Personal Productivity and Time Management

“What Do We Know To Be Absolutely True?

Using First Principles thinking is one of the most effective ways to solve problems simply because it forces you to break down complex issues into small bite-size steps. Doing so helps you find the quickest path to a solution.

Many eminent thinkers throughout history have used the First Principles approach, but my two favorites are inventor, Johannes Gutenberg (you know the whole Printing Press thing) and most recently, entrepreneur Elon Musk (yes, that Elon Musk). It is said that the ancient philosopher Aristotle is responsible for creating this way of thinking, but there is no solid proof of that. But I’m going to go ahead and say it totally sounds like something he would have said.

First Principle Thinking in Real Life

Let’s use Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, as an example, because the Gutenberg stuff is a little too dense and weighty. In 2002, he had the idea of sending the first rocket to Mars. Immediately he faced difficulties in coming up with a plan and a strategy for tackling such a feat. The biggest one was the cost of purchasing a rocket was somewhere around $65 million.

You have a couple of options when you are faced with this situation. You could suck it up and pay the $65 million to purchase a rocket, you could give up, or you could break the situation down using First Principle thinking.

I’m sure you realize what Musk did.

He broke down the problem into a bunch of pieces, (well, maybe more than a bunch, this is a rocket we’re talking about here). Then he reassembled them, putting them together again in a completely new array.

He took the cost of the individual parts and discovered that even after labor and overhead, he would still be able to build a rocket for a fraction of the cost.

SpaceX would eventually build the rocket for 10x less than what it would have cost to buy one and…he still made a profit.

Understanding First Principle a Bit Deeper

Let’s dig a little deeper into First Principle thinking. When you are putting this into practice, you want to ask yourself:

“What do we know to be absolutely true?”

If you think beneath the surface, you find solutions that didn’t exist before.

Back to the example of Elon Musk.

He knew that the cost of the rocket was too high, but he also knew that the cost of materials was lower. So, build a rocket, don’t buy one.

Simple as that.

Now I get it, we’re not all sending rockets to space, but as entrepreneurs, we each have our own rocketship to Mars problems every day.

If you flip houses professionally, you might find that you don’t have enough staff to flip before winter; meaning you’re going to sit on that property for the whole winter.

Big problem, right? The carrying costs would make quite a dent in your profit.

So we ask ourselves, “what do we know to be completely true?”

We know that we cannot afford to keep that house over the winter and that we don’t have enough staff to finish the flip.

You can then break it down to all the reasons why you can’t finish the flip and all the reasons why you can’t afford to hold over the winter. From there, you’ll find your solution, and it might even be different than you originally thought.

How First Principle Thinking Drives Change

The first principle forces you to break things down into smaller pieces and look at each component as its own individual moving part. When you break things down in such a way, it drives innovation because it makes you look at things from a different perspective.

For example, if you have a bike, a boat, and a car, you could take those three completely different things and break them down. Find each part that makes each thing perform its duties, and in the process, you might find that you can build something completely new with parts you pulled from all three things.

First Principle thinking, this process of boiling things down to a binary level has had a tremendous effect on people’s ability to make decisions and foster change.

The reason breaking ideas down is such a revolutionary idea is because people spend most of their time looking on the surface. Most people never look where the ideas are. The ideas don’t sit on the surface because that is where everyone else is looking. It takes the visionaries and innovators to really make an impact — this process of exploring leads to incredible ideas and life-changing breakthroughs.

How To Implement First Principle

It’s easy to sit here and read about the First Principle, but it’s more difficult to practice it in your daily life. This is because we love to optimize form instead of function. When we think of breaking things down to a smaller level, we’re always thinking about changing the appearance or look of something rather than changing its function or purpose.

If we go back in time to ancient Rome, we’ll find a perfect example of changing form but not purpose. For thousands and thousands of years, people have used backpacks for a variety of purposes. During ancient times, people used leather bags to store things for school, travel, or every day.

Later, zippers were added to bags, and more recently, nylon backpacks became a thing. But even though we saw improvements and changes to the bags, nothing about the function of the backpack was changing.

We were changing the appearance and overall look of the bag without changing the function. You don’t always need to change the function; if something works the way it is it’s perfectly fine to leave it that way.

But if you are looking for a solution to a complex problem you should always break the problem down and make sure you focus on changing the function, not the form.

Now if we go back to the Rome example, for many years, people carried messenger bags and satchels of food around on their bags or in their hands. While they are doing this, carriages and wagons are rolling around transporting things from place to place. No one at the time ever thought to put wheels on a bag to make it easier to transport. It wasn’t until 1970 that Bernard Sadow invented the first rollable suitcase. Can you even imagine if we had to carry all our luggage by hand through the airports?

