This is a little exercise my friends and colleagues at Praxis have been up to.
Location: Some combination of West Palm Beach, FL, Pittsburgh, PA, and miscellaneous airport terminals
Current gig: Business Development Director at Praxis
Current mobile device: iPhone 5
Current computer: Apple MacBook — It is the future and Apple is setting the stage for eliminating external ports entirely. Upgrading to this from a 2012 MacBook Pro has been great.
One word that best describes how you work: Systematized.
What apps/software/tools can’t you live without?
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Calendar, Voxer, Forest, HotelTonight, Airbnb, Uber/Lyft
What’s your workspace like?
Mobile. I spend a few days at home working from that office and most of my days on the road doing outbound sales. My laptop bag usually contains my laptop, Kindle, notebook, and miscellaneous chargers.
At home, my office is just a desk with a second display and an external mouse and keyboard. I usually do some basic design work or spreadsheet/database maintenance here. It’s good for a few days in between trips. If I am home for longer periods of time I will go to the beach or a coffeeshop to do creative work.
While traveling, I mostly work from airplanes or my phone. In-flight wifi is a wonderful thing when it works and a curse when it doesn’t. My Comcast subscription has been good for one thing — access to xfinitywifi hotspots all over the country.
I purposely switched over from my MacBook Pro to the MacBook not because of anything related to performance or for being an early adopter, but because the MacBook is so much lighter (nearly 4 lbs!) than the MacBook Pro. It’s made traveling so much better.
What’s your best time-saving trick?
Systematizing.
I try to systematize everything that I do. Inbound sales processing, outbound sales prospecting, blogging, even reading — if I get it down to a system, then I can devote my extra mental energy to other things. I am confident that a good chunk of what makes work so exhausting for people is decision fatigue — creating systems for approaching regular work helps us cut down on the number of decisions you have to make. It also makes outsourcing non-sensitive work easier.
I use an approach I call S3 to approach my regular work in the big picture: simplify, standardize, systematize. I spent several months this summer moving between different CRMs and eventually decided that a Google Sheet would actually be superior because it was just so much easier to regularly simplify and standardize the information that really mattered and because training somebody on it would be much easier and lower cost than training somebody on even a relatively simple CRM like Nimble.
What’s your favorite to-do list manager?
I’ve tried Asana and Google Calendar for coordinating to-do’s for myself and teams before and haven’t found either particularly useful. For coordinating with others, Calendar has been best, but isn’t great for keeping myself on tasks that that don’t keep other around to hold me to them.
For digital to-do’s, I like Swipes, but digital to-do’s still aren’t that great for me. At the end of the day, I like using a blank notebook and writing down my to-do’s in the morning over a cup of coffee and a book. This helps me internalize what I need to do for the day and helps me review each prior day when I get up.
Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without?
I purchased a Kindle Paperwhite this summer and it has helped reduce the weight of my laptop bag while I travel. While I still carry the occasional paperback with me for reference (I almost always have a copy of Zero to One on me for one reason or another), it has made my life much simpler.
I also appreciate having a wristwatch to keep myself on schedule and less attached to my phone.
What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?
Travel. I think I’ve developed a great system for keeping my productivity high while on the road. It’s mostly come through just working through failures to stay productive over time — it’s just a habit.
What are you currently reading?
The E-Myth Revisited (Gerber), Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis), The Four Hour Workweek (Ferris), Atlas Shrugged (Rand) (rereading)
What do you listen to while you work?
I can’t listen to lyrical music while writing or reading. I have a pretty strong preference for Brahms or Beethoven. Beethoven’s Eroica is probably my go-to work music.
Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
I used to think of myself as being pretty introverted — I gained my energy from alone-time and processed information almost exclusively internally. I’ve come to see myself as more extroverted in the past two years, though. I am developing a bias for action that I never had before and find myself energized most by the sales aspect of my job.
What’s your sleep routine like?
I need 6-8 hours every night. Failure to get that much sleep signals to me my own inability to properly manage my time and my thoughts. If I am tossing and turning at night, it means I should have resolved something before trying to sleep. If I am staying up into the night working on something, then I need to do a better job at managing my time. Ryan Holiday had a great article on this here.
I prefer to get in bed between 10-11 PM and get up between 6 and 8 AM. Getting up around dawn helps me get ahead of any work in emails or communications, and allows me to then have a cup of coffee and read before the day has heated up too much. I read before getting into a lot of work because I then feel that I’ve found my leisure time for the day.
Fill in the blank: I’d love to see ______ answer these same questions.
Honestly, almost everybody I meet with through work. I’m most interested in hearing how the ultra-successful investors I know manage their work.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“You should never have to send out a resume.”
What I like about this is that it puts the onus on you to show what value you’ve created and create that track record for yourself. It’s also great for getting away from the anxiety caused by thinking too much about resumes and resume-building.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
I think “productivity hacks” are largely a waste of time and lead people to overlook developing good, strong habits that will lead to a greater productivity payoff in the long run. It’s better to force yourself to come up with a personal development project than to just hack together your routine.
