The Beatles had spectacular success in their day and a relationship developed between John, Paul, George and Ringo, which led to a wonderful flowering of creativity. It was a unique and unrepeatable mix of factors that caused this, but some of the fundamentals for their success may have come down to accidental, but massively effective, time usage.

In the early days of the Beatles, they went to Hamburg, Germany and played there for 2-extended periods that made up 6-months in total. During this time they played seven days a week for 6 to 7 hours each night. That makes up 42 to 49 hours a week. That was an intensive schedule and highly unusual. The average rock and roll band just starting out was probably doing a couple of 2-hour rehearsals a week, with a gig at the weekend. The average band probably put in about 6-hours of playing a week (and from my own limited experience of playing in bands, that’s quite a generous assumption). Consequently, the Beatles had 7-times (42 divided by 6) more playing and gigging experience per week than an average band. In the 6-months that they played in Hamburg, it can be argued that they got at least a 3 1/2 year experience advantage over a regular band. That alone would give a massive advantage, but there’s more.

When you engage in start/stop activities you don’t make efficient use of your time. It takes some time to build up momentum to do an activity and to get in the swing of things and when you stop, you lose some of that momentum. You have to consciously think about what you have to do from one session to the next. When you do things repetitively and consistently, you keep up the momentum and often build it further. It becomes much easier to move actions from conscious competence into unconscious competence and that frees up your consciousness to take on new activities and new learning. This leads to another advantage.

Once you transfer the bulk of activities to the level of unconscious competence, where no further new problem solving is required and little or no conscious thought is required to keep things going, you can then begin to experiment in parallel. Experimentation is a frustrating activity. You experiment because you don’t know what cause will give what effect. It requires a lot of trial and error to learn in this way. An average rock and roll band would have to focus predominantly on a basic level of performance. Without that, they would get no gigs, or else make a hash of things on stage. The Beatles would have established those basics quickly through the intensive scheduling of their performances. Off stage, they would not need to rehearse and so could focus on musical experimentation. With their basic skills finely honed they would then have the dexterity, showmanship, confidence and authority to introduce embellishments and even substantial changes to established songs.

Part of the Beatles great prowess and the reason that they stood head and shoulders above their peers came down to intensive training. This had the snowball effect of refining their skills and could have practically forced creativity upon them (they would have gotten bored otherwise).

You can use the same principle to learn quickly and to learn more effectively with many, many skills. For example, if you learn a language and go to a class once a week for 2-hours, then you have the problems of losing momentum in between. This delays the time to achieve well-honed skills. Over 3-months you would study for 24-hours. However, if you did a one-week intensive course, then you would get in the same amount of learning. More than that, you would build momentum and condition your basic skills through regular repetition. You would achieve unconscious competence much more swiftly. The quality of your results would be much higher overall. If you did a four week course, then you would get in 1-year of average experience.

For any skill that you want to learn, and especially new skills where building ability and momentum is the most difficult, use intensive training whenever you can. Be warned though: when other people see the rapidity of your results they might call you talented, or gifted, or lucky, or a genius - just like the Beatles.

It makes me wonder what other geniuses of music might be created if more bands put in 6-months of 7-days per week, 6-hours a night performing…

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[Photo by United Press International (UPI Telephoto) ]

It’s only natural that an outsider finds it difficult to enter into an established group. That group already has trust and comfort between its members. They have shared experiences together, they know personal things about each other and they often have in-jokes and even little rituals that naturally lead to a feeling of exclusion for other people, even if someone invites you to join the group. Getting along with people is all about rapport. Rapport comes from being able to connect with someone. The more you think the same way as someone else, say the same things, wear similar clothes, have similar hobbies, and so on, then the more connection that you will have with them. They will think, “This is my kind of guy /girl . It’s as if he / she knows me.” This happens because you share interests and value things in similar ways.

