If you get a full night’s sleep, only a small percentage of it is “REM sleep” and that’s supposed to be the truly restorative stuff. You might get like 90 minutes of REM sleep but for most people that’s all you need. Less than 2 hours of REM sleep would be enough to fully restore you.

But the rub is that most people can’t get 2 hours of REM sleep without a bunch of normal garbage sleep around it.

Lots and lots of people put lots and lots of time and effort into trying to improve that. Everyone from scientists to mattress companies try to find ways to get into REM sleep faster, extend it longer, require less sleep around it, etc.

I think that’s valuable work! Could you imagine if eventually we developed medicines, devices, or techniques that allowed you to just drop right into the “good” sleep, do it for 2 hours, and then wake fully rested? I’d pay a lot for it.

I was thinking about that in relation to creativity. When I put myself in a creative flow I can do pretty cool things. I might only do them for 30-60 minutes but get a lot out of it. But my best, most creative 30 minutes often happens in the middle of a 4-hour block.

When I first get warmed up I have to create “the zone.” And when I know I’m approaching another scheduled responsibility the fire tends to cool a little and I’m wrapping up, saving files, organizing things. But that sweet spot in the middle is where magic happens.

Shortening the time it takes for me to get into “REM Creativity mode” or extending how long it lasts in the face of looming responsibilities would be of great help to me. Because of how I currently work, my best work happens pretty exclusively in the wee hours, because that’s the only time when there aren’t any upcoming responsibilities for several hours (sleep? what’s that?).

So just like the scientists and mattress makers, here I am.

Insight is a matter of diligent cultivation and manufacture. It doesn’t spring fully whole from flashes of inspiration.

Tautologically, you can’t grow without changing. If you stretch something to make it longer, it gets thinner. If you squash it down to make it wider, it gets shorter. Energy and mass must come from somewhere, just like character.

Relative movement is key. Relative. You can find great meaning in being the one who climbs the mountain, but you can also find great meaning in being the island amid a stormy sea. Relative. But if you are static in a static environment – no movement, no meaning, no growth.

I was putting away groceries the other day and went down to my basement where I store the paper towels. As a father of three, I often buy pretty large bundles of those, so I was putting away the 12-pack I just bought… in the stack of about four other 12-packs that were already down there.

Paper towels don’t expire so it’s fine to have a lot, but I definitely didn’t remember getting so many. What happened?

Then I thought about it. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply shocks were happening and paper goods in particular were in short supply. So many stores instituted a “limit one per customer” rule. Prior to that, I did what most people probably do – before going to the store, I check to see if I’m out of something and then I only buy it if I am, or close to.

But the supply shock and “limit one per customer” rule changed my habits. Instead, I just always bought the one I was allowed to, every time I went to the store. There was no guarantee that when I was out there would be replacements, so I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to get a scarce resource.

Now (at least where I am), the supply lines are mostly evened out, and paper towels are easily accessible. But I just never really reset the habit of always grabbing a pack when I was at the store. Now that I’ve thought about it I will, but it shows how easily we can fall into habits surrounding scarce resources – or events.

“Any time is never.” If you can do something at any time, you’re far less likely to do it with any sort of frequency than if you can only do it under very specific and infrequent circumstances. Some people love the idea of 24/7 gyms because they don’t feel pressured to get there by a specific time or miss their window, but for many other people the pressure is exactly what gets them there. Needed to get there by 8 PM before they close motivates you – “not needing to rush” really quickly slides into “not needing to do it.”

I think this is the reason why “accountabili-buddies” can work so well – study partners, workout partners, or project collaborators. It’s not because you’re cajoling each other into working harder (or at least, that’s a very small part of it). It’s because the crossing of schedules naturally provides a limit on when you can do the thing you’re doing together. And when you only get 2 opportunities a week to get together with your project partner, you’re far more likely to make sure you take advantage of those opportunities.

You want a good habit? Build a small circle of people who think nothing like you – people who, in fact, might ordinarily be your adversaries – and then be so nice to them that they stay in your circle anyway.

Not too many. Be choosy. Pick for high emotional intelligence; people who can understand and empathize with people they disagree with. That way you can have constructive discussions even when you agree on very little.

The more different from you, the better.

If you cultivate this group well and consistently to the point where you can have high-trust conversations with them, it will be one of the most valuable resources in your life.

Why?

How many different ways can you order the following five letters: A A A A A ?

One.

How many different ways can you order these letters instead: A B C D E ?

120.

If you have a group of five people who all think alike, you’re very likely to get the same kinds of answers and solutions to conundrums as just one of them thinking alone. More people who think exactly like you aren’t very additive to your brainpower. But a few different brains can form VERY different connections, and series of connections, which can lead to great innovation.

Add one “A” to the first list, and the answer is still “one.” Add a letter “F” to the second list and the number jumps to 720. Add a “G” and it becomes 5,040.

Now, at a certain volume trust begins to deteriorate, communication is harder, group dynamics start to come into play, and all that. I think 4 plus yourself is probably the ideal number. But the point is that the ideal number definitely isn’t “zero.”

You should have weird people in your life – and you should be the weird person that they want in theirs.

Here is a small but annoying personal flaw of mine: I feel at my most productive when I don’t have many tasks left on my to-do list. That means that I tend to want to do the small, easily-accomplished tasks first, instead of the larger (but more important!) ones. You can see how that might be a problem.

The best thing to do is the “one big thing” approach, but as I’m tackling the one big thing, I find myself often distracted or stressed by the knowledge that I have a lot of things still left to do for the day, even if collectively those things are only maybe an hour’s worth of work total.

