If you struggle with perfectionism, I understand how you feel. For years, I’ve seen perfectionism as my biggest weakness.

But what if there was a way to work better with perfectionism?

What if perfectionism is not a weakness,
but instead a misused strength?

For me being a perfectionist means living in the constant strain of the gap between what I can envision, and what I can create. And my vision grows faster than my skills, so my choices are: finish imperfectly or not at all.

The common advice is to just “push through” and keep releasing imperfect work until you’re finally able to close that gap.

It seems like sound advice. But taking this approach, it will be years of strain until you get to feel the joy of finishing work and being proud of it.

I will not accept that for myself, and neither should you.
There must be a better way…

How Often are You Proud of Your Work?

Here’s something you may have forgotten:

Pride in your work has nothing to do with its external quality.

Imagine a painter who frequently takes a knife to her work, to the horror of those around her. “Stop! It’s great work!” they say, but she trashes it all the same.

Now imagine a first-time potter, who tries and fails repeatedly to make a small bowl. When he finally finishes, he beams with pride over his misshapen “bowl”.

So which is the perfectionist: the painter or the potter?

They both are.

Why the difference then? Why is one disappointed and strained, while the other is proud and content? Is it temperament? Naivete? Does the painter feel the weight of expectations, while the potter has none?

Relativity

I spend a lot of time on the floor with my son Zeno, playing with Duplo blocks. I’ll build spaceships or helicopters at his request. He’ll be making random irregular towers, and declaring them to be a “bird”, “elephant”, or “dinosaur”.

He concentrates intently, and when he’s done he’ll clap his little hands and say “Yaay, [z]eeeno!” as he looks at me with a deep and genuine pride.

It seems  we are born knowing this, but somehow forget:

Quality is always relative.

He doesn’t care that my blocks are “better”. He doesn’t care that his aren’t as good as he will later be able to make them. All he cares about is that he did the best he could with what he had.

And in the process, he challenged himself just enough to experience flow while working. Naturally and without being taught to, he practiced deliberately on the skills that were just beyond his reach.

Perfect Flow: In Practice

So how can we work with pride and contentment throughout our lives, not just in some distant and imagined future? How can we quietly persist in getting better, when we feel the constant strain of the “gap”, and the expectations we have of our own great potential?

Start with something just beyond your current reach.
Work in flow as long as you need to till you feel proud of what you’ve done.
And only then, release your work into the world.

If you want to write great novels, start by writing flash fiction. Give yourself completely to the 250 word story you want to create. Want to blog? Focus on short blog posts, rather than long ambitious treatises. Do you want to develop a product? Make half a product, not a half-assed product. Do you want to paint? Paint small and often.

Don’t stop working until you feel the subtle warm glow of pride. The signal that, while it might not be “perfect”, it’s the best that you can do right now.

And know that it is more than enough.

You read a lot about productivity out there.

• “50 Producivity Hacks that will Change Your Life”
• “The 13 Things Every Successful CEO Does”
• “17 Reasons Why Your Routine Sucks”

Most of these content-farm articles are just rehashing the same crap. On the other hand, there are people who go very deep on a topic, and risk overcomplicating things (ahem… someone like me!).

Remember though, productivity is just about three things:

1. Decide on what you want.
2. Decide on what you need to do to get it.
3. Do it.

Of course, this is very simple, but it’s not easy. For making decisions, we’re constantly fighting the way our brains are wired. It seems that for most decisions we face in our modern lives, our brains are built to focus on the wrong things.

Thankfully, we are “Predictably Irrational”, as Dan Ariely so eloquently put it. And we can dig into the reasons we make poor decisions, and learn how to make better ones.

Decisive

My favorite kind of books are written by “synthesizers”. People who attack a subject from all angles, trawling data and research and personal experiences, and collecting it into a cohesive framework for you to use. “Good to Great” is one example of this. My favorite team of synthesizers is Chip and Dan Heath.

Their book “Decisive” is one of my all-time most recommended. Since the framework breaks down neatly into sections and lists of techniques, I’ve found myself referring often to the book. But, of course, there’s another way to organize structured information: Gingko Trees!

Here is my Gingko tree summary of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.

During my physics PhD, I spend a lot of time working with supercomputers. Before I had direct experience with writing and running code on supercomputers, the image that came to mind for “supercomputer” was something like this:

The reality is far more mundane:

I’ve never actually seen the supercomputer I used to do my PhD work. It was in Toronto, I was in Montreal, at home in my pajamas.