Making Things Simple: Four Steps to Implement First Principle Thinking

I won’t complicate things and make you feel like you can’t start using this way of thinking in your life. It’s simple and easy when you break it down into small bite-size pieces. (see what I did there? We’re breaking down the process of breaking down.)

Step 1: Identify your problem

As a business owner, you have a problem you are looking to solve. Let’s say your problem is that your employees are taking too long to complete jobs. Something is happening in your business, and everyone is moving slower now.

Step 2: Make a list of the reasons why you can’t solve the problem

We’re going to go off in a different direction and write down all the things that are preventing you from solving that problem. Maybe you can’t afford a manager, or you’re employees are too old, or perhaps morale is too low.

Step 3: Write down all apparent solutions to the problem, but they don’t solve it adequately

There are always simple solutions to a problem, but they usually come with their own issues. You could hire a manager, but then you’d have to pay them, which means less money for you and the employees. You could spend more time at work supervising, but that means less time at home with your family. This is where compromise comes in.

Step 4: Ask yourself, “if the problem didn’t exist, and I could create a solution, what would it be?”

What is your ideal solution? Your ideal solution might be to retrain your employees, hire a manager, or maybe let go of some of the employees who are causing bottlenecks in your process. You may find that cutting the slack and starting fresh actually results in a better outcome.

By now, you’ve probably heard me go on and on about getting rid of your To-Do list and the harmful effects of the Zeigarnik Effect; that voice in our subconscious that nags at us to finish the unfinished.

Still, People wonder how they should prioritize.

“Every time I get something done, I have to add two more things to the list.”

“I just keep buying planners, but I still have the same problem. I can’t make headway.”

“Everything seems urgent all the time”

Well, real talk here.

The list is the problem.

Simply figuring out which tasks are more important than others doesn’t change the fact that there are still 30 things on your list and you won’t suddenly forget about all the other “low priority” items just because you rearranged the order.

It might be time to work on your timing.

Carpe Diem

This famous saying about seizing the day is actually part of a longer phrase Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero which means “Seize The Day and Put Minimum Faith in the Future.”

There will always be more tasks and more things that need to get done. It would be foolish to think that simply arranging tasks in a pecking order will have any bearing on your productivity or your life tomorrow or even an hour from now.

Obviously, it’s important to think big picture when setting a long-term vision for a company or personal projects, but when it comes down to actually getting things done, we must live in the moment.

You assign yourself a task at the relevant moment, you complete the task, and you move on. You don’t worry about what you have to do next because your system will “assign” it to you when the time comes.

You are delegating the responsibility of worrying about these things to an external brain otherwise known as a system of productivity.

Ok But How?

Essentially, any kind of reminder system that is disruptive in nature, like email, a text message, or even a regular old calendar reminder that pops up and makes a noise will do.

You can set an appointment for yourself in your calendar or use FollowUpthen.com to send yourself a reminder via email with all relevant information and at just the right time.

Some examples:

• Grocery Shopping — Email yourself the list at 5:30 PM when you know you’ll be on your way home
• Year-long book project — You do your best writing on Saturday mornings, set reminders for 6 AM on Saturdays and include notes relevant to each chapter so when you wake up on Saturday’s you are presented with the info needed to fuel your creativity
• Getting paid by a client — Email them your invoice with a Follow Up Then set for 1 month from now
• Waiting on an employee to produce a long-term project — Set a follow up email every week to check in and see how they are progressing
• Meeting someone new in a public place — Have their number and description sent to you a few minutes before the meeting
• Making lists of things to buy for an upcoming baby — Forward those links from Amazon to Follow Up Then for 4 months from now
• Write in your journal — use Daily Minded to send you nightly prompts about your day that you simply reply to
• Check in with your project team every Thursday afternoon — Geekbot for recurring reminders at regular intervals.

Where to start?

Take a good look at your list, whether it’s your to-do list, bucket list, leap list, whatever form it’s in, and really think about WHEN these things need to get done or take place.

You want to attack these items in such a way that things can get accomplished as soon as reasonably possible because there will always be more stuff. The good thing about this system is that once you use it, any new task that comes up simply needs to be “timed” and then put out of your mind.

If a task seems to large, then you need to break it up into what I call “micro goals” and then assign timing to each one of those bite-sized tasks.

Remember, the first rule of Less Doing is to optimize, so you want to get your tasks down to their leanest, most basic form, so you can power through them.

Timing tasks is a skill.

Fortunately, it’s an easy skill to pick up and you will quickly get to a place where you become an expert at optimizing your time and resource allocation. Things will get done efficiently but most importantly, you’ll start doing less and living more.

