Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. The infinite player does not expect only to be amused by surprise, but to be transformed by it.
— Finite and Infinite Games

I find Finite and Infinite Games to be a remarkably pretentious book, but as I tumble through the years I’m referencing it more and more. In the finite game, you play to win. In the infinite game, you play for its own sake. 2021 was about infinite games.

2021 has been a wild year. I feel much more capable than a year ago, and dare I say it, I feel like I’m operating at a much higher level.

Reflecting on 2021

I set a couple of goals for the start of 2021:

• Increase the pace of work and projects
• Action more ideas
• Get “out” of client work
• Publish blog posts weekly

I felt going into 2021 that I was capable of doing more, and my goals were focused on that. I didn’t know what deserved the increased action, but I felt I was ready for it. That ended up happening, but not quite how I envisaged.

I certainly increased the pace. Much of that has come from learning how to seriously leverage technology at Ellipsis, the marketing agency I run. Alongside excellent process automation, we’ve built world-class SEO AI tech, and are implementing AI that’s significantly better than what’s available commercially at a fast rate.

I also launched my first serious side-project business in years, with FlipWP launching in a flurry of activity over the summer. I’d been talking to Iain more and more, and launching Flip made a lot of sense.

One hears a lot of advice. You should focus on your strengths; you should scale through technology; you should do products; competition is for losers… 2021 was the year where it all started to make sense.

I focused on my strengths, and what happened next will shock you

Effective executives are not blind to weakness.
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

People say you should focus on your strengths. All this time, I’ve been focusing on my weaknesses! I jest: 2021 was the year where the power and implications behind focusing on my strengths really became apparent.

In the 80/20 rule, I am great at the first 80 and not great at the final 20. The thing about the 80/20 rule what you’ve made is serviceable, but fundamentally unfinished.

This has been the lesson at Ellipsis: I’m great at bringing new things to market, innovating with new ideas, and so on, but I’m really weak on the operational attention to detail. My approach to having a bunch of new enquiries is to say yes to all of them and figure it out later. That was fine for a couple of years, but we have a team of excellent professionals now and I owe it to plan things properly.

Part of that means working with excellent people, gettin g excellent advice, delegating responsibility for the stuff I’m less good at — and then getting out the way. There’s no point having excellent people if you don’t give them space to do their jobs. We’ve done the 80 bit of the 80/20 of Ellipsis, but doing the final 20 will be an ongoing process that’s never finished.

I increasingly get why entrepreneurs are often serial entrepreneurs. If you’re good at the 80 bit, you’ve just got to keep doing it. Hand-in-hand, I increasingly see the value of having a plan for what to do if it works. The lesson has been clear: understand what you don’t know, clearly delegate responsibility, and get out of the way.

This has a flip-side, of course. I’ve been down a deep deep rabbit hole with AI. A year ago I didn’t know anything about AI. I thought it was mainly science fiction. I’ve now taught myself everything I need to use genuinely cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning in all parts of Ellipsis. When you’re obsessively interested in something, it’s usually a sign. If you can harness that into a commercial project, all the better.

This, more than anything else in 2021, has been eye-opening: tackling a topic as complex as AI has given me the confidence to tackle anything else I fancy.

On becoming a no-code AI expert

To remain valuable in our economy… you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

Cal Newport, Deep Work

A friend is an AI researcher at Oxford, and early last year we were chatting about how I was using Zapier to do simple logic. He asked if I’d considered using AI. I said no, because I don’t have a billion pounds to spend on it. Turns out right now is the moment that small businesses can start leveraging AI.

It really was a eureka moment the first time I got a prediction back from Zapier’s AI module: I fed it text and with some simple training it could come back with an answer. That led to a huge rabbit hole. My goal initially with to stop our process automation from being “stupid”. We had simple rule-based decision trees in our process automation and could make those decisions smarter.

It quickly became clear that the AI could make significantly better decisions than a human expert. This is a huge deal. I started training custom Machine Learning models and we started getting pretty wild results on client projects. We increased SEO Content performance by 30% early in the year, and we realised were sitting on so much technology value we needed to do a better job of articulating it.

That led to the launch of Ellipsis FALCON AI over the summer. FALCON AI is our custom suite of AI specifically trained to improved the performance of SEO Content in WordPress — and it runs on no code.

I’m increasingly bullish on process automation and AI for small businesses. Ellipsis uses AI better than… I’m guessing the vast majority of businesses of any size. The technology is just becoming available to everyone, and there are huge competitive advantages to be had from adopting early.

I’m putting together a course on no-code process automation and AI that shares how we do it and how you can too. I’ll have that ready in February. Sign up for a launch discount!

I was way too focused on work for a lot of last year

The activity and action came at a cost. By July, I was fully down an AI rabbit hole (more on that later), Ellipsis was hiring and we were ramping up, and I’d launched FlipWP. But — I was working very long hours, trying to find extra time at weekends to work, and I was doing nothing but work. By the summer I found myself struggling with burnout.

My wife is a doctor and has been working gruelling hours over the pandemic. I responded for a lot of the year by doing the same: letting work become all-consuming and working ridiculous hours. In the moment I could justify it and enjoyed the projects, but over time it caught up with me.

I don’t know whether I was “burnt out”, as I was able to course-correct within a couple of weeks, but I was unhappy, unfit, unhealthy, and certainly heading in that direction.

There was some COVID lockdown stuff mixed in there: not getting out the house enough certainly contributed. It was a wake up call, though, and a prompt to make sure my priorities were in the right place.

I’m big on self-reflection and a bit of thinking time sorted it out. I made a concerted effort to get life more back to normal (starting with going back to my co-working space), reintroducing the strict boundaries around work I’d put in place following my last dance with burnout five years ago. I will fully embrace new ideas and projects and get very excited about them. That helps me be a good entrepreneur.

It also means I can and do get carried away, though. I want to be able to do my work for a long time, and for me that means doing work in moderation.

It’s noteworthy to me how quickly bad habits spiralled. The mental hoops I jumped through and justified to myself to do more work were ridiculous: one of my barriers is I don’t have any email on my phone. But, I found myself downloading the Gmail app, checking email, and then uninstalling; presumably to try and persuade myself I wasn’t breaking my no-email-on-phone rule.

I had minor eye surgery in August. I was waiting alone in a hospital room waiting to go into the operation. I hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink all day and really wasn’t feeling good — and I found myself installing Gmail and sending emails. It was absurd, and bad.

We launched FlipWP as the perfect “side hustle”

Launching FlipWP was good last year. Iain and I had been talking more and more since he started Plugin Rank. We both had demand for people wanting help selling their WordPress businesses, and we saw an opportunity to serve a missing piece of the market. The business has been a solid side project: we’ve signed up around 100 buyers at $250/year and had a steady flow of deals come through the site most weeks.

FlipWP is also an example of a smarter kind of business. There was clear demand for a single place to buy and sell WordPress businesses, but now that it exists nobody else needs to make it. The network effects of a marketplace like this make it a winner-takes-all market, or at least one with a very strong moat.

Understanding this — and doing it — in practice is where dealing with advice like “competition is for losers” comes in. With Flip we’ve seen it, and I want anything in 2022 to be similarly strongly “moated”. Iain and I are always discussing new ideas, and I presume I drive him mad asking “what’s the 4D chess version of this?” Good strategy often means doing different things, differently. There’s often an “easy” option to be had, if you can find it.

I’d give us a 7/10 so far. We’re delivering on the core value proposition, but we need to tell better stories about buyer and seller success, and there are some obvious complementary products to work on.

My attention is kinda shot

I’m big on Deep Work. I’ve written about it many times over the years, and Ellipsis’ whole operations are built around the philosophy. It’s a little disappointing, then, to realise that my attention is shot right now. I really struggle to do real Deep Work at the moment. Even whilst writing this I compulsively checked my Fantasy Football team’s score (it’s doing great btw — I’m in the top ~0.5%).

I’m at least self-aware about this being a problem, but it seems to remarkably difficult for me to do anything about it. Especially when tired, willpower goes out the window. I have all sorts of inconveniences set up: I don’t have a browser on my phone, I have a Chrome extension that makes me wait to load Twitter, and so on. The core problem is still there though. This seems to have become more urgent over the last 6 months — possibly coinciding with me taking more meetings — and it’s a big problem to solve in 2022.

I’m reading a lot more fiction

Hand-in-hand with my attention being shot has been my reading habits: I read 14 books in 2021, which is my fewest since 2015. I read 40 books in 2020 and normally clock about 25.

Goodreads tells me I’ve read nearly as many pages as 2019 when I read 23 books, so maybe this isn’t so bad. The profile of my reading has changed significantly: I used to devour pop-thinking and pop-business books. Something like Atomic Habits shot to the top of my list when it came out a couple of years ago.

I have basically no interest in reading anything of the non-fiction that’s been a staple of recent years: Atomic Habits, Company of One, Digital Minimalism… you know the type. I keep a well-organised reading list that plans my reading across a range of topics I’m interested in… but I’ve been ignoring it and reading a lot more fiction, especially international fiction.

The translated fiction section of Blackwell’s in Oxford has become the source of nearly all my books (especially the extremely aesthetically pleasing Fizcarraldo Editions). The Nobel prize winning Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was one my favourite reads of the year. It’s translated from Polish and I never would have considered it a couple of years ago.

I’m sure the arc will come back around. I do increasingly find something like Atomic Habits annoying in a way I can’t quite put my finger on, but that might just be me. I’ve read ~100 of the pop non-fiction books over the last couple of years and it might just be time for a change.

I do still find some reading for work useful and inspiring, but I’m also happy to follow my interests more. I’m just frustrated I didn’t carve out more time for reading.

