Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

The 5-2 Focus List (A Useful To-Do List Alternative)

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

So here’s a neat variation on the to-do list I’ve picked up from Mark Foster’s Secrets of Productive People, where he replaces what I have to get done with what I’m going to focus on as the primary entries on your notepad.

The 5-2

The process goes like this:

Step One: Put five tasks you want to give your focus to on a sheet of paper. Works best with a mix of complex and simple tasks, but you do you, etc.

Step Two: Work down the list in order. You don’t have to finish a task, just do something to progress it. Then:

  • If you start a task and don’t finish it, cross the first entry off and add it to the bottom of your list. 
  • If you finish a task, just cross it off.

Step Three: Keep going through the tasks in order until you’ve whittled the list down to two, then add three new tasks to the end and repeat this process for the rest of the day. 

Foster argues that five is the optimal starting length because it’s just long enough to pull your forward, without feeling like you can achieve everything without putting in effort. 

The structure of the list means you’re often making small amounts of progress at a regular interval, rather than doing long stretches of work at once, so it’s both less intimidating to start and more likely to accumulate more work than you would have done. 

IN PRACTICE

For those who don’t want to read my scribble in the photograph above, here’s what that looked like on 19 June.

I started the day with five tasks, pulled from my master-list of projects and tasks on Asana:

  • Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
  • Write 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
  • Do my quarterly checkpoint
  • Clear the dishes
  • Clean and reorganise my desk

In my first cycle, I finished writing 250 words and cleared all the dishes, but merely made progress on the other three tasks. As I finished work, they got added to the end of the list (And while I list 250 words, the actual goal on my asana is “write 750 words”, and so it’s actually a thing I repeat three times).

Ergo, my “round two” list features four repeats, and one new action: 

  • Finish reading Secrets of Productive People
  • Write another 250 words on the now overdue Knock, Knock part two
  • Do my quarterly checkpoint
  • Clean and reorganise my desk
  • Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damaged.

This time around, I crushed it—I finished my reading, the writing goal, and my checkpoint with no need for a third entry, so as I hit cleaning the desk and fixing the door, I got to add another three targets: 

  • Clean and reorganise my desk
  • Fix the bit of our door the cat’s damage
  • Draft a “would you like to do the introduction to this collection” letter that was causing me some serious anxiety
  • Print the manuscript I have to do a cover synopsis for and proof this week
  • Write another 250 words

This time around, I not only finished everything, but I overshot on some (reorganising my desk also led to experimenting my webcam set-up, so my spouse doesn’t risk walking into shot; writing the letter that was causing me anxiety quickly became proofing and sending it).

I would have done another five, but I was heading out to dinner with my sister at the end of the day, so I settled for one last entry before signing out. 

That might not seem like a lot for a Sunday, but lots of those were several-hours long jobs. Cleaning the desk means literally pulling everything off and wiping it down with antiseptic wipes, and I read about 75% of the book in one day. Even the writing, which basically involved hitting my average daily word count, was breaking a month-log failure to work on creative projects. Ordinarily, I’d have celebrated getting one of these done on a Sunday.

And it’s not like these are all I did in the day—they were just the focus. I squeezed little things in around the edges, like prepping today’s Facebook posts, and did a couple of “task of opportunity” jobs when I was stuck on how to progress.

Bullet Journals Revisited, And A Defense Of Rapid Logging

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A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method.

I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. Notebooks with no interest in being beautiful objects, but plenty of practical use as a tool. I picked it up around 2012, after being impressed by the way my friend Kate Cuthbert organised her work at Harlequin Australia.

Ten years of relatively consistent bullet journaling is a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten large chunks of my family into the habit — there’s often a family Leuchtturm shop around the end of the year. I’ve experimented with different approaches, from one dedicated bullet journal for everything to bullet journal by project to bullet journal by context (writing/work/life). I’ve researched and experimented with layouts and approaches, and found stuff that really worked for me (elements of Tobias Buckell’s hacks and showrunner John Rodgers hacks have both been useful).

All of which is really a prelude to saying I wasn’t expecting much from Ryder Carroll’s book. I picked it up because the Bullet Journal method has been a lifeline for me in recent years, and I wanted to throw some cash his way for sharing it so freely back in the early days, but I worked on the assumption I knew what I was doing.

Turns out, not so much. 

Going back to basics on bullet journaling after a decade of using the system has been an interesting experience, because there’s a certain amount of drift. You cleave to the practices that are easy and useful, and let other parts fall by the wayside.

Going back to basics—with a more detailed explanation of why they’re in place—proved to be a transformative experience. There are three big tips that have wildly changed my relationship with my bullet journal notebook, but the biggest has been recommitting to my daily log of activities and making notes.

The log, in my experience, is one of the first things to go as people get familiar with the Bullet Journal system. It feels less transformative than indexing and threading, which change your relationship with the contents and thought processes. The value of rapid logging your day is easily overlooked—certainly, for the last few years, I’ve been more likely to implement a daily plan than a daily log.