This was in part disappointing (“What, I don’t get a cool security clearance card?”). But in another way, it was kind of awesome. I’d be sitting in my PJ’s at home sending instructions to a multi-storey supercomputer, and telling it what to do.

Besides making my PhD work possible, I received something else from my work there. Something quite unexpected, that I’ve found very useful to me in my daily life.

I found a new model for thinking about my own mind, that allows me to solve problems without thinking about them.

And it’s one you can practice as well…

Continue reading Your Supercomputer Mind →

Think about the last time you let a great idea slip away.
Do you remember the terrible moment just as it faded, when the only thing you’re left with is the feeling that it truly was a great idea?

If you live and thrive by the ideas you bring to life, you’ll quickly learn to capture all your ideas. You’ll always carry a pen and a small notebook, or some index cards in the back pocket (my approach). Or use apps like Google Keep or Siri, or any of the thousands of note-taking apps available to you.

You shouldn’t have to worry about ever losing an idea again.
But you now have a new, and more insidious problem:

If you can capture every idea, you still risk losing them among all your other ideas.

This problem is far worse, because it can go undetected until it feels hopeless. And when you realize it, idea capture will start to feel less like creative expression, and more like dropping a slip of paper into a giant rolling raffle barrel.

Efficient Systems Make Things Worse

Having a great system in place, like Getting Things Done, does not solve this problem.
In fact, it could make things worse.

Here’s how:

• You have an efficient system to capture and process everything.
• Your capacity increases, leading to a greater volume of ideas generated.
• Since you can’t act on the influx, most of your ideas go into an ever growing “Someday/Maybe” list.
• Soon, you reach a tipping point, where adding ideas in the system feels pointless.
• You get discouraged, and stop using the system.

In a sense, a great system like GTD (which I swear by), can be part of the problem. By being able to handle more ideas and small tasks, GTD increases your capacity.

Without also changing your mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance, you’ll just end up hoarding more ideas.

You might think that having too many ideas is a great problem to have. But it’s really only useful in the brainstorming stage of any project with a well-defined outcome. Ideas on their own, orphaned from any goal, are simply mental flotsam that clog up your flow.

The Hoarder’s Mindset

We can understand the drawbacks of hoarding ideas via my favorite rhetorical device: the analogy. (this one inspired by my wife’s decluttering of 90% of her possessions.)

If your problem is an overflowing closet, you don’t solve it by getting more storage bins, clever stacking, or “closet hacks”. In other words, you don’t solve the problem by increasing your capacity.

You’re addressing the symptom (“I have too many clothes”) and not the root cause (“Why do I feel inclined to keep things I’m not excited about, and don’t wear?”). Hoarders keep everything because it might be useful “someday”, or because it represents a memory.

But the underlying fear is simple: “What if I can’t replace it when I need to?”

Our bodies and our brains have evolved over millions of years for a “feast or famine” lifestyle. It’s a deep-seated response, so being in a “famine” mindset is a pervasive feeling. The result?

Hoarding ideas makes you feel idea-poor.

The underlying message you’re sending yourself is “This might not be a great idea, but keep it. Just in case you can’t come up with a better ones later.”

If keeping all your ideas, even the mediocre ones, leads to feeling idea-poor, the opposite is also true. Keeping only the best ideas, and trusting yourself to be able to come up with more when needed, leads to something much more important than a well-curated “idea file”.

It leads to sustainable creative confidence.

Achieving Sustainable Creative Confidence

In GTD, the entire process really begins by determining whether an idea or task you’ve captured is “actionable”. I believe this is an absolutely atrocious decision point. It’s true, much of what we think are “todos” aren’t really actionable, and the habit of determining the next action is invaluable. But you could have hundreds of actionable ideas, none of which are worth pursuing.

The fix is quite simple, but it takes practice and discipline to follow through.
It breaks down into three steps, all designed to create a tougher filter to use while processing.

1. Identify things you truly “Must Do” by asking “Can I live with the consequences?”
2. Check in with your goals, for each idea or task.
3. Check in with your desired identity, for each idea or task.

I’ll go through each of these in turn.

1. Focus on Consequences

It’s very easy, especially when overwhelmed, to treat everything as being important and urgent. To avoid this, we need a shortcut to understand whether something truly needs to be done or not.

