Guns Blazing
It came as quite a surprise to me that most people don’t plan every month to have something very cool, exciting, and useful happen.
Every time the calendar rolls over, that’s a great opportunity to kickstart something you want to be doing, quit something you’ve been meaning to quit, start living in a slightly different way, or experimenting with something cool and interesting.
I’ve been running Monthly Plans for a few years now. The process is the same every time —
(1) I start by looking, very briefly, at every single day of the last month to see what days went well and poorly, and ideas for next month based on that.
(2) I then do go through a few quick questions to check how the rest of life is going, and generate a further list of options of what I could do.
(3) I evaluate everything all those ideas, see what’s feasible, and pick what I want to do.
(4) I build as many supporting elements as possible to actually make it happen.
(5) Then I give each month a “Theme” for both cohesiveness and inspiration.
It only takes an hour or two, and it’s some of the best time I spend in my life. Some of the ideas I’ve gotten out of the process have been genuinely life-changing.
Let’s look at these points in detail — why and how the elements work together.
(1) Look briefly at every single day of the last month.
I do this all in the Ultraworking Monthly Planning spreadsheet, of course, but you can just as easily do it in text.
I think it’s very important to get a baseline of where things are currently at before planning out next goals. In particular, months with a lot of bad days in them — however you define that — tend to call for consolidation and getting back to a solid baseline before launching ambitious plans.
If you already keep any sort of records of how you spend your time, this should be pretty easy. But if you don’t, you can still figure out much of happened in the last month. You’d start, of course, by looking at the calendar. After that, sent and received emails, as well as Slack and text messages can help a lot.
If you do creative work that involves creating files, you can see the date you started and finished any work by looking at the metadata on the file. (Right Click -> Get Info -> the “Created Date” is when it was created, the “Last Modified” date is when you worked on it last.)
Even if you have no records at all, you should be able to reconstruct at least a third of the days from memory. Think on what you did on each of the weekends, and see if you can remember what you did on the Monday after that weekend. Once you get a couple days in a row remembered, oftentimes a whole week or two falls into place.
While this might sound boring, it’s actually both insightful and fascinating. Our “emotional memory” often plays tricks on us. If you had a bad last couple days of a month, it can feel like the whole month was a bust — even if the first two weeks were exceptional.
When you do this, you’re searching both for patterns— what typically leads to you thriving — as well as unusual stuff to investigate further. If you had a month that was largely flat and uninspiring, but had two great days — and went for a walk through the park on both of those days — the conclusion is obvious. You’re going to the park a lot more this month, in addition to whatever else you might do.
Maybe this sounds trivial, but really, a lot of people accidentally do things that are really good for them, which work really well, but they don’t notice it and do more of it. The easiest starting point to more of what you want is to do what you already know works well for you.
On the flipside, if there’s predictable things about bad days — perhaps starting the day in meetings and calls soaks the rest of your day — then you’ve got some clear guidance for what to do next month. (Keep the start of the day clear, in that case.)
All the time I look at the days of the past month, I’m searching for takeaways that I might do next month. That doesn’t mean I’ll do them — I’m just generating ideas. Typically I’ll get between 5 and 15 ideas by looking at the exceptional days and bad days of the past month, which is pretty cool. This usually takes me 20–30 minutes total. And while it might sound boring, it’s actually fascinating. Try it and you’ll see.
(2) Quick Questions and Impact Areas.
Four questions —
- “What’s the biggest problem you’re facing?”
- “What’s the biggest opportunity you’re aware of?”
- “Any major commitments coming up next month?”
- “What skill or habits would be most beneficial to practice or develop?”
Now note, just because something is the biggest opportunity doesn’t mean I have to do it; it’s also possible to say, “Yeah, that’s the biggest problem but I’m going to let it burn a bit more while I do something else.”
But I want to know what they are. Answering those takes a couple minutes, and then it’s on to evaluating “Impact Areas” —
Again, I do this in the UW spreadsheet for it, but you could do it in text just as easily. An “Impact Area” is fairly self-explanatory — it’s an area that, y’know, impacts your life.
Health, Profession, Personal Finance, Habits apply to most people. Then, your specific Impact Areas would differ based on what you’re doing in life — a graduate student might have Research, Writing, and Teaching as Impact Areas. Maybe “Investing” is one of your IA’s, or maybe it’s not.
Regardless, I jot down a quick note on the state of them, and any options for the next month based on those.
After looking at all the days of last month, answering a few simple questions, and looking at all your Impact Areas, you get a pretty long list of stuff you could do.
Then, it’s time to…
(3) Prioritize and choose what to do.
This is where the spreadsheet really helps — don’t get intimidated by the seeming complexity. You could still do it on paper, though.
The key question here is, “What percent of my time and attention would I need to spend on this if I did it?”
You could train for a marathon, learn to play the piano, learn Hebrew, or start a new business — but you probably couldn’t do all those from scratch at the same time. Any one of those might take 20%–90% of your time and attention.
