Dropbox uploads smaller files first.

Which makes perfect sense. Why should thousands of 100KB files be kept waiting for hours — days, weeks, perhaps — just for a single 1GB file? That would make no sense-lah. 九唔搭八。

Well, human psychology works just like Dropbox.
Bigs things get put off. Tomorrow. “Someday”. “When I have more time”.

Minutiae get done.

Even stupid minutiae. Nobody ever puts off checking their email, text messages or social media. Why? Not because social media is awesome. Indeed, social media is in many ways the exact opposite of awesome. Most of the time, it sucks. It’s invariably boring or stupid or anger-inducing or all of the above. Not to mention the permanent loss of privacy.

Why, then? Why don’t we put off minutiae? It’s not the content (what); it’s the delivery (how). You see, social media and texts and email come sliced into pieces so small, so thin, that you can’t help but eat one. And then another. And another. It’s like Pringles. It’s like the toothpick finger food at cocktail parties. It’s like in-app purchases. So small. And, in general, small ≒ easy ≒ fun. If it seems small but it’s not fun, that’s because it’s not small enough. Slice smaller.

The trick with timeboxing (RanTim ¹ included) is that turns everything into minutiae. If everything’s a game, you’re just playing. If everything is only going to take 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 minutes to do (depending on how you roll the die), then you’re gonna do it now. And if you want to play just one more round, then roll the die again.

Just do one. Turn your most important projects into minutiae and watch them whizz through the express checkout lane of the supermarket of life .

“In her study of slot machine gambling in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Schüll argues that Americans face too many choices…enough to give a sense of overload…To escape, gamblers flee to a machine zone where the goal is not to win but to be. Gambling addictions simply want to stay in the game, comfortable in a pattern where other things are shut out…From the earliest days, video game players were less invested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same.” [Emphasis Added]
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other: Sherry Turkle

“The superstition that all our hours of work are a minus quantity in the happiness of life, and all the hours of idleness are plus ones, is a most ludicrous and pernicious doctrine, and its greatest support comes from our not taking sufficient trouble, not making a real effort, to make work as near pleasure as it can be.” [Emphasis Added]
Arthur Balfour

“Excellence is the next five minutes…Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!”
Tom Peters

“You can do so much in ten minutes’ time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into ten-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.
Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of IKEA

Recently, there was an article on Gigazine (which, along with LabaQ, is my favorite Japanese news site, mostly because it’s not actually news, just cool tech stuff. Slashdot is a bit too paranoiac and ubergeek-hipster-pessimist in style for my tastes. Don’t me wrong, it’s filled with incredibly smart people from whom I would love to learn more, it’s just…there’s an aggressive undertone to it that I, in my emotional immaturity, am unequipped to handle) about some screw-up over at the Russian foreign ministry involving a video game screenshot being used instead of a real photo proving something to do with US military action in the Middle East blah blah nobody cares the point is…

…I have many guilty pleasures ¹. My life is positively filled with them. And one of those pleasures is Zombie Gunship. Fortunately, because I know a bit about structure and nature of addiction ² my relationship with this game is healthily distant — I hadn’t played it in over a year, but the Russian screenshot had reminded me of it, so I fired it up and went to town.

And it hit me.

Wait, before we even get into that, let me say this. Although I do talk about war an awful lot, I am, in fact, a pacifist. Maybe I have that same problem that conservative, “family values” politicians and religious leaders have — talking too much about what you’re against instead of what you’re for (lol). Anyway, violence is almost never right, and it’s definitely never right when other people are encouraging or forcing you to part-take in it — that’s just you being scammed into risking life and limb for people who plan to keep enjoying safety and comfort while they benefit from your sacrifice.

Also, stylized video game violence and real violence are definitely not the same thing, and anyone who thinks they are needs to sit in a white, padded room for a year until they learn their lesson.

OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

So, it hit me.

Physically (not to mention conceptually), playing Zombie Gunship is no different than cleaning house. Of course, conceptually, the zombies are a contaminant that we are cleaning using gigantic cannons mounted on an aeroplane. So there’s that. But even physically, it’s just wiping. You’re just wiping. Swiping is wiping, except with “real” wiping, your real-life house looks awesome at the end. With tablet (s)wiping and in-app purchases, on the other hand, you just end up having paid time and money for a nothingburger.

And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Software is awesome; I write software, too.

But your goal life probably isn’t to accumulate fake stars and kill fake zombies. It’s probably isn’t even to accumulate real gold stars and kill real zombies, either. So how can the nothingburger that is this and virtually any and every other smartphone game be so much fun and “real life” so (for many people) un-fun?

One word.

Structure.

Thank you and good night.

Just kidding (lol). Let me ‘splain.

Again, why are games fun? It’s not the graphics. Real life has AWESOME graphics (Zombie Gunship‘s grainy, low-resolution monochrome game screen is definitely part of its charm, but that’s neither here nor there). It’s not the content. Many games are set in crapsack world dystopias that not even the most emo kid in your school would want to live in. In fact, it often seems that the crapsackier the world, the more popular the game.

It’s the structure, stupid.

So how do we gamify real life? Well, Epic Win, Habitica and their ilk have made a decent go if it, and I wish them nothing but the greatest success, because their success is our success. If they make something awesome, we will be the ones to benefit from it; I will continue to support them as long as they live and continue producing software.

Steve Jobs made (i.e. marketed and induced people to make) insanely great electronics; he made awesome things that continue make our lives awesome; he deserved every dollar he made and more. The Epic Win and Habitica guys will be equally deserving, when and if that time comes. Unfortunately, that time is not yet with us. Because right now, EW and Habitica and apps like them are still boring as funk because (again, right now) they’re literally just lists with cool retro-pixelated icons from the sprite era of video games.

This is cargo cult gamification: it imitates the visual language of games but not their internal structures (which is where literally all of the magic is). We could use our thumbs and pinkie fingers to make ear- and mouth-piece shapes for the rest of time, but that wouldn’t make them telephones. If anything, Facebook (shudder) is more gamified than Epic Win and Habitica combined. Why? Many reasons, but the biggest is that it contains the element of surprise — you never know exactly what’s going to be in your feed, who will post what, when, or exactly how many likes your thing might earn. The cool-looking-icon to-do lists, on the other hand, have zero surprises.

