The Weekly Minute - September 8, 2023
Did you hear?
NFL returns this weekend. It’s a glorious time to be alive.
In other news, my time is consumed with intense work and joyful play time with my family. :)
What I Read
Arrange Your Meeting Schedule to Boost Your Energy (via Harvard Business Review)
Most meeting advice focuses on how to make meetings more effective or how to cut down on the number of meetings you have altogether. But what about how to schedule your meetings alongside other work tasks to best manage your productivity? New research explores this question and finds that many people commit two key errors in organizing their schedules: stacking too many meetings together on the same day or pairing intense meetings with other intense tasks.
When faced with the challenge of scheduling your workday, particularly arranging meetings alongside individual tasks, consider the following:
Focus on the relative proportion of meeting time to individual work time on a specific day, not just the total hours spent in meetings.
Design your workday to create complements between meetings and individual tasks.
Adopt a more holistic approach to workday scheduling
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time? (via Marginal Revolution)
Through factors like work quality, superiority over contemporaries, enduring influence, quantity, consistency, and overcoming obstacles. Bach's exceptional achievements in these areas are highlighted, making a compelling case for his candidacy in being one of the greatest achievers of all time.
The article briefly considers other historical figures like Shakespeare, Beethoven, Homer, Archimedes, Plato, and Aristotle but concludes that Bach's relentless pursuit of excellence across multiple dimensions sets him apart as a strong contender for the title of the greatest achiever in history.
A Few Thoughts
The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea
Appreciate what’s good about this moment
We Need More than Just Customer Feedback
customer feedback alone is not enough pic.twitter.com/xg9NQNZQhX
— Siqi Chen (@blader) September 3, 2023
One Framework
The 3-3-3 Method (via Sahil Bloom)
This is a strategy for structuring your day from Oliver Burkeman, whose best-selling book, Four Thousand Weeks. Sahil shared this on his website recently and it’s a solid representation for what a good day can entail. The 3-3-3 Method is as follows:
Spend 3 hours on your most important thing.
Complete 3 shorter tasks you've been avoiding.
Work on 3 maintenance activities to keep life in order.
“The idea is that if you execute and check off these three major boxes, you've had a good day. It removes the pressure of "never enough" thinking whereby ambitious people get into bed at the end of the day and feel the stress and anxiety of saying they could have done more.”