Getting into an established group can thus prove difficult, so don’t tackle groups head on. Instead, see if you can get know one person from the group well. If you can connect well with one person, then you will find it easier to connect with the group. Your new friend will automatically confer a certain amount of trust and acceptability onto you. It as if the one person acts as a qualifying filter to let you into the group. The next time you get involved with a new group, just listen in and see if there is someone who you think you can connect with. You could ask a stimulating question there and then, but it might prove easier to speak to that person alone, either after the group breaks up or just before they reconvene the next time. You can say something along the lines of, “Hi, I heard you talking about (that person’s topic of interest) and I was wondering what you think about (something related to the topic). I’m interested to know your opinion.” Open ended questions, that don’t require a yes or no answer are great for getting a proper response from someone. If the person is a nice person, then they will respond and you can ask more questions and give an opinion. Most people love to talk about either themselves, or about their favorite subjects. If you can do this in a way that demonstrates that you think that they have expertise and that they also end up thinking that they have expertise, then that person will end up feeling good talking to you - even though you might not actually be saying very much. You can open it up further by asking questions, such as, “And what do your friends think about this?” or “And are your friends interested in this too?” That can lead to you getting know more about those group members and could lead to a strong introduction that leads to a conversation with the group, or that gives you something to talk about with individuals from that group the next time that you see them alone. You can say, “Hi, I was talking to (the first group member) about (topic of interest) and he said that you were interested in this, particularly (whatever was was said previously).”

By tackling the problem in this way, you don’t have to make a potentially unwelcome interruption and then have everyone shut up as they turn their heads towards you. That’s pretty intimidating. By taking a more oblique approach you can enter into the group without having to talk to the whole group just by yourself at the first instance. Once you have contact with one or two members, the rest of the group will naturally become very curious about the newcomer and will thus be interested in who you are and what you have to say.

In terms of speaking in front of a large group, it can prove nerve-wracking at first. The best thing to do is speak openly and honestly and to admit if you are ignorant about something, or feel nervous. Everyone has felt those things and we tend to admire people who admit those things instead of denying them and attempting to cover up. People can easily detect the fakery and it makes them uneasy. If you are ignorant about something or don’t understand something, then just say so. Just say something like, “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand (that particular point), could you explain it further, please?” In my experience, you’ll find that in a large group a lot of other people also don’t understand and will be relieved that you asked. In fact, you might even become ‘the guy who asks for clarification’ such that many people feel relief when you ask clarifying questions - I’ve had that happen to me often. People admire confidence and are deeply attracted to confident people. Having the confidence to admit what you don’t know, and what you can’t do, scores highly with most people (and it’s so rare to find!). I think that it’s easy to do. It’s just honest acceptance of your reality. Of course, it was different at school, when kids would laugh, point and throw rocks at anyone who seemed different, or who had apparently messed up, but outside of school few people behave that way and if you enter a group of people who do behave that way, then leave as soon as you can. Those people are immature and foolish and will only make trouble for you.

It’s very important to know and to accept that you can never be all things to all people all of the time. It would be nice to be perfect and to get along with everyone seamlessly and effortlessly, but that’s never ever going to happen. If you are lucky, at most points in your life you will have a network of about 20 people with whom you have social contact with on a regular basis (say every one to three months) and about 4 of those people will be the people that you spend about 80% of your social time with. That’s just the way that things work out it seems (the 80/20 rule at work again!). I used to spend a lot of effort trying to be friends with every single person that came along, but I don’t bother with that approach any more. I accept that few people will ever have a deep rapport with me and so I tend to rapidly filter out people with whom I can quickly tell that no easy rapport is going to happen; at least not without a long hard effort. Instead of feeling that there is something wrong with me because of this, I accept it as a wise and practical response. I suppose that it can make me seem a little flippant at times, perhaps even aloof, but I no longer care because I don’t set myself the impossible task of attempting to make everyone like me. I mean, I do pay careful attention to people when I first meet them, but I now qualify whether I want to devote time to them, which is the opposite to how I used to be when I used to think, “Can I pass their qualification as a friend?” This is one of the effects of giving up needs. You end up taking control of your desires and outcomes, which is the opposite to needy people.