Again, what does a game — or more generally, any addictive experience — need?

• Clear, unambiguous, winnable goals — this gives a sense of purpose, direction and control
• Surprise: lack of control — externality, randomness, contingency (this was central to B.F. Skinner’s research and discoveries in operant conditioning)…this
• Constraints — for clarity and traction: things to work against. As an aside, people who break the spirit but not the letter of game rules are often accused of “not playing fair”, but that’s total B.S. Bending but not breaking the rules is part of the fun; there’s nothing more exhilarating than a buzzer-beating basket.
• Reward and punishment (probably) — these can be intrinsic, extrinsic or both.

This isn’t an authoritative or even exhaustive list. Plus, a lot of the items, abstract as they are, overlap And I haven’t even mentioned the important insights of the procrastination equation (temporal motivation theory), which, when reverse-engineered, can allow us to structure some highly compelling experiences, but I will touch on TMT/PE indirectly in coming paragraphs. Suffice it to say that a game is a strange blend of stability and chaos. And a to-do list with grainy emojis is way too far king stable.

This wasn’t supposed to a mean review of a class of mobile apps. I definitely don’t like it when people are mean to me, so I try not to be mean to and about to other people. So let’s bring it back to what this post is supposed to be about: how you can gamify your life for less than two dollars (and perhaps even less than that).

This is just one way of many. We want to keep things simple, because adding gadgets and complexity is, more often than not, only fun for the first five minutes after the Kuroneko Yamato guy arrives with your stuff from Amazon and you open up the box; thereafter, it’s nothing but a chore.

You need just two tools:

1. a countdown timer, and
2. a playing die

Both can be purchased at any dollar store.

Roll the die. Whatever number is on the die, that’s how many minutes you run the timer for. During that time, you do one and only one thing. You focus completely. Force concentration, remember?

• Write one paragraph
• Read one page (plus a bit more or bit less, depending on what the time allows)
• Clean one surface
• Empty the dishwasher
• Load the dishwasher
• Whatever the thing is

When time runs out, you either roll again or tap out completely. You win by getting to the end of the time trial — the time box. Perfection is infinite. A timebox is finite. A timebox is winnable.

It seems simple enough. And it is. Remember, though, an idea doesn’t have to be intellectually complex to be good or smart or useful. It just has to work. Leave complexity to academics. Innovation is about new uses for existing tools even more than it is about new tools.

How is all this any different from the timeboxing we — I — have talked about, practiced, pushed and preached up until now? Well, for starters, there’s the new, Skinnerian randomness of the die, so that’s a difference of kind. Secondly, there is a difference of degree — up until now, timeboxing was a medicine. It was a pill. A tool. You — we — took it to make the headache go away. Fire and forget, until the next time. Now, though, I’m suggesting turning timeboxing into not just a spice, not a quaint delicacy, not even a meal, but a staple — the main course at every meal — that is, timeboxing everything: turning virtually anything and everything that isn’t already a fun game for you into a timebox.

In this new scheme of things, timeboxing is the rice (pretend you’re not raw vegan or low-carb high fat lol) and everything else is okazu.

RanTim. Random timeboxing. It’s what’s for dinner.

And breakfast and lunch and snacks .

Fun is about structure, not content. Fun is how not what. Climbing Mount Everest is dirty, dangerous manual labour — even if you’re not a working Sherpa guide (in which case, it really is just labour) — and yet people pay upwards of $100,000 a head for the privilege of doing it. That’s a lot of hookers and blow.

Pleasure isn’t what we necessarily think it is. It’s both simpler and more complex than that. The same physical action, depending on the structure and meaning within which it is embedded, can uplift or depress, invite or repel.

Usually, we let other people embed the meaning for us. But perhaps it behooves us to do it for ourselves a bit once in a while, like when we were kids and a box and a blanket were the USS Enterprise. That isn’t dust you’re wiping, those are zombies. And you have only three minutes to do it. Those aren’t just words you’re typing, they’re a magic spell. Each key fires a gigantic cannon. Oh, and time is running out (lol).

Now, at a philosophical level, I don’t really know why this gamification stuff works (Skinner himself was concerned more with “hows”; that’s part of what makes him such a great scientist — he always chose experimentation over musing), but incompetence has never stopped me before (lol) so let me take a stab at it.

You see, in some ways, humans — those of us who enjoy running water, electricity, sedentary lifestyles, Internet access and “symbolic manipulation”-based non-manual-labour careers, at least — have too much freedom now. Not that that’s a bad thing: having too little freedom sucks balls. And it is better to have too much than too little.

Freedom is like friction, though. You want just enough that you can get traction, but no so much that you chafe, bruise and/or can’t move ³. The solution isn’t to give up our freedom to someone else or have it taken away from us, but to create “fun” constraints for ourselves. So yeah, we “give up” our freedom, but we give it up and take it back on our terms, as and when we want. So it’s not a true surrender. It’s like when the masters served the slaves on the Saturnalia holiday back in Roman times; they weren’t actually giving up their freedom; it was just a game.

Remember, a game is nothing but a list of constraints; it’s a bunch of, essentially, deliberately-introduced, man-made bugs in the software of reality that we decide to classify as “features”. If you really wanted to kick a ball over a white line, you would just wait until everyone else left the soccer field, then you could score all the goals you want. But that’s not want you want, is it?

You want the fun of the friction.

Turkle’s quote up there is telling. We do want to win, but even more than that, we want to be. We want to experience the flow state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a man whose name never gets easier to spell. That is the true purpose of gamification. Gaming is meditation. Gaming is peace. Gaming is enlightenment. And the path there is to mix order and chaos — things are always changing, always different, but also, always the same. You know how the combination of sugar and salt tastes better than either one alone? Yeah. Like that.