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Raise your hand if you want your team to be more productive.

I don’t even have to count all the hands that are up right now, because I know that’s everyone’s ultimate goal.

Our businesses depend on our teams being productive.

In our efforts to maximize our output, we try to find the best team size, and we frequently come up with ways to hire extra people so we’d get more things done.

And that’s a hilariously bad way to improve our productivity.

Why?

I’m glad you asked!

It all started in France, in the year of 1913…

What Do the Ringelmann Effect and Productivity Have in Common?

In 1913, a French agricultural engineer by the name of Maximilien Ringelmann decided to perform a group productivity experiment.

What he wanted to know was how productive would teams be when you increased or decreased the number of people working on the same task.

What happened was that Ringelmann had participants play tug of war for 5 seconds.

The participants pulled on a rope individually, then in groups of 7, and finally in groups of 14.

He used a dynamometer to record how much they were pulling.

The results showed that participants pulled with a force of 85.3kg per person when they were pulling on the rope individually.

When they pulled in 7-person groups, they pulled 65kg per person.

And when they played tug of war with the maximum number of members on their team (14), quite counterintuitively, they pulled the least:

Only 61.4kg per person.

Now, you’re probably wondering:

“What the heck, how is this even possible? There were more of them!”

But it turns out, as Ringelmann increased the group size, the individual force people on the team used decreased.

Ringelmann tried the experiment again by asking the participants to push a crossbar on a two-wheeled cart.

The same thing happened.

When people pulled individually, they used significantly more force than when someone else was helping them.

It turns out: people’s efforts diminish as the team size increases.

And the gap is even greater as we add more team members.

The total force one worker exerted was 1.00.

When one more was added, the two members exerted a total force of 1.86.

When three team members pulled, their force was 2.55. Similarly, four workers pulled a lot more; their force rose to 3.08.

Five workers pulled up to 3.50, and six reached 3.78.

And then the results started stagnating drastically.

When there were seven workers pulling on the rope, they only managed a total force of 3.92. And when eight pulled, they exerted the same force as seven.

It was only 3.92, meaning that one worker exerted half the force they would exert if they had been pulling on the rope alone.

Now, Ringelmann thought the reason behind this was lack of coordination.

It’s much harder to coordinate within groups of 7 and 14 people. Two people who pulled on a rope together were more likely to stay in sync as they pulled.

For Ringelmann, that was the most likely reason behind the phenomenon.

However, he also stated that it could be due to motivation loss.

After all, if you knew you weren’t the only one responsible for taking care of a task, you’d be more likely to sit back and relax — doing your bare minimum.

It turns out, Ringelmann was only partially right when he talked about lack of coordination.

Teams’ decreased productivity actually comes from motivation loss AKA social loafing.

How Does Social Loafing Affect Your Team Productivity?

Now, Ringelmann may not have been 100% right when it comes to the reasons behind decreased productivity, but he was onto something.

That’s why a group of researchers in 1974 decided to conduct the experiment again.

This time, they had an ace up their sleeve: pseudo-participants, with only one participant actually pulling on the rope.

Hey, who said business wasn’t just like tug of war?

Now, those researchers tried the experiment again.

One participant was told that they’d all pull on the rope, while the other members were instructed to only pretend they were pulling on the rope.

And these researchers got the same results as Ringelmann got back in 1913.

There was no reason to coordinate, so lack of coordination could not be blamed for the fact that one team member pulls harder alone than when in a team.

We call this social loafing. Team members reduce their effort because they feel less responsible for the output.

When the one active participant thought everyone was pulling, they didn’t pull as hard.

Other researchers also performed shouting and clapping experiments on blindfolded participants who also wore headphones.

And every time, it was proven that people just aren’t going to do their best if they know they’re not the only ones responsible for getting something done.

To put it simply: individual members think their efforts won’t matter for the outcome, so they don’t give all they’ve got.

But what does that mean for your business?

Social Loafing in the Workplace

Here’s the thing: when too many people at your company feel responsible for the same thing, each member won’t try hard enough and your total productivity will go down.

You can see social loafing everywhere:

If you walk by a construction site, there are always construction workers who are sweaty, tired, and still shoveling. Then you have those who look like they’d just come from a walk in the park.

Go to your local McDonalds. Some employees are doing their best to take all the orders while others are lounging around.

Heck, look at your office. Chances are, half of your team members are just aimlessly clicking on their keyboards or scrolling down their newsfeeds.

This doesn’t happen because they’re mean, lazy or want to ruin your business.

