tim ferriss – Harrison Hansford

Why are you working so hard?

This is a question I’ve always dismissed because I was studying and wasn’t really working. Recently this has changed since I’ve been on placement almost full time. I’m now, for the first time, spending the vast majority of my time working. I’ve also seen the time I spend doing things like going to the gym, spending time helping around the house and importantly sleeping has all decreased, which I’m not happy about. This has made me really consider what I want my future work life to look like, as you saw in my previous post about not working full time.

I think this is a question which people don’t ask themselves enough. The most common answer is, I’m sure, to earn a lot of money and then be able to retire (whatever that means) and travel, or do whatever it is they enjoy. This answer is flawed, in many ways, but it’s also a trap. You’re unlikely to just replicate your desires now, in 20, 30 or 40 years time, whenever it is, you’re values will change and you wont be able to re-coup those lost years working your ass off. An extreme example of the converse of this is to always be semi-retired, working remotely or earning money through passive income, living in a place with very low costs. Tim Ferriss shows that this isn’t as difficult as it sounds, that you can live well for 20-30k per year in a lower income country like Vietnam or Brazil. This is an extreme example, but an interesting idea. What if you weren’t deferring your life for this amazing period we call retirement but lived doing whatever it is you truly love doing, every day.

The other option, and in my opinion the ideal option is that you love doing your job every day AND it pays very well, so you can afford to go part time as soon as possible. This is something I don’t want to assume will happen because I think it’s so rare and don’t want to just jump on the corporate hamster wheel seeking this.

I’m yet to really figure out what it is that I really want to be doing, I’m not sure I ever will. My heuristic for making life decisions is, what will I enjoy most in the short term, its fared me well so far. Despite this, I feel as though I’m getting drawn more and more to what I think I should do rather than what I want to do. I have no answers, other than to continue asking myself the question “do I really enjoy what I’m doing?” The way I help myself answer that is asking if I’d do it for free, and so far, I have been doing it for free and the answer is still yes.

My biggest worry is convincing myself I like what I’m doing and not spending time doing the things I love and I think this should be the worry of most people. So why are you working so hard, and is that really the path you want to continue going down?

The Untapped Power of The Weekly Review

If you were writing an essay, would you write one paragraph, then on another occasion, write another, and another. Imagine how hard it would be to finish this essay, and make it a good one. The essay would inevitably be incoherent and have no clear direction. If we wouldn’t do something as simple as write without looking back on what we have done, why do we live our lives like that?

I’ve mentioned the ‘weekly review’ previously, I had no idea what it was until probably a year ago. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon it initially but it was listening to Tim Ferriss that made me actually commit to it. I started doing a weekly review 3 months ago (almost) every week and it is probably the highest yield productivity change I’ve made in a long time.

What is a weekly review?

A weekly review is simply a reflection on the week that has passed. I sit down on a Sunday evening and look back through my calendar and write whatever comes to mind. If I’m stuck on what to write (which I was a lot early on), I just recount what I did, then I put in how it made me feel. Inevitably, I get side-tracked thinking of new ideas, remembering a good moment, or a bad moment which I then problem solve.

I’ve recently added some structure to my review with subheadings of “What went well last week,” “what didn’t go so well” and “what did I learn.” Following this freeform section I have a tick box where I am reminded to preview my calendar for the week, then a list to write actions based on the calendar, or more commonly, something I didn’t do in the week prior. The final part is my focus for the week, which can be more important goals or something broader.

It sounds like an effort, how does it help?

It does sound like a lot at first, but it honestly takes no more than 30 minutes at most, sometimes as little as 10 minutes. You can easily overestimate how much you’re able to get done in a day, and grossly underestimate how much you can achieve in a week, a month or a year. The weekly review is a way to set larger goals across the week, and identify the barriers to achieving those goals in the previous week. This reflection helps overcome future barriers, ultimately allowing to to achieve your goals, in a much shorter time frame. The weekly review takes the serendipity out of achieving, you don’t have to wait until you happen to remember that thing you were working on last week. Each week you look back, and build on the week gone by, fastracking whatever it is you want to achieve.

How to start?

The best thing to do is to just start, it’s so easy to look at all these techniques for being more productive and have all the tools for the job but not use them. Imagine you’re a builder and before nailing something together you wait until you’ve got a certain hammer which attenuates force 10% better than another, then you dont want to hit your thumb so you then wait until a gadget comes which protects your thumb. Before you know it, there wont be a nail to hit because someone with a basic hammer has just done it for you. That was a poor analogy but the message is simple, the tools you use are better than the perfect tool. Among photographers there is the classic adage “the best camera is the one with you.” The message is the same, just start.

Writing will be hard at first, but it gets easier after the first few sentences. I promise. If it doesn’t, let me know and I’ll write a personal apology.

Stress and Anxiety: Don’t Suffer Twice

This week, I listened to a great podcast about mindfulness and anxiety from Sam Harris and Tim Ferris. Whilst writing my weekly review I realised I experienced some stressful situations in the short, medium and long term which the podcast helped me control, with varying degrees of success. If you just want to see the techniques I use, jump to here

Short Term Stress

I had a very difficult exam (my final one for university!) which seemed to be designed to push you for time. I had roughly 30mins to go, with 30 marks unfinished (out of a 100 mark, 2hr exam), all long responses and I noticed myself getting frazzled and spending time thinking about how I was not going to finish, and flipping between questions.