This isn’t one of those posts where you read it and laugh and/or get inspired and then leave. This is a call to action. Combine the die and the timer and create strings of short, clear, limited, winnable, random, fun timeboxes for yourself. Try it out and see. Mix it up: nest these small time within larger ones; go decremental; deploy the tools as you see fit. And let me know how it goes .

You like that lame, Buzzfeedy title? Yeah. You know you do.

Based on that title, you may be thinking that you’re about to read an answer to the question of “which language should I learn (in order to maximize socioeconomic returns)?”. And, if that’s what you’re thinking, you would be wrong.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Stick with me.

So, as you may or may not know, I don’t read or watch the news. I quit in 2005 and haven’t looked back. Even Jon Stewart admitted it — following the news, especially the political material of which it mostly consists, just makes you sad and angry. But I do still know “stuff” from back then. And I still have thoughts. And I still read books. In fact, not watching or reading the news gives you space to have more “big picture” thoughts.

And one of the thoughts is this — why is the US military, easily the most powerful in the known history of the world, so frequently unable to win decisive victories and unambiguously impose its nation’s will on the vanquished?

That is a question I will not answer today, the “answer”, such as there is one, doesn’t really matter. It’s like asking why the Roman Empire fell — it’s as interesting as all get-out, and I own copies of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and SPQR in multiple languages (Chinese, Japanese, English) — but the process of researching and weighing and thinking through answers matters more than the final answer. The journey is the destination.

What’s the best part of making out? All of it, really. Lol.

So, why are these big ideas relevant to little people like you and me? Because we are the US military. We are in the possession of the most powerful machine in the known Universe — the human mind. And we got ours for free. No pork barrel spending. No defense contractor corruption. For free, playa! Unbelievable, isn’t it? And it runs on groceries! ¹.

Just like Jhene Aiko’s booty.

Wait, what?

Our brains — our minds ² — and the world’s strongest military are both powerful, but neither is omnipotent. So it simply won’t do to behave like a lottery winner ³. Being strong, smart or otherwise “full of potential” does not exempt you from the laws of our mathematical universe. If anything, it holds you to a higher standard of behavior — pedestrians can walk and use their smartphones with relative impunity, but the laws of the land and of physics will mercilessly punish the driver of a car for doing the same. With great power comes, unfortunately, great Spider-Man quotes.

So, there’s a lot of discussion out there about America’s military paradox — unprecedented power mixed with shocking ineffectiveness. ⁴ Much of it silly, some of it insightful. One recurring key phrase, though, really hit me in the nuts. And it is this:

“limited objectives”

The US military has tended to do well when it has had limited objectives ⁵, based on “clearly articulated and achievable goals“.

You and the US armed forces are limited. No person or group of people has infinite time, money, energy or other resources. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing, because the limitations, if you know how to use them to your advantage (instead of whining about them and wishing they weren’t there), actually set you free ⁶. If you want to succeed, you must use your resources judiciously. You must learn to say “no” pre-emptively. You must timebox.

Say “no” to languages other than the one you want to focus on. Yes, other languages are “useful”. Yes, seeming multilingual will impress strangers you don’t even like. But if you want to win hard at anything — at any language at all — you’re going to have to concentrate your forces. That, or, you can go be like Germany and fight on two fronts like an idiot. Your call.

Trying to Bo Jackson it will not make you twice as happy. Two languages doesn’t double the happiness. Three doesn’t treble it. I’m not saying to go monolingual, but I am saying that, pound of pound, joule for joule of effort, depth is probably more rewarding than depth. Just puttin’ that out there. Limited objectives. Limit your objectives. Say “no”.

Say “no” to trying to do more than you have energy to do.

Say “no” to ideas and feelings and actions that do not help you reach your goal.

Say “no” to trying to do and achieve everything all at once, really fast.

Do the little you can, with the little you have, a little at a time, on the little that matters and you will, paradoxically, achieve much.

Concentrate your forces. Don’t clean the whole house ⁷. Divide and conquer. Make your bed. Win that battle. Then move on to another (small) battlefield. Your desk, perhaps. Don’t clean the whole fridge. Cleaning the whole fridge is not a limited objective — you will choke on something that big; you will get sucked into a personal quagmire. No. Pick one shelf. One. ⁸ Fight there. Clean there. Win there. Then, with decisive victory secured, move on again. Rinse, repeat. The principle applies widely if you let it.

Even in a field as apparently vast and infinite as language acquisition, playing it as a longish series of short, winnable games with, again, limited objectives, turns out to be a winning strategy.

There is no too hard. There is only too big. ¹

The reason you think it’s hard is because the pieces you’re trying to handle are too large.
It’s not hard. It’s not difficult. You’re just not using your knife on it.

The slices you’re trying to eat are too thick.
Assuming you’re even slicing at all, that is.

There are no hard problems, just poorly sliced ones.
There are no hard problems, just oversized slices.

You think too big. You make it hard. You need smaller slices. You don’t necessarily need to change the problem or the question (although that might help from time to time), just cut the slices smaller. So small that you’re embarrassed. So small that you kinda hate yourself. So small that it’s almost self-condescension and you’re a baby and you suck at eating and so you need mommy to cut up your food for you.

And you do suck. At eating. But that doesn’t mean that you have to starve.
Think about it: the bigger an explosion you want to make, the smaller you need to think.

SRS didn’t change kanji, it just cut up kanji memorization into smaller pieces. And then fed those small pieces to you. Like a father to his child.

My bath-taking homeboy Archimedes wanted a massive lever to move the world with ². But perhaps all we need is sharper knives, and a willingness to use them.

You thought supersizing it ³ was only bad for your waist. It turns out it’s just as bad — worse — for your soul. Well, for your mind and life and projects. If in doubt, get your knife out.

Vegan or straight ⁴, we would think it cruel, revolting and unwieldly to eat animals — well, mammals and birds, say — by just biting into them while they’re still alive. People simply don’t go around biting into poor little live cows and lambs and chickens, let alone attempt to swallow them whole. The idea is so abhorrent to us that the thought has never even crossed our minds. Animal foods are cut, flavored and even renamed to the point that they look and taste nothing like the original living creature. There is a lesson here for the attentive.