I haven’t been able to run basically all year

I went into 2021 probably fitter than I’ve ever been. I was in a really good rhythm, running 5k 3x during the week and about 15k at the weekend. I was going faster and faster week-on-week, too. Then, one week at the end of January my knee started hurting. I’m still dealing with the repercussions in December.

I’ve never really taken cross-training seriously, and when I went to the physio they were surprised I’d been able to do as much running as I had been, given I was seriously lacking in strength. I worked on increasing strength and slowly got back up to 5k — and then I pulled my hamstring. I went to a different physio this time, and he had a plausible story for what the first physio had missed. We’ll see how that goes, but I do feel positive about finally fixing the issue. That all took 10 months.

I am all about routines, and losing my morning run from my routine was a real difficulty for parts of the year. I tried cycling, walking, even squash, but nothing stuck. I use my running time to clear my head, and the loss of that time really contributed to my burnout over the summer. I need to get back to a good rhythm for running and fitness as soon as I can.

This was the first really serious running injury I’ve had. It has changed my perspective a bit: instead of constantly pushing myself to go faster and faster, and neglecting recovery, I now just want to go at a solid pace — and be able to do that for the next 50 years.

Once COVID case numbers fell over the summer, I got back into playing squash. I love squash: it’s high intensity, great fun, and sociable. Playing too much squash probably contributed to pulling my hamstring. You may notice a trend here.

2022 will be about finite and infinite games

My job is unrecognisable year-to-year. To me that’s the core of the infinite game as an entrepreneur: create a business where the market rewards you for working on interesting problems.

I will carry on doing that forever, ideally. There is a balance, though. One a mastermind call a couple of weeks ago I was asked if I was too focused on the long term. I can see that: hitting £X revenue target is a finite game, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t play. I’ve probably been too snobbish about finite games in the past. For 2022, I will take them on.

I feel really good about where we’re at with Ellipsis: we have the core problems solved, our product-market fit is great, and we just need to add a bit of scale in 2022. I will carry on focusing on my strengths, and that means working on FALCON AI, working on new products, and building new things.

The difference is this year it’s part of the plan rather than a distrction from the plan, and excellent people will be making sure we don’t experience trade offs from me doing new things. Should be fun.

The post 2021 year in review appeared first on Alex Denning.

This post is about the implications of remote work as performance, where the performance has value, and alternative ways of doing things.

Remote work as performance

One of the key differences between remote and in-person knowledge work is that when remote, you have much less information about what your colleagues are doing. You can’t see that they’re at their desk, in their office, out for lunch, in a meeting, and so on. Instead, your main check-in mechanism is to interrupt them, usually via Slack.

When your main mechanism for checking-in with colleagues becomes interrupting them, we incentivise responding rapidly to interruptions as “good”. When you have no idea what your colleagues are doing, one has the assumption: if I can reach them, they’re working! If not, they’re clearly not working.

This is the kind of fear that led to Yahoo banning remote work (the specific complaint was people were checking their emails less when working from home, so yes, exactly this).

This is also a pretty wild conclusion to come to. One can understand why we have this response, but we need remote work environments to move beyond this. Let’s explore the cost of interruptions.

The cost of interruptions

Interrupting people has a non-zero cost. This in some ways glaringly obvious, but we often don’t recognise the cost: how much harm can a quick check-in do? Interruptions steals attention and slows people down; it forces someone to re-orient themselves when they’re not expecting the interruption (which you can’t do in person), interrupts natural workflows that don’t require being interrupted for input or feedback every few minutes of so…it just makes things worse.

Cal Newport calls Slack and email an “all-day unstructured conversation”, and rightly takes aim at them:

“For most people, the paradox is that email and Slack have made their lives better by giving them more control over when they respond to messages. But this same power has also reduced focus on high-return activities like deep thinking or creative work.”

The key thing here isn’t just about managing your time so you can concentrate in bursts of productivity; it’s understanding what a person does as an activity—noticing how we’re always “on” mentally no matter where our body might be at any given moment because all remote workers are constantly checking for notifications from Slack or email.

This has a terrible cost on work/life balance, and also leads directly to the performance of remote work: the speed or frequency at which you reply to your emails becomes both the only thing perceived to matter, and the only piece of your work that’s ever done. Remote work is not going to work out in the long term where this is the case.

Leaning in to performance

Many remote workers have found ways to avoid this problem by turning off notifications and scheduling a set number of hours each day to handle email, Slack, and so on. Some remote workers will go as far as auto-replying to messages informing you of what their email schedule is, and when you can expect to hear back.

I used to think this was unnecessary, but it’s the ideal solution: if remote work is performance, lean into the performance. If we value responding to emails quickly, what could be better than an immediate response! This is expectation setting and letting technology help you out, rather than make you more reliant on it.

Little bits of automation like this are great, and with no-code tools like Zapier offering AI integrations, you can send reasonably smart responses that do the performance for you (with AI you might, for example, detect what kind of message you have received, and send a context-specific response that deals with common queries, providing an answer 25% of the time), letting you ultimately respond on your terms. This is what remote work is meant to be about: freedom and flexibility.

Moving beyond always on

Asynchronous communication, transparency, and trust are, in my opinion, the ingredients of a successful remote workplace. The suggestions above are adaptations to existing ways of working; in order to truly move beyond the always on performance, we need different ways of working.

These don’t have to be radically different: using asynchronous communication tools like Basecamp, and combining this with a very high level of transparency and trust is a superb mix.

When you trust that your team is doing whatever is best for them and the business, you remove the need to check in on Slack to see what’s going on. This is something I really struggled with as a manager early on, but – surprise – transparency and trust, and giving people space, lets people do better work.

If you don’t trust your team, there’s no way they’ll ever be able to do the work that needs doing. And if your team doesn’t trust each other and/or their managers, then every day becomes an arduous battle for everyone involved.

Asynchronous communication and trusting people also alleviates the performance pressure of remote work: the expectation stops being that everything gets a response immediately. If a message goes unanswered for an hour because someone was taking a break outside of the confines of a screen-based workplace – or because they were just Deep Working on something else – hey, that’s fine.

The non-utopian flip side of this is that where someone takes advantage of the trust, you have a problem. Right now, I don’t know how we deal with this, beyond being conscious of this in the hiring process.

Remote work as performance

Companies which can get remote work right faster than everyone else will have huge competitive advantages. Covid has accelerated remote working, but I don’t think it’s accelerated remote workplaces.

Understanding the performative nature of remote work can help us move to better ways of working, making everyone happier and more productive.

The post Understanding remote work as performance appeared first on Alex Denning.

This post isn’t about that, though: this about how we use process to be a technology-driven service company.

Working with process in a business that relies on humans doing the work is nothing new. Using technology to add scale to those processes is a different and exciting way if doing things. 

We work with technology companies, and a common viewpoint is that services don’t scale. Products are viewed as the superior option for their scale. One client even said to me once; “Alex you’re not stupid, so why don’t you make products?”

I see our processes as the product, and building technology around those services is how we scale. We do, of course, need to offer services led by humans and we’ll never dramatically scale beyond the number of hours the team works in a week. But, I suspect how we’ve scaled our processes and become a technology-driven company wasn’t possible even a couple of years ago. I also suspect others are massively under-utilising the methodology we use. This post aims to be insightful and enlightening.

Selling process-driven work

A couple of years ago I remember telling a friend who was asking how business was going: “business is going great, as I’ve accidentally productised our services”.

I accidentally productised services because I had very strong positioning that meant potential clients were coming to me with the same problem repeatedly. I hated writing proposals, so I started copying and pasting from one email to another. Over time, the emails became completely standardised, I moved from a day rate to a fixed price, and my first productised service was created.

“Productised services” are often positioned as a way of taking services and disruptively offering them through a potent mix of low cost labour and technology, all at one convenient price (or more often, a selection of profit-maximising prices).

Maybe I’ve misunderstood, but I always got the impression that this was done with the aim of offering good-enough value whilst maximising profits and letting the business owner move on to something else whilst keeping the income coming in. 

That’s not for me, but accidentally productising my freelance work all those years ago was the vital first step to selling process-driven work as it set up a repeatable set of todos with each project. This then led me to start offering other services based on outputs rather than time. This is the key to leveraging technology, as it aligns everyone’s incentives: the customer pays for the value created, and you can look for ways to save time or add more value than one could add if you started from scratch each time.

Recently we’ve started doing some hourly-based projects. They have their place, and given uncertain scopes for example, they can let us flexibly accommodate the client’s needs. Accidentally productising all those years ago, though, was how this all started and an extremely helpful (although not key) prerequisite for becoming a technology-driven service company.

Building process

Whilst it was bits of freelance work that led to me creating our first product, it was our monthly retainers that led to us becoming a process-driven company.

The monthly retainers followed the success of the first product: a set of deliverables each month for a fixed fee.

Over time as we listened to customer needs and identified trends, we packaged up different parts of the retainers and our flagship Content Growth product was created. This led to us doing the same type of work for different clients.

The kicker, though, was that the retainer was month-based: we had to deliver the work each month, and start again at the start of the next month. This became a kicker because the work would start kicking you if you didn’t keep up, and in the early days it started kicking – hard.

This wasn’t a challenge of capacity: we had the people to get the work done. It was a question of process. We needed to build a production line capable of getting high-quality results every time, and we needed to do it quickly as otherwise the work would become overwhelming.

Leading up to the Summer of 2019 was a turning point: I was getting married and planned to take three weeks off for the wedding and our honeymoon. I’m always offline from work when I’m on holiday, but we were going to The Galapagos islands and I wouldn’t be able to get online if I wanted to.

The business was doing reasonably well, but with most of our revenue based around monthly retainers, I didn’t want to skip a month and lose a 1/12 of our revenue. The challenge, then, was to build sufficient processes ahead of the honeymoon to let me take the time off.