I still find myself at events where I know no one and in those events I still find myself clamming up and talking to no one. I don’t feel bad about that, it’s just natural and for events where I will probably never see the people again, I don’t much care about that. If it’s for something where I will go regularly, then I know that over time I can connect with one or two people and begin to befriend people and become accepted. Again, it’s much easier to break into things when it revolves around a shared interest. Just chatting to a unknown person in a bar is difficult, because there are few common points that you can be sure of sharing. Chatting to an unknown person at a concert for a band that you really like is much easier, because you at least share an interest in music, and probably in the band. Your ability to connect with people is deeply dependent upon how clever you are in putting yourself into situations where connection and rapport comes easily. These things can come about by accident, but why rely on fickle chance when you can take matters into your own hands and set things up to favor you?

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If you would like to receive more fundamental insights into better living, then subscribe to the nickpagan.com newsletter and you will receive a FREE copy of the ebook ‘Understand How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.’ Please use the form at the head of the page.

[Photo by CraigP]

Some years ago, I read about a Dutch road traffic experiment in a busy town that took a radical approach to organizing traffic flows. The experimenters theorized that it was not a lack of roads that caused congestion and slowed down the traffic, but far too many junctions. Many Dutch towns are ancient and they are full of small roads. Wide roads, capable of carrying a lot of traffic are few and the pace and flow of traffic on those few roads is controlled by the cars turning onto and off of those roads into the smaller roads. In the experiment, they cut off the access of the majority of small roads to the main road and redirected traffic along longer routes but with fewer intersections. The result was freer flowing traffic and reduced journey times.

In business organizations, similar problems occur. Work flows freely in parts of the process where there are no dependencies upon other resources. If too many parts of a whole process must go through a resource restriction (similar to a road junction), then a bottleneck will occur and progress will grind to a halt until it makes it through the bottleneck. In project based work, this is a very difficult problem to handle because resources are limited and fixed routines that can be optimized are rare. This is because the size, type, speed and demands of one project to the next are continuously changing.

If you carry out detailed planning of a process, it often becomes clear where the bottlenecks are, so in order to reduce the impact of a limited resource you can do the following things:

1. Gain additional resource - this is the least likely to happen as it is not easy to come by, is generally more expensive and it might only be needed occasionally.
2. Streamline the processes within that resource so that productivity is improved for that operation.
3. Carry out more preparation prior to sending work through the limited resource (It never ceases to amaze me when working on projects in large organizations how often something is held up for the most trivial of reasons. The actual work content is low, but the preparation that remains to be done before that work can be carried out is often high. Every time that you can do that preparation upfront, instead of relying on someone else to take the initiative, you get the work done faster).
4. Remove the number of bottlenecks by routing work through as few individual resources as possible (as per the road traffic experiment - accept a longer route, if it makes the overall journey quicker).
5. Confer more responsibility for getting the task done to those people upstream of the bottleneck to reduce the load on the scarce resource. For example, where doctors are a scarce commodity, nurses can sometimes be further trained to do take on some of the lower skilled diagnosis and treatment work that was once only the domain of doctors.

If you work by yourself, then you are the only resource, however within your sphere of skills lie bottlenecks. These are the tasks where a lack of personal resource slows up the job and prevents it from getting finished. Time and money are common resource constraints, but another, often ignored, resource is your personal aptitude and ability to get done the tasks that you are responsible for. Where that is lacking a bottleneck can often occur. You will tend to keep doing what you can do, whilst all the while creating a log jam at the point where your abilities tend to be weakest.

To avoid this you can adopt similar principles to the above methods:

1. Outsource the work, or buy tools and services that can do it for you
2. Streamline the difficult process. This means taking a careful look at the real personal difficulties that you have in carrying out a particular task. Focus on those difficulties intensely and work out ways that you can eliminate them, minimize them, or learn how to tackle them. Accept that you have to tackle this and resolve to get on with it. The sooner that you handle the problem, by implementing an effective solution, the sooner you can increase your productivity and remove this stress raiser.
3. Do all of the easy and possible preparation that you can upfront of the difficult task. Since you might have use a lot of initial willpower to tackle the job, you want to ensure that once you are underway with it that you are not bogged down with minor and trivial problems.
4. Ease the load on the bottleneck by carrying out your personal work in batches. If a task requires five different sub tasks (one of which is difficult and personally challenging) and you need to carry out that initial task three times, then batch the sub tasks together. This means that you only have to prepare yourself to commence the difficult task once overall, rather than three individual times.

