Five ideas in five minutes

Who doesn’t love a listicle?

Hello! This week has been incredibly busy for me due to increasing work responsibilities and as a result I almost didn’t write anything or work on my projects at all. To combat this I thought I’d embrace a bit of anti-perfectionism and do the simplest possible non-perfect version of writing this newsletter.

So I’m trying something new, I’m writing this weeks article in five minutes, and sharing one idea per minute! Everyone loves a listicle, right? Here’s five things on my mind which I’m calling “How-to-anything”:

1. How to start anything

I was recently reminded of the two minute method from Atomic Habits. It’s what I’m doing today with this newsletter. There is a lot of friction when it comes to starting things and keeping them going. We’re really good at adding that friction ourselves. We want to be fit and good at running, so we plan to go running at 6am for an hour every day. We want to be a writer, so we tell ourselves to write in-depth, life-changing, long-form articles and publish them twice a week.

Instead, aim to reduce friction as much as possible. Find the two minute version. Make the fitness goal to put on your running clothes and step out the door for two minutes. Make the writing goal to open your laptop and write about anything on your mind for two minutes. Make it as easy as humanly possible to do the thing so that you can get started.

You’ll probably do more once you start. The important thing is that you do start. Performing the movement improves the movement. To steal an expression from the strength training world - you are greasing the groove.

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2. How to create anything

Ali Abdaal summarises his method on how to create content for YouTube in three simple steps. I love his method because it applies to creating anything online, not just videos:

1. Get going: Just start! Screw perfectionism. Embrace the fact that you suck. Do it anyway. See the section above (how to start anything).

2. Get good: Once you’re actually doing the thing regularly, then you can focus on intentionally honing your craft and figuring out how to level up: getting better equipment, taking a course, whatever’s relevant.

3. Get smart: Optimising is the last step. We tend to do this way too early (“I need to perfectly optimise my Notion setup before I start my project”, or “I need to figure out the optimal time to pre-schedule my content to get the most views”). Optimising systems and analysing data comes last. Hone your craft first.

3. How to never be offended by anything

Marshall Rosenberg says that all communication boils down to please and thank you. I’ve been reminded of this by refreshing my Non-Violent Communication (NVC) skills this week whilst preparing to give a workshop on effective communication.

We’re either requesting for our needs to be met (please), or having our needs met (thank you). If someone is throwing an offensive critique at you, they’re expressing their own unmet needs, rather an actual objective evaluation of you (“you’re an idiot!" - translation: “I need to feel smarter than others”). It’s them, not you. The same applies to gratitude, people often default to including judgements in their observations even when they’re being positive (“you’re too kind!”).

I never expected to sit through the original 3 hour workshop on NVC in it’s entirety, but it’s genuinely really good. Marshall is very entertaining!

4. How to decide anything

This week I had to book a last minute train. I live in Germany, which means I have the unique displeasure of using Deutsche Bahn. As is typical with Deutsche Bahn, nothing worked, starting with the online booking system. I found myself in an infuriating spiral of attempted and failed bookings. I really needed to book that train.

I would select my train, select my seat, and then some part of the booking system would fail. Be it payment, login, entering my address - each time a different step of the form stopped working. Each time I’d start the process again but the seats I previously selected would be gone. It seemed they were still registered as reserved, probably temporarily locked by my own previously failed booking attempts.

Every time I failed I removed choices from myself.

A friend smarter than me explained that this was appropriate, given the latin origin of the word “to decide” is literally “to cut off” (de- ‘off’ + caedere ‘cut’).

Trains aside, it’s an interesting part of decision-making in life that we need to accept whatever option we’re cutting off. Somewhat related, I really like this quote from Obama on making decisions:

“You don't have to get to 100% certainty on your big decisions, get to 51%, and when you get there, make the decision and be at peace with the fact that you made the decision based on the information you had”.

Thanks Obama! Also yes, the train was delayed. 

5. How to do anything (AKA how to “get shit done”)

This week I had an impossible amount of things to get done in a short amount of time. I realised I’m relatively good in “get shit done mode”. For this I will thank many years in high-stress digital agency environments with short, unmovable deadlines and multiple on-going projects (strongly not recommended). Here is my cheatsheet on getting shit done:

• If you have 25 things to do, make a list and order them from most to least important. Cross out all of the items on the list below the top three. Screw those things. Do the top three. If the three things at the top of the list are of equal priority and you’re not sure which to start with then eat that frog and do the most painful one first. Now do the next. Repeat!

• I’ve already written about the two minute method in this article, now I’ll add the five minute rule: if something important pops-up that will definitely only take 5 minutes or less, don’t add it to your todo-list. Do it now.

• Batch your async-busy-work. Answer emails/slack/whatever in one dedicated chunk, and ignore them completely when you’re doing actual important tasks that require focus. Don’t squeeze in your emails when you have a short break. That isn’t a break.

To take it back to my original goal, this weeks newsletter obviously took me longer than the five minutes I set out to invest. But it wouldn’t exist unless I tricked myself by making the deal to sit down and write something for five minutes, so I’m glad I did! If there’s something you’ve been wanting to do, I’d challenge you to think of what the smallest possible action looks like.

On a side-note, I’ve been considering developing a more consistent look to this newsletter in terms of illustrations and colours. I tend to pick random thumbnails each week depending on my mood, rather than going with one consistent style. If that’s something you are interested to help with or have ideas about, please let me know!

See you next week.

-Mike.