I’ve not read The Four Hour Workweek, but I’m pretty sure this is a similar story: Tim Ferriss wanted to take a vacation so he built out processes to handle all the work. In Tim’s case, he never really went back to work. In mine, I came back to work and found everything was just about still working. At this point I’d mostly created a job, rather than a business. It was clear that the processes needed significant work. 

Iterating process

Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification.

Andrew Grove

We spent the next 12 months iterating our processes. In this time we had our first two team retreats, and at these we started to see the value of having a single process across multiple projects: we could troubleshoot based on a potential improvement for one client, and then immediately apply it to everyone. 

You can’t start automating your process until you’ve defined it, and you shouldn’t start automating your process until it’s fit for purpose. In this period our process wasn’t sufficient. There was still a lot of specific knowledge required and the process relied on having a capable human monitor production to pick up on the inevitable errors. In the lexicon of High Output Management, we’d built a breakfast factory that was burning toast – but the toast looked fine and required an expert to determine if it was burnt.

Thinking we had everything under control, early in this period we hired someone to run this process. This was our first hire in-house in over a year, and the start of moving Ellipsis from the “explore” to the “exploit” stage. The new hire understandably didn’t have the ad-hoc and extremely specific expertise the process required to keep everything working, so things quickly didn’t work out and they quickly left.

This is, of course, a massive oversimplification, but this prompted us to set out about increasing the reliability of the process. Project post mortems are invaluable for situations like this. The process should need a skilled human to run it, but the human should be able to rely on the process to produce high quality results every time. Doing this work really let us turn a corner and start increasing the quantity of clients we were taking on.

Getting better at our work led to more demand, which was great! We’re extremely human resource intensive, though, so this led to capacity issues. Capacity is a constant struggle for service businesses. This is where the final part of the puzzle comes in: becoming a technology driven service business.

Automation project

An army of robots is freely available—it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency.

Naval Ravikant

We use Basecamp for all our project management and have done so since the beginning. Basecamp is great: all our communication and docs and tasks are in one place, we can work with clients or freelancers through there, and it means we don’t need to have the constant interruptions of Slack or internal email to work.

Basecamp has some frustrating limitations: you can’t create recurring tasks, which is annoying if you have recurring tasks – such as monthly retainer-based work. You can’t create subtasks either. This meant we’d always used Zapier to create simple recurring tasks, and we used a single “master” task that got moved through the process rather than multiple subtasks. This experience plus the methodology turned out to be ripe for automation.

Basecamp’s Zapier integration is pretty limited: everything needs the right ID, and for most elements there’s no easy way of looking up the ID. If you want to do anything, then, it needs to be fixed – or so I thought. We create around 50 posts per month and I wasn’t going to create and maintain 50 individual zaps. 

I thus never thought too seriously about overcoming these limitations and stuck to simple tasks and simple notifications. Crucially, though, this made everyone familiar with automation: “the Ellipsis robot” as I called it, would show up and tell people who’d filled in the contact form. It always said “Beep boop” at the start of messages, which made it fairly amusing. We were used to the robot doing things. 

There’s a final piece to the puzzle. As we made our process more reliable, one final problem remained: setting up all the tasks for each month was extremely time-consuming, and occasionally we’d miss things. We also started getting ahead on work for the first time ever, and there was no good way of keeping track of specifically where we’d gotten ahead. I thus set out to get Zapier to create our tasks for us each month.

It quickly became clear, though, that it was possible to run all the extra information we’d been collecting to increase the reliability of the process through Zapier too. It turned out I could create a single zap that would create all 50 tasks each month, dynamically filling in the information on a task-by-task basis. This is when we became a technology-driven service business.

The impact was obvious and immediate: I built a “looping zap” which we use for all our process-driven tasks. The zap dynamically looks up the client and client-specific information in our master Google Sheet and then surfaces it at relevant points. The zap now handles:

• Creating the master task internally
• Identifying the right freelancer (if applicable) and creating a draft task for them (this helps freelancers see what’s coming up) 
• Creating a Google Drive folder for the task and sharing with the relevant people 
• Creating the Docs we need for the task, based on a template but dynamically feeding in all the client-specific info
• If we’re creating new content, a draft outline is created which includes custom client requirements 
• Setting up a client-facing reporting and updating our internal reporting sheet
• Preparing analytics for monthly reporting
• Washing the dishes

It took me maybe 6 weeks to get this working. The troubleshooting of getting the Basecamp IDs dynamically took me down a rabbit hole of trying to learn Python and at one point sending a friend a screenshot of code I couldn’t get working (with no context – he did not appreciate the message). Eventually, though, it started working and it started working reliably. reliably. 

This opened the floodgates: the team immediately understood the value this could bring, and opportunities for automation showed up everywhere. Our process management was the first target, but reporting was next: we improved the quality and cut the time from about two days of team time per month to… a couple of hours? Really not long at all. I spent weeks at the end of last year getting everything in place.

Now, we’re a technology-driven service business. Nothing gets missed, it’s easier for us to deliver high-quality work, and we’ve used technology to add more capacity whilst making jobs easier. It really is the promised land.

Lessons and next steps 

Part 1 of my automation project is complete. We’re continuing to make minor improvements but the basics are solidly in place. It’s diminishing returns from here onwards, but I look forward to identifying those opportunities and getting the work in place. 

Honestly, once you start working like this, you can’t go back. We’ve effectively added another team member to do repeatable tasks perfectly. When people talk about automation and the future of knowledge work, this is a future one can advocate for: where automation makes jobs easier and gives people more time and space to work on the creative parts of their work. 

It’s also noteworthy to me just how quickly this is coming together: I am not a developer, and even a couple of years ago this wouldn’t have been possible for me to set up or maintain. 

If you’re in a position to take advantage of this kind of automation, I highly recommend it.

The post Building process and becoming a technology-driven service business appeared first on Alex Denning.

New ideas often create new ideas, though, and one of the challenges has been finishing projects once they’re past the initial stage of excitement, and bringing others along for the ride. 

Understanding the goal, and implications of the goal

Goal setting is a powerful way of making progress, and I like to use the end of the year to review where I’m at and set new goals for the coming year. That’s fairly standard and uncontroversial.

What I’m less good at is understanding the implications of the goal: doing one thing may lead to unintended side-effects. We understand this with KPIs, which is where paired metrics come from. You might, for example, pair revenue with profit margin to ensure you don’t optimise for one at the expense of the other.

With goal setting we need something similar. I’ve been optimising for moving faster with projects, but projects don’t live in isolation. Without understanding the implications of a goal, one can’t plan for the outcomes. It turns out me optimising for projects creates extra work for my team, something which may not be wanted when I’ve created the space for working on projects by handing over some of my client project work.

Understand the goal, but also the implications of the goal. Finishing projects quickly may be good in isolation, but if it’s having negative second-order effects down the line that’s less useful.

Setting projects up for success

At Ellipsis we talk a lot about setting projects up for success: how can we de-risk a project by getting or providing more information at the start so that it has the best change of working out?

It can be tempting, especially if you lean towards the “let’s do it out and figure it out on the way” end of the scale as I do, to just jump in and do exactly that. If you’re going to have a higher “hit rate” with successful projects, though, you need to spend some time – even a tiny amount of it – planning out the idea, likely risks, and benefits. Does the time frame and budget make sense? What are the likely risks and how can you mitigate them? What are the benefits and are they worth it given the costs? Can you get the benefits in other ways?

Spending even a tiny amount of time thinking about these things has stopped me pursuing projects which I think would be cool, but are ultimately of limited value. There’s a finite quantity of projects I can get done, so avoiding waste is valuable.

One of the ways this has played out is by getting more expert help. If I can pay an expert to save me time, increasingly I will. I’ve been trying to be more intentional about this recently: where are there opportunities to cut a big chunk of time out of a project by paying someone $100+/hour for a consultation? I do get anxious about spending — I recently spent $1,000 on a spreadsheet — but this is all in context. I’m in the “explore” and “exploit” stages for Ellipsis. We’re doing a lot that’s working, but there’s a lot of what we call “unexplored areas” to figure out. Starting and finishing projects to put the pieces together faster has huge, compounding value in the long term. 

Finishing projects

The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we’re about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it’s got.

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

My heuristic previously has been that a project will get finished if I find it interesting, and if I don’t finish it it’s because it’s not interesting. 

That’s not the worst heuristic in the world, but the value of a project goes up significantly if it’s finished. The final 20% is almost always worth it, and it’s not like it even takes 80% of the time: it just accounts for 80% of the resistance feel on a project. 

Acknowledging when I’m stuck or seeing resistance on a project has been a big step for me. Once it’s acknowledged, I can start moving past it.

I use Roam for my knowledge management but have started using it for project management too. My “Projects” board is so full of “someday/maybe” projects that I don’t take the “on deck” list especially seriously. 

Changing that has been extremely helpful: I’m allowed a smaller number of projects on deck at one time, and I can’t move on new projects until the old ones are completed. As I’ve set up the project for success beforehand, I have clear completion criteria, so moving something to complete is much less ambiguous too. 

I’ve gone as far as scheduling regular time in my week for finishing projects. Previously this was time for starting projects, but the projects get started regardless. They don’t get finished regardless! 

Work in progress

Projects can be fun and a source of a lot of progress. Finishing them, fast and slow, is even better. 

The post Starting and finishing projects, fast and slow appeared first on Alex Denning.

Both of my previous posts are now a little dated, so as it has stuck, I thought it’d be interesting to re-review how I’ve doubled down on Deep Work recently.

Remind me what this is?

The idea of “Deep Work” comes from Cal Newport, a Computer Science Professor at Georgetown University, and is something he expands on in his book of the same name. Here’s the idea in Cal’s words:

Deep work is cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve… . Deep work results in improvement of the value of your work output… and an increase in the total quantity of valuable output you produce.