On a personal level, your bottlenecks occur where you have a weakness, or limitation, in your personal ability to get something done. Rather than ignoring this and hoping to battle through it, you can prepare, organize and develop yourself to move past this difficulty with the greatest amount of practical ease possible.

Related links:
Related road traffic experiment in Drachten, The Netherlands

Here’s a Quick Way to Boost Your Productivity - Batch processing

The Common Mistake with Getting Things Done - Lack of Preparation

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[Photo by Kliverap]

A big problem for most of us is that, when we get an idea for a pleasant desire, we immediately want to take action, because we want to have that desire RIGHT NOW! Or within a very short period of time at least. However, whenever you set out to do an important, or difficult, task, you generally have to do some element of problem solving. That means that some part of the task cannot be done spontaneously. It needs some thought attention preparation and organization to overcome the barrier to progress. Unfortunately, your brain would rather not do that.

Once you start to do something that requires problem solving that you haven’t yet done, you will come to a point where can go no further. At this point, your mind will react and think “I can’t do this. It’s not possible.” Doing the impossible is generally a difficult and painful business and so this triggers a response to do anything that avoids pain and moves into pleasure. It is at this point that into your mind will pop an idea and an impulse to do something easier, more pleasant, problem free, instantly attainable, and free of responsibility. For the part of your brain that is focused on survival, the basic default response is that pleasure is good and relatively risk free and that difficulty is bad and brings with it the risk of pain. Consequently, if you don’t understand this point, then you will find it hard to resist temptation, because your nervous system is doing everything that it can to improve your chances of survival at that particular moment.

The number of distractions available to us is myriad and so many of them seem just perfectly designed to soak up huge amounts of time and to deliver us from having to solve problems: TV programs, films, books, video games, lunch dates, sleep, sex, whatever. These things are easy, pleasant, problem free, instant and responsibility free (well, on reflection, perhaps I should remove sex from that list as it doesn’t quite meet all of those requirements). You will never remove or escape all of the distractions that are available to you, because indulging in distractions and in procrastination is just the response to the symptom - a present moment difficulty.

The cause of the symptom is your desire to have, or to do, something that you can’t have or do at that moment. To remove the symptom and hence the response to indulge in temptations, then either give up on the desire, or work out how to make the next step possible.

When the impulse to indulge in a distraction hits you, then before you act upon it, recognize that it has happened because you have reached a stumbling block with the other thing that you are doing. Identify that point of difficulty, describe it clearly and then work out a way to solve it, or move around it. Do that before you indulge in a distraction. This is a vital habit to develop, because what it means is that, when you stop indulging in the distraction, you can return to the task at hand and make immediate progress. If you don’t do this, then when you return to the task you will still think, “I can’t do this!” and the distraction impulse mechanism will be triggered once again. It is only once you stop to figure out how to get beyond the barrier that you can make productive progress once more.

If you find yourself frequently indulging in procrastination, then this effort to solve the problem at hand, at least in principle, before bunking off is one of the most important habits that you can ever develop. It’s the most basic and most practical principle to get you back in the saddle with the minimum of delay. After a while, it becomes a habit to delay the distraction in order to solve the problem. Think of what this will do for you. Instead of your problems dominating you, you turn the tables and dominate your problems. I can tell you that it is a sublime feeling of personal mastery when you can do this. When you do this habitually, you know that you TRULY ROCK!

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Prediction makes us feel good as it gives the illusion that we know what will happen in the future and that conveys certainty and less risk. I once read of how the first weather forecasting service in Great Britain started in the 1700s, or thereabouts. It was hopelessly incorrect, being wrong on almost every occasion and so the service was stopped. However, there was such a backlash of complaints (and remember, this happened back in the days that you had to put pen to paper, buy a stamp and post your complaint, so the public must have been really riled), that the service was reinstated. Such is our thirst for the certainty that we think that prediction can give us.

Most personal and business plans focus heavily on predicting how long it will take to get something done and to finish it. Most of the time these predictions are wrong, but few people learn from this and do something about it. However, there is an enormous downside to inaccurate prediction that generally goes unnoticed.