I find this very helpful in choosing what to do. It’s actually useful to schedule way below 60% — then you have some slack if things go wrong — but certainly you don’t want to commit to more than 100% of what’s possible. That’s a recipe for problems.
Whenever I make my plans, I almost always wind up with above 100% — and I leave it that way in my demo examples of the spreadsheet — but I cut back before starting.
Hugely useful. In general, people tend to both underestimate and overcommit. You’re better off rounding up how long you’d have to spend to make things happen, and then still underscheduling, so you have safety in both directions. After all, if you finish all your plans easily, you can still spend that extra time however you want. The opposite case — underestimating how long things take, and then overcommitting yourself — is of course much less pleasant (and less productive, too).
(4) Heavy operationalization so that your plans actually happen.
I think most people end their planning and goal-setting slightly too soon.
It’s like, okay, you’ve got a goal. Great. Is it actually going to happen, though?
Operationalization is a fancy word for “putting all the elements in place so that your plans actually happen.”
I like to evaluate every possible helpful edge in making plans happen. Can I start the month by putting down calendar blocks of when I’ll do the activities? Can I get accountability, either informally from friends, or professionally from an accountant, attorney, doctor, trainer, whatever? Is there some process I could run the same way every time, for instance batch-cooking every Sunday for the week ahead? Would some data-tracking be appropriate, metrics for business-related things or Lights for personal? Do I need new tools or software? New habits?
I really don’t like to leave any stone unturned.
And it’s often the techniques you’re not familiar with that’d produce the most gains for you.
For instance, some people don’t recruit accountability for themselves very often. But that’s really simple, you can just text message your friend, sibling, or whomever “Hey, I’m doing this thing. Can I tell you about it every Saturday, and you get on my case if I don’t do it?” People are typically happy to support in this way.
(5) The final thing — giving each month a “Theme.”
Now, this is all very straightforward up until this point. Study all the days of last month. Ask some simple questions about problems and opportunities, and look at all the major areas of your life. Estimate and prioritize, and decide what to do. Then set up everything supporting for that month — technology, data, habits, scheduling, processes, accountability, etc etc etc.
This really isn’t very “opinionated” — it’s kind of been best practices to this point, no?
The final thing I do is a little opinionated, it’s my own style. I’d encourage you to give a try even it it sounds a little unusual at first — I give each month a “theme.”
I got the idea from the fact that a lot of elite athletes and elite soldiers would use short mantras to help keep themselves motivated while doing difficult stuff.
So I’ve had months that I named “Boring Methodical Execution” and “Do Less, Better” — fairly straightforward, no?
Some years ago, I ran a nonprofit and every Spring we’d go speak at a bunch of universities, often 18+ universities in a month. Now, if you’ve never done this, it gets kind of grueling. After a few speaking dates, I’d tend to zone out while on the train or in the rental car.
For the third Tour, I remember setting the monthly theme of “On Mission 24/7” — meaning, even if I’m a little tired or fried, still finding something valuable to do on the train or airplane, or a good discussion in the rental car. Of course, I didn’t wind up being on-mission entirely 24/7, but I did do a lot more work when I’d have otherwise zoned out.
When I set a theme, I try to keep it really short. One word is good — “Excellence,” “Dispatch,” “Hyperfocus, “Grounding.” That sort of thing. (Respectively, those months were about increasing quality, getting work done faster, always having a single thing to focus on to the exclusion of anything else, and resetting a bunch of habits and not being expansive after a crazy run.)
I really feel free to make these whatever I want. Laugh if you want, but one of the best months last year was “Fun Protocol” month — I, yeah it’s true, I developed a protocol to study every week ahead on Sunday, and asking how to make it more fun. I also tracked my mood at the start and end of the day every day that month. It was illuminating. And yes, more fun. And, actually, very productive too.
I’ve found giving the month a theme — really, “naming the month” — tends to make everything more salient, and it’s rather motivating and enjoyable. I wrote about the success and fail rate of all my monthly policies for 2017 on LessWrong at the start of last year if you’re curious to read more on the topic.
February: “Guns Blazing”
You can laugh again, if you want. Or cringe. I normally don’t name my months anything “pseudo-badass” — but yeah, the theme I’m running for February is “Guns Blazing.”
Context would be in order.
Last November, we grew 46% at Ultraworking. Which was both great, and crazy. All sorts of internal systems we had didn’t really keep up with the large growth.
Around mid-December, I realized I needed to switch gears a lot and build better internal systems — boring stuff like thorough bookkeeping and accounting, mandatory stuff like better customer service workflows, internal team and management systems like Google-style OKRs.
So January’s policy was “Reloading” — really thinking through, from first principles, how both the company systems and my personal systems would go.
Now, I’ll swear to it that “Guns Blazing” didn’t occur to me until a month later. But with all the systems functioning at a much higher level, after “Reloading” month I was itching to run loose again. In January, there was a lot of thinking, design, training, processes… not expansionary, not particularly glorious, just bread-and-butter systems building to hit higher levels of operational consistency.
With that done, and in a relatively healthy state, I’m itching for an intense and expansive month. Hence — “Guns Blazing.”
