Joe Robinson: Bald Guy, Marketer, Self-Improver.

I spent years feeling like the best way to be productive was to do everything, all the time. 
Lately, I’ve been trying the complete opposite approach. It’s working.

How much is too much?

If you’re the self-improvement type, it’s easy to end up with half a dozen different activities you want to maintain on evenings and weekends to keep yourself moving forward.
It’s probably a hangover from education, right? All those years studying 5 or 10 different things at once.

Depending how your life looked when you started, it might have even been easy to do at first. For me, a silver lining of the lockdowns in 2020 was having all the time in the world to focus on development.
Then came 2021. As the world opened back up, my calendar did the opposite:

• I went back to having my own flat, and all the upkeep that comes with one;
• Gyms reopened, and I was back to 3 or 4 workouts a week;
• Bars and venues finally opened their doors and an in-person social life came back;
• I dedicated at least one midweek date night and a day of my weekend my first serious relationship in years;

I loved having so much going on, but it was obvious how much less time I was taking to grow my skills.
My planned 3 or 4 nights at the gym was more like 1 or 2, and even that wasn’t a given. I was stretched. The idea of finding time for the 5 different things I’d been doing looked less realistic by the day.
I spent easily 18 months blindly sticking to the old plan, but it just wasn’t panning out.

Planning my goals for 2023, something clearly had to give. I decided to change up my approach.

Consistency over variety

The problem was pretty simple. By giving each habit a couple of small time blocks a week, any small change of plans could wipe a habit off my calendar for the week.
These time blocks were too small to make good progress if they only happened every 2 or 3 weeks.
My new routine needed to be more robust. It couldn’t be derailed by a short-notice change.

Looking at a month instead of a week, there was a clear alternative. Instead of doing every activity every week, work on one thing at a time in short bursts.
Instead of trying to write content on Mondays, practice music on Wednesdays, grow my marketing skills on Thursdays… I’d pick one thing and put all my downtime that week towards it.
It didn’t have to be set in stone; if inspiration struck midweek I could always mix it up. And some things like exercise only really work if you’re consistent.

For most stuff though, it works; it’s totally reasonable to spend a full week writing content which I can put out over a longer stretch of time.
Or choose a song to learn and get really into the details of it for a whole week.
Over a month or so, I can still touch on everything. But it happens in focused bursts instead of scattered, shallow work in the name of feeling productive.

This way if my plans are interrupted for a night, it cuts down on my total time at this one activity instead of wiping something off my schedule completely.
It builds flexibility into my life and cuts down on compromises. So far it’s early days, but I’m optimistic for where this can go.

Momentum is powerful

The more I considered this change, the better an idea it seemed.
Spending a whole week on the same project comes with all sorts of advantages:

Familiarity grows over time:

By the end of the week, I’m much more engaged than I’d have been otherwise; I gather momentum I can’t get with frequent shallow work.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he touches on the TV show Blues Clues and its scheduling. Unlike other children’s TV shows, the same episode airs every day for a week.
As the week went on, children’s understanding of the episode’s topic grew and they knew the answers to questions before they were asked. This isn’t a trait we lose over time!
There’s no reason you can’t engage in the same practice 5 days in a row as an adult, and you’ll get up to speed faster each time.

Something unfinished is now motivating

In my old schedule, it was hard to finish things because I only had 45 minutes or an hour to dedicate towards it. Having to leave it until next week was demotivating. It felt the same as doing nothing.
A blog post can take 2 or 3 hours and I don’t have that kind of time very often. This way, I can leave something unfinished on Tuesday and be excited to revisit it on Thursday. 
Over the week, I’ll chip away at it until it’s done. Over time, hopefully my pace will pick up. But that growth will come faster from the kind of practice I now get.

Some things aren’t fun in short bursts

Even some of my leisure activities benefit from this and I’ll test this idea there too:
For as long as I can remember I’ve loved video games. I probably always will. But as an adult, I don’t play them nearly as much even when I have time.
Part of the problem is that it takes time to experience an open-world game, or get good at a new style of game I don’t know. I end up replaying the same old stuff for familiarity’s sake.
I’m missing out on detailed worlds and compelling stories because I’m trying to play for an hour a week and it’s not enough.

My favourite story-based game of all time is probably God Of War (2018). No surprise, I played it during lockdown after putting it off for 6 months.
I couldn’t have followed the story or grasped the gameplay in small bursts, but by committing a long time upfront, now I can dip in and out and enjoy it.
This can be applied to all sorts of games and activities which my new routine has opened up to me.
I won’t finish a game in that first focused week, but it’ll give me a baseline to pick at the rest of it without feeling rushed or disengaged. Going back later won’t be a chore.

This can still fit around my life

Maybe my priorities are split one week; that’s fine. I can alternate days or choose to do two smaller projects consecutively.
The goal here is not to be spread too thin; if a single focus would be too strict I can always have two. Just as long as it’s not 4 or 5 again.

Less is more

Bill Gates famously said that people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
From where I’m standing, I was making that mistake on an even smaller scale.

You can only do what works for you, and if small bursts of something are good for you then you should stick with them.
For me though, this has helped me get excited about my goals again instead of trying to spread myself too thin or feel like a failure.
If your schedule looks anything like mine, I urge you to try it.
There’s something about being able to drop right back into the zone on the second or third night of something that’s really satisfying, and the results are obvious.

You’ll get more out of your time, and isn’t that what you’re here for?