Why do you let your projects have bad, unsexy names that gross you out? ⁵
Why do you try to eat them alive with you and them kicking and screaming and blood and suffering for all involved? ⁶
Why don’t you cut them into appetizing slices?
Why do leave them so bland? Why don’t you flavor them — make them taste sweet and savory?

You make things taste good before you put them into your mouth. Perhaps your life ⁷ deserves the same courtesy. ⁸

File this one under “autobiographical advice”….

But I guess that file would include all advice ever given in the history of mankind. All philosophy is (auto)biography…I think Steve Chandler or someone said that once.

So let me paint a little picture for you. The other day, I’m at my house. I wake up in the morning. I take a shower. I gingerly wash my nether regions. I get out, wrap a towel around my modesty, slip into a robe. Then I sit on the couch for a bit to cool off.

16 hours later I’m still on the couch; water is running in the kitchen; the household gas has turned itself off. And I know a whole lot about Roman history. You see, I’d just spent 16 hours watching Spartacus.

Most people would be frustrated. Not me. I was fascinated. I was fascinated because if you had asked me two paragraphs ago: “Hey Khatz, baby, I love how you fill that robe. Wanna watch 16 hours of blood and guts?”, I’d have said: “No, that sounds monotonous”.

So I knew that it wasn’t the case that something was wrong with me. Nothing is wrong with me ¹. No, something is right with Spartacus. Spartacus is structured in such a way that it’s easy to watch it for 16 hours.

• Why do you watch Spartacus: Vengeance instead of making that call?
• Why do you shop around for a new trackball mouse on Amazon instead of writing that email?
• Why do you go for a walk instead of working on that project?

Why do you do that meaningless “delta” activity instead of the big, life-changing “alpha” activity you already, unequivocally know truly matters?

Because when you think of alpha, you think too big. You think of all of it at once. And it’s tiring. So tiring. Just thinking of it hurts. “A day of worry is more tiring than a day of work” and all that.

But when you think of delta, you’re only really thinking of clicks and atoms. Delta doesn’t require you to think. Delta doesn’t require you to worry. Delta doesn’t scare you with its enormity. Delta doesn’t make you feel like a chump for not having started earlier. Delta lets you get lost in the moment. Delta comes pre-chunked for you. Delta has been thought out and planned and laid out by someone else. Delta has been designed to be addictive.

MikeLike on November 17, 2011:

You’ve clearly used this method to accomplish great things, so I’m trying to put my skepticism aside… I see how this would apply to something like cleaning the house, but I’m having trouble seeing how it can be applied to larger, more complicated and cognitively intensive tasks. For example, a 20-page paper for a college class.

If I could only work in spurts of 90-120 seconds, I might finish 2 or 3 sentences at a time. Sometimes I wouldn’t even finish one sentence. If I then had to switch, when I came back I’d have to spend most of the timebox figuring out where I left off in the argument and getting myself back in that train of thought. Then it would be time to switch again.

I guess I’m saying that while I see the benefits of frequent task-switching (novelty bringing more mental energy and interest), there are also costs. Some tasks just seem more suited to spending 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or even an hour immersed in focused work.

What do you think about that? Am I misunderstanding how the timeboxing method applies to tasks like writing a paper? Or are the some tasks that work better with timeboxing than others, and if so how should we decide when to make use of this technique?

Duh. If you write 2~3 sentences at a time enough times…the paper will write itself. How do you think I produced this entire website, which, at this writing, would fill a couple of Harry Potter-size books?

Admittedly, this website sucks. But that’s beside the point. It’s here.

There are no truly big atoms. There are no big tasks. Only long sequences of small tasks.

There is no such thing as “hard”: there are just things that need smaller chunks than you’re currently using.

1. Don’t accept anything but the best.
2. Don’t break it down into small pieces.
3. Don’t timebox.
4. Do everything in big time increments. Real work happens in big time increments.
5. Tire yourself out.
6. Don’t stop until you’re bored and hate yourself.
7. Don’t take any shortcuts or save yourself time.
8. Don’t start badly — make a good start or don’t start at all.
9. Don’t start early, wait until everything is ready.
10. Don’t start now, wait until the time is right. Timing is everything.
11. Don’t have fun. Real life is boring. Real life is struggle. Real life is trying hard.
12. Don’t let anything be easy or fun.
13. Always take the longer, harder, way.
14. Don’t take the easy way. Don’t make life easy. Don’t let things be easy. Make it hard, hard, hard. Hard is good. Pain is good. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Bleed. Suffer.
15. Don’t run your own experiments.
16. Don’t trust your own judgment.
17. Don’t do a little bit. Give your everything or do nothing at all.
18. Make it very important.
19. Stress yourself out. Stress is good for you. Real, responsible people feel stress and pain and suffering. Stress and pain and suffering makes you strong and righteous. If you’re not suffering, you’re not building character.
20. Don’t listen to your own hunches.
21. Don’t mix up people’s advice and methods.
22. Don’t have fun.
23. Don’t be playful.
24. Count complex, detailed metrics or count nothing at all.
25. Don’t listen to contradictory advice. Listen to only one method, one guru and obey him completely. Believe him. He is your new deity.
26. Don’t believe in yourself.
27. Know that you’re a piece of schyte and you’ll never amount to anything.
28. Believe that genetics determine everything. Know that you will never amount to anything more than your worst ancestor.
29. Don’t try any of your own original ideas.
30. Don’t combine techniques and ideas from different fields. This is not Kansas, Nairobi or London. Nothing you know or have ever done before is relevant here.
31. Stop as soon as you think the people around you don’t think you’re cool.
32. Stop as soon as someone ignores you.
33. Stop as soon as someone makes fun of or criticizes you.
34. Find reasons why you can’t.
35. Look for reasons why you won’t succeed.
36. Stop as soon as someone praises you.
37. Stop as soon as your spouse cries. Your spouse’s tears make the Universe stop. Emotion is right. Logic is wrong.
38. Don’t be resourceful. If the door is closed, do not find the window. Give up.
39. Know your limits. You never were much and you will never amount to much.
40. Give up as soon as you hit a single snag.
41. Blame your mother. It’s her fault you’re the way you are.
42. Blame your father. It’s his fault you’re the way you are.
43. Blame your country. If you lived in a proper country, you wouldn’t have these problems.
44. Blame men. Men get in your way.
45. Blame women. Women suck and are gay and keep holding you back.
46. Blame the Jews. If Seinfeld weren’t on the air, your life would be perfect.
47. Do not find your way. If there is no way already prepared then there is no way.
48. Look around you for advice. If success were possible, everyone else would be doing it.
49. If you don’t get it right the first time, give up. You don’t have talent. Everyone talented was good from the word “go”. Only do things you’re talented at.
50. Do not do or think anything original.
51. Don’t apply the Pareto principle. That stuff is a lie. If all you had to do was focus on the most important 20% then everybody would be doing it.
52. Don’t apply Parkinson’s Law. Think about it: how good can a law be if it has the same name as a disease?
53. Go with the majority opinion. If everyone else thinks it, it must be true. That’s what democracy is about.
54. Don’t do the best you can do now. Wait until everything is perfect.
55. Read, believe, imbibe and immerse yourself in the opinions of people who have never achieved what you are trying to achieve.
56. Don’t accept anything that’s less than perfect.
57. Don’t walk. Don’t move. Rush. Fly faster than the speed of light.
58. Don’t rest. Work until you hurt yourself.
59. Don’t change plans. Don’t change methods. Marry your modus operandi and stay with it until you die.
60. Don’t do one. Don’t do a little. It’s all or nothing. Some will not do. A little will not do. All or nothing.
61. Don’t improve gradually. Don’t use kaizen.
62. Don’t stop doing stuff that’s a waste of time.
63. Don’t take the quick and dirty path.
64. Only listen to authority figures.
65. If anyone says anything is impossible, believe them.
66. Don’t appreciate small improvements. If it’s not a big improvement, it’s nothing.