When we create time estimates for when things will finish, we set up new objectives and expectations. When we fail to achieve these objectives we end up feeling bad. We then either rage against reality for not meeting our predictions, or against ourselves for proving inadequate. These are, in fact, ridiculous stances to take, but it happens very commonly. The real problem is that creating a plan based primarily upon time estimates and expecting it to be right actually designs failure into the whole effort.

When you look up the word ‘plan’ in the dictionary or thesaurus, no mention of time is given. Most descriptions and synonyms refer to process and organization. An action plan should not initially focus on the time taken to do something. It should focus on the process required to get something done. You can only get a job done by carrying out every single point of the process that gets the whole job done. If you overlook any single part, then the job will not get done.

Where most people go wrong with personal planning is that they set an objective and then give a time estimate for how long it will take to complete the job. If you have never done a particular task before, or if it’s something that you’ve done before but it requires new aspects of problem solving, then your time estimates will, more often than not, be very inaccurate. In my experience, most people underestimate the time by by half, i.e. it takes twice as long to do as they expected.

With this kind of plan, you set off with a poorly thought out process in place for getting things done, encounter all sorts of problems, get waylaid and frustrated, fail to meet your targets and then end up feeling annoyed, or even miserable with yourself. Once again, reality failed to bend to your will.

If you want to create a useful plan, then proceed as follows:

• start by identifying and describing your objective very clearly
• work out the major activities, or subtasks, required to reach the end point
• split those those activities into the different types of work needed. For example, when working alone, think of the different modes of thinking that you require (creative/imaginative, analytical, compositional, procedural, organizational, productive) and divide the work accordingly
• consider the resources needed (skills, materials, equipment, services and so on) and their availability

As you go through this process you are, in effect, carrying out the task, in principle, in your mind and as you do this you get a better idea of the order in which things must be done as well as what you need to get things done. The most vital thing to take note of are the foreseeable difficulties. These are the things that will block your progress, usually because you don’t have a possible solution to move you forward, or you lack the personal skills, knowledge, experience, process necessary, or you don’t have the physical resources necessary to get the job done. If you don’t identify these things in advance, then when you reach them you will grind to a halt - guaranteed.

When you have planned, i.e. designed your process for getting things done, in sufficient detail that you know all of the things that combine together to create the finished thing and you have identified and solved the foreseeable, or likely, problems, then you can start. You might still feel the urge to put time predictions onto things for the convenience of planning your day, or week, but never let the time estimate determine whether you feel successful, or not. Success comes from getting the end result, and that is done by completing the whole process that takes you there. The prime focus is always upon progressing with the process. If it takes longer than you wanted, then you either have to accept the lateness, or else give up when the time runs out.

Accurate time predictions for things that you’ve never done before, or don’t repeat often, is fiendishly difficult. By focusing on designing a full and accurate process for getting the work done, you focus on planning for an accurate reality, rather than stressing yourself out with imaginative, but highly inaccurate timescales as the determining factor for how you carry out the work and how your judge your performance.

The most important thing to identify and focus upon with your planning are the real hard difficulties that you will have to get through. This is where planning has the greatest effect for allowing work to progress smoothly. By identifying these problems in advance and by working out solutions for them, in principle at least, you prepare yourself to cope with the worst of what is to come. Most people don’t do this. They pay little attention to these things and then, when they reach that point where progress is impossible, they find themselves frustrated. This leads to the generation of negative emotions, which tend to drive people into procrastination and into feeling inadequate. In the worst case, it can lead to putting in a lot of effort, only to arrive at a hold up that is just too big to overcome. This is leads to paralysis and very often it finally leads to quitting. If you have already put a lot of effort into something, then this a tragic event.

On a day to day level, the ‘How To Do‘ list turns an ordinary ‘To Do’ list into an effective process for getting things done during the day and it focus on that especially important point of identifying and dealing with barriers to progress in advance of going into action.

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If you would like to receive more fundamental insights into better living, then subscribe to the nickpagan.com newsletter and you will receive a FREE copy of the ebook ‘Understand How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.’ Please use the form at the head of the page.

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