Deep work lets you do the above by demanding you focus, distraction-free, for long periods of time. This state of distraction-free concentration gives you the space you need to create valuable breakthroughs in your work.

Here, then, are some of the ways I’ve doubled down on Deep Work.

Time blocking

IF THERE IS ANY ONE “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

– Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

My time over the last couple of years has shifted from 100% maker, to maybe 25/75 maker/manager, and now back the other way to maybe 66/33. This creates a dichotomy: two of the highest value things I can do are:

1. Unblock my team
2. Do high-value business development work

The trouble is, one requires deep focus and the other requires being available and responsive! What a dilemma!

Time blocking is the way forwards here. Cal discusses this in Deep Work at length, and it often comes up on his Deep Questions podcast. The Market has obviously smelled an opportunity, and you can now even buy a Cal Newport branded Time Block Planner (one does have to be a little amused that Cal says he created his own planner because the ones he was previously using, presumably Moleskine, changed to a lower paper quality, and then his ones have poor reviews from apparently having poor paper quality).

Time blocking is an excellent way of protecting your Deep Work time and effectively splitting maker vs manager time. It’s also, happily, a way of avoiding procrastination as you’re always clear on what your next action should be, and it also makes you commit to realistic timings for your day.

I’m onto my third year of time blocking in a daily planner and it’s an excellent complement to Deep Work. When my planner didn’t arrive in time for my first day of work for 2021, I literally didn’t know what to do with my work day. I’m dependent on it that much.

Embracing asynchronous communication

We don’t have any internal email at Ellipsis, and we don’t use Slack either. We use Basecamp for everything, and it’s excellent. Everything is in one place, and it’s built around asynchronous communication: you let whomever you need a response from know that you need their input, and they’ll get back to you in context with the rest of the task, at a time that makes sense for them.

The result is (for the most part) more thoughtful and less stressful communication. Basecamp does have all-team chat functionality, but it’s not that good. Happily, that stops it from being used too much. It does have a good one-to-one chat function which is good, but that gives a channel for discussing anything private or urgent. Basecamp is, as far as I’m aware, the best project management tool for remote team Deep Work (other options could be Asana, Notion, or something like P2).

We have some fairly extensive rules around how we use Basecamp which, sadly, make it very difficult for our clients to use, so we use Trello for that.

I know if I had Slack I’d check it all the time. Avoiding it has been one of the best things I’ve done for Deep Work.

Exercise / the morning routine

I’ve finally cracked it. No further blog posts are needed. I have the perfect morning routine. Sadly, it’s perfect for me at this moment, but it might give you some ideas.

My perfect morning routine involves exercising, having breakfast whilst reading, and then going to work with a cup of coffee. Sounds pretty idyllic! I do a 5k run on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and then a long run on Saturdays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I do one of a couple of home workouts as cross-triaining.

That’s worked really well for me over the year-and-a-half. The interesting bit for me is that when the lock down started in the UK in March last year (I’ve been working from home since, so I’m yet to go back to my co-working space), I didn’t change this routine. The exercise in the morning is probably the main thing that helps make sure the vast majority of days are Good Days.

Setting expectations

One of the privileges of running my own business is that I get to set the standards and expectations.

With clients, our new client onboarding includes a note on how we are a “Deep Work” business, and the benefits and tradeoffs to them (higher quality work, but they can’t get hold of us instantly).

With my team, they know I’ll either reply to them immediately or in a couple of hours, depending on whether I’m in “maker” or “manager” mode.

Deep Life

Creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time.

The Deep Work philosophy goes further than just blocking out some of your time. Cal increasingly talks about The Deep Life, a philosophy where doing good, important work is a part, but it’s only one part of many. Doing Deep Work is tiring, so balance is a necessity.

Cal argues that one needs high quality time with friends and family, good exercise, and high quality leisure activities. I’m often tired after work, but I know that forcing myself to go for a walk will lead to me having a much better evening than if I sit on the sofa and watch Netflix until it’s time for bed.

I’m normally very good at separating out work time with non-work time. Over the last 18 months, I’ve slowly been expanding my work hours, though. I used to finish at 5pm pretty regularly, but in the last six months it’s been getting later and later.

This is a fairly regular cycle: I’ll work more, realise it’s resulting in my getting less done overall as I do not do my best work when fatigued, cut back, and then slowly let the hours creep up again. That’s ok: ideally I’d take the message and leave it at that, but I enjoy my work, always want to do more/new things, and thus find myself pushing my end-of-work time back. That’s a reasonable trail of thought! I know this happens, though, so I can keep an eye on it and catch it early.

Phoning distractions

I started drafting this post a couple of weeks ago, and in the interim I’ve struggled with my focus. Realising this, I’ve been trying to work out what’s different. Just two things: I installed YouTube on my phone to watch something, and never uninstalled it. I was spending a lot more time watching YouTube. Easy fix. I also installed the browser back on my phone (this is genuinely inconvenient at times and friends probably fairly mock me for this, but it’s not hard to re-install it). I was spending a lot more time reading social sites using that browser. Another easy fix.,

I normally have my phone set up without these apps, making it a fairly dull affair: if I want to check my phone I can, but there’s nothing of interest on it so I check it less. I may be making connections too wildly here, but I found my general background level of anxiety and impulsiveness to check my phone has gone up. Removing these items off my phone is my usual practice, and an easy one to reinstate.

The routine is constant evolution

This is all extremely personal, and I hope by sharing it I can give you some ideas. The main benefit, though, is making me sit down and think about all these things. This is a constantly evolving process, and that’s something to embrace. For me, that means I’m always looking out for signs that need to be tweaked. My wife would argue I do this too much, but I like it. If I’ve got more/less done, felt better/worse, and done something differently, that’s all information to use.

As all of this is so personal, I find it helpful to try out changes. I want to do more reading and writing this year, so one of the experiments I planned for the start of the year was blocking off the first 90 minutes of my day for Deep Work. I’ve assigned a different activity to each day, reducing friction by allocating the time. It’s also blocked out on my calendar. That all makes sense, but I’ve still found myself struggling to do more than one or two days a week. Now I know that, I can work out why and try and solve the problem. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try again – or scrap the experiment. Either are perfectly fine outcomes.

Deep Work is immensely rewarding

I put all this effort into my Deep Work as whilst it’s a demanding, exhausting, and uncompromising way of working, when executed well it’s also extremely rewarding.

A key test for me is how long I think I can do something. Professionally, there’s two parts to that: how long can I do my job, and how long can I work the way I currently do? For me to be satisfied, the answer to both needs to be “a long time”. That’s why I’ve doubled down on Deep Work: it’s the way of working that lets me do my best work, at a sustainable pace.

The post How I’ve doubled down on Deep Work appeared first on Alex Denning.

2020 is over, hooray! I can’t start this without talking about COVID-19. At the time of writing, in the UK hospitalisation rates are higher than ever, 1.9 million people have died worldwide, and whilst vaccinations are starting it seems plausible restrictions are still in place in 12 months’ time. I’ve been mostly at home, my wife works in medicine and has been doing dangerous work where a lot of people have died. It’s been terrible.

2020 was a good year to be working remotely already, though. It was also a good year to be working in an industry which helps people work online. For me personally, 2020 had things which were Very Bad, but day-to-day I had a good routine, got on with my work, and I made the most of it. Let’s thus look at a couple of areas.

Ellipsis

My day job is running Ellipsis. 2020 was our best year ever. We grew revenue by over 100%, hired 3 full-time people, and delivered more and better-than-ever work to a record number of clients. We also added much more sophistication into the business, doing a huge amount of work on processes and systems around client work, but also project management, sales, our marketing, and professional development.

I see Ellipsis as the market-leader for marketing in WordPress. With that comes a responsibility to help drive forward the professionalisation of our area and share what we’re learning. We really lived up to that in 2020, making genuinely new progress on marketing in WordPress and sharing that with both our clients and the community as a whole. I couldn’t be prouder of the team, and am extremely excited about what we’re going to do this year.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. Whilst I am extremely bullish about the future growth of the WordPress industry and I suspect overall growth in WordPress last year was extremely strong, we’re obviously not immune to a global recession. We had a couple of challenges:

• In March/April we saw new projects postponed as clients understandably dealt with economic uncertainty by postponing projects
• We use a “hub and spoke” model, where the core team and expertise is in-house but we use a pretty big network of freelancers for specific expertise on specific projects. This is a really efficient model which lets us give clients great value, but it means we had a juggling act dealing with significantly higher unavailability than normal.
• No travel! This meant no team meetups and no conferences. Our team meetups are a huge part of how we work and solve problems. We fortunately had one in February just before restrictions kicked in, but they’re now on hold indefinitely and with hiring, half the team now hasn’t met in person. There were also no WordCamps . I normally go to 4-6 WordCamps a year, and they’re extremely valuable for meeting new people, talking to our clients, and keeping a finger on the industry “pulse”. Not having them left a big hole in our sales funnel.

We dealt with all of these. We decided early on that we should continue with our plans for the year, and that meant hiring two people in mid-2020. I’m financially fairly risk-averse, and that meant I’d built up a cash reserve for the business. We decided that now was the time to use some of that in order to continue with our hiring plans and be in a stronger position when demand recovered — which it did pretty quickly. We also added a lot more freelancers to our network to add resilience.

Around the same time we also started working on systematising our sales and marketing. Until then this was something I took care of, and I was doing a good enough job that it didn’t need much attention. We needed more predictability and insight, though, so we put in place KPIs for these and started working towards them. Our Head of Content Natasha and I now meet with James, an excellent consultant, every fortnight and I attribute a lot of the progress we made last year to these meetings and the work around them.