It happens because they don’t feel integral to the success of the company.

They don’t feel responsible for the output.

Your team members feel like cogs in the machine, and they won’t give their 100%.

Now, when this happens in your team, your revenue isn’t the only thing that’s suffering.

Your team members are suffering, as well.

When one part of the group is doing the majority of work, it’s easy for them to grow resentful of the team members that aren’t doing as much.

Additionally, if your team members are comparing themselves to other members’ levels of productivity, they won’t want to improve and reach their own standards of excellence.

Instead, they’ll put in only as much work as they see everyone else putting in.

And that’s a problem.

How to Eliminate Social Loafing and Increase Your Productivity

Now, we know that one of the main causes of social loafing is group size.

According to extensive scientific research, the ideal team would have 4.6 members.

I guess Tim from Accounting is just going to have to say goodbye to the limbs he likes the least.

Joking aside, the number majority of business owners (myself included) found to be the perfect ratio for productivity was 6 team members.

Anything less than 4 team members is too small to be effective.

Anything more than 5 is too complex, and the returns will start decreasing.

As you look at your organization, you don’t want to have teams that have more than five members.

If you need a big team, if you’re doing work that’s that complex, what you can do is break down complex tasks and clearly assign responsibilities.

This way, every team, and every team member will feel personally accountable for the outcome of that task.

What I know from my experience is that when you shrink a team or shrink anything, establish a limit, you’re actually forcing innovation.

Your people have to think differently.

They have to be more effective.

The best thing we can do is have teams that are slightly smaller than what the task requires.

They’ll be more efficient together.

Look at your organizational chart and make sure that no individual teams are larger than five members, and you’ll see a massive increase in productivity.

Everyone will start pulling their weight, and they’ll do their best work.

Conversely, if you make your team members work in huge teams, you’ll see how fast their productivity levels spiral. Especially if you aren’t clearly delegating tasks and making sure they know who’s responsible for what.

It’s a recipe for disaster.

Team members who feel that their skills are inferior to that of other team members will sit back and let the seemingly more capable teammates handle their work.

Your team will suffer, and so will your business.

And reducing social loafing follows the same principles of working out.

If you really want to get fit, you can’t just do the minimum work required every day.

You have to push your muscles day in and day out, and keep increasing the intensity.

Only then will your system dance to the tune of increased productivity.

I know, I’m coming in a little hot there. Honestly, I don’t want to knock the morning routine per se. In fact, I’m cited in Hal Elrod’s book, “The Miracle Morning For Entrepreneurs”.

But people put so much emphasis on it; like if you don’t have a morning routine, there’s no way you’re going to be successful.

The thing is, setting the alarm is easy. It’s what you do after that, that determines your productivity.

I get up at 5:45 in the morning. I have four children who go to three different schools, want four different lunches and require a full-court press of attention from my wife and me before I drive them to their respective schools.

I mean, it is a morning routine, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with me, and I like it like that.

After drop off, I have a full day of work that requires me to schedule interactions before 2:30 pm, because I pick my children up from school. Everyday. I’ve cleared my schedule to allow me to be entirely present for my kids while they are home. No distractions, no phone calls, no meetings.

After the kids go to bed, I get on my gym clothes and go out for a four-mile hardcore run in all kinds of weather over two bridges. I think about ideas, for my clients’ businesses and my own. I can solve many problems at a 7:00-minute mile pace because my body knows what to do, and my mind is free to engage in higher level thinking.

I can work stuff out in the half-hour it takes me. When I get home, I immediately make Trello cards for my team about those ideas. Then I shower, get in bed and watch TV.

I feel amazing. I look forward to that part of the day. It allows me to clear out my brain so that when the day starts, it can begin without lingering anxieties or unsolved problems. Plus an evening routine is so much more in my control. A morning routine can get easily derailed by a sick kid, a hectic travel schedule or a miserable night’s sleep.

The building of a nighttime routine requires self-discipline, as you only have yourself to hold to account. I believe developing that mind muscle is a cornerstone to building a more productive life.

My point in describing this routine to you is not so that you’ll be impressed, or irritated, it’s to illustrate the importance of a day designed around a singular priority, one at a time.

Super interesting sidebar here, did you know that the word priority was only used a singular noun until the Industrial Revolution? Then it quickly became a plural. So, if you think about it, there can only be ONE priority, because the definition describes something of the utmost importance.

So when you think about organizing your day, developing a routine, think about a singular priority during a specific time. When you make something a priority, then you make the time for it. Having too many priorities (more than one) is a sure-fire way to get your brain to do none of them. “I’m so swamped, everything’s a priority” no longer works, and that feels pretty damn good.