Apply these steps, tools and memes, and you will successfully get nothing done ! Good hunting!

For your referential pleasure, I made this little conversion table. That time sure adds up!

Decremental Timebox → Real (=Full) Time Conversion Table
(Key assumption: 1 minute decrement, so 4 minutes → 4 minutes + 3 minutes + 2 minutes + 1 minute)

• 1 minute → 1 minute
• 2 minutes → 3 minutes
• 3 minutes → 6 minutes
• 4 minutes → 10 minutes
• 5 minutes → 15 minutes
• 6 minutes → 21 minutes
• 7 minutes → 28 minutes ~ 1/2 hour
• 8 minutes → 36 minutes
• 9 minutes → 45 minutes
• 10 minutes → 55 minutes ~ 1 hour
• 11 minutes → 66 minutes  ~ 1 hour
• 12 minutes → 78 minutes
• 13 minutes → 91 minutes ~ 1.5 hours
• 14 minutes → 105 minutes
• 15 minutes → 120 minutes = 2 hours
• 16 minutes → 136 minutes
• 17 minutes → 153 minutes
• 18 minutes → 171 minutes ~ 3 hours
• 19 minutes → 190 minutes
• 20 minutes → 210 minutes  ~ 3.5 hours
• 21 minutes → 231 minutes  ~ 4 hours
• 22 minutes → 253 minutes  ~ 4.25 hours
• 24 minutes → 300 minutes = 5 hours
• 25 minutes→ 325 minutes ~ 5.5 hours
• 26 minutes → 351 minutes ~ 6 hours
• 30 minutes → 465 minutes = 7.75 hours ~ 8 hours

“It is not about staying the course. It is not about pushing yourself for long periods of time…The key to your great performance is intense effort balanced by deep recovery. It’s becoming a sprinter inside a marathon. You live in a marathon, but the way to thrive in that marathon is to push yourself to the limit and then recover.” ~ Tony Schwartz

Hey team. It’s been a while. Welcome to another (quite unplanned) installment, the tenth, of this rather inappropriately named Timeboxing Trilogy. For those of you wanting to pick up from where we left off, check out Part 9: Birthlines And Timeboxing, ←here. ← There.

Um…the question of timeboxing and rest/recovery is on which I’ve vacillated a lot and on which I may well vacillate again. That’s just how I roll. At times, I have advocated deliberately resting between timeboxes, urging people to resist the well-meaning urge to force themselves to continue and thereby kill the proverbial golden egg-laying goose ¹ of energy and concentration.

But then, sometime later, in this very series no less, I pooh-poohed the idea of taking a break, suggesting that anyone who needed a break after a 120-second timebox shouldn’t be working in the first place. And now I’m back on the side of “take a break between timeboxes, whether you feel you need to or not”. What gives? Like I’ve said, I’ve shifted between these points of view multiple times. And maybe I’ll shift again, who knows? So what’s different about this time? Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr are what’s different. Loehr and the Schwartz have written several books on the issue I’m about to discuss, including but not limited to:

• The Power of  Full Engagement
  • [Japanese version: 成功と幸せのための4つのエネルギー管理術─メンタル・タフネス], and
• Toughness Training for Life
  • [Japanese version: メンタル・タフネス─勝ち抜く「精神力」を手に入れる].

OK, but so what? So what indeed. I guess right about now would be as good a time as any to explain just who Schwartz and Loehr are and what their story is. Um…I’m recounting this from memory, so there may be some BS/abbreviation/inaccuracy on my part. Schwartz was originally a journalist by profession; tennis was a big hobby of his. Loehr was a sports (performance) psychologist. Using knowledge and techniques that he had personally arranged, discovered and developed, Loehr showed a middle-aged Schwartz how to beat a seeded twentysomething pro player, simply by relaxing more between plays, both physically and psychologically.