I really enjoyed writing our Press Marketing newsletter last year. We launched the first issue in January, and by the end of the year we had 350 subscribers with a 50% open rate. For a lengthy, niche monthly newsletter, I was very pleased with that. We also started regularly publishing insight-heavy content on our blog, and produced our first whitepaper too.

Hiring was big in 2020. We hired 3 people, 1 of whom left fairly quickly. That was a big learning experience and also an inflection point for us. We now have a Manager for each of our main service areas and are set up to grow this significantly this year. At the time of writing, our first Content Specialist starts tomorrow!

George and Monica are the two new team members who joined in 2020, with the roles of Conversions Manager and Content Manager respectively. George brings a huge amount of CRO expertise to the team, and Monica brings a phenomenal amount of agency experience to the team. Both have been a pleasure to work with, and they’re now managed by Natasha, our Head of Content and Conversions and supported by Peta, our Head of Outreach and Analytics.

We didn’t get it right the first time. We didn’t grow the team at all in 2019, so whilst we felt ready to do so in January 2020, we lacked experience. In hindsight we didn’t have the right setup to make it work, and with hindsight it was quickly obvious to me I had made a huge error in getting in the way too much. Having our first person leave was fairly stressful, but it taught us a lot and we definitely got it right the second time. We tweaked the role, I got out the way, and we’ve really kicked on since.

Automation, systems, and processes also got a lot of attention last year. Our Content Process in particular received a lot of attention: this is how we deliver our Content Growth plans, and one of our strengths is we can continually iterate across all our clients and then quickly roll out improvements to everyone. The Content Process is always getting better but improved significantly last year. It’s also now powered by a lot of automation. This was another big win. 

We do our Content Growth on a monthly basis, so there’s a lot of work that gets done each month. We’ve always used Zapier to power some automation, but towards the end of the year it really clicked for me the extent of what was possible. We went from using Zapier for bits and pieces to pushing basically everything through Zapier. We now use about 5,000 actions/month in Zapier, and it probably does the work of half a full-time person. A couple of examples for you:

• All monthly tasks are now created through Zapier, with related tasks taken care of automatically. This includes creating docs, sub-tasks, reporting – the whole lot. One of these Zaps runs to 30 individual steps!
• We used to manually enter rankings and sales on a per-post basis into spreadsheets. These are now done by a monster-size zap which chews through about 4k individual actions in Zapier in about 30 mins.
• Our onboarding and kickoffs are now automated through Drip and Zapier.
• Sales work is much more reliable, with the help of Zapier.

This is a recent, and interesting trend: we’re becoming partially a technology company, not just a services company. This means we can add scale and reliability through technology, letting the automation take care of the low-value work and the team take care of the high-value specialist work. There’s more to be done on this in 2021 and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Somewhat unusually for an entrepreneur, I’m not primarily motivated by money. Don’t get me wrong – I like earning a good salary, and I will always charge what we’re worth – but I’m more interested in what revenue lets us do, rather than the revenue as an intrinsic end in itself. This means revenue goes to the bottom of the Ellipsis section, and whilst we’re going to grow revenue significantly this year, we don’t have a revenue goal. Instead, we have a profit margin goal as our “north star”, as that’s what makes everything possible.

That said, revenue was very strong in 2020. We doubled our revenue from 2019 and invested significantly in the future of the business. Our Marketing Audit and Strategy work is the first bit of work we do with new clients and we did one of these most weeks in 2020. From there we can do implementation work, and we saw significant growth with our Content Growth plans, and Copy and Email work. We added significantly more value to all of these.

We also introduced new service lines! We’ve introduced Technical SEO, solidified our packages for Lead Generation and Customer Retention email sequences, and in December launched our CMO-as-a-Service plan. We’ve filled our initial roster for that, and I’m extremely bullish about the growth we can help these clients unlock.

We aimed to gain B Corp registration last year, but it didn’t happen. It was probably too early for us, and we were defeated by the volume of work. We’re working with Chris to get the registration this year.

Personal development

My work is intrinsically linked with Ellipsis, but personal development gets a separate section. My “job” is currently unrecognisable to 12 months ago, which is exactly how I like it. I’m internally driven by solving interesting problems and learning new things, and my job offers me the perfect place to do both.

A couple of areas I made a concerted effort to improve on, and I feel went especially well:

• Management: one of my professional aims last year was to become a great manager. You’d have to ask my team, but I feel I improved significantly in this area last year. I also started “leading” the company, rather than just “managing” it. High Output Management was a breakthrough book for me on this in 2019, and Making of a Manager was similarly helpful last year.
• Product development: I identified this as a weakness in my skill set and set out to fix it. I read a couple of good books and put this into practice as much as I could.
• Enterprise marketing: we worked with bigger clients and on bigger projects than ever last year, and it was very pleasing to me how our approach and systems worked well at these scales. I did also learn and adapt, though, and this was rewarding.
• Finance and biz strategy: I find business strategy extremely interesting and will take pretty much any opportunity to learn more about it. Last year felt like the year where things started to come together on this.

Fitness

Around December 2019 I finally found a really good fitness routine, and I’ve been doing it ever since: 3x short runs and 2x home workouts on weekdays, and then a long run on Saturday mornings. I did lose my 15 minute cycle commute when my co-working space closed in March, but this fitness regime has really worked for me. And, incredibly for a regular runner, I didn’t have any injuries last year! Finally finding a good HIIT workout I can do at home seems to have done the trick for cross-training.

I was entered for the Surrey Half Marathon in early March and it did go ahead, but after an injury in December 2019 I was only fit enough for the 5k. Other than that, no races. I did make an effort around October to increase my pace a bit, and I also read Faster Road Running which has given me some ideas to make my training more effective. So far so good, and this year should be a good one for running.

Reading

I read a lot of books, but when the first lockdown hit I vowed to read more! I ended up reading 40 books last year, which was a record reading year. My reading was more varied last year, too, which I enjoyed.

I keep track of what I read on GoodReads, and rate everything too. Last year was interesting: fewer quake 5/5 books, but a lot of really solid 4/5 books. A couple of highlights:

• Making of a Manager
• Great Thinkers
• The Master and Margarita
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
• Half a Yellow Sun
• Americanah

There’s three fiction books on that list, which would never have happened in previous years! I’ve been reading more and more fiction, and those three in particular were very enjoyable. I also made a more concerted effort to read more anti-racism books to educate myself, and my list for this year continues that theme. 

For the last 5 years I’ve kept notes from every non-fiction book I’ve read, and last year I switched my system over to Roam. Roam is for “networked thought” and lets you link together notes on the same topic. It’s been game-changing for how much I use my book notes. I can now pick a topic – say, 1-on-1s – and instantly get every note I’ve ever made on the topic. You can do more advanced filtering and referencing too. I’ve used this for writing a couple of articles and it’s been great. I’m looking forward to more of that this year. If only they’d get the mobile/tablet experience sorted out.

Things that didn’t go so well

I’m going to skip over the sad bits: we barely got to see family and friends in person, although we were able to hang out with them online. It’s obviously not the same. We also had trips to Japan and Malawi booked which got cancelled. My wife and I love travelling and do it as much as we can. I was really looking forward to those trips. I’m a keen photographer too, but travel is the main time I do it. I did totally clear my photo editing backlog last year, but I took very few photos.

I would have liked to have written more. I did well on the reading, but less so on the writing. Similarly, whilst I did still take holiday with a “staycation”, I did a terrible job of switching off over this time. I’m pretty good on work/life balance in general as I know what’s sustainable for me, but I’m obsessive with my work and am always thinking about things. I really struggled to take good breaks last year.

I also did very little political work last year. I had intentions of being properly involved with my local Labour party, but I did no campaigning and only went to one meeting. I put all of my energy during the week into my work and I’ve consistently struggled to make time for anything else, even in the evenings. This is an area to improve this year.

Looking ahead

Ellipsis is my main professional focus, and we have ambitious company goals to meet this year. We’re going to do more than ever, and do it better than ever. That involves growing the team, pursuing new opportunities, and my role further evolving to work “on” rather than “in” the business.

I also have some personal development goals. I’m working at a good pace but feel ready to do more and learn more. With less travel and more time to focus, this is a perfect year to do it. “Increasing pace” is my professional theme for the year. I’m experimenting with blocking a 90 minute Deep Work session at the start of my day to facilitate that. 

I keep a journal and look back at notes at the end of the year. It was interesting for me to note just how many ideas were jotted down that ended up being actioned and working well. It was also interesting to note, though, that there was often a massive time lag between identifying something and doing it. I’d like to reduce that lag time this year. I’ve got a good system for tracking projects in Roam and so far progress feels good.

As soon as it’s safe, I’m very much looking forward to seeing family and friends in person properly again. That may or may not be this year. I’ve also missed going on planes. With flightshaming that’s an unfashionable thing to say, but I do get a disproportionate amount of joy from choosing the route, tracking the prices, and trying to pick the optimum seat. It’s a silly game, but I find it bizarrely satisfying.

I feel selfish saying it, but whilst 2020 in general sucked, for me I feel I made the most of it and on the whole it was professionally a very good year. I’m bullish that 2021 can be very good too.

The post 2020 year in review appeared first on Alex Denning.

I recently read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I was looking forward to this: Cal’s previous book Deep Work has had a huge influence on my professional life (as I’ve written about before) and I’m a keen subscriber to his blog posts.

The book was set up to be a home run, but it was simultaneously really good and a little disappointing. The core idea started very strongly and was packed with insight, but by the end it strayed too far from this core insight and was relyig on weaker secondary sources, ideas, and arguments.

I hope this is both a useful recap of the points which resonated most with me, and a useful intellectual critique of where the book went a little awry.