After about 30 seconds of fueling the fire of anxiety, I identified my stress and thought, “it doesn’t matter how many questions I’ve got to go, I just need to keep powering through them and finish them the best I can,” and that’s exactly what I did. I put this ability to identify and put aside my stress down to my meditation, which I poorly adhere to but have still seen the benefits, this being one.

Medium Term Stress

My medium term stress was having a busy week ahead with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being full of work, and a lot of research to do. The way I managed this stress was ensuring I had a to do list of the essential pieces I needed to have finished, and just worked hard to get them finished by thursday so on the days I was working I was able to switch off afterwards so it still felt like I had a weekend; worked a charm.

Writing the tasks down and blocking out time in my calendar has been a great way to show me how much I really do need to get done because the worry about having a lot of work to do is always worse than the actual work.

Long Term Stress

My long term stress is more about the career I want to pursue, I am coming to the end of my degree and have several options but unsure which one to take. I’m still figuring out how best to approach this, but I currently have two heuristics:

Which path will be more fun to do
Which path has the most options afterwards

So far this led me to choose my degree (Exercise Physiology is more fun than Engineering) my jobs and the research projects I’ve been involved in as well. It is working out pretty well so far.

You can never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, so by choosing a path which has the most options and will be fun in the short term removes a lot of the stress around making significant live decisions. Tim Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is also really useful for life-altering decisions as well.

Strategies to Stress Less

It’s not that I don’t stress, I do, but I’ve really learned over the past few years how to better manage my stress so that it doesn’t distract me from what is important.

For short term, in the moment stress, like in an exam, you have to understand your stress, allowing it to be put away and ignored so you can deal with the problem at hand. Mindfulness Meditation (with Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app) has helped in identifying this stress, allowing you to not be consumed by it.

For medium term, stress about the coming days or weeks, writing a list and scheduling your time in a calendar helps to make you realise that the stressor is probably not as time consuming as it seems, and by blocking out time for it, Steve Jobs’ ‘Imaginary time’ comes in and with a pressing enough deadline, clearly set out in a calendar and a list, you can achieve almost anything. What happens when your tasks aren’t time bound is called Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so block off the time you need and have no more, trust me, you’ll finish it.

Finally long term stress. Making life decisions suck, you can never be sure of what result your decision will have, but there are ways to ensure you enjoy it. Choose something that you’ll enjoy doing, the worst thing that happens is you enjoy yourself, then do something else. Choose something which doesn’t close doors, or even opens them, nobody knows what they want to be doing in 5 or 10 years, so don’t limit yourself with your choices.

Finally, the main takeaway from this post should be that the object of your stress will never be as bad as what you think it will be, so don’t suffer twice by stressing about it. Just saying ‘don’t stress’ doesn’t help so I’ve given some thoughts on how I manage my stress so I’m not wasting my energy on my ruminations.

I’d love to know what you do to manage your stress and any techniques which have worked for you, leave a comment down below and get in touch if you’d like to chat through your stresses with me!

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Being Remarkable

If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it?
Seth Godin

I want to be remarkable, and I am sure that I will be. My girlfriend always laughs at me when I say this, or when I say “I want to change the world,” but I do, and more importantly, I will. How I plan on doing this, I’m not sure yet, it is looking like it will be in the realm of health and medicine, but who knows, that may very well change. For Me this is a constant struggle, I feel like I should know what to do, and what I want to do with my life, but I couldn’t be further from that.

I sat down on a rainy afternoon to do a fear-setting task as designed by Tim Ferriss. The task is designed to help you overcome your fears and act on whatever life change or decision it is you want to make. I sat down, drew out the matrix on an A3 piece of paper and couldn’t think what action it was I wanted to check. Pondering fruitlessly I looked back through my notes where I write in any ideas I have and stumbled upon some notes I took from the ‘Not Overthinking’ podcast by Ali & Taimur Abdaal on Vision (I’d definitely recommend it)

This led me to Seth Godin’s blog when in his ‘Top 100’ posts I found, how to be remarkable, 10 tips on how to be great, perfect for my problem. One of the tips to ask yourself was the one at the start of the post; “If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wear it.” Unfortunately I didn’t (and don’t) know what it would be I would be putting on a T-shirt, but it helped reinforce I had to do something, because I wasn’t going to wake up one day and be remarkable. I know my goal, but the path is unclear; which doesn’t mean there isn’t a path. I suppose that’s how it is for everyone. No (well, not many) 21 year old knows exactly what they want from life, nor should we, but you have to expose yourself to as many situations where new opportunities can present, and seize them when they do.

Tim Ferriss’ blog about fear setting opens with

Action may not bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Benjamin Disraeli (British PM from the 1800’s)

Currently in my life, I’m cruising, I’ve got a few stable jobs, uni is going well and there is little risk (an issue i’ve talked about previously). With no risks, opportunity has no chance to present herself. On Not Overthinking they often speak about the internet as a means to ‘get yourself out of your village’ which is a metaphor for increasing your surface area to opportunity outside of your immediate connections. So in the absence of a clear path, I’m going to use that as a starting point. The internet is a gateway for a world of opportunity, so if you’re in a similar position to me, I suggest its your starting point too.