So what? Give me a chance here. I’m gettin’ there; I’m gettin’ there. Loehr and Schwartz’s spiel is that there is a personal resource that is even more precious than time: energy  ( = the capacity to do work). Their idea is that we build capacity by repeatedly cycling between (eu)stress and relaxation (= recovery = rest). Too much relaxation leads to atrophy, decay and unfulfilled potential; too much (eu)stress leads to pain, suffering, injury and disease. It turns out that, contrary to that constant nagging sense of guilt we always seem to be carrying around, most people don’t relax enough — and that’s everyone, from professional athletes to layfolk. And it also turns out that we all need far more relaxation than we think we do. In fact, if Schwartz and Loehr are to be believed, most of our time should be spent on relaxation ², punctuated by short, intense bursts of exertion (=eustress).

So anyway, apparently, both eustress and relaxation are absolutely necessary for well-being and increased capacity: use it or lose it. Anyone who knows about how muscle is built is probably familiar with this idea: what happens is that exercise (= eustress) causes tiny tears in muscle tissue; these tears then heal, leaving you with tissue that’s bigger, better and stronger than before. In fact, a similar process seems to happen in bone as well (Wolff’s Law):

“bone in a healthy person or animal will adapt to the loads it is placed under. If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading…The racquet-holding arm bones of tennis players become much stronger than those of the other arm. Their bodies have strengthened the bones in their racquet-holding arm since it is routinely placed under higher than normal stresses.” ~ Wikipediation

What does this have to do with Japanese? For the answer to that question, you’re going to have to check out the QRG(no, seriously)! Haha . The short answer is: not a lot, but not nothing. I guess you can:

• think of your SRS time (reps especially) as eustress, and
• the rest of your “just chillin’ and passively enjoying Japanese time” as recovery.

To put it in concrete numbers, the state of the art in coaching experience and research literature suggests that you should maybe only do up to about 90 minutes per day of conscious Japanese “study” — pedalling. And this 90 minutes should not be all in one block. Instead, you have dozens of tiny “SRS sprints” spaced out throughout your day. The rest of the time, just chill, just coast.  Do Japanese, but in a chill way. Kick back. Catch some ‘toons. Let it wash over you. Pretend you’re at the beach and Japanese is the sun and the sea or something… Now, how does timeboxing fit into all this energy business? Well, what I’ve been doing is having incredibly short, incredibly intense timeboxes, punctuated by very long breaks. My breaks are now at least twice as long as my timeboxes (and sometimes five, ten or even a hundred times longer), even when the timebox itself is only 60~120 seconds long. So I’ll have:

• A 90-second timebox followed by a 60-minute break.
• Or I’ll have a 1-2-3-4-minute incremental timebox, followed by a 50+-minute break (meaning that, yes, I”ll only work 10 minutes/hour [1+2+3+4=10]…but boy will I work).

That kind of work-rest ratio may seem preposterous to you, but it’s:

1. Highly sustainable — the golden goose of focus stays live — and
2. Highly productive, no doubt because of Pareto/Parkinsonian side-effects — if I can only work so long, I’m forced to do only important work, and to work quickly and efficiently. There is no room for waste.

Anyhoo, that’s all from me today. I’ve only scratched the surface of this stuff,  so feel free to check out more of it on your own. You’re sure to find some life-changing hints and ideas:

• Tony Schwartz talks @ Google
• Jim Loehr talks

The previous installment of the trilogy is here, first installment here.

What’s that? The meaning of the word “trilogy”? Don’t…Don’t even start. Just…don’t.

Today, I’m just going to quickly share with you a little technique I came up with recently that uses birthlines to approach tasks where unnecessary fear and BS is involved. To keep things short, I will assume you already know what birthlines are.

Basically, this technique combines decremental and incremental timeboxing with birthlines. What happens is that the birthlines keep decrementing in distance, while the work that’s done at the birthline increments. So like this:

1. Rest: 64 minutes
2. Birthline 0: Work 1 minute.
3. Rest: 32 minutes
4. Birthline 1: Work 2 minutes
5. Rest: 16 minutes
6. Birthline 2: Work 4 minutes
7. Rest: 8 minutes
8. Birthline 3: Work 8 minutes
9. Rest 4 minutes
10. Birthline 4: Work 16 minutes
11. Rest 2 minutes
12. Birthline 5: Work 32 minutes
13. Return to 1?

So what’s happening up there is that we’re halving the time between birthlines, while doubling the length of timeboxes. The actual numbers are, of course, up to you.  I don’t use birthlines like this all the time, but this kind of “inverse timeboxing” is useful for easing yourself into things that would otherwise get unnecessarily avoided. Things like, I dunno, filling in tax forms. For writing AJATT itself I mostly use “parabolic” timeboxing.

If you have a task you’re avoiding, one thing you could do is start with this “inverse timeboxing” or “birthline timeboxing” or whatever we’re going to call it, and then, once you’re past the worst of the fear and avoidance, switch to a simpler timeboxing method.

That’s it. Pretty simple. First you rest for a whole hour, then work for just 1 minute. So you don’t even have to stop procrastinating to begin with . Life is sweet, ‘innit?

Next installment: Timeboxing Trilogy, Part 10: Timeboxing, Tony Schwartz and Recovery | AJATT | All Japanese All The Time j.mp/dM8XoP

OK, now I’m just abusing the word “trilogy”.

Series starts here. Previous post is here.

I can’t find the original comment, but back in one of the preceding timeboxing posts, a kid asked a very pertinent question. It went something along the lines of:

“How can a 60-second timebox have any meaning or motivational value if you know you’re just going to have another one?”

Great question. Excellent question. Let me answer it very simply.