Digital Minimalism: sound core message, but feels bolted together

Cal Newport has been writing about productivity in knowledge work and critiquing social media platforms for the last decade, so is the perfect person to write this book.

Digital Minimalism argues we need to think much more intentionally about the digital tools and platforms we use, that we give up way too much time and attention in exchange for a small amount of value, and the conclusion from these should be to use digital tools and platforms significantly less. “Digital Minimalism” is a “named philosophy” for the above, in the same way “vegetarian” is a “named philosopy” of eating.

The core argument has more nuance than that, but that’s the core of it. I’d been hesitant to read the book as I got the impression it was mostly based on an expanded version of is argument, which Cal has been blogging about for a while, and the results of a reader survey he did early last year.

I eventually took the plunge, though, and did enjoy it. The core message isn’t too complicated, but I certainly do use my phone too much and sometimes with these things one just need to be told the same thing in lots of different ways. It does also attempt to develop a philsophical framework for the “digital diet” later in the book, which I’ll touch on again later.

I’ve covered the core idea, but there were a bunch of other sections which stuck out to me. I’ve collated a couple of these below:

• You must replace “general looking at phone” with “high quality leisure time” for your digital minimalism to be successful.
  • This means reading, sports, art, and so on. Cal argues one should plan these leisure activities, and whilst this takes a bit more effort, it’s well worth it given the alternative.
• “How much of your time and attention must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter?”
  • Cal makes the point Twitter is not useless, and that’s what makes making a decision about your usage of it so difficult: there are legitimate benefits, but Cal argues they’re occassional and do not correspond to the amount of time one spends collecting these benefits.
• “If you must use [social media]… and you hope to do so without ceding autonomy over your time and attention, it’s crucial to understand that this is not a casual decision. You’re instead waging a David and Goliath battle against institutions that are both impossibly rich and intent on using this wealth to stop you from winning.”
  • This is a theme throughout the book. I understand a common objection (and indeed what I try and persuade myself I’m doing) is “oh but I can use it in moderation”. Cal argues no: you will ultimately lose if you do this. I assume in this analogy we’re ignoring that David did win.
• “You don’t make a conscious decision about each of the sites and feeds you end up visiting; instead, once the sequence is activated, it unfolds on autopilot. The slightest hint of boredom becomes a trip wire to activate this whole hulking Rube Goldberg apparatus.”
  • Yes, absolutely. I have one of these: news, Twitter, and in a bad moment Slack, Facebook, and Messenger too. I’ve been at least noticing this and making vague attempts to stop it recently.

There are plenty more interesting points, and that’s the really good part. The little disappointing part is where the book does only an okay job of moving beyond its core message.

The chapter on solitude, for example, was very interesting but leans very heavily on Lead Yourself First for its arguments. It does a good job of summarising those arguments (for good measure I read Lead Yourself First after finishing Digital Minimalism and it added a bit more insight (but not a vast amount more), but there’s relatively little original insight from Cal here.

Indeed, Cal’s main problem is he’s writing a book about how to stop looking at your phone so much, when he’s never had that problem. As someone who’s never had a social media account, he can’t attest to the nuances involved; everything relies on the reader survey. At time’s it’s a little too “Reader A quit Facebook and within six weeks had painted seventeen masterpieces and hosts lavish dinner parties where their closest friends have deep conversations on the philosophy and the meaning of life every Tuesday.”

There is, surely, a step between Facebook and the dinner parties, and the reader survey does yield a lot of stories, but also self-selects to productivity nerds like me who really want to focus on this stuff and read Cal’s blog every week. Without having had to go through quitting Facebook himself, I feel Cal misses out on this a little.

It’s a weird mix of practical “self-help” with philosophy around work, creativity, and the good life bolted on. I don’t think that’s a criticism – I did enjoy the philosophical sections – but it does feel bolted on. One assumes Cal was working with fellow author Ryan Holiday’s book marketing agency – premsumably how you do end up doing interviews with provactive headlines like Cal Newport on Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes – and one wonders if this also encouraged a more mainstream approach which resulted in bolting on this “how to” section. I’m searching around for explanations, but it certainly felt a bit weird to read.

Equally, one could counter the above by arguing Cal’s previous books were written for people especially interested in productivity like me, and Digital Minimalism was simply aimed at a wider audience. Maybe, but even if one takes this more generous interpretation, it does still feel bolted on.

I was a little disappointed, and went to the trouble of writing this, because I’ve enjoyed Cal’s previous writing so much. I gather there’s a new book in the works – I look forward to reading it.

The post Digital Minimalism has valuable lessons on technology and the good life, but was also a bit disappointing appeared first on Alex Denning.

My to-read list is long, and books can wait years to get read. I select a mix of interests, and try to make sure my reading is well rounded. It’s thus fairly unusual that I read Lessons in Stoicism quickly after finding it. I find the subject matter (modern takes on Stoicism) interesting but it’s also pretty short and I find the cover design extremely pleasing. Even the fanciest systems are undermined by the simplest things.

My reaction when I finished reading the book was that it was okay, but nowhere near as good as A Guide To The Good Life (aff link), which was one of the first of the modern Stoicism trends and remains one of the best. A Guide To The Good Life explores how to live according to Stoic rules at a deeply practical level. It’s a popular book: it’s supported by the original Stoic text but it’s very much a fresh interpretation.

Lessons in Stoicism is similar, but it’s much more rooted in the original texts. Indeed, looking back at my notes, I didn’t note much but what I’ve got down here is very good.

The most interesting section for me is covering Seneca’s essay On The Shortness of Life. The author extensively interprets the essay for the 21st century and it’s very good. My notes are below.

The other particularly interesting thing here is the analysis that’s missing. Stoicism is a philosophy popular with wealthy white men. There are exceptions, but on the whole this is true. Two of the most well known Stoic authors: Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were exceptionally wealthy. Marcus Aurelius was the Roman Emperor and literally the most powerful man in the world at the time.

Today, Stoicism is a hit with wealthy technology self-improvement types, typified by the advocism of Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday. I watched Ryan Holiday’s talk from Stoicon, a Stoicism conference, the other day, and somebody asks: “why are there so many white dudes here?” Ryan says he doesn’t know, but the lessons from Stoicism are useful to everyone. That may be true — somebody other than me would need to answer — but reading my notes it became apparent: Stoicism is the ultimate individualist philosophy. It’s perfect for 21st century capitalism. Everything is on you: master your feelings and ignore your situation, and you’ll be happy! Don’t worry about material possessions! That’s a whole lot easier to say when you don’t suffer from systematic oppression, as people like me don’t. It’s also easier to say when you at least have the option of buying things you don’t need. I’d love to read more on this from sources better qualified to speak to it.

There are valuable lessons to be learned from Stoicism, though, and Lessons in Stoicism isn’t quite the popular and fun text that A Guide To The Good Life is, but it is a very good complement to it.

Below are my notes, and here’s an affiliate link to Amazon.

Lessons in Stoicism by John Sellars: book notes

We might judge so quickly that something is good, and do it so often, that we start to assume that the thing in question just is good in itself. But nothing external is inherently good; it’s all just matter in motion. Only a virtuous character is genuinely good. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was an avid reader of Epictetus, often tried to remind himself of this by pausing to think about the physical nature of seemingly desirable things before passing judgement on them: a fine meal is merely the dead body of a pig or a fish.

The good news, according to Epictetus, is that we have complete control over our judgements, and with some reflection and training we can soon overcome the tendency to judge things unthinkingly. If we can do that – if we can become masters of our own judgements – then we’ll be in complete control of our lives. We’ll decide what’s important to us, what we desire and how we act. Our happiness will be completely within our own control. On the face of it Epictetus seems to be saying that we don’t have control over very much at all, but in fact he is saying that we have control over everything that truly matters for our wellbeing.

His point is that even if you think they are good, the fact is that you have no control over them. If you make your happiness dependent on one of these things, it will be extremely vulnerable to forces out of your control. Whether it be a romantic relationship, a specific career ambition, material possessions or a certain physical appearance, if your sense of wellbeing depends on one of these sorts of things, then you have effectively handed over your happiness to the whims of something or someone else. That’s not a good position to be in . If you think you do have control over these things, when the plain fact is that you don’t, then frustration and disappointment are almost guaranteed.

Epictetus proposes thinking of your life as if you were an actor in a play. You haven’t chosen your role, you don’t get to decide what happens, and you have no control over how long it will last. Rather than fight against all these things which are out of your control, your task is to play the role you find yourself in as best as you can.

If we let our attention slip we can quickly lose whatever progress we may have made. So, we need to integrate periods of reflection into our daily lives. Marcus Aurelius describes practices of morning reflection during which he prepares himself for the coming day, contemplating the sorts of challenges he is likely to face so that he will be better placed to handle them. Similarly, Seneca outlines a process of evening reflection during which he goes over his day, thinking about what he did well, where his attention may have slipped, and how he might do better tomorrow. Epictetus goes even further: like the mariner sailing the ship, it is essential that we remain focused every single moment of the day, prepared for whatever might happen next. We must keep our key philosophical principles always ready to hand, so that we don’t fall back into making mistaken judgements. This is philosophy as a daily practice and a way of life.

he insists that nothing bad ever really happens, given that all external events are neither good nor bad in themselves. Someone who keeps this idea in their mind and doesn’t rush to hasty judgement will simply accept what happens for what it is, without judging that something terrible has occurred.

Adversity in life works in a similar way: it lets us display our virtues and it trains them so that we can improve. If we can see this, then we’ll happily welcome adversity when it comes.

excessive good fortune is in fact really bad for us. When are we ever tested if we never experience any difficulties? How will we ever develop the virtues of patience, courage or resilience if everything always goes well? There is no worse luck, Seneca says, than unending luxury and wealth, which will serve only to make us lazy, complacent, ungrateful and greedy for more. This is real misfortune! By contrast, whatever adversity life throws at us will always be an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and to improve our characters .