The Bullet Journal Method convinced me to give logging another try, and it’s value was proven in the weirdest of places—giving our cat medication. 

Some backstory: we’d been giving The Admiral pills because the poor kitten has a UTI and some teeth issues, and for the majority of that time my spouse, Sarah, has been our designated pill delivery person. Not that I wouldn’t try — I’d give it a go every morning — but my first few attempts were unpleasant for me and the cat, and Sarah would step in and take over in order to avoid distressing The Admiral further.

Fortunately, Sarah had some insight into what I was doing wrong, and would give me a tip after every attempt. Unfortunately, since the pills happen right before I started work, those tips would ordinarily get lost in the sudden transition from “home Peter” to “work Peter”, with slow (or no) improvement.

The cat’s illness coincided with the recommitment to logging, and part of that meant jotting down every event—work tasks, books started, giving the cat pills — and one or two notes about the experience.

So instead of letting things fall out of my head, every bit of advice Sarah gave me got  logged and reviewed. I made my own notes, critiquing each attempt, walking through each step until I figured the point of divergence between concept and practice. I’d create notes to supplement that advice with my own research, hitting up youtube and web pages.

And it only took a few days for a task that I would have flailed at for a week, giving into the option of learned helplessness, to become something I could wrap my head around. Admittedly, right at the end of our three days of giving tablets, but there’s now a record of thinking through and correcting all my mistakes to review the next time I have to do it.

The same philosophy’s started to spread through day job tasks, and publishing tasks. Projects that had stalled for months started to pick up speed, both because I was thinking about them with more clarity, and because taking notes gradually led to building system.

Logging’s become a habit worth keeping over the last two weeks, and one that I’ve stuck to far more consistently than other journaling habits.

That said, it comes with challenges: I’m used to a standard bullet journal lasting me between three months and a year, depending on what I’m doing (faster while researching a PhD, slower when working for places that have their own project management systems). Logging and note-taking on this level is chewing through pages far more quickly than I’m used too, and it’s conceivable I’ll go through a notebook a month if I stick with the rate of pages-used-per-day that I’ve run with over the last two weeks. 

On the plus side, I’ve got a *lot* of blank notebooks, but I can see a future where I need to think really hard about how they’re all going to get stored once they’re filled.

In the meantime, The Bullet Journal Method‘s a recommended read if you’re interested in trying the BuJo out or revisiting the foundations. Trust me when I tell you there’s more to get out of it than you’d think. 

Cortisol and Coffee

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to make my spouse happy is having a cup of coffee waiting for them the moment they wake up, perched on their bedside table beside the phone delivering their wake-up alarm.

Fortunately, this is pretty easy for me to provide, given that we live on slightly different schedules (I get up early to write, they sleep in because they find it harder to fall asleep than I do).

Unfortunately, drinking coffee first thing in the morning is actually a pretty terrible thing to do to your body.

The logic here comes down to cortisol, aka “the stress hormone”. Despite it’s nom-de-plume as a stress marker, bodies naturally produce three cortisone surges throughout the day, and the first of them is right as we wake up. This phenomena — the Cortisol awakening response – means we’re 50% to 77% more cortisone within a half-our of waking up each day. Think of it as your body’s acknowledgement that waking up means shits about to get real, so you’re primed to be alert and deal with the shift from relaxed to engaged.

Except there’s a bunch of stuff that can affect the level of cortisol in your bloodstream upon waking up, ranging from whether you’re a shift worker, whether it’s light out, whether you’re a lark (who naturally produce more cortisol) rather than a night owl, and whenever you have ongoing pain conditions.

It turns out the caffeine in coffee interrupts this cortisol production, causing the body to produce less of the hormone and rely on the coffee instead. Instead of getting the morning energy boost from cortisone, we’re getting it from a substance that we quickly develop a tolerance to.

In this light, optimal coffee consumption usually happens later in the day, when our cortisol levels ebbs (Can’t stomach the thought of going without a hot beverage? Tea might make an interesting substitute — Arthur Chu has a twitter thread on the impact on theanine in tea alongside the caffeine, and why it makes a difference),

Of course, if you’re enjoying your morning coffee, none of this is really meant to be an admonishment and a demand to stop. I read all of this — and wrote all of this — with the mindset of someone who figured “you’ll take my morning cup of coffee out of my cold, dead hands, assholes.”

Except…well, here’s the thing: I do regularly skip the coffee first thing, which has less to do with the science above, and more to do with crime writer Elmore Leanard’s morning routine when he was initially building his career. Leonard would wake up before work and write, and he motivated himself by refusing to drink coffee until he’d written his first 750 words of the day.

I adopted that habit myself when I started a full-time work last year, and the result is that I’m usually y awake for an hour or so before the first cup of coffee hits my system. And it’s definitely taken an edge off my mornings, and made the routines a little easier to cleave to, so long as my day-to-day stress levels aren’t off the charts.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be one of those people who waits two hours for my morning coffee, but I could well be on the way to becoming someone who doesn’t wake up to a cup of Joe first thing.