Now, this isn’t the sort of thing I recommend doing casually, and maybe don’t recommend for most people at all. It takes a lot of supporting structures in place. But for February, my policy means I’m aiming for 12 hours of focused work per day every single day, and doing literally only two things this month — Work, or Rest.
That’s it.
Now, I’ve ran for extended periods of time at this standard of performance before — so I emphatically don’t recommend you just jump into something this intense — but it seems right for me right now.
Notably though, I want to talk about operationalization. To hit 12 focused hours a day, and while sleeping 8 hours on average, that means I’ve only got 4 hours per day for everything else.
Say that ~2 hours are out for eating, chores, the very short commute I do each day, and such. That’s 2 hours left.
What this means, in practice, is that there’s 2 hours left — 120 minutes… and so losing even 20 minutes to a random activity is costing me 1/6th of my free time on a day.
So I sat and thought really carefully. “Where do I lose even 20 minutes?” I then went and set up a bunch of technology and practices to get those odd-lots of time back.
I took every website that’s not explicitly work-related, and put it on block using the Mac app SelfControl. Now, SelfControl typically only blocks things for up to 24 hours, but I edited the settings (as described here) to block everything for over 30 days.
There’s still some tricky things, though. I like using Twitter, and see some use in it for announcements and lightweight conversations with good people. So, just for a month, I unfollowed everyone. (I’ll follow you again when I’m out of “Guns Blazing” mode, presumably in March. No disrespect intended!)
Another problem remained — I’ll sometimes reflexively search Google for one of the Boston sports teams: the Patriots, Celtics, Red Sox, etc. I don’t really follow sports much any more, but it’s, like, a reflex. And sometimes I’d see that, say, Marcus Smart got into a fight with someone, and it’s really intriguing, and I’d click on a Google news story or a game log and lose 20–40 minutes from that.
And I can’t block Google.
So, how to deal with this? Hmm.
First, I looked into switching to another search engine — but no, Bing and DuckDuckGo both give sports score updates when you search a team.
I looked into various extensions and Google search settings to remove sports from the top of Google, but couldn’t find anything. Eventually, I found a Chrome extension called FoxFilter that lets you block certain words if they appear in a URL. It’s normally set up for parental controls, but it works perfectly for my use case.
This is what I mean by leaving no stone unturned.
I then created a little template I fill out at the start of each day in a journal entry,
====================
GUNS BLAZING
Biggest project?
Enjoying the process?
Can I put in 12 hours today?
Anything else?
====================
And of course, I told everyone who would listen that I’m doing it. Accountability, eh?
I typically start new policies on a Sunday, so whenever the month starts on a different day, I either implement them a few days early or late. So, Guns Blazing officially started on January 27th. This is my third day on-pace for 12 hours of focused work. From past experience, I estimate I’ll probably hit 80%–90% of days on that standard (which would be between 23 and 27 days out of a 30 day month). A little scary, but in a good way. Bang bang.
Do Try This at Home
Monthly Planning, I mean, not the 12-hours-a-day-thing. I wouldn’t personally try that most months; it’s something to be done in perfectly optimal conditions with a lot of careful setup.
But Monthly Planning is flexible — it helps you recognize if you’ve had a run of bad days and that consolidation and baseline improvement is key. It helps you recognize when things are stable and a big run might be possible. It’s a good format for odd experiments — again, my “Fun Protocol” month led to some exceptional gains in both enjoyment and surprisingly productivity too.
If you want to run it in my style, it’s quite simple —
- Look at each day of the last month for takeaways. Pay particular attention to exceptional days and bad days. What ideas does this suggest for next month?
- Ask yourself what the biggest problem you’re facing is, and the biggest opportunity you’re aware of. Check if you’ve got anything unusual coming up this month (travel, etc) and ask what skills or habits might be useful to develop. Then look at the state of the areas of your life — health, finances, profession, habits, and all the areas relevant to you specifically (Writing, Investing, Family, Meditation, Research, etc.)
- Estimate and prioritize all the options you just generated. Be conservative since everything takes longer than expected. Then look to commit yourself well below 100%. Targeting 60% committed is safe and sound; even 40% might be a good idea.
- Ensure your plans actually happen — consider everything relevant that might help. Scheduling, accountability, technology, processes, habits, etc.
- If you want, give your month a “Theme” — might sound corny, but actually works like magic.
In related news, we’re hosting a couple free live Monthly Planning events if you want to join in. They’re free to attend and insightful —
We’re also running a Chinese New Year’s promotion if you want to get more peak performance going on —
But, of course, you could also do UW-style Monthly Planning solo (this link is to get the spreadsheet), or you could simply do it in a text file.
You look at last month and the state of the areas of your life, you prioritize and select what to do, and setup as many supporting elements as you can think of so that your plans actually happen.
Give it a try, eh?
And if you want the full experience, give your a month a name. It’s fun and useful.
As for me? I’m on Guns Blazing for February. Wish me luck, eh?
Sebastian Marshall
Ultraworking