“Is this important?” or “Do I have to do this?” are not helpful because they draw your attention to the task itself, and not the outcome. You can instead use a “What If?” question to trigger your imagination:

“What would be the consequences if I didn’t do this?“

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll be surprised at the sheer volume of supposedly urgent or critical tasks that simply do not need to be done. That doesn’t mean that you won’t do them, but having this question first allows you to skip the other filters if you must do the task

2. Check in with your Goals

The second filter is to ask:

“Does this move me toward my goals?“.

Again, simple. But it’s so easy to trick ourselves into simply “being busy”, that it’s worth reflecting on your goals not just weekly, but every time you pick up an item or idea to process.

This not only ensures that you’re moving forward with every task, but it also makes thinking about your goals a frequent habit.

3. Check in with your Desired Identity

Think about this: any worthwhile goal you have would probably take a year or more to achieve. And, despite how sure you might be right now, accomplishing your goal might not actually make you much happier.

With goals, how you reach your goals is at least as important as reaching them. And so, you need a way of evaluating whether implementing a given idea would move you toward your goals in a way that feels right. Ask yourself this:

“Would the person I want to become, act on this?”

This question forces you to think about your values, and your desired identity. It also allows you to side-step your fears. If an idea scares you a little, without appealing to this “bold fearless” version of yourself, you’ll find some way to justify not pursuing it. But you’re more able to answer honestly whether your ideal self would pursue it or not.

And, as with checking in with your goals, checking in with your desired identity as part of this process forces you to think about the person you want to become several times a day. As I’ve mentioned before, this simple trick is a powerful way to change.

Summary

So much of productivity focuses on the organizing aspect of any system. What lists, what software, how do you prioritize your todos, how do you schedule them, and so on.

But a simple and powerful way to get the right things done is to stop the wrong things from getting into your lists in the first place. It’s not easy, but the reward is being able to focus on the ideas that give you chills, the tasks that truly move you forward, and the challenges that make you a better person in the process.

The following was sent as a newsletter for the end of 2014. I’ve decided to add it here, for the benefit of future readers (hey, that’s you!).

The world is abuzz with people making resolutions, going on diets, signing up for gym memberships, and making promises to themselves. Promises that they know deep down they won’t really keep…

Sound familiar?
If you’re determined not to fall into the same trap this year, read on…
Continue reading Two (silly) Techniques for Lasting Change →

I’ve been balancing a number of things over the past few years, and continue to do so. Yet I’m reaching a point where it no longer feels overwhelming. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, but recently I looked up from work and realized, “I’m on the right path. I got this.”

I’m finding my flow, and it’s been worth all the struggle to get to this point. I can work on Gingko, and make tangible progress, while not letting any balls drop. I can help my wife, part-time, with her skincare business (everything from logistics, to design, to IT). I can go for walks with my son, do laundry, groceries, read. Spend time with friends. Take time to think things through.

Some have said that I’m “doing it all”, but I want to state emphatically, that the idea of being able to “do it all” is damaging.

In fact, “doing it all” is the primary enemy of a balanced life.

The key lies in what I don’t do. Here are some of the highlights.
Continue reading Running a software startup, an eCommerce site, finishing a PhD, and raising son: What I don’t do, to make it all work. →

Writing is something that’s extremely difficult to do well.

It is, after all, a form of telepathy. Transferring hazy ideas from your mind, onto an external medium, in a way that some other mind (that you have not, and may never meet), can digest, so that they end up with that same idea in their minds.

I stumbled across this video, and thought I’d share it with you, as well as highlight a few of the points and how they apply in Gingko.

Don’t Wait: Write

“Writing is how we work through ideas, not just share them…”

I thoroughly agree with this statement. If you’re doing research work, or any long and winding creative process, you should be writing daily. Even if it’s just for yourself.

During my PhD work, I often found that writing was a great way to keep the thread going day in and day out. I would keep a detailed log of what I was doing, and why, and towards the end of the day, tell myself what the next step would be.

This is similar to Ernest Hemingway’s advice, by the way:

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

– Ernest Hemingway, 1958 interview with George Plimpton

Besides keeping a log & picking up the thread, writing in Gingko as you go is a way of maintaining perspective. You are not simply keeping the thread day in and day out, but if your journal is tree-structured, you can do the same for every week, month, and quarter. This keeps you from going down the blind alleys that litter any creative work.

In a nutshell, this constant perspective could very well save you years off a PhD (or novel, or any other ambitious writing project).