1. First, you’ve got go get out of the mindset that a 60-second timebox has no intrinsic value. Or, more accurately, you’ve got to get into the mindset where you can see the intrinsic value of 60 seconds. And what mindset is that? It’s this one. It’s the probabilistic algorithm mindset: it’s the mindset that says: “I’m not going to a lot of work; I’m not going to do perfect work; I’m just going to do something that helps [for 60 seconds]”. So a short timebox is saying to you: what you do doesn’t have to be big, it just has to help.
2. Once you understand that 60 seconds can have value, you are then in a position to begin to appreciate nested timeboxing. Because the whole point of nested timeboxing is to bring form to the formless. 60-second timeboxes are great, but an endless succession of them can seem, well, endless. That’s where nested timeboxing comes in. It puts these useful microtimeboxes (which I’ll arbitrarily define as any timebox of size < 300 seconds) into a larger framework of meaning. Nested timeboxing gives bigger meaning and structure to the small-but-useful microtimeboxes.
3. Finally, there’s no rule that says you have to use 60 seconds as your timebox length. That just happens to be a length that appeals to me personally. That’s just how I play the game; it’s how I roll. Remember, though, this is all a game, i.e. it is something you play at. For fun. The rules only exist to make things fun. Change, interchange and ignore at will.

So that’s the basic idea there. Keep your questions coming, they’re top stuff .

Here we go again with another entry in the timeboxing series…I really should stop calling it a “trilogy”, since there are quite clearly more than three parts, but…whatever. I mean, it was originally intended to span only three parts but it kept — OK, no, we’re seriously not talking about this any more.

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

Some very pertinent questions about the value of timeboxing (or lack thereof) came up on the Twitter the other day. Since my answers are too long to tweet, I’d like to share them with you here.

“Isn’t time boxing just a long-winded way of procrastinating? Isn’t a better idea just ‘get crap done’? Why use timers and crap?” — @TracyBBoy

Excellent question…s. Let me attempt an answer.

>Isn’t time boxing just a long-winded way of procrastinating?

How is it procrastination to say “I’m going to do thing T for M minutes starting now“, and then do it?

>Isn’t a better idea just “get crap done”?

Is it? What about the people who sit around paralyzed thinking “but it’s gonna take forever”? What about tasks that do need to be done, but also need to be prevented from taking too long? What about tasks that are cyclical, that do not finish? What about tasks that cannot be easily divided into even parts but would benefit from being done piecemeal (and since time can always be divided evenly…)

>Why use timers and crap?

If time is easier to divide than task quantity, then it makes sense to divide by time. Time is (now) a universal, standardized, unambiguous, and often quite convenient metric.

Timeboxing is about giving form to the formless. It’s about making the large small.

At some meta-level, we are only afraid of what we can’t understand. And what does the word “understand” mean? Well, in Japanese, you say 分かる/解かる/理解 (wakaru | rikai), which shares the same root as 分ける (wakeru) and 分解 (bunkai), all of which mean “to break apart“. In jive, when you’re explaining something to someone, you (used to) say “let me break it down for you”.

Once something is broken down into small, visible pieces, you own it; you control it; you understand it. You can’t fear it and you can’t fantasize about it. All that’s left is to do. To play with it. That’s what timeboxing is about.

But…whatever. It’s not like it’s an idea that needs defending. If it would work to go slap everybody in the face and tell them to shut the fork up and get it done, Nelson Mandela bootcamp style, I’d be for that, too. But that’s what we do right now, and it doesn’t work. All it does is make people feel like crap, teach them to work reactively out of fear and shame (rather than proactively out of joy and greed), and add an unnecessary “moral” element to work.

Most work is and should be amoral. I vote for “cleanliness is next to knowing where the heck your stuff is, being able to think straight, and having no household pests” over “cleanliness is next to godliness”.

The difference between timeboxing and “just do it” is the difference between abstinence (“tell them kids to just not do it”) and contraception (“let’s put some mechanisms in place to mitigate the consequences of the fact that those kids may just do it”). The former is simple and straightforward, but also produces higher per capita teen pregnancy and STD rates. The latter requires some overhead, but we’re at least admitting what the nature of most humans is going to be in a society that allows freedom of motion. And that is the point — we need to work with the human organism and not against it; if the human organism wants smaller pieces, then it should get them. The least we can do for ourselves is present work in appealing portions, even if the content of the work itself remains largely unchanged.

Hmmm…got a bit racy there with the examples…

It may well be that you’re already able to just do it. It certainly sounds like it. There are people like that, just as there are people who simply can’t use, won’t use and don’t need to use tools like Remembering the Kanji and SRS. That’s wonderful — it really is. You’re making the right choice; you should continue to go ahead and just do it. There are many areas of my life where I’m like that — where tools and equations just get in the way. But there are plenty where I’m not. In these latter areas, I need to introduce new ideas and tools; I need to think and strategize and tweak; I need to use my head and I need to allow for some overhead — because the alternative is that nothing happens.

Timeboxing is overhead. But it is not net overhead… it brings us net gain. Except when it doesn’t, in which case, it’s just overhead and should be avoided. So don’t timebox, TracyBBoy. You don’t need it; it would be like a dark-skinned person going to a tanning salon. Like the people who just can’t get into SRS, you already have things figured out, and that is a good thing. Run with that. Leave the children to their toys .

“@ajatt All you need to get crap done. No timers, no convoluted equations, etc.: nowdothis.com” — @TracyBBoy

I’m mostly a pragmatist, too. But you have to know when to be a pragmatist and when to be an intellectual. And sometimes, you need to intellectualize your problem in order to come up with a more pragmatic solution for it. When pragmatism and simplicity get in the way of effectiveness, we call that anti-intellectualism.

I actually really like that app, NowDoThis. It’s not the antithesis of timeboxing at all. In fact, it’s a great timeboxing tool. Timeboxing is all about single-tasking.

Let’s say I put “write book” in the app. Am I going to be able to single-task that? No toilet breaks, no eating, no sleeping? All in one day? All in one sitting? 500 pages? No. I’m going to need to say “write 1 page” or “spend 30 minutes writing”…What’s that? Is that the pitter-patter of little timeboxing feet I hear?

Will timeboxing solve all my problems?

Timeboxing will not solve all your problems any more than your favorite dish is good enough to eat at every meal every day for the rest of your life. Timeboxing is a tool, an ingredient. And it goes great with NowDoThis! While far from omnipotent, it is highly potent. Batteries not included. Dilute to taste. Results may vary.

Big thanks to @TracyBBoy for his probing questions and app suggestion. He really touched on core issues and made this post possible. Tracy exemplifies a healthy attitude toward tools; he is not submissive; he is better than any tool — the tool has to prove itself to him, not the other way around.