So sometimes, I cheat. I trick my brain a little.

When I’m writing out my to-do list for the day, if it has both a single large task that needs to be done, and a decent number of smaller tasks that I know will distract me, I’ll put a few things on the list that are actually already done. Small tasks that I actually did the night before or that only require 10 seconds of effort, like “check the mail.” The effect of this is that as soon as the day starts, I can put 3 or 4 checks on the list, and that gives my brain a sort of false sense of momentum that lets me focus on the big task without getting distracted by the smaller ones, because it feels like a lot of the smaller ones have already been accomplished.

I can’t do this too often, or my subconscious will build up a resistance to it and it’ll become rote. But every once in a while, it’s a helpful little trick.

May you reach all your most elusive goals.

Many people violate the speed limit while driving by around 10-20%. Very often, even if you zoom right by a police officer, the officer won’t bat an eye unless you’re exceeding it by closer to 30% or more. Of course, there are plenty of confounding factors there (which aren’t the scope of this post), but the point is that every day thousands of people routinely exceed the speed limit. Doesn’t that mean that the de facto speed limit is in fact 10-20% higher than the posted one?

People violate the speed limit, but they don’t ignore it. Believe it or not, even the people who are speeding are mostly basing their speed on the posted limit, even as they’re exceeding it. Let’s say you have a road with a 55 MPH limit. People might regularly go 60 or 65. But far fewer of them will go 80 – at least on that road. Put them on a road with no speed limit, and they might happily cruise along at 90 MPH or more. Why?

Because the posted speed limit is still anchoring them. Their brains are starting with what they’re told, and then adjusting up or down. But they’re not just pulling a number out of thin air.

I once gave a group talk on salary negotiations, and to start I did a little exercise. I divided the group in half, and to each group I gave a small 2-question quiz. The quizzes were slightly different. Here’s the quiz I gave to group A:

“Question 1, answer Yes or No: Was Rosa Parks 22 years old during the famous bus incident? Question 2: How old do you think she was during that event?“

Then here’s the question I gave to group B:

“Question 1, answer Yes or No: Was Rosa Parks 62 years old during the famous bus incident? Question 2: How old do you think she was during that event?”

The answers to question 1 weren’t really important, but I averaged each group’s answers to question 2. Group A guessed an average of 28 years old. Group B guessed an average of 46 years old.

Neither group actually knew how old Rosa Parks was (she was 42 during the events in 1955, by the way!), and so if I had just asked everyone to guess I’d have gotten a mostly random sampling. But when I anchored them to a number – even a mostly meaningless one! – they mentally adjusted from that number, rather than coming up with something from scratch. Group A mostly figured that 22 was a little too young to be likely, but was probably close; Group B did the same thing in reverse down from 62. The overall lesson is that being the first to speak in salary negotiations can actually help you, because you’re setting the initial number that gets negotiated from.

Which brings us back to speed limits. The people setting them might know perfectly well that most people aren’t going to be 100% diligent in strictly obeying them, but they also know that most people won’t deviate from them by much.

We’re vulnerable to anchoring because isolated evaluation is really difficult. If your boss asks you if you can get something to her by next Friday, it’s easier to adjust that up or down by a day or so than to step back and really think through a reasonable deadline, so you default.

Every time you find yourself compromising, “meeting in the middle,” or otherwise agreeing to something with a small change, take a moment of reflection. There’s nothing wrong with being mostly agreeable with people you trust, of course (like, presumably, your coworkers). But it’s good mental training to make sure that you’re the one in control of what “reasonable” means to you.

Every second of every day of every week of your life, you make a decision on how to spend your time. You choose to do one thing, and as a consequence you choose not to do approximately a bajillion other things that you could have done with that time.

The point is, you don’t need “more time.” You have exactly as much as everyone else, and exactly as much as you’ll ever get. You don’t need more time; you need fewer things. Or, more likely, different things.

That’s a mindset shift – people want “more time” because they don’t want to stop doing anything, but they want to do more stuff, and they’re upset that they can’t. Me too!

Some people look at time like they look at houses. You may have a small house, but when you fill it with too much stuff and people to fit comfortably, you put in the effort and get a bigger house to expand into. They think time works that way – if I just put in the effort, I can expand my available time. I just have to work harder or find a different organizational system or become a less distractible person.

No. You need to stop doing stuff. And people want to believe that there’s this hidden reserve of 20 hours a week of useless, hated activity that they can uncover and eliminate, and then suddenly they’ll have time to do all the things they want to. But that’s not the case – pretty much everything you’re doing right now is stuff you want to do.

It may not be stuff you should do, if the opinions of “future you” are taken into account. But “present you” wants to sit on the couch and watch TV for an hour a night, because “present you” is tired from a long day. And “present you” wants to commute 45 minutes each way from work (even though “present you” denies this) because “present you” enjoys the benefits of that job and equivalent benefits aren’t immediately available anywhere else.

The point here is that if you want to do something you’re not currently doing, you’re probably going to have to stop doing something else that you also want to do. Sure, your schedule probably isn’t Pareto optimal now, but it also probably isn’t hiding a hidden reserve of 20 hours that you can get as a free lunch because it turns out you’ve been accidentally standing in line for 3 hours a day to get into your own house or something.

Take a step back and reframe. Yes, you want to take that painting class. But you also enjoy the phone chats with your sister. If you weren’t already doing either of those things, and you had a two-hour hole in your schedule to fill, which would you choose? Remove the status quo bias, pick the thing you’d rather do, and accept that you simply cannot do everything.

Of all the things you can waste time on, the very worst is worrying about wasted time.