Identify your Key Idea

This, I believe, is the single biggest challenge in the way PhD’s are pursued (at least, from my experience and interviews). And a simple diagnostic is in the title.

Here is the title of my PhD in physics: “Flexible polyelectrolytes: like-charged attraction,
linear stability, and long-term structure”.

Quick: Can you tell me what question I’m answering? Well, neither can I. In the end, I wrote a “topic” thesis, where I “did studies” about some system, but came up with no concrete answers to any specific question. My paper is about flexible polyelectrolytes, but doesn’t firmly answer any one question posed about flexible polyelectrolytes.

Can you answer these about your own work?

1. What question does your research answer?
2. Or at least: What more refined questions does your research allow you/others to ask?

The talk presented above does make a good point: you won’t know at first what your single key idea is. But you must keep searching for it.

There’s an oft-repeated statement from journalism that applies: given a day to write a story, a good journalist would spend half a day crafting the right Title and Lede.

For you research, what’s your title? For your screenplay, what’s the logline? In Gingko, what is your root node?

That one sentence deserves more thought than any of the nitty gritty problems that your work presents you, but it often gets no thought until the end, when it’s likely too late (as it was for me).

Put your Readers First

In writing out the core findings of your research, it’s very tempting to go all out on the details. But don’t forget that for your readers, this is all new, and that you are likely suffering from the “Curse of Knowledge” (you can’t imagine what it’s like not to know what you already know).

I find that in this case, using Gingko’s card tree approach can really help. First, describe any given portion in concrete and intuitive terms, as if you were giving a presentation on it. And then, you can expand on that idea by adding 2 or 3 child cards with more detail. And so on until you’re satisfied.

You no longer have  a conflict between “dumbing down” your idea, and presenting all the details. you can do both.

There’s a great deal of good advice in this talk, especially when he touches on general principles of writing as opposed to going over specific structures and outlines. If you’re doing any serious writing, I recommend this video.

Just a few quick tips to share today.

And while they can save you a few minutes here and there, the real benefit of tips like this is that they’re little things that help you keep moving and stay in flow while you’re working. And anything that helps you stay in a state of flow for longer is worth learning.

1. To Search is to Jump

I use the search feature of Gingko constantly. Not only does it hide everything that doesn’t match your query, it also moves your focus to the first match. Which means that you can use search to quickly jump to a different part of the tree.

In shortcuts, here’s how it works:

1. Press /
2. Start typing a word that’s in the card you want to jump to.
3. Cycle through the terms (Ctrl+G / Ctrl+Shift+G) if necessary, or type more to restrict your result further.
4. Once the card you want to jump to is selected, hit Esc to clear the search query and stay on that card.

In words, it may seem long, but once you practice this a few times, it lets you jump from where you are to anywhere on the tree, very quickly. And that’s invaluable for staying in flow while writing.

2. Quickly insert image from DropBox

If you use DropBox to store your images or photos, and want a way to quickly add them to your tree, just copy the following script onto any card, and you’ll get a handy “Image from Dropbox” button in that card:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.dropbox.com/static/api/2/dropins.js" id="dropboxjs" data-app-key="g8vslfgsfr3v7ty"></script>
<button onclick="getChooser()">Image from Dropbox</button>

<script>
getChooser = function(){
  Dropbox.choose({
    success: function(files) {
      alert("![]("+files[0].link.replace('dl=0','dl=1')+")");
    }
  });
}
</script>

Then click the button, select your image, “Ctrl+C” the alert that shows up, and paste it wherever you need it.

3. Add icons from Unicode characters

UPDATE: It has come to my attention that these icons don’t work consistently across browsers & operating systems. I know because I started using them for Gingko’s UI, and some people saw empty rectangles where there were supposed to be up/down arrows, etc.

What you can do instead is use Bootstrap’s Glyphicons, by including a <span class=”glyphicon glyphicon-inbox”></span>. It’s longer, but more reliable.

If you have a project management tree, it’s often very helpful to be able to add icons to visually distinguish the different categories. The simplest way I’ve found of doing this, is to use http://copypastecharacter.com.

Just visit the site, click the character you want, and paste it into your card.

I know there are better and prettier icon collections, but if the idea is to quickly put something in there, and move on, this has been my choice so far.

So that’s it for now.

Do you have any tips or tricks you use with Gingko to help you stay in flow?
Let us know in the comments!