Here we go again with another entry in the timeboxing series…I really should stop calling it a “trilogy”, since there are quite clearly more than three parts, but…whatever. I mean, it was originally intended to span only three parts but it kept — OK, no, we’re seriously not talking about this any more.

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

Today, as promised , I’d like to answer some of the questions you raised in comments on preceding articles of this series. Let’s go straight to it.

Did you use timeboxing to write these articles?

Yes. Although sometimes I eventually had enough momentum going to not need the timeboxes.

How long should one [rest] break for between timeboxes, and what are recommended activities?
Should I make my work timeboxes and rest timeboxes equal in  lengths?
What if I like 2-minute timeboxes for resting? Should I not do them because you say I shouldn’t?
Also, if I feel like stopping mid-timebox should I continue anyway or should I stop because I want to stop?

OK first of all, write this on your liver: never use the word “should” in my presence. There are no “shoulds” in AJATT. People are always shoulding all over themselves </TonyRobbinsReference>. Do whatever you want. Do whatever makes you happy and productive.

I don’t make rules: I make games. SRS is a game. Nested timeboxing is a game. Games have rules, too, but those rules are designed to make things fun and addictive. That is their only purpose. It just so happens that we use the game of timeboxing to do “productive”(-seeming) things, but that doesn’t make it any less of a game, any more than a beanbag stops being a beanbag because it’s an office and not a living room.

Second. I don’t take breaks between nested timeboxes. I mean, I do insofar as I ultimately stop working and go do other things, but taking breaks isn’t part of the game, if you will. For me, the point of (nested) timeboxing is to be working all the time you work. It’s about focus. Gosh, I’m using all these words I hate. I do have natural moments of “pause”, but no official breaks. But that’s just me.

I hate time-limited breaks. To me it’s like timing sex.  I’m gonna break until I feel rested, and I’m gonna hump until it no longer feels good…and I don’t know when that is until I get there…When hungry, eat…when tired, rest. When bored, change the channel. But that’s just me.

Now, I know a lot of you are thinking: “but if I start resting, I’ll never stop”. That’s because you’ve been raised in slavery. Don’t you see? BECAUSE your breaks have been rationed out and time-limited, they have increased in value a hundredfold. More than all the camels and women in the desert, yazalami! They’ve become like crack and gold and diamonds and baseball cards and first edition comic books — valuable BECAUSE they are rare.

Humans are forgetful, but not lazy. Humans work hard. Watch someone play WoW, those motherlovers get worn out. And we’ve all read those news stories of kids in Korea playing video games literally to death. Humans are hard-working sons of mothers. We only seem intrinsically lazy because we have inadvertently given rest activities a very high (but extrinsic) value.

With timeboxing, we are doing the complete opposite of that. We are rationing out and nickel-and-diming and salami-slicing and swiss-cheesing and bite-sizing and shrinking and wrapping and miniaturizing the work, while freeing up the rest. The idea of timeboxing is to make work addictive by making it exciting and rare and short.

When tired, rest. Rest all you need to. Make your rest abundant and you’ll get bored of it. Flood the market with rest — make it so that you can rest any time. It’s kind of like how when you were a kid and you actually wanted to go back to school as the summer holiday grew to a close. You were like: “enough of this Nintendo and candy and playing outside already…get me my uniform and pencil case — I’m going back to meet the lads!”.

Aside: IMHO, there’s a bit of a scam going on with school summer holidays. It seems to me that they’re designed to be just long enough that you get sick of them, but not so long that you start taking on productive, independent learning projects that would demonstrate to you that you don’t need school. But I digress.

Again, I do take breaks during the timeboxing, but never for more than one minitimebox (i.e. never traversing a timebox — the alarm lets me know “hey, get back in the game”). If you need to rest that much then you shouldn’t be working, period. But that’s just me.

So, either:

• Stop and go do something else until you’re bored of it — eat, sleep, rest, whatever.
• Or, make your timeboxes smaller.

The whole thing about nested timeboxing is that it’s not a new form of slavery, it’s not a new way of forcing yourself to work. Nested timeboxing is designed to make you want to work. It’s supposed to make you go: “What? 60 seconds of work??? I’ll do that for free! Heck, I’ll pay for the privilege to get on the ride :D…where’s the turnstile?”. If it doesn’t do that for you, then tweak it until it does.

Remember: game = FUNgible. You run the show. You make the rules. I cannot sit here and tell you what to do and if I were you I wouldn’t let me tell you what to do.  Dang, man…life is complex enough, already.

Do not mold yourself to fit any idea I put forward. Mold the idea to fit you. This is a blog, not a religion.

A personality cult with fascist leanings, yes, but not a religion.

Again, do whatever you want. This is all a game. It’s not school; I am not your teacher; you do not take take orders from me. I’m barely sharp enough to be making systems (games) that work for myself. Don’t come here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed looking for magic pills; I have none for you. You will gain nothing from following or forcing yourself to be like me. Just try stuff out and see what you like.

For freak’s sake, man…you are not an “average” person; we all have a lot in common, but there is no “average” person. So don’t come here to take orders, come here to see a perspective and see how you’re going to use it. This is why people — Americans, at that — die at personal development seminars: they don’t know when to just act like a cat and tell the whole world to buzz off because it’s ball-licking time. Be a cat about this, not a lapdog.

So… There is a 2 minute break between each timebox, correct?

No. If you need to rest that much, you shouldn’t be working. I mean, come on, in dual timeboxing, the small timeboxes are only like 60 seconds each. What’s to rest from?

When I read a textbook using 30 minute time boxes, it felt too easy at the beginning.

Dude…I say let it be too easy . Then again, you weren’t asking a question.

When I have a short break between study sessions, I lie on the sofa and do nothing.

Good one!

Anyway…that’s it from me for now. Uncle Khatzumoto went a bit PG-13 there…I hope you weren’t all scarred. Feel free to add any questions and insights you may have; I’d love to do one more round of Q&A.