In his essay On the Shortness of Life, Seneca says that, for many of us, by the time we are really ready to start living, our lives are almost over. It’s not that our lives are too short; the problem is that we waste so much time. We procrastinate, pursue things of little or no value, or wander aimlessly through life with no clear focus. Some people strive to achieve success so that they can be wealthy enough to buy luxury goods that will end up discarded in a rubbish bin long before their lives are done. In so doing they waste the greater part of their lives. Others strive for nothing, just going through the motions of daily routines without any sense that the most valuable commodity they have – time – is slipping away. Some people have a clear idea of what they want to do but, paralysed by fear of failure, put off and delay things and conjure up excuses for why now is not the time to act. All these different types, Seneca says, fail to live. It is only in rare moments that most people really feel alive. The bulk of life is reduced to merely passing time. So what’s the remedy? How does Seneca think we can take control of our lives and live them to the full? First of all we should stop worrying about what others think. Don’t try to impress others; don’t pursue their favour in order to secure some advantage. Too many people care about what others think of them, but pay little attention to their own thoughts. They sacrifice their time to others but rarely set aside time for themselves. Yet it’s absurd, Seneca suggests, that someone might be so protective of their money and possessions and yet so freely give away their far more valuable time. We also need to hold in our minds the brute fact that we shall die. Our time is not unlimited. A good part of whatever time we shall have is gone already. Not only that, we have no idea how much is left to come. Today could, in fact, be your last day. Perhaps tomorrow will be your last. You might have weeks, months, a couple of years – the truth is that none of us know. It is all too easy to assume that we’ll all make it to eighty or ninety years old, but perhaps not all of us will. The assumption may be false and, whether it is or not, it encourages us to put off things into a future that may never come. Seneca mocks the person who postpones all their plans and dreams until retirement. Do you really know you’ll make it to then? If you do, are you sure you’ll be in good enough health to do whatever it is that you’ve been postponing for so long? But even if all goes well, why postpone life until the bulk of it is already over?

There’s also the question of what’s worth pursuing. For a good many people, the goal is success in some form or other, whether that be wealth and fame, respect and honours, or promotion and high office. Yet Seneca notes that, more often than not, people who attain such things are far from satisfied, for with success comes a whole host of demands and pressures. Having gained everything they ever wanted, there’s one thing they now lack: time, time for themselves, for peace and quiet, leisure and retirement.

But it is not just the demands that come with success. It is all too easy to live in a perpetual state of distraction, never fully attending to what it is that we should be doing, what we really want to be doing, or even the sheer experience of being alive. Constant noise, interruption, news, media, social media – all these things can demand our attention to the point that it becomes difficult to focus enough to complete anything. As Seneca puts it, ‘living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man’. They are effectively taken up with doing nothing. Once this habit develops they fall into a continual state of restlessness, unable to relax or to concentrate on anything. Such people become fully conscious of the value of life only when it is almost over.

If we don’t address these issues, Seneca argues, it doesn’t matter how much longer our lives continue. Even if we lived for a thousand years, we’d fritter most of the time away. The task, then, is not to strive to make our lives last as long as possible; instead, we ought simply to make sure that we enjoy and make full use of each day as it comes, not forgetting that it could perhaps be our last.

Learning to live well is, paradoxically, a task that can take a lifetime. The wisest people of the past, Seneca adds, gave up the pursuit of pleasure, money and success in order to focus their attention on this one task. Although they might not have agreed on an answer, Seneca insists that preserving one’s time and devoting it to oneself is essential: Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.

With this renewed sense of the value of time and a determined effort to prioritize our own leisure, what does Seneca think we ought to do? He quickly dismisses the playing of games and sports, as well as the popular holiday activity of what he calls ‘cooking one’s body in the sun’. Indeed, he attacks many of the things that are often referred to today as ‘leisure activities’. Instead, he recommends philosophy as the finest and most worthy activity, by which he means thinking, learning, reading history and literature, reflecting on the past and the present. This is the opposite of rushing around in the pursuit of worldly success, which, he says, is ‘won at the cost of life’.

Seneca’s essay is a polemic against what he saw as the shallowness of the culture of the relatively wealthy in first-century Rome. It is striking – in some ways frighteningly so – how relevant all this remains today. We like to think that humanity has moved on, and hopefully improved, over the last two thousand years, but Seneca shows us that many of the issues that people grapple with today are no different from those that preoccupied the inhabitants of imperial Rome.

Epictetus likens life to the Olympic games: the contest is upon us, you cannot defer any longer, and everything depends on what you do right now, on this single day.

The post Lessons in Stoicism: book notes, and commentary appeared first on Alex Denning.

We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond good enough. We do very little that challenges our brains… for the most part, that’s okay. “Good enough” is generally good enough. [But with deliberate practice] If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

– Anders Ericsson, Peak

Recently I discussed how we can think about applying deliberate practice to knowledge work, looking at Professor Anders Ericsson’s book Peak and thesis of deliberate practice, a theory of skill development which focuses on performance and how to improve it, rather than just knowledge for its own sake.

The first post discusses some of the challenges in applying deliberate practice to “knowledge work”. Ericsson’s focus is on areas with objectively defined expert performers and well-established training methods; think chess or tennis, not “knowledge work” like development or marketing.

As the post explores, there are ways of taking the key tenets of deliberate practice and applying these. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Identify the expert performers in the field
2. Figure out what makes them so good
3. Come up with training techniques to replicate the experts

This is what the first post discussed. Doing this would be a good start, but you’d miss out on the related skills you need to use deliberate practice in practice with your day-to-day.

How do you develop your “training techniques”? How do you make sure you stick with it and don’t quit? How do you self-monitor your progress?

Answering these questions is essential to actually doing deliberate practice. That’s what this post is about: how to actually do deliberate practice, in practice.

First: be clear what you’re practicing

This seems like an obvious place to start, but the nuances are why we need the extra context around deliberate practice. You need to be clear what you’re practicing, and set a clear, measurable goal for improvement.

You’d rule out “improve my writing”, for example, as this is not measurable. Indeed, “writing” is not a good skill to target; you need to be more specific. “Increase the quantity of sales situations I close using copy” would be better, as long as you have a current rate and a target rate to work with.

A more abstract example: if you wish to improve, say, the quality of arguments you make within your writing, you might struggle to find an objective measure for this, but you could create a “best practices” scorecard based on the work of experts in your field, and give yourself an objective score against that.

You then need two items:

1. Your current skill level
2. Your target skill level

Once you’re clear what you’re practicing, commit to practicing until you reach the goal, not just for a set period of time. Being clear that you can and are going to achieve what you’re trying to achieve will help you stick with your practice, which is the next point.

Be clear you’re not going to quit, and use strategies to do so

A key theme of Peak is people quit skill practice way too soon: they quit when it gets hard or when they reach a plateau, but these are not stages at which you can’t do it. Ericsson is very clear on this, and argues you need to be clear with yourself you’re not going to quit because you’ve plateaued or regressed.

He suggests you make a deal with yourself that you’ll do what you need to do to get back to or beyond where you were before the plateau, and then you can quit. “You probably won’t”, he says, because once you’ve made that little bit of new progress you’ll remind yourself that what you originally aimed for is possible.

Further, make sure you have the time to practice by time blocking the space to do your practice. Ericsson says this should be “a fixed time… that has been cleared of all other obligations and distractions”, and suggests an hour each day where you have the energy to devote full concentration is suitable. You can further weaken the possibility you’re going to quit by celebrating the little bits of progress you make on the way.

And finally, classic productivity advice: get enough sleep, and keep healthy. This is one of my favourite quotes from the book:

The best and the better students averaged around five hours more of sleep per week than the good students, mostly by taking more time for afternoon naps.

Clearly, the secret to peak performance that we’ve all been missing is a good afternoon nap.

Create your own opportunities to practice, inside or outside work

This point is one of the most interesting, obvious, and yet easy-to-miss in Peak: create your own opportunities to do your deliberate practice. Ericsson argues:

Real life — our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies — seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.

This can happen inside or outside of work, but one must manufacture these opportunities. A point made earlier in the book is often we get “good enough”, and then plateau. This seems especially true in most workplaces: there’s often no perceived business need to get better than “good enough”, so once we get to that stage it’s probable there’s general improvement over time, but rare there’s dramatic improvement.

In order to get that dramatic improvement, consider: what opportunities can you create within your day-to-day work – ideally something which helps real work get done – that would let you practice focused repetition on a skill you’re trying to improve?

Often the answer is a new project: at my company Ellipsis, for example, we have a monthly “Book Club” in which we’ll listen to and discuss a particular book, article, or podcast. This is half-way to doing this: it provides opportunity to discuss skills within work time, and the monthly cadence ensures we’re sticking with it consistently.

Another example: I wanted to improve my ideas around professionally important topics, so I’ve added half an hour of writing to my morning routine. I’m writing this article in this time! This is also time blocking, which we mentioned earlier.

A further suggestion is to get yourself and your colleagues into the habit of thinking about practicing as this will help identify opportunities throughout the day “in which normal business activities can be transformed into practice activities”. There are probably much more of these than you realise at first glance.

The major benefit of creating opportunities as part of your normal work day, or adapting regular work activities, is it makes your practice much more convenient. It also creates secondary benefits from doing the practice: you get the skill improvement, but also progress on whatever project you work on. From that point, it’s much easier to do the work. Think seriously about this one: how do you create your own opportunities?

Work deeply

Strands of Deep Work, one of my favourite ways of working, show up everywhere! It’s a key part of deliberate practice: in order to do your practice, you need to be focusing wholly on what you’re practicing. Ericsson goes as far to say “there is little point at all to practicing if you don’t focus”.

