[Weekend WRAP 45] The Value of Experience & Doing Less

Published almost 2 years ago • 3 min read

Hey Reader,

A quick heads up that I'll be hosting a live workshop on note-taking and idea development. This is one of the most popular sections in the Productivity Power-Up course and I'm excited to share the process with you.

The price will be ~ $50 and limited to 50 people. I host these workshops as a Zoom Meeting so everyone is on video and can easily ask questions. People always remark how much more they get out of an interactive meeting over a more passive "watch me work" webinar. I'll have a date for you next week!

🧠 Idea of the Week: The Math of Doing Less

I'm binging the Deep Questions with Cal Newport podcast and one of my favorite episodes is The Surprising Math of Doing Less. The part that resonated with me was Cal describing his early goal planning method.

If you know anything about Cal and his book Deep Work (a personal favorite) then you know Cal is a very productive guy with an extensive planning method. He even has a planner I'm reviewing soon. So I was surprised to hear this in the middle of the podcast.

When you first start a long term plan, you should be doing shockingly little thinking about that plan, just get going. Once you’re convinced this is something important to do, start putting aside time during your weekly planning. That weekly planning will influence your daily planning and let that feedback help you refine and improve those plans. And don’t be mad at yourself when you get the timing wrong because it’s impossible to do. You don’t get a gold medal for guessing how long a hard project is going to take.

I often see people stuck at the beginning because there's a sense of "I don't know everything about the outcome/goal/problem so I can't move forward". That's kinda the point though. You can't know everything without doing the work and building experience.

Sönke Ahrens makes this point in How to Take Smart Notes - that is through experience that we develop intuition about what the right decision is. Ironically, long-term planning becomes even less important as intuition develops.

They—experts—have acquired enough experience in various situations to be able to rely on their intuition to know what to do in which kind of situation. It is a matter of practice to become good at generating insight and write good texts by choosing and moving flexibly between the most important and promising tasks, judged by nothing else than the circumstances of the given situation.

The takeaway for you — do less at the beginning, but keep doing the thing! This is how you develop expertise and experience to stay agile and make decisions in the moment about what is best. You'll also be able to plan further in advance because you have a built-in timeline for how long a project will take.

đź“ą Secret Newsletter Video

Developing an idea capture system is one of the most productive things you can do. It removes the top of mind stress from the beginning of any project, even something as small as writing an email newsletter.

My process is simple, though it has taken me time to develop. Start with a friction-less capture method, a process to review and customize the idea, then a tool to add references, additional notes, and ultimately publish.

In this short four minute video I show you how I develop an idea in Roam. You can also do this in Obsidian, Notion, and many other tools.

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You might notice even from the thumbnail, but I'm showing you how I put together this very newsletter. Before writing, I had not decided to write about Cal's podcast. I wasn't even thinking about it. I was thinking about a dozen other things, can you relate?

This is what a lot of people struggle with in getting projects and ideas in motion. There are hundreds of other things in our brain. To fight through the noise and select one idea fluttering near the surface in a moment of creative turmoil... well it's no wonder you give up!

Taking notes and developing your ideas distributes productivity—and creativity—to many small moments instead of one moment of "inspiration". The good news is that you can do both. Inspired by something recently? Great, go for it! For the other 90% of times you simply need to do the work? You have notes.

To "connect the dots" on everything. The process I described here and shared a preview of is what we'll cover in the workshop and eventual course.

This is the biggest productivity unlock I've experienced in the past three years because it removes so much friction and stress to doing the work. I know it can do the same for you!

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This edition of the weekly wrap is sponsored by Western Rise. I love the Evolution Pant, it's a go-to for the trail or the bar, and the first pair of pants I pack when I'm traveling. They're stretchy, water-resistant, and pack down to the size of a Yeti water bottle. Check out their clothes at WesternRise.com.

Have a great weekend,

Matt Ragland

p.s. if you have a (literal) minute to share feedback, click here.

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