So – focus.

He also argues for general “digital minimalism”:

More generally, look for anything that might interfere with your training and find ways to minimize its influence. If you’re likely to be distracted by your smartphone, turn it off. Or better yet, turn it off and leave it in another room. If you’re not a morning person and you find it particularly difficult to exercise in the morning, move your run or your exercise class to later in the day when your body won’t fight you so much.

Set yourself up to succeed with your work habits, and then do the work.

Develop your ability to self-monitor your practice

One of the key parts of deliberate practice in more traditional skill areas – like chess – is the insistence on comparing yourself against centuries-old best practices and best players. As we’ve discussed, in knowledge work this is more difficult as it’s harder to get an objective measure of who is the “best”, and in many fields there’s no guarantee they will still be the best in twelve months!

Thus, one solution to this lack of benchmarks and even the lack of tutelage is to build visualisations of what success looks like, and then “self-monitor” your practice again these. Ericsson suggests a number of solutions:

• Pay attention when you practice! Are you improving? This links closely to the Deep Work point above.
• Build a monitoring point into a weekly review, using “the three Fs”: focus, feedback, and fix it. The relevant quote from the book is below:

Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.

I do a fairly comprehensive weekly review regardless, and that was a good opportunity to consciously think about the three Fs. I’m sure over time the aim will be to identify and work on these in the moment, but for now getting into the habit of thinking like this with a weekly prompt seems like a good start.

Ideally get a trainer or mentor of some sort

And finally, let’s just throw this in: as we’ve covered, it’s hard to get a trainer for knowledge work, but Ericsson is extremely clear that everyone could benefit from a trainer of some sort:

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understands and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.

The solution may be to look more creatively at this: who does excellent work in your field that might be willing to talk to you every couple of months? Something like this would be closer to “mentorship” than “training”, but it might be the best way of doing this.

Deliberate practice is motivational

Ericsson’s conclusion is pretty motivational: deliberate practice is a way for everyone to get better, and there’s no reason why more people can’t utilise it:

There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach. Open that door.

There are obviously going to be cases where there are socioeconomic factors which genuinely do prevent people from following their dream. For those of us privileged enough to have the opportunity, though: whatever it is you’re after Ericsson is clear you can put in the work, put this into practice, and see the benefits.

Let’s recap the main points this post has made:

1. Be clear what you’re practicing
2. Be clear you’re not going to quit, and use strategies to do so
3. Create your own opportunities to practice, inside or outside work
4. Work deeply
5. Develop your ability to self-monitor your practice
6. Ideally get a trainer or mentor of some sort

That’s your framework for putting deliberate practice into practice for knowledge work!

The vast majority of this post has come from Peak by Anders Ericsson, but there’s also inspiration from Cal Newport’s books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

All three have been very positive reads, and come highly recommended.

The post Deliberate practice: a practical guide to practicing knowledge work appeared first on Alex Denning.

I had changed my mind about bringing any physical books at the last minute, so when we arrived at our Riad (hotel) one of the first things I did was download the Kindle app for my phone and find something to read. I settled on Peak by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at Florida State University.

The subtitle is Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, and the book is about Ericsson’s work in researching “deliberate practice”, a theory of skill development which argues the most efficient way of learning is solo practice on specifically honing a part of your skill. Racking up the hours in general (the “10,000 hour rule”) is rubbished; instead it’s racking up the hours focused on specifically improving your skill.

This got me thinking, a lot: deliberate practice is most easily applied to “traditional” skill areas like music or dance or chess. What would a program of deliberate practice for my field of marketing – and indeed my career – look like? This post explores the parameters and options.

The key tenets of deliberate practice

Ericsson’s arguments for deliberate practice are persuasive, and he powerfully shows much of the “talent” or “natural skill” we take for granted is in fact just hard work and deliberate practice. The likes of Mozart had intense musical training from age three!

Indeed, Ericsson makes both egalitarian arguments and has hopeful messages! He’s pretty clear that a lot of the pursuit of excellence through deliberate practice is mindset:

With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis — getting out of your comfort zone — and forcing your brain or your body to adapt. But once you do this, learning is no longer just a way of fulfilling some genetic destiny; it becomes a way of taking control of your destiny and shaping your potential in ways that you choose.

He then describes the key tenets of deliberate practice. You need:

• An area where effective training techniques have been established
• A teacher or coach to provide rapid feedback
• To be constantly pushed just beyond your limits
• Well-defined, specific goals involving imrpoving some aspect of performance
• Full, Deep Work-style, attention on the practice
• Effective mental representations of what you’re trying to achieve

You can see how these requirements lend themselves well to traditional skills like playing the violin, rather than something as rapidly changing as knowledge work or digital marketing. So how do we proceed?

Deliberate practice in knowledge work

The focus on “traditional” skill areas leaves space to better and more deeply understand deliberate practice in the knowledge work space.

It’s clear that deliberate practice in knowledge work should be able to deliver exceptional benefits, in large part because the lack of focus on this reflects a tendency to accept a “good enough” skill level and leave it there. Cal Newport, one of my favourite productivity writers, cites a paper from Ericsson which predates his book, in a blog post on a similar topic:

As Ericsson describes it, most active professionals will get better with experience until they reach an “acceptable level,” but beyond this point continued “experience in [their field] is a poor predictor of attained performance.”

We assume that more experience and time on the job will eventually equate with a higher skill level, but if the day to day is always doing a “good enough” job across projects, where will this improvement come from?

Experience is an incomplete answer

Experience is widely taken as the best proxy for skill improvement, but as discussed above it offers an insufficient answer. Yet, it clearly does have value: practical experience is central to deliberate practice. We thus come closer to bringing the two strands of argument together!

Robert Greene’s Mastery has a significant section on getting experience, and argues optimising your work for learning is one of the most valuable things to seek early-on in your career:

You must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning. Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come—far more than the paltry increase in pay you might receive at some seemingly lucrative position that offers fewer learning opportunities. This means that you move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. You do not choose apprenticeships that seem easy and comfortable.

This focus on “objective feedback on your performance and progress” does fit with deliberate practice: as Ericsson repeatedly says, in order to improve you must get constant feedback.

We thus don’t dispute that experience is important quite so strongly. Instead, a more nuanced picture appears where not all experience is the same and thus experience should only be valued if it is deliberate practice-compatible experience. This final qualifier touches on the other side of deliberate practice, which is one of reasons it hasn’t caught on so well in knowledge work: you need to know objectively what constitutes “the best”.

Creating an objective measure of the best

Getting deliberate practice-compatible experience is part of the puzzle, but so is identifying top performers. Ericsson ideally wants a field where “the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field”. Further, you want objective – bias-free – measures for these.

In knowledge work this is much harder to do! This may well be why the idea hasn’t caught on more in these fields.

There are ways of creating your own objective measures: Peak cites the famous United States Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program (its more famous name is “Top Gun”), where the level of top-of-game expertise was created during the program. Benchmarking existing skill levels through competitive situations is certainly one way of creating these objective measures, but it’s difficult to do the same in, say, marketing. It’d be fun but extremely difficult to get a sufficient quantity of marketers to take part in a competition for long enough to get good results!

Ericsson, to his credit, does offer a fairly lengthy section on working through this (formatting mine):

For anyone in the business or professional world looking for an effective approach to improvement, my basic advice is to look for one that follows the principles of deliberate practice:

1. Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them?
2. Does it offer immediate feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it?
3. Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what sets them apart from everyone else?
4. Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess?

A yes answer to all those questions may not guarantee that an approach will be effective, but it will certainly make that much more likely.

His solution, then, is a training program which aims to fulfil the tenets of deliberate practice. As Ericsson says, this will make it more likely the training program is successful. Yet this is framed as a corporate exercise which would presumably be time-bound and – as the book says – only probably successful. This isn’t actually a plan for succeeding with deliberate practice in the long term.

Ericsson later restates the above advice for fields like knowledge work:

First, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.

We thus see for deliberate practice to work in knowledge work, we need to be much more intentional about mastery over the long term. This is the area we don’t know about or focus on.

“At most companies the fundamentals of fostering great performance are mainly unrecognized or ignored.”

There are clear and obvious spaces for deliberate practice to push us forwards in the arena of knowledge work, yet we haven’t figured out what those are and we don’t spend any time trying. As Cal says at the end of the post linked above:

The deliberate practice research tells me that this approach would likely generate large gains in my expertise… Why am I not doing this?

And indeed, as Cal gets at in his post why are businesses not focusing on creating the space for improving through deliberate practice? Given the lack of focus, it probably wouldn’t take a huge effort to fairly quickly move to the top of your field. Yet, we don’t do this.

The answer as to why is probably a simple one of priorities: it’s easy to recognise this is important in the long term, but prioritising the long term is hard when there’s urgent short term work to do. The lack of clear answers across disciplines – you need to know specifically what constitutues “the best” in the area you’re focused on – also makes this harder to implement.

Cal ends his post saying he’s going to spend some time working through what deliberate practice in practice means for him. The benefits are obvious; I’m certainly going to do the same.

Addendum: a schedule for deliberate practice in marketing

How does one come up with a plan for deliberate practice in a field like marketing? Well, we can use Ericsson’s recommendations above:

1. Identify the expert performers in the field
2. Figure out what makes them so good
3. Come up with training techniques to replicate the experts

Starting with a reading list of expert marketing performers seems reasonable, and then collating and remixing notes to identify what makes them so good – and then finding ways to put that into practice in focused ways throughout the course of my general work (ideally with some sort of feedback mechanism) seems like a good enough place to start.

I’m planning on making a more systematic effort to plan out my deliberate practice; I’ll do a follow-up post to report my findings. I thoroughly enjoyed Peak, and can recommend you start by giving it a read too.

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